1

Msrepresentation
Codes of Affect and Politics in
Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry
ISaBEL ARMSTRONG

Slush. When Ezra Pound warned that a new modernist aesthetic

valuing linguistic concentration and the simultaneity of the multi-
ple image in an instant of time must 'Go in fear of abstractions', he
added that nineteenth-century poets filled up the gaps in their
poetry with slush. 1 Such a formulation implicitly feminizes all nine-
teenth-century poets by associating them with emotional excess,
but even by contemporaries affect was seen to be the particular
characteristic of women's poetry. Put more blandly, as expressed
by Thackeray'S Sir Barnes Newcome in The Newcomes, who gave a
series of emollient lectures to retrieve his political reputation, this
was 'The Poetry of Womanhood and the Affections': 'We glance at
Mrs Hemans's biography, and state where she was born, and under
what circumstances she must have at first, &c., &C'.2 Such poetry
belongs to a language we have forgotten how to use and to read.
Yet the possibilities of that culture of affect, and the genres and lin-
guistic forms it engendered, the possibility that 'slush' might
possess some epistemic potential and might even have done the
work of critique and analysis, are particularly worth enquiring into,
given the impoverished terms of our own century for feeling and
emotion. It is illuminating to mark the moment when affect became
an embarrassment - Virginia Woolf was quite right to see that what
she called a 'hum' of affect in A Room of One's Own disappeared
from English society around 1914, obliterated by a new, 'progres-
sive' modernist poetics torn out of the mind. 3
The moment of affective culture's demise in turn generates ques-
tions about its trajectory and the politics around it earlier, in the
nineteenth century. Why did an emancipatory poetry of the 1790s-
a poetry of the affections - based on an ideology of feeling which
3

I. Armstrong et al. (eds.), Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 1999
4 Changing Genres and Codes across the Century
assigned a civic value to the passions, come to be inflected as
conservative and feminine by the 1850s, seemingly claimed for a
reactionary agenda? Can we associate this with the disappearance
of a directly polemical political poetry among women? Is what can
be used for conservative purposes intrinsically conservative?
When she described affect as 'a sort of humming noise, not ar-
ticulate, but musical, exciting ... " Virginia Woolf recognized a
difficulty inherent in any analysis of it. 4 Affect's semantic field is
broad. It crosses categories: emotion or feeling experienced in con-
sciousness and registered by the body, both mental and kinaesthetic,
belonging to mind and soma; it relates to reflexively known passions
and the unknown drives, straddling the conscious and the uncon-
scious just as it straddles physiology and mind, belonging to the light
and the dark. It at once includes the passions within itself and can be
differentiated from them. Above all, though Woolf associated affect
with the communality of shared images, often the banal repetition of
cliche 'hummed' by men and women alike, it is not 'articulate'. One
cannot point to it in a text. An effect of language, it is not in language:
there is only linguistic evidence of it in the structures which are its
traces and the traces which are its structures. Experimental psycholo-
gists are not agreed about how to define affect or whether it can be
defined at all. The interaction of neurophysiological with cognitive
experience, the need for a more refined taxonomy which differenti-
ates between emotions, feelings and drives, how far affect is a
response to or antecedent to arousal, innate or learned, all these are
recurrent questions. 5 As textual critics we can at least interrogate a
cultural tradition which developed a discourse of affect and consider
the rhetorics concurrently at work in poetry.
Difficulties of definition may have obstructed a hermeneutics of
affective poetry, but these are not the foremost reasons why critics
do not write about it. There is another reason, and that is the 'Whig'
genealogy of nineteenth-century women's poetry as a progressive
move towards modernism. Most nineteenth-century women poets
were in print up to about 1914, the First World War, when, as we
have seen, modernism killed them. And even their memory was
obliterated by the end of the Second World War, when a successful
drive to return women to domesticity, to prevent unemployment
for returning troops, consigned to cultural amnesia an active
history of women's publications and of feminist commitment
throughout the nineteenth century, a history which even now is
inadequately documented. 6 The Whig genealogy undoubtedly con-