Victorian Poetry

The Victorian poetess

British national character. 19 In 1847, for example, Gilfillan contended: "in
proportion as civilisation advances, and as the darker and fiercer passions
which constitute the fera natura subside, in the lull of that milder day, the
voice of woman will become more audible, exert a wider magic, and be as
the voice of the spring to the opening year." 20 In their persons, lives, and
poetry, women poets were expected to represent the domesticity, refine-
ment, and purity associated with specifically British or English women.
Hemans's constructions of domesticity became so naturalized as descrip-
tions of British identity that Maria Abdy wrote in tribute: "we half
unconsciously repeat / Strains we have learned as household words to
greet." 21
Not surprisingly, many women followed Hemans's lead to extrapolate
the poetess' role from the domestic ideal. They also drew on women's
presumed maternal capacity, as when Sara Coleridge published her popular
Pretty Lessons in Verse, for Good Children (1835). Sometimes, too, a
poetess would characterize her work as an extension of the philanthropic
activity prescribed for bourgeois women. During the 1850s and 1860s
Mary Sewell wrote widely distributed didactic poetry. Her preface to
Homely Ballads for the Working Man's Fireside (1858) argues that the
working classes have "an instinctive love and appreciation of simple
descriptive poetry," which is for them "an almost needful relaxation from
the severe and irksome drudgery of their lot." Maintaining throughout the
stance of a well-meaning gentlewoman visitor, she offers her poems as an
expression of her "earnest sympathy and interest." 22

IV

Thus it would appear that the Victorian discourse on women and poetry
remains firmly grounded in the aestheticization of women, on the one
hand, and the rhetoric of separate spheres and female influence, on the
other. But this is only half the story. The language and precepts of domestic
ideology have to some degree distracted historians from remarking the
extent to which women's participation in public life broadened from the
early decades of the nineteenth century on. Likewise, as several literary and
social historians have shown, the belief that separate spheres were comple-
tely dominant can prevent us from understanding the interconnections
between gender and other crucial categories such as class, nationality, race,
reason, and sexuality. 23 The rhetoric of domestic ideology often sounded
dogmatic because it served to consolidate bourgeois, imperial, and national
interests at a time when women were making incursions into public and
political affairs to an unprecedented degree. Indeed, Victorian women

189