I have to wonder, while reading Gilbert and Gubar, why the feminine criticism has to be seen as women clearly differentiating themselves from men. As a female, I cannot think of a time that I've taken the feminine criticism into consideration while reading a text. In terms of poetry, men and women have different writing styles, but what's to say women can't write powerful texts without the guidance of fellow women poets before them? A fear of "trail-blazing" seemingly perplexed the first female poets, but I'm having issues with that because men were at some point the first to write a certain idea (though that had to be years beyond years ago).
Poetry needs inspiration, and, as Gilbert and Gubar note, men typically had muses which were females. What is to say women couldn't have male muses? And I'm not saying men weren't inspirational for many women, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a prime example, but when reading Gilbert and Gubar, it seemed this idea wasn't an acceptable one. Mainly, I can't see why women didn't just write, regardless of how men wrote. I know it's a "man's world," but the joy of writing can be an amazing muse in and of itself.
Kaitlyn,
ReplyDeleteI think you touched on the obvious reason why women didn't "just write" and that's the social one. The one where if women wrote they were somehow insane, hysterical, or masculine, and also for much of the time women were only socially mobile through marriage. I think this would have scared a lot of would be writers away, and I can't say I wouldn't do the same.
For those who didn't care about things like this, I think the reason is different. In his treatise, "The defense of Poesy" Sir Philip Sidney writes that the end of "right" or true poetry is to teach the reader, delight the reader, and move the reader to right action. He thought of the poet in the Greek term "vates" or a maker of a new and ideal world. The poet was a prophet, a moral counselor, and was desperately important to the society. I don't think that they wrote for the joy of it like we do today. For us, I should say for me, creative writing is therapeutic, it is an avenue for emotions and the like that cannot be expressed otherwise. That is sort of the PosMod idea of poetry that I think many of us have grown up with in school. The chicken soup for the soul idea of poetry. I think for a women poet, it would have been especially important to write something of infinite worth because they might have felt this was the only chance the gender would get to prove themselves in literature. I am not saying this would be a reasonable idea, but i think that writers at that time thought of their message almost as if it was from the gods or something. So to "just write" to them would have been taking it far to lightly. It works for us though and I think great thoughts come from "just writing", but we live in a different time i guess.
Jeremy's comment reminded me of an epithet that circulated (fairly often, I think) about the sentimental female author in the late nineteenth-century: that she was just one of those "damned mob of scribbling women." Forgive me for not knowing the exact source of this--it has shown up in polemical essays by Nathaniel Hawthorne and has become the title for a very cool interactive site on women's literature, by the Public Media Foundation: http://www.scribblingwomen.org/. I imagine there were some complex pressures on women to perform more legitimately in certain ways than in others.
ReplyDelete-Prof. Graban