pisat’ zhenshchiny” (How women should write, see chapter 4 ), and
many others.
Still another interpretive strategy is Sandra Gilbert’s discussion ofEdna St. Vincent Millay as a “female female impersonator... looking at
herself being looked at” (“Female Female Impersonator,” 298 ). Millay,
writes Gilbert, used “the fetishized private life of the woman to comment
on the public state of the world,” an affirmation that “the personal is po-
etic” ( 309 ). This is an approach that fruitfully could be applied to the po-
etry of Garelina, Zhadovskaia, and Rostopchina.
In addition, literary scholars could explore the use of irony by manynineteenth-century women poets, not exuberant “Romantic irony,” but,
rather, irony in the dictionary sense: the use of words to express the op-
posite of the literal meaning.^42 As men writers of the time used Aesopian
(metaphorical) language to smuggle forbidden ideas past the censor-
ship, women writers used irony to criticize the constraining circum-
stances of their lives. I suggest that critics, both nineteenth-century and
contemporary, have remained oblivious to much of this irony because it
never occurred to them not to take literally everything in women’s po-
ems, just as it did not occur to them that women might create personae
(see chapter 2 ). We find irony in poems that warn women of the dangers
of writing poetry (for example, in Teplova’s “Sovet” [Advice, 1837 ]),
throughout Pavlova’s Dvoinaia zhizn’,especially in the descriptions of Ce-
cilia’s upbringing and surroundings, and in much of Rostopchina’s po-
etry (see chapter 4 ). These and other interpretive strategies can enrich
our appreciation not only of nineteenth-century women’s writing but
also of men’s writing. For example, Ostriker describes Milton’s ambiva-
lent depiction of Satan in Paradise Lostas an example of duplicity.
Men critics often ignored women’s poetry even if it did not addresswomen’s experience. Beyond creating new ways of reading women’s—
and men’s—poetry, is it possible to find gender-neutral, inclusive stan-
dards to evaluate men’s and women’s poetry together? Only in this way,
to return to our third question, can we determine if these and other for-
gotten poets are “good.” Although developing such standards will re-
quire a great deal of rethinking by aestheticians, historians, literary his-
torians, and literary critics, the possibility of doing so is suggested by
the work of one aesthetician. Tomas Kulka describes a tradition of aes-
thetic evaluation, based on theories of Plato and Aristotle, which ana-
lyzes art on the basis of three nongendered principles: unity, complex-
ity, and intensity. Kulka defines unity, which he considers the most
Introduction 19