KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADESseemed consequently repressed, they appeared to the modernists to be
absurdly ignorant of their own desires. From the perspective of the early
twentieth century, the truth about sex had been newly revealed and
Tennyson's passionate love for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, Swinbur-
ne's alleged inability to understand that "biting's no use," and Christina
Rossetti's repeated refusals of marriage offers could all be brought forth to
bolster the notion that there was something wrong with the Victorians that
made their poetry less than it could have been, a sexual block that also
blocked the creative process.
In the 1960s and 1970s, an emergent feminist literary criticism began to
examine gender and sexuality as cultural constructs, and the work of
women poets like Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
started to receive more attention. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination (1979), a foundational text for feminist
criticism, included extensive discussion of both poets and this work, along
with Margaret Homans's Women Writers and Poetic Identity (1980), with
its discussion of women's responses to Romanticism, brought Bloom's
Freud-inflected theories of influence to texts by women. Bloom's use of
Freudian models to talk about how influence operates for male poets made
it impossible to think about poetry as gender neutral by making visible the
ideologies of masculinity interlinked with ideologies of poetry and aes-
thetics. Feminist critics like Gilbert, Gubar, and Homans could then look at
the ways in which these ideologies of masculinity acted to block women
writers' creative imaginations, by making the categories of poet and
woman mutually exclusive. Allied with mute silent nature, lacking phallic
strength, having as a Miltonic model of rebellion Eve, rather than the
heroic Satan, women poets had even more to contend with in the poetic
tradition than their anxious brothers.
In this groundbreaking feminist criticism, there is a stress on women
poets' responses to an oppressive patriarchal tradition, on the absence of
women poets relative to women novelists, and on the difficulties that
femininity poses for a sense of poetic identity. This type of feminist inquiry
reacts against the way that women poets had hitherto been treated in
literary criticism - as bad poets who wrote about their personal experience
in an embarrassingly transparent manner, and who were merely pretty, or
hysterical, or worth only biographical consideration. While early feminist
critics focused on women poet's oppression, self-repression, and failure,
they revealed how thoroughly masculinist the dominant ideologies of
poetic identity were. Moving away from biography, Gilbert, Gubar, and
Homans combined Bloom, Freud, and feminism to disclose how thoroughly
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