Figs and Fame

Abstract

In The Bell Jar (1963), Sylvia Plath describes her protagonist’s metaphoric struggle with the future: ‘I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.’¹ Esther’s vision implies agency, the possibility of doing something as well as the necessity to (re-)act and a future that must be shaped. Plath’s fig tree, however, is a twentieth-century conception of futurity, not an eighteenth-century one. The future seemed more contingent in the early modern period and less accommodating to the visions of the individual.² In this chapter, I would like to trace eighteenth-century women’s conceptions of the future in poetry, as their poems reveal aspects of agency, here taken to mean specifically the possibility to shape and influence their future. ‘Agency’, Paula Backscheider asserts, ‘may be assessed in proportion to perceived ambition’.³ Ambition is an aspect of futurity implying the hope of some future rewards. It is also an important indicator of the more general impressions conveyed by women’s poetry of what it was possible to think and to express in the eighteenth century. Anyone writing poetry with even the slightest thought of publication in mind –and I dare say most of the women who found their way into print did have that thought in mind, no matter how much they protested the contrary –had dreams or visions of a future, however unusual.