KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADESpresence of metaphors of gender and sexuality in Victorian critical works,
the increasing association of the realm of culture with the realm of
sexuality, the repeated attempt to produce accounts of the differences
between the masculine and feminine imagination - all of these elements
suggest that gender and sexuality operated as a discursive field in which
battles about art and society, literature and tradition, language and
representation, might be played out. The idea, put forward by Barbara
Charlesworth Gelpi, Carol T. Christ, and Dorothy Mermin, among others,
that Victorian poetry was somehow feminized, that even the male poet had
a more complex relation to femininity than simple exploitation or oppres-
sion, inaugurated a new interest in what sexuality and gender had to say
about art, and a new interest too in masculinity, particularly in dissident
masculinities. 33
As Foucault famously observed, it was also during the Victorian period
that homosexuality and heterosexuality were first classified as sexual
identities. Critics in the later 1980s began to be interested in the homoeroti-
cism of In Memoriam, the figuring of "the perverse" in Swinburne, and the
invocation of homophilia in Hopkins. 34 In 1990, Richard Dellamora
treated the poetry of Tennyson, Hopkins, and Swinburne to show how
desire between men and notions of poetic androgyny underwrite and
indeed structure conceptions of art and poetry throughout the nineteenth
century. 35 Thai's E. Morgan and Yopie Prins have also explored the use of
figures of same-sex desire by both male and female poets. 36
The second way in which feminist criticism has changed the face of
Victorian poetry is through the challenge made by the recovery of women
poets' writings, since the reclamation of this large body of work encourages
a radical rethinking of the poetic canon. The 1913 edition of The Oxford
Book of Victorian Verse, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, contains a huge
array of male and female authors, many more even than there are in the
most inclusive anthologies available today. Yet from about 1930, when the
first edition of George Woods's Poetry of the Victorian Period was
published, to 1959, when Walter Houghton and G. Robert Stange's
anthology Victorian Poetry and Poetics appeared, we can see a gradual
process of narrowing down both the number of poets included and the
amount of work from each. In the 1990s, however, research on women
poets flourished, and several paperback anthologies made it possible to
introduce the work of these women to a wider audience. 37 The recovery of
poetry by women writers has implications for the study of more traditional
writers as well. A poem like "The Lady of Shalott" can be read not only
against Byron but also against the extremely popular women poets of the
1820s and 1830s Hemans and L.E.L., who made women's emotional
42