Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and historicism

aspects of Victorian Hellenism extended well beyond the largely male
world of Oxford. If, as Dowling and other post-Foucauldian critics such
as Herbert Sussman have contended, 24 the emergence of a diversity of
masculinities and masculine poetics can be traced through the various uses
of historicism in Victorian writing, then what can historicist poetry tell us
about understandings of femininity in the period? In other words, how
did the distinctive gendering of historicism affect women writers at this
time?

Ill

Christina Crosby proposes that "in the nineteenth century 'history' is
produced as man's truth," enabling "'man' [to]... know himself in
history, find his origin there and project his end." 2S By contrast, she argues,
women stand outside history, remaining "intrinsically unhistorical." More-
over, women who wished to write historical poetry were doubly disadvan-
taged, for it can be said that of all literary forms poetry depends most on
rules and conventions mediated through tradition. Not only did women
often receive little or no formal education in the classical authors who
defined those rules and conventions but they also lacked their own aesthetic
models. Even Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who was probably as deeply
read in classical literature as any other poet of the time, memorably
complained: "I look everywhere for Grandmothers and see none." 26
Further, women poets were frequently obliged to develop strategies to
negotiate or subvert the masculine literary history that was their only
inheritance in order to intervene as speaking subjects in a literary tradition
that had them typecast as silent objects of desire and inspirational muses.
Thus Christina Rossetti wrote a sonnet sequence entitled "Monna Innomi-
nata" (1881) in which the anonymous lady of a Renaissance sonneteer
speaks "for herself." 27 Each of the fourteen sonnets has epigraphs from
both Dante and Petrarch, and each provides the unknown woman's
perspective on a love affair known in literary history only from the man's
point of view. Sonnet 5, for example, is prefaced by the lines "Amor che a
nulla amato amar perdona" ("Love, who exempts no loved one from
loving"), from Dante, and "Amor m'addusse in si gioiosa spene" ("Love led
me into such joyous hope"), from Petrarch. It begins with reference to the
traditional elevation of the man to a state of perfection through his noble
love of a woman, then shifts perspective in the sestet:

So much for you; but what for me, dear friend?

To love you without stint and all I can

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