Had I been born a hero

Helen Deutsch

Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre by Paula Backscheider
Johns Hopkins, 514 pp, £43.50, January 2006, ISBN 0 8018 8169 2

What would the 18th-century poetic canon look like if women were included? Imagine women poets being venerated alongside Alexander Pope, who held that ‘Most Women have no Characters at all,’ or Jonathan Swift, who, at the conclusion of that catalogue of excremental horrors ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, has his speaker remark: ‘Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/Because she rose from stinking Ooze?’ Or even Samuel Johnson. If women’s writing were taken into account, would it change the way we read and judge the poetry of an era long assumed to be magisterially Augustan and masculine? In her passionate and wide-ranging study of 18th-century women’s poetry, Paula Backscheider quotes Isobel Armstrong’s framing of such questions in a suggestively entitled essay, ‘The Gush of the Feminine’ (1995):

We have had two hundred years to discover a discourse of and strategies for reading male poets. They belong to a debate, a dialectic; we know how to think about politics, epistemology, power and language, in productive ways that . . . make these poets mean for us. A hermeneutics has evolved. Not so with the female poets. We are discovering who they are, but there are few ways of talking about them.

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Vol. 28 No. 18 · 21 September 2006 » Helen Deutsch » Had I been born a hero (print version)
Pages 25-26 | 3224 words

Letters

From Norma Clarke

‘We think back through our mothers if we are women,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, but there is no evidence that 18th-century women poets did anything of the sort. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is fine as polemic, but it makes dubious history, especially on poetry (the subject of the original lectures was ‘Women and Fiction’). Helen Deutsch’s review of Paula Backscheider’s Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry recycles much that was wrong in Woolf and is still wrong in those who passionately wish to bring women into ‘the old-fashioned canon’ (LRB, 21 September).

Eighteenth-century women poets read Milton and Dryden, Pope and Swift, Young and Gray, and they made their mark by trumpeting themselves as exceptions to the ordinary run of women who did not. Retirement poetry was not a specifically female tradition, nor was friendship. It is nonsense to talk of women having been ‘confined indoors for centuries’ and tiresome to be told that Jane Austen – whose family cherished this writer in their midst – hid her manuscript under the blotter as if it was a shameful secret (it wasn’t). These are myths of the ‘I wrote it while pushing the baby around the park’ variety. Nothing is ‘easier to write while distracted’.

Poetic ability signalled superiority – a quality the 18th century valued. For middle and working-class women it might translate into social elevation. Local grandees hunted out talent, following the lead of Queen Caroline, who in the 1730s took up the thresher poet Stephen Duck. There was cachet in being a patron; ‘natural genius’ might be discovered in women as well as men. The washerwoman capable of iambic pentameter, or a rhyming servant, carried social value for a mistress keen on having a reputation as a cultural player. For the upwardly aspiring woman poet in a society which placed women below men there was little inducement to reach back to foremothers: the point was to display ability in the established (high, male) tradition.

We should also bear in mind that poetry expressing the workings of the inner self was relatively unusual until the later 18th century. Wit and satire, based on classical models, dominated. The misogynistic writings of Swift and Pope provided women with opportunities: the retaliatory ‘defence’ of women is a sub-genre all its own. Both men, meanwhile, especially Swift, were supporters of women writers. Social rather than solitary, public and political rather than private, poetry’s ‘hospitable atmosphere’ in the 18th century was about mixing the sexes, not segregating them. It was the development of literary criticism and the institutions that supported canon-formation at the end of the century, along with the Wordsworthian poet as priestly hero, that changed the terms and has complicated later understandings.

Norma Clarke
London N15

From Helen Deutsch

Norma Clarke disagrees more with Paula Backscheider than with me (Letters, 5 October). I chose Woolf’s outdated, polemical and still (to Clarke’s dismay) powerful A Room of One’s Own as a ‘proleptic prequel’ to Backscheider’s book as a way to make sense of Backscheider’s attempt to imagine a separate women’s poetry in the 18th century. I contended that the nature of poetry-writing itself makes such an endeavour impossible, and pointed to conversations within genres – including retirement and friendship poetry – between men and women poets of the period. My aim was to show how Woolf’s desire for a fully realised women’s writing is both echoed and complicated by Backscheider’s project. I don’t share this desire, but as Backscheider’s book demonstrates, it can be good to think with and against.

Helen Deutsch
Los Angeles