Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry by David Bromwich (review)

Abstract

976 Reviews nineteenth century tracing 'the rise and fall of the ideal girl' (p. 11) with reference to a range of literary and socio-historical materials. Chapter i begins with the study of the juvenile delinquent in the firstpart of the nineteenth century: 'by 1850 it is a truism that there is nothing so unlike a criminal as a little girl' (p. 12). In a corresponding literary analysis, Robson explores the figure of the innocent, otherworldly girl in Wordsworth's poems and De Quincey's autobi? ography. Chapter 2 demonstrates how Dickens's Little Neil and the model girls of Sarah Stickney Ellis's conduct literature memorialize the past selves of their older male relatives and the spirit of a bygone rural England while contemporary exposes of the working conditions of lower-class girls reveal that 'innocent girlhood is [. . .] an economically contingent construction' (p. 13). Chapter 3 probes the 'self-feminizing tropes' of John Ruskin's autobiography and his ' "school-girl" text' The Ethics of the Dust (1866), which stage the figure of the girl as representing 'the lost self of childhood and the continuingtrue self (p. 14). Chapter 4 focuses on Lewis Carroll's photographs of little girls, which show 'an uncanny ability to confound oppositions, [. . .] between adult and child' while his 'textual fancies' get bogged down in sentimentality (p. 14). Chapter 5 'charts the destruction of the fantasy of the ideal girl' (p. 14) as the image becomes desacralized through contemporary investigations into the sexual exploitation and abuse of working-class girls. The book concludes with a look at Ernest Dowson's sonnet sequence 'Of a Little Girl' in which 'the child is a potentially sexual receptacle for emotion, rather than the guarantor of the sealed perfection of the man's lost girlhood' (p. 15). Robson's well-written book will offerfood forthought to anyone with an interest in gender and sexuality in the Victorian period. Her different'take' on Lewis and Carroll offersa welcome corrective to studies overwhelmingly concerned with paedophilia. She juxtaposes literary and cultural materials to good effectand her readings of indi? vidual writers are convincing. However, I was disappointed by the lack of historical material on the supposed 'feminine' world of childhood, which seemed limited to a few generalizations and remained undeveloped throughout. The title of this book suggests a more in-depth treatment of the making of a type, the Victorian gentleman, than it actually offers.It presents us with a series of readings based on several literary men's idealizations and fantasies of girlhood but it needs to work harder to make its case that such fantasies are the inevitable symptoms of a constructed middle-class masculinity bereft of its 'feminine' past. Queen Mary, University of London Catherine Maxwell Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry. By David Bromwich. Chicago and Lon? don: University of Chicago Press. 2001. xvii + 256pp. $16; ?10.50. ISBN o226 -07561-3. In the preface to this collection of his essays and reviews spanning twenty-two years, David Bromwich asks: 'But what does one read criticism for? Mainly, I think, quo? tations' (p. xiii). Citing a great quoter like Randall Jarrell,Bromwich emphasizes the line as the unit of modern poetry and, in his quoting of lines that 'have captivated the mind's ear', he is the equal of critics like Jarrell or David Kalstone. However, Adrienne Rich, an extensive quoter in her prose writing, is not approved. Reviewing the essays of this 'professional scold', Bromwich declares that he had 'seldom read a book that quoted so much bad poetry' (p. 175). His own criticism has been, he says, both explicatory and an attempt to say 'what was in the poem's mind' (p. xi). He likens reading a poem to getting to know a person and discovering the points of attraction, the 'give' at surprising places. This MLRy 98.4, 2003 977 disarming simplicity in a critic who is, after all, one of the great readers of Marianne Moore and John Ashbery is a reminder of how Bromwich has been in the vanguard in encouraging students to explore difficultpoetry. The reprinting of these essays in one volume would be an important event for this reason alone. The...