The Whip Signature

Abstract

Over the past fifteen years, in the heat and ferment of lively feminist debate, the work of nineteenth-century American women poets seems to have changed, both in style and content. They used to be figures we might think of as favourite aunts, then they became our literary foremothers, and just recently they have come to seem more like sisters, uncannily bringing to the surface our own shameful lapses of pride and perversity. Obviously, the changes in these literary personalities have come about because of changes in the critical aperture through which we view them. In the early years of feminist literary criticism, Americans tended to use a wide-angle lens, lining up Emily Dickinson, for instance, against disabling and enabling Others: male Romantics, British female novelists, and other American women poets. In this phase pre-modern women seemed like our favourite aunts: sharp-tongued, eccentric, but always seen in the context of their familial relations. As we viewed these slightly off-centre figures from the past, we were especially sympathetic to the misfortunes they had suffered and the disabling conditions they had endured. Fifteen years ago when I wrote The Nightingale’s Burden, about ‘Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900’, the anxieties of authorship were a principal concern of American feminist critics like myself. There were so many circumstances, it seemed to us then, that inhibited the flow of female creativity.