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From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry
From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry
From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry
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From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry

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With the transformation and expansion of the nineteenth-century American literary canon in the past two decades, the work of the era's American women poets has come to be widely anthologized. But scant scholarship has arisen to make full sense of it. From School to Salon responds to this glaring gap.


Mary Loeffelholz presents the work of nineteenth-century women poets in the context of the history, culture, and politics of the times. She uses a series of case studies to discuss why the recovery of nineteenth-century women's poetry has been a process of anthologization without succeeding analysis. At the same time, she provides a much-needed account of the changing social contexts through which nineteenth-century American women became poets: initially by reading, reciting, writing, and publishing poetry in school, and later, by doing those same things in literary salons, institutions created by the high-culture movement of the day.


Along the way, Loeffelholz provides detailed analyses of the poetry, much of which has received little or no recent critical attention. She focuses on the works of a remarkably diverse array of poets, including Lucretia Maria Davidson, Lydia Sigourney, Maria Lowell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Emily Dickinson, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Annie Fields.


Impeccably researched and gracefully written, From School to Salon moves the study of nineteenth-century women's poetry to a new and momentous level.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 8, 2021
ISBN9780691231105
From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry

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    From School to Salon - Mary Loeffelholz

    From School to Salon

    From School to Salon

    READING NINETEENTH-CENTURY

    AMERICAN WOMEN’S POETRY

    Mary Loeffelholz

    PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

    PRINCETON AND OXFORD

    Copyright © 2004 by Princeton University Press

    Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

    In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

    All Rights Reserved

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Loeffelholz, Mary, 1958–

    From school to salon : reading nineteenth-century American women’s poetry / Mary Loeffelholz.

    p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 0-691-04939-4 (alk. paper) —ISBN 0-691-04940-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

    eISBN 978-0-69123-110-5 (ebook)

    1. American poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Women and literature—United States—History—19th century. 3. American poetry—19th century—History and criticism. I. Title.

    PS147.L46 2004

    814.3099287–dc22

    2003064126

    British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

    https://press.princeton.edu

    R0

    To the memory of Barbara Jean Peiffer

    Contents

    Acknowledgments  ix

    INTRODUCTION: The Objects of Recovery  1

    I. Prodigy and Teacher; or, Poetry in the Domestic-Tutelary Complex   11

    CHAPTER ONE

    Who Killed Lucretia Davidson?  13

    CHAPTER TWO

    The School of Lydia Sigourney  32

    II. Lessons of the Sphinx: Poetry and Cultural Capital in Abolition and Reconstruction   65

    CHAPTER THREE

    Poetry, Slavery, Personification: Maria Lowell’s Africa  67

    CHAPTER FOUR

    A Difference in the Vernacular: The Reconstruction Poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper  94

    III. The Conquest of Autonomy   129

    CHAPTER FIVE

    Plied from Nought to Nought: Helen Hunt Jackson and the Field of Emily Dickinson’s Refusals  131

    CHAPTER SIX

    Metropolitan Pastoral: The Salon Poetry of Annie Fields  162

    CONCLUSION: The Sentiments of Recovery: Adrienne Rich and Nineteenth-Century Women’s Culture  192

    Notes  209

    Index  267

    Acknowledgments

    MANY FRIENDS and colleagues in nineteenth-century American literature, poetry, and feminist studies have generously given of their intellectual inspiration and personal support during the writing of this book. Virginia Jackson, Yopie Prins, and Eliza Richards have helped me learn how to read nineteenth-century poetry of all kinds; their work is my abiding intellectual example, and their friendship a continuing pleasure. I am grateful to Shirley Samuels for exchanging work in progress, helping organize conference panels in warm places, surviving MLA meetings with me in cold places, and sharing the company of her children, John and Ruth—but most of all for her enduring friendship. Members of the Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers Group, especially Elizabeth Young, Sandra Zagarell, and Susan Harris, have generously shared with me their wide knowledge of nineteenth-century American culture, as well as their professional and personal kindness. For sustaining conversations over the years about Emily Dickinson’s writings, I am grateful to my fellow board members in the Emily Dickinson International Society, especially Cristanne Miller, Suzanne Juhasz, and Martha Nell Smith; to Martha Nell and Marilee Lindemann I also owe my thanks for their friendship, support, willingness to listen—and for taking me to hear Bruce Springsteen. Adela Pinch offered the project timely encouragement in difficult moments, as did Elizabeth Barnes. I thank Lawrence Buell and Cassandra Jackson for responding to earlier versions of some of these arguments, and Karen Sánchez-Eppler and Tricia Lootens for their comprehensively helpful and insightful readings of the manuscript for Princeton University Press.

    For hearing out earlier versions of some of the book’s arguments, I am grateful to Christopher Looby and the University of Pennsylvania English department; Priscilla Wald and the University of Washington English department; Philip Cavalier and the faculty of Catawba College; Peter Donaldson, Diana Henderson, Ruth Perry, and the Literature faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Lynn Wardley and the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University; Domhnall Mitchell and members of the Emily Dickinson International Society; and Meredith McGill and Rutgers University. My own colleagues, especially Guy Rotella, Stuart Peterfreund, Wayne Franklin, and other participants in the English department’s Barrs seminar series, have been constant and helpful interlocutors. I also thank Northeastern University and Vice Provost Ronald Hedlund for the award of a Research and Scholarship Development Fund grant that allowed me valuable time toward the book’s writing.

    For daily inspiration, I am grateful to Marina Leslie, who walked and talked out the beginnings of this book in our circuits around Jamaica Pond, who read with advice and encouragement, and who has been for the past ten years and more of our shared time in Northeastern’s English department my best example as a teacher, colleague, and friend. Laura Green has been the most demanding and at the same time the most generous reader that anyone completing a manuscript could ask for; her companionship in ideas has made this work not just possible but pleasurable.

    In the years it has taken to write this book, the love and strength of my family—my parents, Paul and Kay Loeffelholz; my brothers, Michael Loeffelholz, Mark Loeffelholz, and James Loeffelholz; and my sister, Anne Savage—have been tested and not found wanting. It is for all of them, but most especially for her daughter, Lauren, that this book is dedicated to the memory of my sister Barbara Jean Peiffer.

    Permission to reprint the following selections from Emily Dickinson’s writings is gratefully acknowledged: poems 401C, Dare you see a soul at the White Heat; 1373, The spider as an artist; 819B, The luxury to apprehend; and 513, The spider holds a silver ball, are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Letter 323, To T. W. Higginson, Mid-July 1867, reprinted by permission of the publishers from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1958, 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

    For permission to publish and quote from the manuscripts of Annie Fields, I am grateful to the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

    Lines from poem V, from poem XII, and from poem XVIII of the Twenty-one Love Poems, from Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff, and from Power, from The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977, by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Lines from For Memory, Heroines, and Culture and Anarchy, from A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978–1981, by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1981 by Adrienne Rich, used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

    An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as Who Killed Lucretia Davidson? or, Poetry in the Domestic-Tutelary Complex, Yale Journal of Criticism 10 (1997): 271–93; I am grateful to the Yale Journal of Criticism and to the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as Poetry, Slavery, Personification: Maria Lowell’s ‘Africa,’ Studies in Romanticism 38 (summer 1999): 171–202, and is reprinted here by courtesy of the Trustees of Boston University. Portions of chapter 6 appeared in The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston’s Public Poetry and the Great Organ, circa 1863, American Literary History 13 (summer 2001): 212–41, and are reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.

    For permission to publish the images included in chapter 4, I thank the Harvard Theatre Collection, the Houghton Library.

    INTRODUCTION

    The Objects of Recovery

    The analyst who only knows about those authors from the past who have been recognized by literary history as worthy of being conserved is embracing an intrinsically vicious form of understanding and explanation. Such an analyst can only register, unwittingly, the way the ignored authors have affected, by the logic of action and reaction, the authors to be interpreted—the ones who, by their active rejection, have contributed to the others’ disappearance from history. This is to preclude a true understanding of everything in the work of the survivors themselves that is, like their rejections, the indirect product of the existence and action of the vanished authors.

    —PIERRE BOURDIEU, The Conquest of Autonomy

    THIS BOOK, like so many others in American literary scholarship of the past twenty-five years, is fundamentally a recovery project, aimed in the first place at delineating some part of the existence and action, in Bourdieu’s words, of a set of authors who had all but vanished from literary history for most of the past one hundred years: American women poets of the nineteenth century.

    Since the early 1990s, however, nineteenth-century American women poets have been well on their way to recovery. Nineteenth-century American poetry generally and especially poetry by American women have seen a minor publishing boom recently: John Hollander’s two-volume Library of America collection of nineteenth-century American poetry came out to much fanfare in 1993, preceded by Cheryl Walker’s 1992 anthology of nineteenth-century American women poets and Jane R. Sherman’s African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, and followed in 1997 by Janet Grey’s anthology She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century and, a year later, by Paula Bennett’s massive Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology.¹ General pedagogical anthologies like the Heath and Norton anthologies of American literature soon began to follow suit by expanding their offerings in poetry, and other presses have followed the first wave of dedicated poetry anthologies with still other compilations. These anthologies clearly indicate a revival of professional interest in nineteenth-century American poetry beyond Dickinson and Whitman, but what is striking about this revival are the specific professional forms this interest has so far taken—and not taken.

    Popular nineteenth-century American poets, male and female, are today being copiously anthologized; but the relative dearth of scholarly essays and, even more, of full-length books on these poets suggests that criticism is only just beginning to confer scholarly significance on them.² Furthermore, with some recent exceptions, very few general works in American literary and cultural studies have turned to poetry, especially nineteenth-century poetry beyond Whitman and Dickinson, in the course of explicating U.S. cultural histories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other national thematics. The new American studies in this respect has so far differed surprisingly little from the old; as Joseph Harrington observed in 1996, American literary studies from the 1950s onward, for all the energies of canon expansion and new historicisms, has generally gone about its business as if American poetry is not American literature.³

    What has made this now widely anthologized body of poetry so slow to develop a body of interpretive criticism, by contrast with the wealth of literary-critical and cultural work on recovered nineteenth-century American fiction? One answer is surely that recovery efforts in nineteenth-century American writing have tended to privilege social themes as a principle of selection and as their central critical means of understanding literature’s embeddedness in history. Lyric poetry’s traditional foregrounding of formal artifice and individual emotion over thematic social realism is unlikely, on these principles, to seem significant to read and teach as a genre, even if some individual poems can be enlisted within thematic categories already granted professional salience—as literature of the Civil War or of abolition, for example. In Harrington’s related analysis, this current division of labor between poetry and fiction in American literary studies is an artifact of critics (whatever their intellectual genealogies otherwise) having [bought] into a New Critical ideology of poetry: In the professional imaginary, the corollary of poetry’s hypostatization is the notion that fiction provides a privileged access to history (Why Poetry Is Not American Literature, 508). Exercising its historicist commitments almost exclusively on fiction and nonfictional prose, the new American studies, like the old, tacitly preserves poetry in its unexamined New Critical role as apolitical and asocial aesthetic object.

    And yet the generic particularity of poetry surely preceded the New Criticism, even if it did not take New Critical forms in the nineteenth century. Karen Sánchez-Eppler assumes the historical, not retrospectively New Critical, particularity of poetry when she suggests in her Touching Liberty (1993), which draws on nineteenth-century American poetry, fiction, and prose in analyzing abolition’s rhetoric of the body and literary reactions to that rhetoric, that analyzing lyric poetry . . . disables an emphasis on thematic political content and instead reveals how aesthetic, stylistic, and formal mechanisms come to accrue ideological significance.⁴ This is not to issue an ahistorical brief for the unique formal apartness of poetry. Rather, along with Sánchez-Eppler, I argue here that analyzing poetry can under some circumstances make evident with special force what is true of literature more broadly, that its social effects and its embeddedness in history lie not only in thematic political content, through which fiction enjoys its privileged access to history, but also in the politics of genre, which makes aesthetic, stylistic, and formal mechanisms available to authors. Beyond that, literature’s social effects lie in the changing politics and circumstances of the cultural field itself, in Pierre Bourdieu’s famous coinage, which makes authorship itself possible in different ways, at different times, for different social agents. In the current disciplinary circumstances of American literary studies, the study of poetry underlines with special force Tony Bennett’s observation, entirely in the spirit of Bourdieu’s sociology of culture, that literature "is not something whose social underpinnings must be sought elsewhere; it is a set of social conditions and its analysis consists in identifying the effects of these conditions."⁵

    Despite the enormous professional energies devoted in the last two decades to reviving a broader canon of nineteenth-century American writing, a great deal of the poetry written by nineteenth-century American women other than Emily Dickinson has yet to be analyzed along the lines laid out by Sánchez-Eppler and Tony Bennett. My aim in this book is to demonstrate that this body of poetry can be not only anthologized but also read critically today. Reading the poetry written by nineteenth-century American women, I argue here, entails not only understanding how a given poem’s aesthetic, stylistic, and formal mechanisms come to accrue ideological significance but also understanding how particular social contexts or sites of poetry’s production and consumption supplied nineteenth-century American women poets with aesthetic and formal possibilities already endowed with social significance. As the book’s title schematically implies, my reading of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry is embedded in the larger story of the nineteenth-century rise and elaboration of the cultural field in the United States: the emergence of modern forms of cultural hierarchy, including an autonomous realm of aesthetic high culture, in the United States, and of poetry’s movement within that field from the sites of didacticism to those of aestheticism. From School to Salon attempts to trace a broad shift in the social locations in which American women gained access to authorship in the genre of poetry: a shift from reading, reciting, writing, and publishing poetry in the didactic context of primary and secondary schooling to reading, reciting, and publishing poetry in the emergent later nineteenth-century venues of autonomous high culture, like the salon.

    Versions of this larger story have been told about nineteenth-century American culture by Lawrence Levine, in his Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988), and by Richard Brodhead, in his Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (1993), among other critics.⁶ Like Brod-head in Cultures of Letters, I approach this larger cultural history through close readings of exemplary literary works and exemplary authors’ careers. My aim is to perform for these poets the kind of reading Brodhead offers of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a reading that shows how little the social situation of Alcott’s authorship is external to her work and argues that indeed "one project of Little Women is charting the field of specifically artistic spaces that have opened up at the time of its writing" (Cultures of Letters, 102, 98–99). From School to Salon undertakes to read a set of nineteenth-century American women poets with a view not only to the social situations in which they wrote and were read but also with the assumption that these women’s poetic works themselves always formally embody, and sometimes self-consciously chart, the differential possibilities for authorship within the cultural fields they inhabit. The project thus asserts and attempts to demonstrate that this body of poetry can and should be read in ways that bridge the gap between internal formalism and external historicism, between close readings of works and analysis of their historical conditions of possibility.⁷

    I open by pairing two early nineteenth-century poets whose access to authorship was rooted in schooling: Lucretia Maria Davidson, a posthumously published child prodigy, the poetess as exemplary beautiful dead student, with her complement in Lydia Sigourney, the sometime Hartford schoolmistress who became the United States’ best-selling antebellum author of didactic sentimental poetry. Dead at seventeen of tuberculosis, Lucretia Davidson would live on in the afterlife of elocution textbooks aimed at molding other young ladies of her class; her life, writing, and death became exemplary of early nineteenth-century American transitions in women’s education. Lydia Sigourney, by contrast, actively managed her own transition from schoolmistress to didactic poet over the course of her long career, and in doing so became a central fashioner of the domestic-tutelary complex that enabled Davidson’s posthumous career as a prodigy-poetess. These chapters juxtapose extended readings of long poems written by Davidson and Sigourney, Davidson’s Amir Khan (the title poem of her posthumous collection of 1829) and Sigourney’s Connecticut River (first published in Samuel G. Goodrich’s 1828 gift book, The Token), with readings of exemplary scenes of instruction in posthumous biographies of Davidson and in Sigourney’s autobiographical prose. Davidson’s and Sigourney’s long poems, I argue, in their quite different ways both perform and critique early nineteenth-century relations between poetry and ambitious middle-class women’s schooling. For both Davidson and Sigourney, the cultural field surveyed is transatlantic as well as intra-American: Davidson’s Amir Khan displays its young author’s learning in the transatlantic idiom of romantic orientalism, and Sigourney’s prospect poem, centered on the American village with its schoolhouse, enters into a transatlantic dialogue of village poems that includes her American precursor Timothy Dwight’s Greenfield Hill (1794) and stretches back to Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770) and Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751).

    The following two chapters pair Maria Lowell’s aesthetically ambitious abolitionist poetry with the Reconstruction-era poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Nineteenth-century American women like Lowell and Harper found in the abolitionist movement and in the postwar struggle for African American civil existence important occasions for writing poetry conspicuous for its political themes; at the same time, however, this body of poetry conducts its political arguments in the context of both implicit and explicit questions about cultural capital and aesthetic, as well as moral, education. Like Lucretia Davidson’s and Lydia Sigourney’s most ambitious poems, Maria Lowell’s and Frances Harper’s writings both incorporate and revise familiar nineteenth-century scenes of instruction. Chapter 3 centers on Maria Lowell’s long poem Africa, written and published in the culturally elite precincts of the abolitionist movement (it appeared in the Boston Female Antislavery Society’s annual gift book, The Liberty Bell, in 1849), which trades both on the cultural capital of imported high British and European romanticism and on popular educational rhetorics and images of race for its poetic and political strategies. Like Maria Lowell’s abolitionist poetry, the poetry Frances Harper published after the Civil War functions simultaneously in different cultural registers—popular and elite, written and oral, religious and secular. As Frances Smith Foster observes, Harper’s mission in this poetry is mediating between cultures, speaking to African American audiences of enormously mixed literacies as well as back to white readers; it both represents and performs reconstructed models of education for African Americans.⁸ Chapter 4 reads Harper’s postwar poetry, then, both against works like Lowell’s Africa and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Chambered Nautilus (1858) and for its rich internal mediations between different forms of literacy and cultural capital, culminating in Harper’s great postwar diptych of Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869) and the Aunt Chloe sequence (published in Sketches of Southern Life in 1872). The chapter concludes with a look forward to Harper’s fate in American literary canon formation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contrasting her absence from the Modern Language Association’s hardening college-level canon with Harper’s afterlife at the turn of the century in what was by then the more popular and heterogeneous discipline of elocution.

    Chapter 5 treats Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson, and chapter 6 the poet Annie Fields, better known as a Boston salon hostess and wife of James Fields, publisher of the Atlantic Monthly. Jackson and Fields, these chapters argue, made their careers within a later nineteenth-century American literary field increasingly structured by emergent formal and informal institutions of high culture and the ever-finer gradations their burgeoning made possible. For both Jackson and Fields, taking up these new positions entailed rejecting or modifying earlier nineteenth-century modes of becoming a woman poet, modes rooted in the domestic-tutelary complex and its instrumental, didactic understanding of women’s writing, in favor of a more autonomous sense of the aesthetic. Identified not with the women’s domain of primary or secondary schooling but with the great publishing organs of later nineteenth-century American high culture and their complementary performance space, the salon, Annie Fields preserved the memory of earlier generations of women writers (she was a biographer, for example, of her friend Harriet Beecher Stowe) but at the same time differentiated her generation from theirs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fields wrote, regarded books as a medium of the ideas of the age, and as the promulgators of morals and religion; what Stowe and her sister writers lacked, in Fields’s view, was a study of the literature of the past as the only true foundation for a literature of the present—that is, a sense of literature as an autonomous, self-generating, self-referential field of culture, the sense of high culture that had emerged in the United States by the nineteenth century’s end. Fields overtly laid claim to this elite territory in her classicizing poetry, replacing the domestic-tutelary complex’s scenes of instruction with scenes of high-cultural transmission; Jackson fashioned a more popular niche, closer to the middlebrow realm claimed by her editor and friend Josiah Holland but still informed by high culture’s refusal of didacticism. Understanding this later nineteenth-century cultural field in finer grain, I argue, illuminates Emily Dickinson’s much-disputed historical location—illuminates the refusals, to use Bourdieu’s term, around which she ordered her life and work.

    One of the Gilded Age elite cultural institutions Annie Fields had a hand in founding was the Harvard Annex, which would eventually become Radcliffe College, Adrienne Rich’s alma mater. Fields always regretted her lack of formal higher education, and with the exception of Emily Dickinson’s famous nine months at Mount Holyoke, none of the poets explored in From School to Salon attended college. To name the canonical women poets of twentieth-century American literature in connection with their college affiliations—Marianne Moore and H.D. at Bryn Mawr, Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar, and so on—against the popular women poets of the nineteenth century is to realize how decisively the sites of women’s poetry have shifted from the school to the university, with Annie Fields’s generation at the historical pivot point. Modernist women writers, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Suzanne Clark, and other literary historians have argued, lived and wrote this shift as part of their complex drama of affiliation with and disaffiliation from women writers of the nineteenth century.From School to Salon will bring its narrative of women, poetry, and schooling forward to close with a glance at the career of Adrienne Rich, whose work has been consistently but tensely allied with the modern university, from her early education at Radcliffe through her literacy work at the City College of New York in the sixties and her later affiliations with Douglass College (of Rutgers University) and Stanford University. What are the consequences for Rich’s poetry, when later twentieth-century feminist scholarship in the university begins to make the women’s nineteenth century available as an object of knowledge or cultural capital? On or about 1978, Adrienne Rich—along with many other feminist writers and academics—discovered the nineteenth century, and particularly nineteenth-century women’s history. Rich’s 1981 volume, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, significantly departs from her 1978 book The Dream of a Common Language in the degree to which it locates precursors for Rich’s twentieth-century feminist identity in women writers and activists of the nineteenth century. No sooner does nineteenth-century women’s culture become available for Rich as an object of identification, however, than it provokes a crisis of identification, as the race and class fissures of twentieth-century feminism mirror and replicate those of the nineteenth century, and indeed those of Rich’s own personal life and poetic career.

    The question my conclusion brings to Rich’s poetry—What are the consequences of recovery?—is a question, of course, for the whole of From School to Salon. Why recover obscure nineteenth-century women poets at all? In Mary Poovey’s provocative words, Is there any point in recovering a writer’s work, just because the author belongs to a category—in this case, the woman writer—that we and our students consider important?¹⁰ Poovey deduces from her own experiment in recovery (a virtuoso reading of Ellen Pickering’s obscure 1839 novel Nan Darrell) that [a]s important to canonization as some universalist assessment of ‘quality’ is the ability of certain texts to tell us something about the imaginary wholes our discipline has been devised to illuminate: literary history, the history of gendered writing, the history of cultural ideas (Recovering Ellen Pickering, 449). And yet she does not find her recovery of Pickering finally worth the trouble; these novels, Poovey concludes, may help us recover the qualities that enabled a writer to subsist at the margins of popularity in the early nineteenth century, but they do not enhance our understanding of the early-nineteenth-century novel, of women writers, or even of something as amorphous as ideology (448). The hermeneutic circle formed in the relation between the discipline’s imaginary wholes and its already-canonized individual works need not and perhaps should not expand to include more Ellen Pickerings.

    Pierre Bourdieu, however, would reply to Poovey not only that this circular mode of understanding is intrinsically vicious but that it is bound despite itself to register, unwittingly, the way the ignored authors have affected, by the logic of action and reaction, the authors to be interpreted—the ones who, by their active rejection, have contributed to the others’ disappearance from history.¹¹ In Bourdieu’s argument, the discipline’s imaginary wholes drawn around familiarly canonized authors are always already structured by forgotten authors, without being able to reflect on that structuring. Describing somewhat different imaginary wholes would allow the discipline to include the objects of recovery—in both senses of object, the artifact and the aim with which it is sought—in critical understanding. As one reply to Poovey’s question, From School to Salon argues among other things for enlarging the objects of recovery projects—from individual authors and poems or themes to cultures of poetic literacy or cultural capital as embodied in poems and poets. What I ultimately want this book on nineteenth-century American women’s poetry to yield is not only a series of detailed readings of particular poems and poets but also a map of the changing cultural field of possibilities, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, in which these women poets emerged and which they helped shape. To borrow Patricia Crain’s formulation, reading these poets is an occasion to witness the small change of cultural capital at work.¹²

    Beyond the sheerly antiquarian pleasures of delving into the archives, then, I hope this book will contribute to the emerging larger history of women’s relationship to literacy or literacies, as exemplified by Crain’s work and that of other scholars.¹³ The women poets and their readers who figure in From School to Salon played an important role in the institutionalization of an Anglo-American vernacular literary canon. At the nineteenth century’s beginning, these American women poets translated to the United States much of the ethos and the curriculum of the British dissenting academies that helped birth a vernacular English literary canon as the specific cultural capital of the rising bourgeoisie, distinct from the classical Greek and Latin literary curricula of Oxford and Cambridge.¹⁴ At the century’s end, Annie Fields participated in stratifying the (by then well-established) Anglo-American literary canon and helped rejoin that canon to the classical curriculum at its highest social and educational levels, both by insisting on the importance of classical languages in elite women’s higher education and through her poetic translations and imitations of Greek and Latin texts. The history of how nineteenth-century American women wrote poetry is part of a wider history of women’s access to particular forms of cultural capital.

    This is my own history as well, of course, as a college-educated woman writing from the literary precincts of the present-day university, a century after Annie Fields longed to enter Harvard. But it is also the history of educated men and of common readers, because the nature of cultural capital changed historically for everyone when women began to have broader access to it. In Nancy Armstrong’s words, Today few of us realize that many features of our standard humanities curriculum came from a curriculum designed specifically for educating polite young women who were not of the ruling class, or that the teaching of native British literature developed as a means of socializing children, the poor, and foreigners before we became a masculine profession.¹⁵ We all inherit the cultural world that obscure nineteenth-century American women poets helped to make.

    PART I

    Prodigy and Teacher; or, Poetry in the Domestic-Tutelary Complex

    CHAPTER ONE

    Who Killed Lucretia Davidson?

    IN 1837, twelve years after her subject’s death at age seventeen from tuberculosis, popular novelist Catherine Sedgwick contributed a long biographical sketch of the poet Lucretia Maria Davidson to Jared Sparks’s Library of American Biography. Sedgwick’s biographical essay consolidated the reputation Lucretia Davidson had earlier won with her small posthumous collection, Amir Khan and Other Poems, assembled at the instigation of Lucretia’s mother, Margaret, edited by academician Samuel B. Morse, and published in 1829. Thus sponsored chiefly by women, Lucretia Davidson’s posthumous career as a poet had also, as Cheryl Walker has put it, a number of contemporary male midwives,¹ Washington Irving and Robert Southey conspicuously among them. A few years later, Mrs. Margaret Miller Davidson would draw on similar forms of authorization—this time with Washington Irving supplying Sedgwick’s place as introductory biographer—in assembling and publishing the Poetical Remains of still another daughter, Margaret Miller Davidson, who also died of tuberculosis in her teens. The combined Remains of both sisters, together with Sedgwick’s and Irving’s biographies, were issued in a handsome new two-volume companion edition in 1841. Lucretia Davidson’s Remains sold well enough to circulate for several decades, in translations as well as in new American editions.² In 1843, finally, Mrs. Davidson completed the family portrait when she appear[ed] for the first time before the public in her own person, with Selections from the Writings of Mrs. Margaret M. Davidson, introduced again by Miss Sedgwick, who justified Mrs. Davidson’s discarding the diffidence natural to a recluse and delicate woman by referring to those readers who have expressed a curiosity to know more of the mind whose holiest and brightest emanations were infused into those rare sisters, who seem hardly to have touched our world on their passage to Heaven.³

    The combined 1841 Remains attracted the notice of Edgar Allan Poe, who damned them with faint praise and used them as a stick with which to beat on the Davidsons’ promoters.⁴ Even Poe’s ambivalent notice, however, had to concede that those promoters had been effective; indeed, that is half his grievance as well as half his fascination with the Davidson sisters. By the time Poe reviewed the composite Remains in 1841, he was well and ironically aware that Lucretia Davidson was a family enterprise, a cottage industry, a fulminating discursive formation, as well as the proper name of a dead girl. If, in his famous dictum, the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world, what seems to have intrigued Poe in the Davidson sisters—young, white, upper-middle-class, consumptive, dead, thus by convention beautiful, and poetical as both subjects and objects—was at least in part the cultural machinery brought to the making of this poetical. His review of Margaret Miller Davidson’s Remains opens with an account of her elder sister’s making as a poet: The name of Lucretia Davidson is familiar to all readers of Poetry. Dying at the early age of seventeen, she has been rendered famous not less, and certainly not more, by her own precocious genius than by three memorable biographies, those of Morse, Sedgwick, and Southey.

    The name and death of Lucretia authorize the appearance of her sister Margaret Miller, whose name and remains in their turn implicate yet another woman, the other Margaret Miller Davidson. Few books, Poe says of Margaret’s Remains, have interested us more profoundly:

    Yet the interest does not appertain solely to Margaret. In fact, the narrative, says Mr. Irving, will be found almost as illustrative of the character of the mother as of the child; they were singularly identified in taste, feeling, and pursuit; tenderly entwined together by maternal and filial affection, they reflected an inexpressibly touching grace and interest upon each other by this holy relationship, and, to my mind, it would be marring one of the most beautiful and affecting groups in modern literature to sunder them. In these words the biographer conveys no more than a just idea of the exquisite loveliness of the picture here presented to view. (74–75)

    What interests is precisely the relationships of interchangeability among the women. Death is the sign under which women’s identities are ‘entwined’ with one another (or, to recall Sedgwick on Mrs. Davidson, their emanations . . . infused into one another) with exquisite loveliness, also poetry, the representational result of that entwinement.

    But it

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