Reviewed by: Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege, and the Politics of Subjectivity Joanne Feit Diehl (bio) Hogue, Cynthia . Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege, and the Politics of Subjectivity. New York: State U of New York, 1995. 262 pp. Cynthia Hogue's Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege, and the Politics of Subjectivity is an ambitious work that offers significant theoretical insights into relations among authorship, gender and style. Through a series of attentive [End Page 113] close readings of Dickinson, Moore, H.D., and Rich, and the application of a spectrum of feminist and psychoanalytic (especially Kristevan) theory, Hogue provides a perspective on the formulation of a tradition of American women poets based upon a shared aesthetics and a common schema, a position of authorial equivocation that Hogue sees as resulting in what she names an "ethics of style." Most provocative is Hogue's over-arching conviction that these poets share a common strategy of "equivocation," a verbal articulation that positions itself, in its very duplicity, in a place of subversion of the dominant mode of masculinist discourse. Hogue's interest is in the "nature of poetic subjectivity," and she does a brilliant job of demonstrating through minute and elegant close readings the efficacy of such a stance of equivocation as it works itself out in individual poems. The deployment of an eclectic bastion of theorists, including De Lauretis, Mulvey, Doane, and de Man, as well as Kristeva, enables Hogue to move convincingly from discrete readings to observations on a meta-theory of style, one that not only addresses fundamental issues in poets' work but asks central questions relating to the practice of theory in relation to gender and genre. While the aim's of Hogue's project and its execution are admirable, problems, as one might expect from a work of such vast ambition, do emerge. Because the central tenets of the book's theoretical argument are not fully realized, the potentially fascinating philosophical implications that preface the chapters on individual poets are never fully realized. Indeed, a few of the initial tenets themselves warrant further support. One wishes that Hogue had explained more fully the sociohistorical influences of race, class, and gender that govern her determination that the poets she examines are collectively "disempowered because of their sex, but privileged because of class and race" and thus "share a relation to white male hegemony that inflects the construction of their subjectivity in poetic language in discernible ways" (xvii). While one understands the need to find grounds for categorizing poets in order to discern a tradition without violating poetic individuality, issues of class and race, which are invoked as criteria for inclusion in the book, nevertheless play a very small role in Hogue's later ongoing discussions of these poets (although Hogue's reading of Rich is somewhat of an exception to this generalization). While considerations of social and "racial" identities do, of course, impinge upon poetic voice, the mere assertion of this phenomenon does not constitute an argument that delineates the imp [act of experiential conditions on style. The Preface's second premise is also somewhat problematic. Hogue states that "the purpose that unifies this book . . . is the concern to demonstrate [End Page 114] how these female poets exemplify a destructuring of the very poetic power they assert . . . an ethical poetic practice" (xviii). She goes on to note that these poets "variously unsettle and redefine the valorized discursive positions male poets have traditionally assumed. I find this sharp a distinction based upon gender somewhat disquieting when I recall such Dickinson poems as "Mine—by the Right of the White Election!" (Poem 528), "The Soul selects her own Society—" (Poem 303), and "On a Columnar Self—/ How Ample to rely" (Poem 789) to mention only a few poems by one of her authors. More interesting is the idea, already addressed, of "equivocation" which Hogue links to the specificity of her poets' class position. To understand equivocation as "a double linguistic operation that not only resists unified meaning, but refuses to occupy a position from which semantic fixity can be imperially proclaimed" is, as Hogue herself acknowledges, "to characterize a discursive methodology that operates as a way of both disrupting and redefining relations of...