The Posthumous Voice in Women's Writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath

Claire Raymond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351883665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This provocative book posits a new theory of women's writing characterized by what Claire Raymond calls 'the posthumous voice.'This suggestive term evokes the way that women's writing both forefronts and hides the author's implied body within and behind the written work. Tracing the use of the disembodied posthumous voice in fiction and poetry by Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath, Raymond's study sounds out the ways that the trope of the posthumous voice succeeds in negotiating the difficult cultural space between the concept of woman's body and the production of canonical literature. Arguing that the nineteenth-century cult of mourning opens to women's writing the possibility of a post-Romantic 'self-elegy, ' Raymond explores how the woman writer's appropriation and alteration of elegiac conventions signifies and revises her disrupted relationship to audience. Theorizing the posthumous voice as a gesture by which the woman writer claims, and in some cases gains, canonicity, Raymond contends that the elegy posed as if written by a dead woman for herself both describes and subverts the woman writer's secondary status in the English canon. For the woman writer, the self-elegy permits access to a topos central to canonical literature, with the implementation of the trope of the posthumous voice marking a crucial site of woman's interaction with the English canon.

Chapter 1
Spectral Gardens: Pastoral Tradition and Feminine Self-Elegy

In The Oaten Flute, which Celeste Marguerite Schenck praises for reinvigorating critical attention to the elegy, Renato Poggioli pushes a reading of the convention of the pastoral elegy not only to contain the concept of a “pastoral oasis,” as in Dante’s Commedia, but also to frame a way of generically rereading prose works, fitting them into a genealogy of the pastoral.¹ His posthumous elasticization of the boundaries of the convention (The Oaten Flute was published under the auspices of A. Bartlett Giamatti ten years after Poggioli’s untimely death, Giamatti’s gesture itself marking an uncanny repetition of elegiac convention) drew criticism for what some argued were too-subtle interpretations of the conventions of the genre.² But Schenck’s Mourning and Panegyric points out that Poggioli’s sharpening of our awareness of the gestures of the pastoral in the context of works that obliquely deploy the conventions demonstrates their vitality. Schenck contrasts Poggioli’s more elastic interpretation of elegiac codes with, for example, Ellen Lambert’s rigid definition of pastoral elegy, a definition so confining, suggests Schenck, as to limit participation in pastoral elegy to Theocritus alone.³

In contending that Shelley’s Mathilda, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Dickinson’s child elegies, and some of Plath’s Ariel poems participate in and comment on the formal parameters of the pastoral elegy, my argument inherits the terms of reading practiced by Poggioli and Schenck, in that, in finding gestures of elegiac conventions in the works, I put pressure on the parameters of the conventions. Needless to say, none of the works on which I am writing are full participants in the pastoral elegy. The alterations of the elegy that I read in Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath mark the formal code of elegy as commentary by difference, shaping these writers’ self-elegies as feminine texts. These writers’ deployment of some terms of the pastoral elegy in what I am calling a feminine self-elegy is the formal gesture by which I interpret a writer positioning herself as at once outcast from the canon and able to overturn that outcast status.⁴

Lambert locates responsibility for the shifting of the meaning of elegy to that of a poem about death in English literature, while Schenck links mourning and death to the pastoral from the beginning, claiming that even “in early Greek pastoral poetic ceremonies, the orphic protagonist(s) either decry a loss or voice a consolation.”⁵ From Virgil to Moschus to Milton, the tradition presents the younger poet-shepherd lamenting the dead voice of another male figure, although, strictly speaking, Lambert is correct in noting that only relatively recently has the word elegy come to mean exclusively a poem commemorating and lamenting the dead.

While it would seem that I am applying the term elegy, in “feminine self-elegy,” in the later and latter sense of the word—the sense in which elegy is simply a poem of mourning, a poem about death—I argue in this chapter that part of what distinguishes the works of Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath from female elegy is their conceiving of the possibilities of their own canonicity, their works’ address and alteration of some critical motifs of the pastoral elegy. In particular, I point to Schenck’s argument:

What survives the demise of pastoral conventions, characters, symbols, is pastoral’s initiatory function as a mode in which the young careerist demonstrates his fitness for the literary life. Either he invokes a ceremonial frame for his self-presenting utterance, or else, by means of sophisticated parody, he refuses the conventional symbols of poetic immortality and exposes the celebratory tone of such pastorals as hollow.⁶

In other words, what survives Milton’s elegy for the elegy is the initiatory function by which the male poet bids his entry into the canon.

If, as Schenck contends, a poet like Hart Crane ironizes the commonplace of the elegy in his poem “The Bridge,” Crane’s vision of the hollowness of the initiation at once puts him in conversation with Dickinson (for whom he wrote an elegy of sorts) and establishes and preserves his place as a writer of the male elegy, one who critiques the tradition from within, making a bridge between himself and earlier male poets.⁷ Strikingly, Crane’s elegist invokes a heroics of the battlefield in the very place of the pastoral:

[…] Thou, pallid there as chalk
Hast kept of wounds, O Mourners, all that sum
That then from Appomattox stretched to Somme!
Cowslip and shad-blow flaked like tethered foam
Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring⁸

Here, the heroic images of war intermix with the pastoral “cowslip,” mocking the conventions of the genre while by no means distancing the concerns of male power and privilege, all that is fought through and for in wars, from the center of the poem’s enterprise. Crane’s mixing of the heroic and the pastoral may be said to collapse the distinction Lambert makes between the pastoral, or mourned, death and the heroic, or envied, death, but that very collapse strengthens and preserves the male domain of this English elegy.⁹

The passage underscores, then, Peter Sacks’s theorizing of the male elegy as a literary act that codifies and preserves masculine codes of honor and privilege in the face of death, blurring the very boundary that Lambert places between the pastoral and the heroic death.¹⁰ While the classical pastoral elegy and epic poem contrast sharply and strictly in content and form, in English literature after Milton the pastoral elegy serves the function of commemorating precisely the honor and name of the male figure elegized and, reciprocally, honoring the implicit figure of the male elegist himself. Indeed, Schenck identifies a thematics of initiation as the essential stroke of the pastoral.¹¹

But in contrast to Crane’s image of holding hands with Walt Whitman, the feminine self-elegy approaches the pastoral conventions without a hand to hold. The self-elegy written by Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath is not elegy primarily in the sense of being a work about death and mourning—is not simply elegy in the more recent sense of the word. The self-elegy achieved by these women writers evokes pastoral elegy. In these works, a woman dead before her prime is dramatically mourned by a speaker whose eloquence answers the silencing of the other woman’s voice, a voice that is belatedly revealed to be the same as the voice of the speaker. Here, the convention is altered by the feminization of both the elegist and the subject of the elegy. The subversion of the conventions on which I focus is that rhetorical gesture of inscribing an elegist who claims to elegize herself from the space of her death; this altering of Sacks’s male elegy not only troubles the topos of the pastoral but also, I suggest, forefronts the interdiction of the daughter-as-speaker from the canon, staging this interdiction in an allusive move that posits an always belated audience whose performative reading will restore the topos of the feminine elegist. I read the prose works Mathilda and Wuthering Heights and some poems of Dickinson and of Plath as self-elegies because they formalize the initiatory structure of the pastoral, altering that structure to expose the woman writer’s exclusion from the master–apprentice dialogue, shifting the structure to pose a scene in which the dead speaker is elegized by herself. A self-elegy at once recognizes woman’s isolation from the canon and imagines the speaker placing herself either in the canon or in some other alterior lineage in which her literary genius is recognized and, as it were, immortalized, couched against death. The process becomes a privative ritual of self-initiation outside the genealogy of male canonical discourse.

The apparent ungendering of the speaker, for example, that opens a poem in which Dickinson claims poetic genius for her speaker, “This was a Poet” (Fr446), also encodes that poem’s reading of the relationship between feminine voice and elegy, inasmuch as the poem places itself as a commemoration of another poet. Dickinson’s poem’s use of the pronouns “This,” “It,” and “Ourselves” not only ungenders the poet and the speaker but also links that effacement of gender with an implicit understanding of the monumentalizing effect of elegy, its making of its subject and its elegist into literary items. Dickinson’s poem’s use of “This” and “It” makes the poet not only neither male nor female but also not human, an object apart. But this extrahuman status suddenly collapses in the poem’s third stanza, which assigns a masculine “He” to the poet and states that the male poet “Entitles” the feminine speaker to “Poverty” (12–14). While it is highly possible that Dickinson uses the “He” (“The Poet - it is He -”) to refer to herself, claiming for herself poetic immortality, such an interpretation slips into reductive readings in which we focus on Dickinson’s appropriation as a woman writer of a male persona in her poetry as if this were a simple reversal and consequently ignore the more nuanced argument about gender that her poem makes. For Dickinson’s poem describes a male poet taking away a feminine speaker’s elegiac rights.

The male poet described in Fr446 does not write about just anything. He writes elegies: he “Distills” “Attar” from what has “perished,” and he “Arrest[s]” the “familiar species,” placing elegy in a pastoral, the terms of which the male poet commands (3–5, 6, 7, 9). Given the poem’s resonance with others of Dickinson’s in which she describes a speaker who imagines herself having riches of poetic genius, it seems likely that here Dickinson inscribes for her feminine speaker the elegiac rights of a male speaker, gaining for her speaker a male poet’s power by making this implicit argument against the gendered code of traditional pastoral elegy. (The force of Dickinson’s poem’s argument is in its questioning of the necessity of a speaker’s being masculine in order to attain canonicity, or poetic immortality “Exterior - to Time” (17).

Strikingly, the poem’s final stanza suggests that the current speaker will “Rob” the male poet of his “unconscious” “Portion,” his uncritical assumption of his own superior position as male elegist (14, 15). Dickinson’s speaker leaves the male “Poet” curiously awash in self-regard, the phrase “Himself - to Him - a Fortune” suggesting that the male poet has drifted solipsistically into a bloated self-satisfaction while the wily feminine speaker “Rob[s]” from him the “Attar,”—the essential or necessary poem (15, 5). The aggression and violence implied in Fr446 point to the elegy as the crux of the male poet’s claim to canonicity, to poetic fame “Exterior - to Time.” That Dickinson may claim such status for herself is at once the point here and also beside the point. This gesture inherently evokes the speaker’s premature exclusion from other elegiac traditions, for in her self-elegies she makes her speaker the mourned and the mourner, establishing lineage as empty frame.

The reader is inscribed into the self-elegy, inasmuch as the eclogue structure of the pastoral invokes audience as witness, participant. The self-elegy is written, however, only as if read, never as speech; it is not the corpse or ghost speaking but rather always already text self-aware of its presence as text—anticipating readership, invoking readership.¹² Implicitly, the feminine self-elegy invokes audience as witness to complete the performance of elegy posed categorically as existing only as text, as trace. Here, the performed-as-speech tradition from Theocritus and Virgil is stripped away, and the spare poetics of self-consolation, what Beatrice Guenther calls the “limit of mimesis,” replaces the eclogue with spectral writer and reader. If Luce Irigaray argues that woman only uses language by imitating, or mirroring, male language, I connect her argument with the convention of what Sacks calls the male elegy to establish a way that women writing the self-elegy develop a mode of mourning that neither entirely mimics the terms of the male elegy nor fails to contend magisterially with its pastoral conventions. If the feminine self-elegy mirrors back the speaker mourning for herself, this mirroring is not, as Irigaray would contend, merely imitative of male elegy.¹³ Rather, it addresses itself in a manner at once privative and dramatically directed to an audience, albeit a belated audience.

Only the belated audience for the self-elegy, the reader, makes meaningful the reflexive gesture of inscribing mourning for oneself as if from the space of one’s death. The audience is called upon to perform and complete the aborted mourning of the speaker elegized by her own voice. This formal address of the codes of elegy asserts the woman writer’s capacity to actively appropriate and alter the terms of that very male canon that resists her claims to it. In disagreeing with Irigaray’s argument that women can only mirror male language, I am suggesting that the act of mirroring the terms of an established literary convention allows the woman writer of the self-elegy to alter and comment on the conventions. Here, allusion is used as an active mirror, an awareness of the frame of tradition and of how the angle of what is placed before the mirror of text will change the language.

Indeed, for the woman writer historically denied canonical place, the pretense of mirroring conventions of the male elegy performs an implicit commentary: by pretending to remark upon the passing of herself as on the passing of a genius, the troped posthumous feminine speaker reconfigures the very literary terms by which her exclusion is marked and generated.¹⁴ This formal appropriation of the gesture of apprenticeship—an ironic apprenticeship to oneself—in the feminine self-elegy comments on the underlying exclusion of the feminine from the canon, the canon built, as Schenck argues, on apprenticeship and mastery as interdependent terms.¹⁵ In Virgil’s Fifth Eclogue, as in Moschus’s Lament for Bion, the elegizing of the male precursor is the driving force of the poem’s inherent claims for its significance. Dialogue scenes at once linking elegist, audience, and elegized are also, importantly, scenes in which the dead man is granted fame by a surviving younger male poet. Terms of master and apprentice are highlighted and ironically hollowed in the feminine self-elegy, in which the speaker poses as her own master.

Dickinson’s “It bloomed and dropt, a Single Noon” (Fr843) marks the feminine speaker’s encounter with the pastoral elegy by its specification of noontime, the time of elegy.¹⁶ In Dickinson’s poem, the elegist is depicted as confronting her own failure...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Introduction
• 1 Spectral Gardens: Pastoral Tradition and Feminine Self-Elegy
• 2 Lethe's Shore: Mary Shelley's Sacred Horror
• 3 Eating Eternally Deeper: The Posthumous Voice in Wuthering Heights
• 4 Emily Dickinson as the Unnamed, Buried Child
• 5 Rossetti's Late Suitors: The Death Lyrics and the Speaking Body
• 6 Hooks and Ladders: Sylvia Plath's "The Rabbit Catcher"
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index