'Bird, Jewel, or Flower?': On the Tokenization of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry

• Published in: ELH Vol. 90; no. 3; pp. 767 - 798
• Main Author: Rice, Kylan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2023
• Subjects: 19th century; American literature; Culture; Females; Feminism; Gifts; Love; Memory; Modernism; Narrative techniques; Plot (Narrative); Poetry; Poets; Popular culture; Self concept; Women; Writers; Writing; United Kingdom > UK; England
• ISSN: 0013-8304; 1080-6547; 1080-6547
• DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a907208

[...]appearing in a gift-book called The Moss-Rose, A Parting Token (1840), the American poet Lucy Hooper's "The Turquoise Ring" is a narrative poem that describes a woman who is "made to preserve" a turquoise ring given to her by a lover before separating from each other for an extended period of time.5 In Hooper's poem, the woman's "fervent … belief" in the "power" of the ring as a memento that "link[s] the future to all the past" is "met with its appropriate reward"—her lover's continued faithfulness and eventual return, a conclusion suggesting that a man's fidelity is contingent on the woman who cherishes his gifts.6 For readers of annuals, this insight also applied to "tokens" like The Moss-Rose which featured poems by female writers like Hooper, who modeled the gendered dynamics of gift exchange that drove the circulation of literary annuals, portraying women as repositories of romantic memory. "7 If, as Landon complains, "love, love is all a woman's fame," then failing to love or falling out of love is as good as falling into public oblivion, at least in the context of a literary marketplace that sanctioned the circulation of women's poetry under the guise of intimate gift exchange.8 Printed in The Literary Gazette in the same year that the first English annual was published, and read by critics as a commentary on the same "bourgeois demand for inexpensive mass-produced art objects" that contributed to the rapid diffusion of annuals and gift-books throughout early nineteenth-century popular culture, Landon's "Wafers" foreshadow Hooper's poem seventeen years later, showing how women were expected to remember, to "prize the slightest thing / Touched, looked, or breathed upon" by a lover, using their own poems to perform or model this cherishing in an attempt to avoid being forgotten by lovers and readers alike.9 Of course, as Landon presciently observes, forgetting was bound to happen anyway, even as a direct consequence of honoring the terms of the "forget-me-not": doomed to remember, women are damned to the past, while the rest of the world forgets and moves on. Asking how female poets could be both "widely popular and utterly forgettable," recent work by Alexandra Socarides and Elissa Zellinger extends the efforts of at least two prior generations of feminist scholars who have sought to understand the cultural erasure of nineteenth-century women's writing, in the process legitimating and making legible the aesthetic decisions and cultural strategies deployed by female writers to compete in a nineteenth-century literary marketplace infused with repressive gender norms.10 In contrast to early recovery-work by Janet Gray, Cheryl Walker, and Paula Bennett, who focus on how literary values promoted by modernism and New Criticism discriminated against the cultural longevity of nineteenth-century women poets, a second generation of literary critics, including Eliza Richards, Virginia Jackson, Yopie Prins, and Tricia Lootens, argue variously that the forgetting of women poets was already underway even as they wrote, due to the nature of the generic modes they were obliged to perform by popular demand.11 In particular, by writing through the persona of the "poetess," female poets reproduced a "generic representation" of selfhood that capitalized on its own "vacancy" as a way to secure widespread circulation in their own time, contributing to their own forgettability by emptying their poems of the individualized subjective content prized by later readers of lyric poetry.12 According to Jackson and Prins, the irony of the poetess is that, even as contemporary scholars "recover" this figure as an important nineteenth-century phenomenon, their efforts ensure that women poets continue to be "forgotten in the very process of being remembered," insomuch as they only become visible to the extent that they participated in an empty, abstracted version of literary femininity.13 Indeed, given the canonicity of the critical problem of forgetting and forgettability, it can be argued that nineteenth-century women poets are increasingly remembered today because they were forgotten--a process of endless recovery that endlessly retokenizes writers who were already obliged to figure or frame their poems as gift-tokens in order to negotiate a literary love economy, as I show in this essay. After its advent in England with the publication of Rudolph Ackermann's Forget Me Not in 1823, the first American annuals began to appear in 1826, eventually outstripping British production, which started to dwindle after 1835.14 While literary annuals circulated differently in England and America, their cultural function as feminized gift-books was broadly the same, with crossover sales of British books in the American marketplace, where the annual fad eventually "developed into even greater proportions and lasted longer" and left a profound impact on the development of American women's poetry as described by the scholarship I have just outlined.15 Indeed, as Susan Brown and Katherine Harris have observed, the British literary annual "participated in the production and evolution of the Poetess Tradition" that Richards, Jackson, and others have identified as the apparatus underwriting the wholesale cultural erasure of women's poetry in the American context.16 Both Landon and Osgood are frequently cited as iconic examples of the nineteenth-century poetess.17 They also conspicuously contributed with great frequency to literary annuals and gift-books, suggesting that they were apparently in no way averse to participating in a market that circulated women's poetry as tokens of affectionate remembrance.18 However, even as they embedded themselves profitably in a nineteenth-century gift economy, both poets worked from the inside to manipulate the gendered dynamics of remembering, forgetting, and being forgotten, finding ways to resist obligatory memory-work by undermining the stability of the memento as a profession of faith.