From School to Salon

Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry

Mary Loeffelholz

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691231105
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

Notes

INTRODUCTION. THE OBJECTS OF RECOVERY

1. John Hollander, ed., American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 1993); Cheryl Walker, ed., American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Joan R. Sherman, ed., African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Janet Gray, ed., She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997); Paula Bernat Bennett, ed., Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

2. Emily Watts’s early formalist survey, The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), included some popular nineteenth-century women poets. Cheryl Walker’s The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), stood alone as a scholarly book dedicated specifically to nineteenth-century American women’s poetry until Elizabeth A. Petrino’s Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America, 1820–1885 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998). As I write, however, major new studies are forthcoming, including Paula Bernat Bennett’s Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), and Eliza Richards’s Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2004).

3. Joseph Harrington, “Why American Poetry Is Not American Literature,” American Literary History 8 (fall 1996): 496–515. Harrington cites Dana Nelson’s The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature (1992) as one example of many of influential work in new American literary studies that does not look to poetry as American literature. For recent studies on general topics in American literature that do include poetry, see, for example, Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), which moves between the novel and poetry by Sigourney, Longfellow, and unpublished writers; Carolyn Sorisio, Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833–1879 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), which treats Frances Harper’s poetry; and Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). Sharon Harris’s review essay “‘A New Era in Female History’: Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women Writers,” American Literature 74 (2002): 603–18, demonstrates how true Harrington’s observation remains in the field of women’s writing particularly. As Harris accurately notes, “Recovery of nineteenth-century U.S. women’s writing began primarily with novels, then we looked to autobiographies, travel narratives, women’s suffrage texts, and so on” (605). The end of the essay confirms poetry’s place in the “and so on,” gesturing toward “poetry, for instance” (617), as a site of important current work. The work in poetry specifically cited as important by Harris, however, Paula Bennett’s Nineteenth-Century Women Poets and Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, ed. Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith (Ashfield, Mass.: Paris, 1998), remains stubbornly locked in the category of anthologies or editions.

4. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 12.

5. Tony Bennett, Outside Literature (London: Routledge, 1990), 284.

6. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

7. Writing of critical work on Frances Harper and other pre-twentieth-century African American writers, Frances Smith Foster complains of “[t]he notable reluctance of many scholars to offer close readings of texts or to assess the literary aesthetics that these early writings manifest.” Foster’s own work attends to both the social conditions of African American women’s writing and the literary intricacies of particular works, and calls for recovery of the “literary aesthetics” of pre-twentieth-century African American literature. “Gender, Genre, and Vulgar Secularism: The Case of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the AME Press,” in Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts: Race, Class, and Gender in Black Women’s Literature, ed. Dolan Hubbard (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 51, 54. Foster’s critique implicitly takes issue with Paul Lauter’s influential brief against close formalist reading, especially as applied to working-class art; canon revision on Lauter’s model would proceed directly from anthologizing to a form of teaching, not yet fully articulated, that would dispense with the medium of close explication. “Caste, Class, and Canon,” reprinted in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Robyn R. Warhold and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 129–50.

8. Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African-American Women, 1746–1892 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 140.

9. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, The War of the Words (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988); Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

10. Mary Poovey, “Recovering Ellen Pickering,” Yale Journal of Criticism 13 (2002): 438. See also the eloquent responses in the same number by Margaret Homans (453–60) and Jill Campbell (461–65), followed by Poovey’s rejoinder (467–78).

11. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Conquest of Autonomy,” in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 70–71.

12. Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of American from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 12.

13. In addition to Crain, see recent work represented, for example, by the essays collected in Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write, ed. Catherine Hobbs (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Katherine H. Adams, A Group of Their Own: College Writing Courses and American Women Writers, 1880–1940 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); and Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African-American Literary Societies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).

14. On the eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century history of this development, see John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. chapter 2, “Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon” (85–133).

15. Nancy Armstrong, “Literature as Women’s History,” Genre 19 (winter 1986): 367.

CHAPTER ONE. WHO KILLED LUCRETIA DAVIDSON?

1. Walker, Nightingale’s Burden, 80.

2. In 1871, M. Oliver Davidson made the last nineteenth-century attempt to trade on the family name, reissuing Lucretia Maria Davidson’s poems (and finally dropping the antebellum convention of designating them “remains”) in an illustrated edition, prefaced with his own biography and a few of his poems; see Poems by Lucretia Maria Davidson, ed. M. Oliver Davidson (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1871).

3. C. M. Sedgwick, “Preface,” Selections from the Writings of Mrs. Margaret M. Davidson, the Mother of Lucretia Maria and Margaret M. Davidson (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1843), n.p. Mrs. Davidson’s writings never received the acclaim of her daughters’ poetry.

4. Edgar Allan Poe, “Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson,” in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 10: 221–26, and “Biography and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson,” 174–78.

5. Joan Dayan argues that “convertibility”—“the unbelievable overturning of the law of identity and contradiction,” rendered fictionally as tales of “possession, multiple hauntings, and identity dissolutions”—is the key to Poe’s critique of “the white epistemologist of the sublime, the enlightenment ‘universal man.’” See “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American Literature 66 (June 1994): 244; see also Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 200–203. For a complementary reading of Poe and the ladies that reads Poe’s identification with women poets in terms of the literary marketplace rather than epistemological vertigo, see Eliza Richards, “‘The Poetess’ and Poe’s Performance of the Feminine,” Arizona Quarterly 55, no. 2 (summer 1999): 1–29.

6. Poe, “Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson,” 10:222.

7. See Dayan, “Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” 260–62, on the operation of this racial vocabulary of womanhood in “Ligeia.”

8. Miss [Catherine] Sedgwick, “Biography of Lucretia Maria Davidson,” in Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson, Collected and Arranged by Her Mother (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1847); Washington Irving, “Biography of Miss Margaret Davidson,” in Biography and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1841), 11. All citations of the Davidson sisters’ poetry are from these editions.

9. Dayan, “Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” 259.

10. Richard Brodhead, “Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America,” in Cultures of Letters, 13–47. Brodhead reads Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter as “an attempt to weigh the methods and powers of a newer against an older disciplinary order,” and adds, “Taking the measure of this new order might be said to be the task of Edgar Allan Poe’s altogether weirder gothic as well” (29).

11. Ibid., 47.

12. Fiction dominates in most literary-cultural studies of mid-nineteenth-century American culture in addition to Brodhead’s, from Ann Douglas’s early Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977), to the more recent Culture of Sentiment: Race Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Of the fifteen essays in Culture of Sentiment, none uses poetry as its primary body of evidence or focuses on the cultural location and work of poetry specifically as a genre. Fiction’s dominance holds across divergent critical perspectives: Judith Fetterley, for instance, criticizes Douglas’s, Brodhead’s, and Samuels’s books for purveying too “disproportionately negative” an assessment of women’s “sentimentalism,” but she, like them, focuses almost exclusively (if not self-consciously) on fiction. Judith Fetterley, “Commentary: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Politics of Recovery,” American Literary History 6 (fall 1994): 607.

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