Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewBorderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism. Susan J. Wolfson . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. xix+430.Gillen D'Arcy WoodGillen D'Arcy WoodUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Search for more articles by this author University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMorePoor Keats, as we know, got roughed up by the reviews. Beginning with Shelley's Adonais, he entered posterity as the effeminized victim of Tory pundits who bullied “little Johnny” and manhandled his lisping inanities without mercy. Interesting, then, that Keats himself found the reviewing game so wimpish: “Reviews have enervated and made indolent men's minds—few think for themselves” (241). For one who crafted a poetics of indolence and suffered for it, this would seem a protest too far, but Keats's mannish admonition of the reviews, for Susan Wolfson, marks a characteristic “zigzag” across the shifting Regency map of writing, gender, and propriety, where the gender of indolence (for example) is indeterminate and macho attitudes are available to all as required. For Wolfson, the gender politics of Romantic writing are heterodox even where they appear most craven or conservative because the greater economy is unstable, a complex of “wavering, arbitrary, and often traversable borderlines that vex and complicate the symbolic order” (35).The zigzag functions as a key trope in Wolfson's wonderful new book, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism, in which the standard concept-metaphor for gender criticism—a concentric circle, with patriarchy at the center and women writers at the margins—is abandoned in favor of a fractal field of gender possibilities, a kind of undulating double helix of signs she calls the “border.” Disposed along various points of this borderline are four Romantic-era writers, two female, two male: Hemans, Jewsbury, Byron, and Keats. In the course of sustained close readings of each of these writers, Wolfson succeeds in crafting a more elastic, inclusive gender criticism in which the old apartheid categories of “women's writing” and “masculinity” are conspicuously absent, as is gender theory as an explicit body of texts or tradition. Borderlines represents a new feminist praxis, almost a joint experiment with the Romantic texts it hosts, in a new transgendered rhetoric of masks and attitudes, an advanced historical exercise in the border crossings of gender-in-language.The gender wars of the early nineteenth century were founded on two helix-like figures of the eighteenth: the man of feeling, whose contemptible double was the effeminized and useless poseur; and the conduct book heroine, whose education and leisured independence, taken to its ironical, ungoverned extreme, produced the “monstrous” form of Mary Wollstonecraft. Wolfson begins with Wollstonecraft and a familiar fool's parade of misogynists: Rousseau, Burke, and Richard Polwhele. The zigzag effect of Romantic gender politics was famously apparent in Wollstonecraft's satire on Burke's sentimental love of monarchy in his Reflections (1790), where she casts herself—tactically, temporarily—as the police of masculinity. Burke/Wollstonecraft prototypes a cross-border exchange in gender roles that Wolfson will stage throughout the book, the main body of which focuses on the confused viral legacy of the 1790s in the two decades between Napoleon's defeat and Victoria's ascent to the throne. Wollstonecraft's epoch-making arguments for the constructedness of gender and her exposure of its man-favoring historical biases had scandalized the chattering classes of the 1790s but were mostly hushed up by the 1820s, in which would-be daughters of the gender revolution, such as Felicia Hemans and Maria Jewsbury, resorted to a range of feints and stratagems in the face of a reenergized cult of domesticity.Beginning with Domestic Affections (1812), Hemans reenvisioned the domestic sphere as a field of tragedy and desire, implicitly breaching the terms of domesticity itself by calling insistent, often melodramatic attention to its limits. In Hemans's vast output, from domestic homilies to gory historical romances, the terrain is consistent: “A world of women, in the very heart of domestic affection, turns desperate, violent, and self-destroying” (54). The domesticity of Hemans's themes assured her readers she was no Wollstonecraftian she-male, but the darkness of her feminine fables and personae—as Cleopatra, as Properzia Rossi—was no less a form of feminism for its lack of a consistent political countermodel. Hemans, like Wollstonecraft (and Godwin), dreamed of transcending gender, of a “utopia of double-sexed souls” (305), but such dreaming required the proper rhetorical insulation. Hence the matronly Hemans reputation we must be alert to deconstruct. Wolfson convincingly repatriates Hemans from the Victorian era to post-Waterloo Romanticism as a Wollstonecraftian guerilla whose “true haunt and home was a shifting ground between counter-cultural critique and conduct book compliance” (50) and the cumulative effect of whose gender work was “to expose a cultural mythology” and “trace out a cultural unconscious of fragmented, dissonant awarenesses” (54). The first of these dissonant, barely available awarenesses was the “toxic, irrepressible legacy of Wollstonecraft” (78), whose politics Hemans never owned but whose central theme—“the failure of domestic ideals, in all cultural varieties, to sustain women's lives” (62)—Hemans amplified, with necessary interference.Maria Jewsbury, like Hemans, was a submerged Wollstonecraft acolyte, a brilliant conversationalist whose social success converged with her literary career into the just manageable, borderline image of the fully accomplished woman turned professional. In a letter, Jewsbury hinted at the greater scandal of Romantic women's writing, for which the risky adoption of male sublimities might just have been another cover: “Literary enthusiasm is no more; but without literature as a profession, a void would be created in my heart” (120). If Wolfson misses anything, it is the possibility that gender play may be a language substituting for something else altogether—the desperate urge to earn professional status, to be in the business of writing, to succeed in the print marketplace—a desire that may, beneath the masks a “marginal” writer such as Jewsbury wears, bear no distinguishing marks of gender whatever (recent revisionary studies of the professionalization of female authorship in the Georgian period by Paula Backscheider and Betty Schellenberg do not fall within the ambit of Borderlines, which relies more on the feminist paradigm established by Mary Poovey's Proper Lady and the Woman Writer [University of Chicago Press, 1984]). Jewsbury first eased her way with satire, earning the approval of Wordsworth—the reassuring refusal of all metaphysics far outweighed any risk of offense—but in The History of an Enthusiast (1830) claimed a Byronic autogenesis. Her portrait of the artist as a young woman performed a characteristic Romantic zigzag around gender, “its discourses shifting between object lesson and ironic critique” (109), and articulated a Wollstonecraftian logic of female self-development while borrowing from male models—Rousseau, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley—to fill out the double-gendered figure of the autobiographizing poet. Jewsbury's truncated career—uncongenial husband, early death—has been cast by recent critics within a “paradigm of defeat” (130), a prolepsis Wolfson here refuses in favor of a more heroic account. Her readings reveal in Jewsbury a thoroughly modern professional energy that expressed itself, virtuosically, in a sequence of brilliant essays on/in gender.In the text/life economy that Freud gleaned from Romanticism, what is disallowed in life will express itself as text. The inverse of this repression is hypocrisy, while the destruction of the entire economy we find in Byron, who, in his manipulation of his own publicity, used gender to transcend the two-dimensional authorial figures of mask and masquerade into a unique specularity of extraordinary and still-enduring cultural reach. Both Hemans and Jewsbury made use of Byron, whose “passion-driven, self-tormenting hero is a contingency of gender and culture that is open to substitution” (66). Turning to her male authors, Wolfson devotes chapters to two of the Byronic she-male heroes so intriguing to women readers (and writers), namely, Sardanapalus and Don Juan. The “drag theatrics” (169) of Sardanapalus exemplify, perhaps better than any other text Wolfson reads, the indeterminacy of gender rhetoric and its uncanny relation to authorial social existence. In the play, as in life, “dandy Byron tweaked bad-boyism with feminine flair” (137). The louche kingly attitudes that are the play's substance are disavowed by the hero's belated rush to martial action. In the same way, Byron's manly literary legacy in the nineteenth century proved strangely immune to the cross-gender suggestions of such texts. Byron's trick in Don Juan, of course, was to vocalize the libertine man-of-the-world and leave the transvestite fantasies to the story. Byronic theatricality, founded on his corrupt aristocrat persona, reassured his readers that these were the fantasies of any privileged straight male with sufficient money and time on his hands. Inoculated by the scandal of literal sex itself, Byron's poetry crossed and recrossed the figurative borderlines of gender with impunity: “In the mask of enslaved, cross-dressed Juan,” for example, “Byron sings liberation” (193). For Wolfson, Hemans and Jewsbury “wrote” Byron on the authorization of Byron's own female characters who notoriously assume control of the narrative of Don Juan. In truth, as these women writers saw, Byron wanted a hero(ine). One such is the randy Fitz-Fulke, who comes to Juan in disguise “like a female author wrapped in a male pseudonym…a modern woman, sexually self-possessed, socially adept, out to manipulate the system of representation to advantage” (201).Not so Keats, however. From the supine Adonis in the bower in Endymion to his own hectic letters to Fanny Brawne, Keats's legacy in the nineteenth century was a failed masculinity overdetermined by adolescence and class, a modern iteration of “eroded manliness” (247) whose ur-figure may be traced through centuries of British cultural discourse. Wolfson offers a witty and fascinating disquisition on the Keatsian body through the canonical portraits of Joseph Severn and William Hilton, but also on Keats's own edgy body consciousness. What was the height of fame for a Regency poet? Not “Mister John Keats, five feet high,” certainly (John Keats to Benjamin Bailey, July 18, 1818, in Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends, ed. Sidney Colvin [London, 1891], 144). And this unhappy realization plays out in Keats's signature “scenes of gender crisis, where female power threatens male autonomy, or a man feels pumped with power by mastering a woman” (208). The exquisite self-consciousness of these scenes rescues them from misogyny, however, just as his bower of “slippery blisses” was never simple effeminate “driveling.” What “the self-congratulatory sarcasm” of the Tory reviewers missed was “Keats's own ironizing of the whole industry of masculine self-making” (218). At the same time, however, Tory class rage is precisely what was later written out of Keats's tale of gender betrayal. J. G. Lockhart used Keats's suspect sexual poetics as a way to malign his class allegiances, while the Victorians equated effeminacy with political disengagement, emasculating Keats all over again with different tools. Only recently has this legacy of misreading been challenged by Nicholas Roe and others, while Wolfson produces what is perhaps the most sophisticated analysis yet of Keats's poetry as gender politics.In his paradigmatic “Sleep and Poetry,” Keats leaves the bower to imagine a destiny as the “noble charioteer,” just as in the “King Lear” sonnet he resolves to abandon the “barren dream” of effeminizing romance for the manly “fierce dispute” of Shakespearean tragedy (“Sleep and Poetry,” in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978], 165–66). But these resolutions are always provisional in Keats, always a crossing back and forth between imagined—and imaginatively gendered—poetic destinies, what Wolfson calls Keats's “part defensive, part earnest, part bold, part parodic story of poetic desire” (234). In her brilliant chapter on Keats's Victorian reception, Wolfson traces a complex map of misreading. In official literary culture, Keats was initiated into “the ladies'companion culture of the annuals” (255) and was banned from the men's club of the anthologies. But at the queering margins we find Keats “emerging as a code of sentimental description by which men could express and communicate a love for intellectual, feeling-shaped male beauty” (264). Over the course of a century, this Keats comes to supersede the effeminate Cockney as a new “name for a sensitivity…that sustains, demands, and determines new understandings of gender” (278). Here, as everywhere in Borderlines, Wolfson makes the implicit argument for her Romantic texts not merely as the object of gender criticism but as a radical, revelatory, entirely up-to-date discourse of gender itself, to which the language of “theory” is mostly superfluous, at least within the literary-critical expositions Wolfson so compellingly performs.In a book about the stylizations of gender and gender-as-style, it would do well to dwell on Wolfson's writing. Admirers of her distinctive brand of formalism will not be disappointed by Borderlines. All texts under discussion are generously quoted and integrated within her own probing, limpid prose. As method, it represents a high-water mark of the literary-critical art, one in which every relevant poem, letter, and review lies at hand, in which the primary texts appear (convincingly) to drive the course of the discussion, rather than lying supine, in Keatsian languor, for the critic's next act of penetrating insight. There is so much to be had from this book. Readers of Byron and Keats will find recent work on Romantic sexuality and poetics both absorbed and advanced, while the chapters on Hemans and Jewsbury in particular represent landmarks in the criticism of both poets, still in its first generation. The cumulative effect of these readings—with the voluminous peripheral and intertextual material in view—is a new and frankly thrilling account of Romanticism itself as “a various, ever shifting force field of gender attractions and performances; swooning heroes and capable heroines; men of feeling and women of intellect; women called masculine or manly, men deemed feminine or effeminate; cross-dressers of both sexes” (28). For her own vehicle, Wolfson offers a style of gender criticism decoupled from identity politics as such and even from gender itself as routinely considered. She is implicitly wary, in her own writing, of what William Rossetti bad-temperedly called “the monotone of mere sex” (Lives of Famous Poets [London, 1878], 347). She thus deliberately keeps the “first wave” of Romantic feminist criticism—Mellors, Ross, Homans—at arm's length (xvi). For Wolfson, the constraints of gender cut both ways, as do its possibilities. The task of the gender critic is thus not so much to expose the ideology of texts—with all the antipathetic violence that critical prerogative assumes—as to work with the grain of “complex imaginations engaged with complex cultural dynamics” (2). In Borderlines, Wolfson has found a rich and intellectually satisfying mode of sympathetic reading that abdicates none of the powers of critique. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 1August 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/653503 Views: 470Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. 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