rather than an art while complacently noting that their “pure and irre-
proachable” morality resulted in monotonous poetry.^17 In effect, women
poets had to choose between being women and being poets.^18
The Poetess
The poetess, a nineteenth-century figure that has survived into the
twenty-first century, is worth considering in more detail. She repre-
sented the feminine “Other” of the poet, whose masculinity was per-
ceived as the universal norm. The twentieth-century scholar Alicia Os-
triker notes that “some of our most compelling terms of critical
discourse imply that serious poetry is more or less identical with potent
masculinity” (Stealing the Language, 3 ). She mentions Harold Bloom’s im-
age of the oedipal struggle between “strong” poets, and such terms of
critical approbation as size, greatness, stature, and hardness. Similarly,
Gilbert and Gubar discuss the literary tradition that identifies the pen
with the penis and the author with the “authority” of a patriarchal God
(Madwoman in the Attic, 6 , 8 ).
But, the scholar Svetlana Boym argues, while the poet’s masculinegender is perceived as neutral, the poetess’s “exposed genderedness”
(Death in Quotation Marks, 197 ) (in Russian represented by “marked”
feminine adjectives and past-tense verbs) renders her an “an aesthetic
obscenity” ( 203 ), “a grotesque conglomeration of lackand excess” ( 194 ,
italics in text). The poetess lacks objectivity, taste, genius (inventiveness,
originality), and social responsibility—the cultural authority of mas-
culinity—while suffering from an excess of subjectivity, of feelings,
manifested as hysteria ( 194 ). Boym gives Marina Tsvetaeva as an ex-
ample of a poet caught between the images of the tasteless, vulgar, trans-
gressive “poetess” and the high culture “woman poet,” a conflict men
poets do not routinely face.^19
Several other scholars have written of the “exposed genderedness”not only of poetesses but also of women writers in general. In the twen-
tieth century Susan Gilbert wrote that the woman poet’s body of work
is treated like the body of the poetess (“Female Female Impersonator,”
299 ). Similarly, the scholar Mary Ellmann observed that “books by
women are treated as though they themselves are women and criticism
embarks at its happiest upon an intellectual measuring of busts and
hips” (Thinking about Women, 29 ). One thinks of Aleksandr Ska-
bichevsky’s review of Zhadovskaia’s poetry, which verges on a sado-
masochistic fantasy: “On all of [her poetry] lies the seal of trampled
Social Conditions 27