The Victorian poetesscanon an almost post-modern performance of identity that explores female
eroticism; Stephenson pronounces L.E.L.'s writing for annuals "subversive
with... impunity." 47 Mellor argues that "[w]orking from within an
essentialist construction of the female as the beautiful and the loving,
Landon's poetry uncovers the emptiness, the self-defeating consequences,
of such a construction." Similarly, she contends that Hemans's work
"exhausts - both in the sense of thoroughly investigating, finding the limits
of, and in the sense of using up, emptying out - the very domestic ideology
it espouses." 48 Not everyone is receptive to such views, however. Blain
remains unconvinced that Victorian readers "were in a position to share
such a sophisticated vision" of these poems. 49
Such debate suggests two points. First, individual figures must be reas-
sessed in relation to the conditions under which they wrote and were read.
Second, the traditional standards by which we evaluate poetry - many of
them the legacy of Modernism and its critical progeny the New Criticism -
appear woefully inadequate for the study of nineteenth-century women
writers. 50 Despite the energetic scholarly activity of late, our grasp of their
poetry is yet at an early stage. Armstrong and Joseph Bristow must still
resort t o "a vocabulary of [their] own making to describe the two principal
poetic genres [used by women poets] of the early and mid-century." 51
The Victorian poetess demands further attention. Her work has already
helped us to reconsider our critical priorities and conceptual frameworks.
In the latter part of the twentieth century, Victorianists have repeatedly
debated canonicity and literary value, precisely because women poets
occupy a vast, uneven, and culturally vexed terrain in which materiality
and ideality, and aesthetics and commodification continually intersect in
the construction of both identity and community. Virginia Jackson and
Prins argue compellingly that, as "the embodiment of sentimental ex-
change" whose texts "proclaimed their status as cultural currency," poe-
tesses problematize the foundational assumption that lyrics are "personal
subjective utterance[s] of historical subjects." 52 The Victorian poetess
encourages us to untangle threads that have remained entwined for more
than two centuries. These investigations prove urgent since our culture
continues, often violently, to aestheticize women's bodies. Despite eco-
nomic gains, women inhabit a society of spectacle and commodification
where the female body remains caught between the positions of subject and
object within the forces of production and consumption. Gendered divi-
sions, such as that between private and public, still structure our quotidian
world. Further, the literary and critical domains appear marginalized and
feminized to an unprecedented degree in an increasingly technologized
global "information" culture. The Victorian poetess is a deeply contested
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