The Aesthetic of Renunciation Chapter 15

GILBERT, Sandra M. & GUBAR, Susan. The madwoman in the attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. New Haven & London : Yale University Press, 2000, p. 539-580
The womans hair, my sister, all unshorn, Floats back disheveled strength in agony, Disproving thy mans name . . . Elizabeth Barret Browning It seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeares sister as I had made it . . . that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed . . . For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered . . . that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. Virginia Woolf Had Mrs. Dickinson been warm and affectionate . . . Emily Dickinson in early life would probably have identified with her, become domestic, and adopted the conventional womans role. She would then have become a church member, active in community affairs, married, and had children. The creative potentiality would of course still have been there, but would she have discovered it? What motivation to write could have replaced the incentive given by suffering and loneliness? John Cody

Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poets heart when caught and tangled in a womans body? Virginia Woolf exclaims halfway through A Room of Ones Own. She has been telling the story of her imaginary but paradigmatic woman poet, Judith Shakespeare, the great male bards wonderfully gifted sister. Like her brother Will, Woolf speculates, Judith would have run off to London to become a poet-playwright, for the birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. Unlike Will, however, Judith would quickly have found that her only theatrical future lay in the exploitation of her sexuality. Woolf reminds us that Nick Greene, The Elizabethan actormanager, said A woman acting put him in mind of a dog dancing, and obviously

a woman writing was even more ludicrously unnatural. The same Nick Greene however, or so Woolfs story runs, would have been very willing to use Judith Shakespeare sexually. He took pity on her, Woolf notes dryly; she found herself with child by [him] and so who shall measure the heat and violence of the poets heart when caught and tangled in a womans body? she killed herself one winters night and lies buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle. In this miniature novella of literary seduction and betrayal, Woolf defines a problem that is related to, but not identical with, the subject of women and fiction which triggers her extended meditation on the woman question in A Room. As she points out . . . , England has had . . . many learned women, not merely readers but writers of the learned languages. More specifically, both English and American literary histories record the accomplishments of numerous distinguished women prose writers essayists, diarists, journalists, letterwriters, and (specially) novelists. Indeed, beginning with Aphra Behn and burgeoning with Fanny Burney, Anne Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen, the English novel seems to have been in good part a female invention. . . And yet, as Barrett Browning mournfully enquired, where are the poetesses, the Judith Shakespeares? It is the poetry that is still denied outlet, Woolf herself notes sorrowfully, and the only hope she expresses is that Mary Carmichael, the imaginary modern novelist who has replaced Judith Shakespeare, will be a poet . . . in another hundred years. Woolf wrote these words in 1928, at a time when there had already been, of curse, many women poets or at least many women who wrote poetry. . . . Why, then, did she consider poetry by women somehow problematic in its essence? . . . We can begin to find answers to these questions by very briefly reviewing some of the ways in which male readers and critics . . . have reacted to poetry by women like Barrett Browning, Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson, a poet whose work one hopes (but cannot be sure) Woolf read. () A friend who is also a literary critic has suggested, not perhaps quite seriously, that woman poet is a contradiction in terms. (James Reeves introducing the Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1959) - . . . [F]rom what 2

Woolf could call the masculinist point of view, the very nature of lyric poetry is inherently incompatible with the nature or essence of femaleness. ()
Two of the [most frequent] charges . . . are lack of range in subject matter, in emotional tone and lack of a sense of humor. And one could, in individual instances among writers of real talent, add other aesthetic and moral shortcomings: the spinning out; the embroidering of trivial themes; a concern with the mere surfaces of life that special province of the feminine talent in prose hiding from the real agonies of the spirit; refusing to face up to what existence is; lyric or religious posturing; running between the boudoir and the altar; stamping a tiny foot against God or lapsing into a sententiousness that implies the author has re-invented integrity; carrying on excessively about Fate, about time; lamenting the lot of the woman; caterwauling; writing the same poem about fifty times, and so on. (Theodore Roethke reviewing the work of his friend -and sometimes mistress- Louise Bogan) ...

Along similar lines, John Crowe Ransom noted without disapproval in a 1956 essay about Emily Dickinson that it is common belief among readers (among men readers at least) that the woman poet as a type . . . makes flights into nature rather too easily and upon errands which do not have metaphysical importance enough to justify so radical a strategy. Elsewhere in the same essay, describing Dickinson as a little home-keeping person, he speculated that hardly . . . more than one out of seventeen of her 1,775 poems are destined to become public property (). Equally concerned with the problematic relationship between Dickinsons poetry and her femaleness with, that is, what seemed to be an irreconcilable conflict between her gentle spinsterhood and her fierce art R. P. Blackmur decided in 1937 that she was neither a professional poet nor an amateur; she was a private poet who wrote indefatigably, as some women cook or knit. Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of anti-macassars. Even in 1971, male readers of Dickinson brooded upon this apparent dichotomy of poetry and femininity. John Codys After Great Pain offers an important analysis of the suffering that most of Dickinsons critics and biographers have refused to acknowledge. But his conclusion, part of which we

have quoted as an epigraph, emphasizes what he too sees as the incompatibility between womanly fulfillment and passionate art. In view of this critical obsession with womanly fulfillment clearly a nineteenth-century notion redefined by twentieth-century thinkers for their own purposes it is not surprising to find that when poetry by women has been praised it has usually been praised for being feminine or, conversely, blamed for being deficient in femininity. *** Without pretending to exhaust a controversial subject around which whole schools of criticism swim, we should note that there are a number of generic differences between novel-writing and verse-writing which do support the kinds of distinctions Woolf makes, as well as her conclusions about the insanity of suppressed (or even unsuppressed) women poets. For one thing, novel-wring is a useful occupation, almost pace Blackmur like baking and knitting. Novels have always been commercially valuable because they are entertaining and therefore functional, utilitarian, whereas poetry (. . .) has traditionally had little monetary value (. . .). That novel-writing was (and is) conceivably an occupation to live by has always, however, caused it to seem less intellectually or spiritually valuable than verse-writing, of all possible literary occupations the one to which the nineteenth century assigned the highest status. (. . .) Verse-writing associated with mysterious inspiration, divine status, bardic ritual has traditionally been a holy vocation. From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century the poet had a privileged, almost magical role in most European societies, and he had a quasipriestly role after Romantic thinkers had appropriated the vocabulary of theology for the realm of aesthetics. But in Western culture women cannot be priests (. . .). How then since poets are priests, can women be poets? As Woolf shows, though, novel-writing is not just a lesser and therefore more suitably female occupation because it is commercial rather than aesthetic, practical rather than priestly. The novel, until the twentieth century a genre 4

subservient to physical and social reality, most often requires reportorial observation instead of aristocratic education. () As Western society defines him, the lyric poet must have aesthetic models, must in a sense speak the esoteric language of literary forms. He (or she) cannot simply record or describe the phenomena of nature and society, for in poetry nature must be mediated through tradition that is through an education in ancient rules. But of course, as Woolf . . . learned with dismay, the traditional classics of Greek and Latin meaning the distilled Platonic essence of Western literature, history, philosophy constituted spheres of masculine learning inalterably closed to women except under the most extraordinary circumstances. In our ignorance of Greek, Woolf once suggested, we women should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys. Interestingly, only Elizabeth Barrett Browning, of all the major women poets, was enabled by her invalid seclusion, her sacrifice of ordinary pleasures to make a serious attempt at studying the ancients. Like Shelley, she translated Aeschyluss Prometheus Bound, and she went even further, producing an unusually learned study of the little-known Greek Christian poets. What is most interesting about her skill as a classicist, however, is the fact that her familiarity with the ancients was barely noticed in her own day and has been almost completely forgotten in ours. Obviously, there is a sort of triple bind here. On the one hand, the woman poet who learns a just esteem for Homer is ignored or even mocked as, say, the eighteenth-century Bluestockings were. On the other hand, the woman poet who does not study Homer because she is not allowed to is held in contempt. On the third hand, however, whatever alternative tradition the woman poet attempts to substitute for ancient rules is subtly denigrated. (. . .) Besides the fact that novel-writing does not seem to require the severely classical education poets and critics have traditionally thought verse-writing entails, the writing of prose fiction is in a sense a far more selfless occupation than the composition of lyric poetry. This has perhaps been the crucial factor in causing literary women to choose one genre over another. Bred to selflessness, most women were continually conscious of the feelings of others, of personal relations, as Woolf reminds us. Indeed, Woolf notes, all the literary training 5

that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. It is almost inevitable, then, that a talented woman would feel more comfortable that is, less guilty writing novels than poems. The novelist in a sense says they: she works in a third person form even when constructing a first person narrative. But the poet, even when writing in the third person, says I. (. . .) The novel, on the other hand, allows even encourages just the self-effacing withdrawal that society fosters in women. Where the lyric poet must be continually aware of herself as a subject, the novelist must see herself in some sense as an object, if she casts herself as a participant in the action. In constructing a narrative voice, moreover, she must as a rule disguise or repress her subjectivity. (. . .) That women have had to manipulate events rather than participate in them have had, that is, to speak indirectly rather than directly leads us finally to yet another reason for their long avoidance of verse as well as for their notable history of novelistic success, and it is a reason that brings us full circle back to Woolfs agonizing tale of Judith Shakespeare. For as we noted earlier, in the pages of a novel a woman may exorcise or evade precisely the anxieties and hostilities that the direct, often confessional I of poetry would bring her closer to enacting in real life. If, as Joyce Carol Oates once suggested, fiction is a kind of structured daydreaming, lyric poetry is potentially, as Keats said, like Adams dream he awoke and found it truth. Even if the poets I, then, is a supposed person, the intensity of her dangerous impersonations of this creature may cause her to take her own metaphors literally, enact her themes herself: just as Donne really slept in his coffin, Emily Dickinson really wore white dresses for twenty years, and Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton really gassed themselves. Because of such metaphoric intensity, Woolf postulates, Judith Shakespeare who shall measure the heat and violence of a poets heart when caught and tangled in a womans body? lies dead at a literary crossroads in the center of A Rooms of Ones Own. Yet she is not inalterably dead. For, as we shall see, many women poets have resurrected her unquiet spirit.

PARA REFLETIR: 1. Compare as dificuldades enfrentadas pelas escritoras na produo de romance e poesia, considerando as especificidades de cada gnero. 2. Qual o principal critrio utilizado por crticos homens na anlise da poesia escrita por mulheres? Quais as implicaes desse critrio na avaliao da poesia de autoria feminina? 3. Quais dificuldades Judith Shakespeare possivelmente enfrentaria no sculo XXI?