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| ISBN-13: | 9781587292873 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/1999 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Soft Canons American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition
University of Iowa Press Copyright © 1999 the University of Iowa Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87745-689-6
Chapter One The Conversation of "The Whole Family": Gender, Politics, and Aesthetics in Literary Tradition
KAREN L. KILCUP
In 1849 tireless anthologist and literary guru Rufus Griswold separated his bestselling The Poets and Poetry of America into two collections. The first, with the same title, contained only male poets. The second, The Female Poets of America, expanded the selection of increasingly popular women writers. The implications of this division were clear: male poets represented "real" poetry, while their female counterparts occupied a separate category-what Robert Frost would later call "sentimental sweet singer[s]"-appealing largely to a female audience. If from one angle Griswold's gesture celebrated the achievements of his female contemporaries-and if Griswold worked personally to advance the reputations of many women poets-from another perspective this separate publication emblematized and helped inaugurate the bifurcated consideration of American male and female writers, of "masculine" and "feminine" traditions, that is still very much with us. A central goal of Soft Canons is to explore connections, discuss mutual influences, and propose theories of difference or alliance, attempting to bring together these separate spheres of criticism and to create a more richly textured account of American literary history.
At this point one might well ask, what are masculine and feminine literary traditions? These terms are of course constantly in flux, negotiating with ideas of canon and criticism that, as I will outline below, have themselves changed dramatically over time. Moreover, although such traditions may have had a degree of internal coherence (with varying degrees of self-awareness) at the moment of their elaboration, they are also created and transformed retrospectively by readers who tell different stories of their development. To speak of them as actual facts rather than virtual events in some sense falsifies them. We also need to recognize that both writers and critics were involved (sometimes differently) in the creation of literary traditions and that literary criticism identified itself as a "discipline" only in the opening decades of the twentieth century, when the evaluation of literary texts moved from the broader ("popular") culture into the academy. In addition, what was masculine to one generation would sometimes prove feminine to another: the gendered quality of literary production varied, depending on the position of the critic and his or her historical moment. Finally, "aesthetics" and "politics" have been intricately connected in American literary history.
I wish to suggest here that literary criticism has not only severed feminine and masculine traditions, it has done so in a way that has made a genuine reintegration of the canon more difficult. By often conceptualizing women's writing in opposition to male writing, this scholarship, some of it feminist, has opened a gap that is difficult to bridge. In some sense, the impetus for discussions about the canon in recent years has emerged from an ongoing debate about the appropriate situation of "the aesthetic" (often, in a political move, identified with the masculine or the male) and "the political" (often identified with the feminine or the female) in American literary tradition. Another important goal of Soft Canons, then, is to work toward a model of criticism that closes these fractures. Critics' oppositional stance may in fact emerge from the structure and protocols of literary criticism itself, and, in particular, "the use of argument as the preferred mode for discussion." The adversarial strategy demands that we distinguish ourselves from our predecessors, that we clear our own intellectual space, "establishing credibility or cognitive authority"; such a strategy almost determines an adversarial rather than a dialogical stance. At the same time, as I point out in more specific terms below, it may be necessary for a group attempting to identify its tradition at least initially to demarcate an aesthetic and/or cultural terrain in distinction from the "mainstream" in order to achieve an acknowledged presence in literary history. We need to ask, however, how long such a separate identity is useful, for opposing the "mainstream" necessarily reiterates its centrality. The essays in Soft Canons suggest that it may be more beneficial at this moment of cultural fragmentation in the United States to inquire into the conversations between, and even the meshing of, "traditions"-here principally masculine and feminine, but also black and white, straight and gay, Western and Eastern-while continuing to value the particularity of each.
The distinction between male and female authors' work-and an awareness of the constructed tension between aesthetics and politics-has inflected American literature from the time of Anne Bradstreet's pronouncement in "The Prologue" that "carping tongues" would consign her hand to the "needle," not the "pen," and that she was radically circumscribed by gender expectations: "If what I do prove well, it won't advance, / They'll say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance." In the nineteenth century, at virtually the same moment in American literary history that Griswold performed his radical surgery on poetic tradition, Nathaniel Hawthorne was complaining privately (though now famously) to his friend and publisher William D. Ticknor about the "damned mob of scribbling women," whom he claimed dominated the literary marketplace, in effect recreating segregated literary traditions. Several years before Hawthorne's grousing, Margaret Fuller had reviewed the terrain of "American literature" in curiously bifurcated-and, where female poets were concerned, wholly elliptical-terms. Fuller's critical overview of American prose includes the historians William Hickling Prescott and George Bancroft along with Emerson and Cooper; she touches upon the contributions of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Caroline Kirkland in one very brief paragraph and devotes only a single sentence to Lydia Maria Child and Anne Stephens. Poets include Bryant, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Richard Henry Dana, Longfellow, Lowell, and others, but exclude entirely the huge, and hugely popular, contingent of women represented in Griswold's anthology: Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Lydia Sigourney, and Frances Sargent Osgood among them. In some sense, Fuller performed a criticism that regarded masculine and feminine-here, literally male and female-traditions in tandem but not necessarily in dialogue.
The path to the current segregation between these traditions was, however, a circuitous one. Writers, as opposed to critics or reviewers, often seemed to interact briskly and profitably. In the late nineteenth century, for example, William Dean Howells presided over the development of a realistic fiction that attempted to correct the emotional excesses of ostensibly feminine sentimental literature, but his movement included female as well as male writers: Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown among them. Even in antebellum America, reviewers, as Nina Baym suggests, were both male and female, and their "opinions [did] not divide along gender lines."
Although other anthologists and critics did not necessarily follow Griswold's lead in this approach, literary culture as a whole would become increasingly bifurcated, culminating in modernist critics' "disappearing" (popular) women writers from the canon, often on the basis of their inadequate aesthetic merit and/or their overinvestment in political and, hence, nonuniversal concerns. This disappearance was perhaps most evident and most hostile in the case of poetry-not surprisingly, since the most influential early modernist critics were T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The distinctions and oppositions that were made at the turn of the century and into the twentieth century emerged in a variety of locations: for example, in anthologist Edmund Clarence Stedman's jittery assertion in his American Anthology (1901) that "the work of [women's] brother poets is not emasculate, and will not be while grace and tenderness fail to make men coward, and beauty remains the flower of strength"; in an essay in the elite Century Magazine by poet-critic Helen Gray Cone claiming that "sentimentalism has infected both continents [America and England]" and disparaging "the flocks of quasi-swan singers"; in a later, famous essay by poet-critic Louise Bogan in which she observed that "women ... contributed in a large measure to the general leveling, dilution, and sentimentalization of verse, as well as of prose, during the nineteenth century." Female writers like Bogan and Marianne Moore would be admitted to an increasingly masculinized and aestheticized literary field only on the condition that they wrote unemotional, detached, and intellectual poetry: that they wrote "like men" and contributed to masculine literary tradition.
Yet many modern critics, like Van Wyck Brooks, however much they might condescend to some women writers, nevertheless discussed them alongside their male counterparts: Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Lydia Maria Child on the same page with Emerson and Hawthorne, for example. Brooks devoted substantial attention to Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beecher Stowe well before the recent renaissance of interest in these writers. He also acknowledged that the years after the Civil War were dominated by women writers: "The 'glorious phalanx of old maids' that rejoiced the heart of Theodore Parker was to dominate New England for an age to come, the age of the 'strong-minded women' that might have been called the age of the weak-minded men." Though it was explicitly limited to white, New England writers, Brooks's account offers one example of an attempt to envision an holistic American literary tradition. With the development of a modernist aesthetic criticism opposed to Brooks's historical approach, this kind of linking between men and women writers would virtually disappear; the new paradigm was F. O. Matthiessen's powerful American Renaissance, which, with its narrow assumptions about the aesthetic, managed to reduce an eclectic and polyvocal period to a tiny group of writers, with Emily Dickinson noteworthy by her absence. Joanne Dobson has pointed out the limitation of this still-current definition of the American Renaissance, observing that "the 1850s saw a variegated literary arena in which realism contended with romanticism, popular sentimentalism influenced private thinking and public policy at least as much as did high-minded cultural analysis, and the writing of women achieved a visibility equal to that of the writing of men." In spite of these realities, American literary tradition became synonymous with male-white male-writing.
With the arrival of feminist and minority perspectives in the critical domain beginning in the mid-to-late 1960s, writing by women, men and women of color, gays and lesbians, and other excluded groups began to be the subject of investigations, but it was necessary to establish these traditions as traditions, to explore the minoritized writing by itself, to make claims for its aesthetic as well as cultural significance. During the 1970s and 1980s these perspectives helped to generate a flood of recovered and new work, from the authentication of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Jean Fagan Yellin to the recognition of Toni Morrison with the Nobel Prize for Literature. The appearance of The Heath Anthology of American Literature in 1990-a project conceived and inaugurated, Paul Lauter tells us, in 1968-marked a turning point in the reintegration of the canon, and yet literary criticism itself has been slow to react to this reintegration and to develop a synthetic and nonoppositional view of nineteenth-century American writing. Studies such as David S. Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance and Suzanne Clark's Sentimental Modernism begin to suggest the fruitfulness of a comparative approach across gender. As Dobson observes, "A truly revisionary history of nineteenth-century America will work toward dismantling hierarchical assumptions that privilege masculine experience over feminine, elite literature over popular, and the culturally dissenting over the culturally embedded" (165). Attempting to heal the bifurcation in language that is embedded even in affirmative and proactive accounts like Dobson's, this revisionary history must, as Soft Canons does, include a consideration of male and female writers together: of their mutual influences, their alliances and alienations, and their construction of the terms of literature.
It is important to pause to acknowledge the direct influences and personal relationships that existed between many of these writers: Hawthorne may have been critical as well as complimentary when he affirmed of Fanny Fern that "the woman writes as if the devil was in her" (17 : 307), but like many of his counterparts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he had close relationships, whether competitive, affiliative, or supportive, with women writers. Well-known associations include those between Whittier and Lucy Larcom, Frances Sargent Osgood and Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James and Constance Fenimore Woolson, and, of course, Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. As Shirley Marchalonis has observed, such literary friendships have been repeatedly been oversimplified: "either [the male] was the mentor who taught her to write and used his influence to have her work published, or else she was in love with him." She adds, "In either case, critical interpretation has made her the inferior being...." Moreover, scholarship has frequently ignored the role of women as mentors for male artists. Some of the essays in Soft Canons expand our understanding of such relationships, while others outline the poignant absence of such relationships where they were perhaps most urgently needed.
Perhaps no text better emblematizes the relationship between male and female writers than the "collaborative" novel, The Whole Family, which serves as both an instance of and metaphor for cross-gender conversation in American literary history in the opening moments of the twentieth century. In some sense, The Whole Family illuminates the complex relationship between aesthetics and politics, and highlights the alienation between feminine and masculine literary traditions, that would come to dominate criticism in the next sixty-odd years. The novel was conceived in 1906 by William Dean Howells, who suggested the project to Elizabeth Jordan, then editor of Harper's Bazar. Howells sought to assemble a group of eleven other distinguished authors who would each month contribute a new chapter to be published serially in Jordan's magazine and later collected into a book. He proposed that the book would depict an ordinary American family whose "Young Girl" had just become engaged to be married, and he projected that each contributor would write from the point of view of a family member or friend. Jordan, who agreed to act as editor, hoped to showcase regular contributors to the Harper's group of magazines and "to bring together the greatest, grandest, most gorgeous group of authors ever collaborating on a literary production." Yet the pair's plans for the "Harper's family of writers" encountered unexpected difficulties. Some contributors wanted to be paid more than the project promised; others could not fit it into their timetable; some agreed to participate and then later bowed out; others, considered very important to the project (such as Mark Twain), declined altogether.
The difficulties attending the novel's inauguration were dwarfed, however, by its actualization. The "conversation" of the "whole family" of American authors fractured sharply along gendered lines: Mary Wilkins Freeman, by then a fading if still admired figure, managed to interrogate the trajectory of the domestic romance toward inevitable marriage by creating "The Maiden Aunt" as an attractive-even erotic-"other woman" who intervenes between the young engaged couple. According to Alfred Bendixen, although Freeman "had a great deal of respect and admiration first chapter, particularly his treatment of the old-maid aunt, irritated her. Freeman felt that Howells's conception of the aunt was based on outdated values that condemned a single woman in her thirties to an eternal and dowdy spinsterhood" (xxii). In a letter to Jordan defending her chapter, Freeman highlighted the many single women for whom "their single state is a deliberate choice on their part, and men are at their feet. Single women have caught up with, and passed, old bachelors in the last half of the century. I don't think Mr. Howells recognizes this. He is thinking of the time when women of thirty put on caps, and renounced the world. That was because they married at fifteen and sixteen, and at thirty had about a dozen children. Now they simply do not do it" (quoted in Jordan, 266). It is worth noting that Freeman herself had been single until she was forty-nine, and Jordan was at the time single and in her early forties.
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