The Victorian poetessthat the category of the poetess was "a trap enforced by masculine disdain
for cultural refinement" as the novel achieved dominance. 3 In much more
complicated ways, the poetess designated a fiercely contested role in the
literary market of a rapidly transforming society.
The term's instability emerges in "To a Poetess," a poem that typically
for its time reveals considerable tensions in the figure of the female poet. In
this metaphysical contemplation of her role, the poetess is pulled between a
temporal world of imperial vastness and an eternal world of divine
inspiration. Moreover, the relationship between the poetess and her voice
remains perilously uncertain. The embodied utterance ("thy living voice")
is curiously dissociated from the Poetry ("the soul's voice") that will live
on. But at the same time the disembodied eternal voice of the soul itself is
finally reidentified with the "breathing" poetess: the material presence from
which it had just been severed. Ultimately, the living poetess, rather than
her "living voice," is viewed as the true utterance of the poetess' soul. The
poem is not alone in its confusion. Although its contradictions are more
legible than in some other Victorian writings, throughout the nineteenth
century the poetess represents a discursive site where certain cultural
anxieties are particularly legible.
In this chapter, I explore how influential and often contradictory under-
standings of the Victorian poetess are informed by a commodified aestheti-
cism that frequently conflates the woman poet's body with her literary
corpus. This particular structure becomes clear in a pronouncement made
in Eraser's Magazine in 1833: "Beauty is to woman what poetry is to a
language, and their similarity accounts for their conjunction; for there
never yet existed a female possessed of personal loveliness who was not
only poetical in herself but the cause of poetry in others." 4 This idea
circulated in various cultural forms, not only in literary writings but also in
paintings, periodicals, and sculpture - all of which made the poetical body
of a woman available for consumption. Similarly, this idea was advanced
by authors of popular conduct books such as Sarah Stickney Ellis, who
advised their readers that beauty and poetry were associated with a
specifically female domain separate from the material concerns of the
marketplace. In The Daughters of England (1837), Ellis argues that "to
have the mind so embued with poetic feeling that it shall operate as a
charm upon herself and others" may well be superior to "fill[ing] a book
with poetry." 5 Poetry is for women a mode, not an occupation.
For women writers, the major problem in this formulation is that women
are poetry. They live and inspire it but they do not write it, while other
people - namely, men - have the privilege to do so. One of the balder
articulations of this view suggests such exclusion may engender violence.
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