The critical fortunes of Victorian poetrygender was written into ideas about poetry, imagery, form, and intertextual
reference, and thus how gendered poetry itself was.
Because feminist criticism has made use of all the major theories and
methodologies, the concerns I have outlined in previous sections of this
chapter - the poet's relation to society, tradition and influence, language
and representation - have been concerns for feminist criticism of Victorian
poetry as well, concerns inflected by gender and sexuality. Feminist
historicist critics, for example, might read Christina Rossetti's "Goblin
Market" (1862) not as a fairy tale for children but as a trenchant analysis
of the workings of capitalism, as a contribution to and meditation on the
discourses circulating around the "rescuing" of fallen women (particularly
those produced around Magdalene Houses), and as yet another example of
the way the figure of the sexually imperiled white woman could be called
upon to justify imperial violence in India. 30 Just as critics generally have
historicized ideas of tradition and influence, so have feminist critics sought
women's traditions in the writing of poetry, and new ways of seeing women
poets' relation to the canon. Just as psychoanalytic critics used Lacan and
Derrida to bring together issues of representation and gender, so feminist
psychoanalytic critics made use of Lacan, Derrida, and French feminist
psychoanalytic critics like Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva
to produce feminist readings of these issues. Homans, for example, in an
essay on Rossetti and Emily Dickinson, draws on Irigaray and other
psychoanalytic and deconstructive critics to distinguish between metaphor
and metonymy in "Goblin Market" by showing the different relations these
tropes have to the feminine body. 31
Feminist criticism has changed the face of Victorian poetry in two central
ways. First, by focusing on how Victorian poetry constructs gender and
sexuality, it made visible how central ideas about gender and sexuality are
to this poetry, not only as subject matter but also as kind of foundational
structure. For instance, Joseph Chadwick, writing about "The Lady of
Shalott" in 1986, pointed out how the Lady's femininity was central to the
ideas about art she embodied, how the same split between public and
private that confined women to domesticity also made culture itself -
aesthetic activity - separate from the public world of money and politics,
and thus allied it with femininity. Yet both women and artists are
dependent on the public world from which they seem to be separated and
safe, a world "which accords them no stable or certain value at all." 32 So
the poem critiques both domestic ideology and the ideology of aesthetic
autonomy as a kind of mystification of the true status of women and
artists. Here the insights of feminist criticism are called into play to
illuminate the old question of the poet's position in bourgeois culture. The