The Political Poetess

Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres

Tricia Lootens

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400883721
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

The Political Poetess challenges familiar accounts of the figure of the nineteenth-century Poetess, offering new readings of Poetess performance and criticism. In performing the Poetry of Woman, the mythic Poetess has long staked her claims as a creature of "separate spheres"—one exempt from emerging readings of nineteenth-century women's political poetics. Turning such assumptions on their heads, Tricia Lootens models a nineteenth-century domestic or private sphere whose imaginary, apolitical heart is also the heart of nation and empire, and, as revisionist histories increasingly attest, is traumatized and haunted by histories of slavery. Setting aside late Victorian attempts to forget the unfulfilled, sentimental promises of early antislavery victories, The Political Poetess restores Poetess performances like Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus" to view—and with them, the vitality of the Black Poetess within African-American public life.Crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline to "connect the dots" of Poetess performance, Lootens demonstrates how new histories and ways of reading position poetic texts by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dinah Mulock Craik, George Eliot, and Frances E. W. Harper as convergence points for larger engagements ranging from Germaine de Staël to G.W.F. Hegel, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, Alice Walker, and beyond.

Section 1

Racializing the Poetess: Haunting “Separate Spheres”

CHAPTER ONE

Antislavery Afterlives: Changing
the Subject / Haunting the Poetess

Consider the following scenario: as a young woman celebrates her marriage in the “flowering depths” of a wood, a “horde” of murderous strangers descends. Tearing the bride in “wild despair” from her dying lover’s arms, they carry her to their ship. That night, as survivors gloomily watch the “spoilers’ vessel” becalmed offshore, a “piercing cry / Bursts from the heart of the ship.” “Wild forms” appear, struggling against a blaze that climbs the mast “like a glittering snake,” shrivels the sails, takes “the flag’s high place in air,” and reddens the very stars. “Plunging from stern and prow,” figures leap into the sea, until “the slave and his master alike are gone,” leaving alone on deck a woman whose eye, “with an eagle-gladness fraught,” confirms the message of the blazing brand she brandishes: “Yes! ’twas her deed!—by that haughty smile / It was her’s!” The kidnapped bride has “kindled her funeral pile!”: she has vindicated the “blood” that “hath made her free.”¹

Thus one of the most famous suicide narratives of early nineteenth-century Poetess performance, Felicia Dorothea Hemans’s “The Bride of the Greek Isle,” draws toward its close. Violent invasion; kidnapping; shipboard imprisonment, followed by vengeful, fiery rebellion: no wonder one class of undergraduates reportedly asked, “Were there black people writing in the time period?” How, though, might we explain their teacher’s recorded surprise?² How, indeed, have Hemans critics, myself included, so easily evaded such connections?³ Years ago, we might have simply insisted that this is, after all, a Greek bride. By now, though, given recent critical attention to the midcentury reception of American sculptor Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave statue, we should surely know better. When is a “Greek slave” not necessarily a Greek slave? At a moment of acute controversy around transatlantic slavery, it would seem: a moment, that is, like 1825, when Hemans’s poem first appeared. Suicides, fiery rebellions: so central were these to controversy over the Middle Passage that by 1790, kidnapped Africans’ willingness to choose death over enslavement had already sparked parliamentary debate (Marcus Rediker, Slave Ship, 18). Slave runners’ denials notwithstanding, generation after generation of kidnapped Africans, including women, had killed and were killing themselves in the Middle Passage.⁴ They flung themselves into the sea; they died by self-starvation, defying force-feeding; they sank into fatal “fixed melancholy.”⁵ “Death was more preferable than life”: thus reads Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s resonant late eighteenth-century account of his own forced journey from Africa: “a plan was concerted amongst us, that we might burn and blow up the ship, and to perish all together in the flames.”⁶

By 1825, then, “newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic” had already “endlessly chronicled the bloody uprisings of the enslaved,” including the “spectacular,” fiery “mass suicides” of rebels bent on “blowing up the entire ship.”⁷ What is more, where newspaper accounts circulated, so, too, did poetry.⁸ Indeed, by 1789, one such poem, James Field Stanfield’s The Guinea Voyage, had even partly anticipated the narrative of “Bride.” (Having been seized by attackers who slaughtered her beloved on their wedding day, Stanfield’s once-joyous African heroine Abyeda dies from lashing during the Middle Passage.⁹)

Sometimes, to be sure, a Greek slave is, or tries to be, only a Greek slave; and indeed, Hemans, in contrast to many of her contemporaries, including Anna Laetitia Barbauld, William Blake, Thomas Chatterton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Cowper, Mary Lamb, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Thomas Moore, Hannah More, Amelia Opie, Mary Robinson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth, remained notably silent with respect to transatlantic slavery, which had enriched her sometime home city of Liverpool. Still, where reception was concerned, Hemans’s personal convictions might scarcely have mattered.¹⁰ By 1834, after all, in the antislavery collection The Bow in the Cloud, quotation of Hemans could preface celebration of Phillis Wheatley, the “Negro Poetess.”¹¹ Indeed, Maria Weston Chapman’s 1836 radical Garrisonian Songs of the Free and Hymns of Christian Freedom not only cited Hemans’s poems repeatedly but took her words as epigraph.¹² In reading Hemans’s “Greek Slave,” then, Romantic period specialists might do well to attend to Victorianists’ accounts of poetic responses to Hiram Powers’s statue.

This having been said, given Romantic period specialists’ earlier, more immediately energetic engagements with histories of transatlantic slavery, they can hardly be faulted for having missed this point.¹³ Indeed, if Victorian poetry specialists have modeled anything in this context, even where so explicit an antislavery poem as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave” is concerned, it may have been avoidance. For while earlier generations’ silence may bespeak larger patterns of authorial neglect,¹⁴ even in more recent years, feminist Victorianists have tended to read EBB’s sonnet above all in relation to its author, leaving more insistently political analyses, including feminist analyses, to art historians and Americanists.¹⁵ Might there be something particularly “Victorian,” even, about Romantic poetry readers’ impulse to sequester readings of “Bride of the Greek Isle” from awareness of the Middle Passage? Perhaps; but not necessarily in the way one might expect.

EARLY ANTISLAVERY VICTORIES: VICTORIAN AFTERLIVES

Leaping and lingering: such movement, I’ve suggested, will characterize much of this book. Here, I hope to practice both, shifting to a larger, speculative mode while grounding my speculations through attention to one highly charged artistic object: J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On. Now iconic in its own right, the history of Turner’s painting begins in controversy and celebration, only to end in pain, evasion, and displacement. In this, it opens up a very Victorian story indeed.

Long notorious, Turner’s depiction of the jettisoning murder of captive Africans has, in recent years, attracted increasing scholarly attention.¹⁶ It is to this painting, commonly termed the Slave Ship, for example, that historian Linda Colley moves in closing Britons, her influential 1992 study of the making of “British” national identity between 1707 and 1837. Taking Turner’s work as opening illustration, Colley’s “Slavery, Freedom and Consensus” section reminds readers that although Britain’s official withdrawal from the slave trade came in 1807; its passage of the Emancipation Act in 1833; and its extension of full, formal emancipation to all West Indian slaves in 1838, for culmination of British patriotic antislavery celebrations, 1840 is the year that stands out (350–63, 352, 356, 350). “From being the world’s greediest and most successful traders of slaves in the eighteenth century, the British had shifted to being able to preen themselves on being the world’s foremost opponents of slavery,” Colley writes; and in 1840, preen they did (351). “London was to host the first International Anti-Slavery Convention”; and this coming event, of which “the publicity-conscious Turner was certainly aware,” she proposes, shaped Turner’s work (351). In depicting the notorious 1783 jettisoning of some 133 captives from the slave-ship Zong, then, Colley proposes, Turner sought to “commemorate the doom of slavery and not just a handful of its victims.”¹⁷

Past antislavery victories, Colley notes, now become central to Victorian patriotic self-understandings. Proven commitment to Emancipation offered the British “an epic stage upon which they could strut in an overwhelmingly attractive guise,” an “emblem of national virtue” they could use both to “impress foreigners with their innate love of liberty” and to “reassure themselves whenever their own faith was in danger of flagging.”¹⁸ As illustration of the expanding nineteenth-century celebration of “the memory and mythology of the anti-slavery campaign,” then, Slave Ship thus claims its place in Britons as emblematic of forces destined to become “an important part” of a midcentury “Victorian culture of complacency”: a culture “in which matters of domestic reform were allowed to slide” (360).

Though specialists in later British history might take exception to Colley’s implicit characterization of a fall into Victorianism, few would probably disagree with her claim that “successful abolitionism became one of the vital underpinnings of British supremacy in the Victorian era, offering—as it seemed to do—irrefutable proof that British power was founded on religion, on freedom and on moral calibre, not just on a superior stock of armaments and capital” (359). Faith in national moral and political awakenings fueled by sentiment and backed by statistical analysis; confidence in the redemptive power of (disenfranchised, overtly apolitical) feminine influence; conflation of “freedom,” colonial expansion, and free trade: it’s hard to find a cliché of Victorian patriotism that can’t trace back, at least in part, to Britain’s dramatic transformation from the world’s major slave power to a self-proclaimed global agent of liberation.

Why, then, is this a past that, until very recently, most students or teachers of Victorian literary culture have tacitly downplayed?¹⁹ Consider, for example, that ever-irresistible target for canonical investigation, the Victorian portion of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Absent from the 2000 seventh edition’s period introduction, the word “slavery” does not appear even in the coyly Americanizing headnote for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which asserts that, “like Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” EBB used “literature as a tool of” unspecified “social protest and reform” (1043–63, 1173–74, 1174). John Ruskin’s controversial praise of Turner’s Slave Ship does appear (1429–30). Still, as if to confirm Marcus Wood’s depiction of that painting’s “critical history” as “until very recently” an “intriguing record of ignorance, misreading and evasion,” a gloss depicts Slave Ship as a scene of orderly sea burial for “victims who have died during the passage.”²⁰ (Ruskin’s own reported response to children who asked what the figures in Turner’s water were doing: “Drowning!”²¹)

Given this, it may come as no surprise that in the Norton Seven’s Victorian timeline, the year 1833 appears without mention of Emancipation (1064). Intriguingly, however, within that same edition’s Romantic Period section, where a brief chronology stands inserted between the headline “The Romantic Period. 1785–1830” and the introduction’s first words, one of four entries reads as follows: “1807: British slave trade outlawed (slavery abolished throughout the empire, including the West Indies, twenty-six years later)” (1). Modestly parenthetical, oddly proleptic, this single line sets emancipation adrift in a strange temporal zone. Unnamed though the year 1833 remains, that year now defines a “Romantic period” whose boundaries never quite touch the realm of the Victorian.

Why should pedagogical commemoration thus displace and efface, even while invoking, the meaning of 1833? At work here, I suspect, may be an inherited disciplinary culture still marked by the force of what J. R. Oldfield has termed a “culture of abolitionism”: a culture, that is, tacitly committed to teaching “Britons—and Britain’s colonial subjects—[and others] … to view transatlantic slavery through the moral triumph of abolition,” thus conveniently forestalling any tendency to focus on “the horrors of slavery and the slave trade.”²² Honored solely as Romantic period culmination and terminus, 1833 can thus invest the moment of technical (not actual) Emancipation with the force of a definitive, irreversible, and/or sufficient triumph, floating free of direct association with Victorianism.

The Norton Seven ends an era. By 2006, the timeline of the Victorian portion of the Norton Eight was to include, if not the definitive 1838 formal Emancipation, the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act and even the 1865 “Jamaica Rebellion” (1000–1001). Barrett Browning’s antislavery poetry, now acknowledged as such, actually appears: indeed, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” is doubly honored by inclusion in the appendix “Poems in Process.”²³ No longer explained (away) in a note, Turner’s Slave Ship itself stands first among illustrations, as a full-color plate.²⁴ Storm; ship; foregrounded, shackled limbs: in the eyes of thousands of students, the iconography of this shocking, passionately debated image comes, here, to help define Victorian literary culture itself.

Clearly, a pedagogical revolution has taken place: one worthy of inspiring curiosity no less than celebration. What might we make of the sudden emergence of the Slave Ship as so visibly “Victorian”? With this in mind, let me return to the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention, already addressed here, through Colley, as symbol of the “memory and mythology of the antislavery campaign,” and with it, of the “Victorian culture of complacency” (360). Organized by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS), the most powerful and, as it would turn out, long-lived of British antislavery groups, the 1840 convention was indeed a celebration.²⁵ The Royal Academy exhibition at which Turner’s Slave Ship made its debut; the commemorative 1839 reprinting both of Thomas Clarkson’s 1808 History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade and of William Wilberforce’s Life and Co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Slaves, Spheres, Poetess Poetics
• Section 1: Racializing the Poetess: Haunting “Separate Spheres”
• Section 2: Suspending Spheres: The Violent Structures of Patriotic Pacifism
• Section 3: Transatlantic Occasions: Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Poetics at the Limits
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Acknowledgments
• Index