type of the poet, egoism, escapism), literary primitivism (bards, minstrels,
ballads, and romances), and a return to nature—and, one could add, the
search for nation—women poets more typically concerned themselves
with female heroism; female desire; domestic affections; home, family,
and community; female childhood; education; motherhood; and careers
(Wolfson, “Romanticism and Gender,” 385–96). If Romanticism describes
only the concerns of men, it may not make sense to speak of women Ro-
mantic poets—unless we expand our definition of Romanticism.
This is not to suggest that these women poets did not write lyrics onthe Romantic themes of the poet, nature, and nation, as well as love
lyrics. We have seen in chapter 2 that they did, although usually from
their own point of view. I would suggest, however, that because the work
of women poets does not conform to the gender norms of Romantic po-
etry—for example, the male’s quest to be reunited with the female
Other—their work has been marginalized or considered insufficiently
intellectual, philosophical, or “universal.” Of course, middle- and
upper-class women—whose lives were characterized by physical, le-
gal, and often psychological limitations, financial dependency, and
expected subservience to men—would not have found relevant the
metaphor of a quest, even for a male Other. Nor could the German
philosophical striving for an idealized yet sexualized “eternal femi-
nine” serve as a tenable basis for their poetry. In addition, the mythol-
ogy available to men poets could not help them depict women’s expe-
riences. A recent study of Romanticism includes chapters on the male
archetypes of Werther, Faust, Prometheus, Napoleon, the dandy, and
Don Juan.^57 The only female Romantic archetype discussed is La Belle
Dame Sans Merci, a soulless man-destroying character, who has much
in common with the archetype that Dolores Barracano Schmidt calls
the “Great American Bitch” (“The Great American Bitch,” 900–905).
Like their European counterparts, these Russian women poets intheir lyrics not only reinterpreted male Romantic themes but also
treated the “women’s themes” just mentioned. Images of female hero-
ism, for example, appear in Kul’man’s poems about Korinna and Sap-
pho, Pavlova’s “Jeanne d’Arc” ( 1839 ), Rostopchina’s “Kak liubiat zhen-
shchiny: predsmertnaia duma Sharloty Stiglits” (How women love:
The dying thoughts of Charlotte Stieglitz, 1841 ), Bakunina’s “legend in
verse” about the early Christian martyr Iulianiia Nikomidiiskaia ( 1849 ),
and in Fuks’s Osnovanie goroda Kazani( 1837 ). The theme of female desire
appears in the lyrics of almost all these women poets, but without the
pornographic overtones that often accompany descriptions of male de-
Gender and Genre 83