What Kind of a Critical Category is "Women's Poetry"?

Abstract

When Ana Parejo Vadillo and I decided to organize 2002 conference Poetry and Fin-de-siecle, several of my colleagues asked whether this focus on was not old-fashioned now. For many in Britain women's writing is seen to signify purely a feminist political stance in which one argues for value of against an assumption that it is forgotten or undervalued. (1) Yet this is not just a category created for a late-twentieth-century political gesture, which can therefore be discarded when that act of recuperation is deemed to be over: it is, as we shall see with particular reference to work of May Kendall, a category which existed to shape identity and a framework for reading in later nineteenth century. It is shifting critical currency of term women's poetry, within field of late-Victorian studies, that I want to explore here. differences between conception of women's represented at Isobel Armstrong, Virginia Blain, and Laurel Brake's 1995 Rethinking Women's Poetry: 1730-1930 conference and that apparent at 2002 Poetry and Fin-de-siecle conference might be a useful starting point. Certainly in 1995 sense in which women's was a recuperative term was still in air. (2) In contrast, discourse of forgotten was hardly in evidence by 2002 conference. But if 1995 conference was an important marker of that initial moment of rediscovery, it was also to act as a catalyst for critical trajectory which we followed thereafter. Armstrong and Blain's book is subtitled and Genre, 1830-1900; emphasis of volume is on the investigation of gender and its interplay with (Preface, p. xiv). Charting involvement of poetry in a wide range of discourses and debates has occupied us since. If there was a change apparent in 2002 conference agenda aired in 1995, it might be subtle twist of focus Gender and Genre to, more specifically, Gender as Genre. debate about genre of gender was, of course, already apparent in 1995 conference in concern of several speakers with historical role played by category women's and necessity, to current critical thinking, of understanding generic qualities of this label. Yopie Prins' published paper this conference begins by stating need to theorize and historicize a category that we assume to be self-evident: namely, woman (3) Anne Mellor, about Romantic literature, adds to this discussion of woman poet as a generic category by arguing for need to distinguish between tradition of and female-authored poetry which does not conform to this practice: tradition of female (4) It is this attempt to interrogate deceptively unified term women's which interests me here. questions raised in these papers have become more and more insistent in our thinking about women's as we have moved farther away importance of term as a recuperative one. Susan Brown, in her extremely useful chapter on The Victorian Poetess (2000), does much to provide an overview of recent growth in number of personas recognized as possible positions for Victorian woman poet. For Brown, even one category of poetess contains many possible personas. (5) She goes on to make chronological claim that from 1870s onward, explicit invocation of is more critical than poetic (p. 196). She cites Elizabeth Sharp's 1890 Women Poets of Victorian Era as an accurate reflection of mood of previous two decades. What we have here, writes Brown, is a new poetess, rather like her fictional counterpart New Woman (p. 197). (6) This sense of women's referring to a multiplicity of established personas became one of recurring themes of 2002 conference on fin-de-siecle poetry. …