ditionally mourn their induction into second-class citizenship, their loss
of agency, freedom, and power in the world. For example, Annis Pratt
maintains that in the nineteenth century women, unlike men, experi-
enced puberty as “enclosure” and “atrophy” (Archetypal Patterns in
Women’s Fiction, 30 ). Carol Gilligan sarcastically quotes Freud, who
wrote that a girl’s puberty is marked by a “wave of repression” neces-
sary to transform her “masculine sexuality” into the specifically femi-
nine sexuality of her adulthood (In a Different Voice, 11 ). Karen Horney
wrote in 1926 , “In actual fact a girl is exposed from birth onward to the
suggestion—inevitable, whether conveyed brutally or delicately—of
her inferiority” (Feminine Psychology, 69 ). Horney felt that women’s re-
sulting low self-esteem along with discrimination against them made it
extremely difficult for them to find any meaningful life’s work aside
from child rearing (69–70, 185–86). Sacks himself acknowledges, if
somewhat obscurely, this difference in women’s experience. He writes
of twentieth-century women poets: “Whereas the male figure’s castra-
tive loss of actual force is compensated by its subsequent wielding of
symbolic power, the female figure has been robbed by its cultural oc-
clusion, of even this latter compensation” (English Elegy, 324 ). We have
seen in chapter 1 just how little symbolic power nineteenth-century Rus-
sian women poets could wield.
On the other hand, as Gilligan, Horney, Modleski, and Simone deBeauvoir have suggested, women receive other consolations: the ability
to bear children; closeness and community with their mothers, sisters,
and friends; a period of sexual power over some men; and social approval
if they do not violate the rules of decorum.^43 These differences between
men and women’s experiences, I submit, are reflected in their elegies.
As with the poema, fewer women poets than men titled works“Elegiia,” possibly because they found the classical origins of the genre
intimidating. Among the men poets we have been considering, Pushkin
titled four poems “Elegiia,” Baratynsky six, Del’vig two, Lermontov
two, Fet four, Iazykov thirty-four, Khomiakov two, Maikov two—and
he also used the word as a section heading for several poems—Guber
two, Kol’tsov one. Among the women poets only three—Shakhova,
Lisitsyna, and Teplova—wrote poems they titled “Elegiia,” but virtually
all of them—as did all the men poets—wrote poems elegiac in tone and
content.^44
And, as in the case of romanticheskye poemyand ballads, the elegieswritten by these women poets differ from those of their men contem-
poraries in focusing on women’s experiences. Some losses described in
76 Gender and Genre