Strategic Aestheticism: A Response to Caroline Levine

Until recently, Michael Field was best known as a poet concerned with the intricacies of form. Literary avatar of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, Michael Field drew inspiration from literary and visual traditions ranging from the Sapphic lyric fragment to Renaissance painting. Especially in the early years of Michael Field's career, critics found much to admire in their poetry. Yet the classical erudition and commitment to form at the heart of their artistic vision prompted their most public failure. In February 1893, having just finished reading Anna Karenina, Bradley and Cooper saw Elizabeth Robins perform in Ibsen's Master-Builder. Describing Robins in her diary as "Modernity itself in skirts" (Field 6: 18v), Cooper recounts the excitement of this moment: "A woman's mobility is in her forever, when once she is awaked to life, also her eagerness for experience, that raw material of now, which has been selected for her & limited grudgingly through the centuries. A true modern not only feels the zeitgeist but acts on its contagious motives, without wasting a moment in delay" (6: 22v, emphasis original).

Thus awakened, Cooper and Bradley were inspired to seize the modernity of which they so wished to be a part by stepping out on the public stage far more directly, far more publicly as women writers, and far more politically than they had before. Later that year they published the first Michael Field play to appear in prose rather than in the lyric form of the closet drama. A Question of Memory deliberately took up an issue that was for Field—all things being relative—topical and contemporary, the 1848 Hungarian Revolution. The play was performed only once, on 27 October 1893, at the Independent Theatre, to humiliating reviews. William Archer, Ibsen's translator and reviewer for the World, wrote perhaps the worst: "The ladies who choose to be known as 'Michael Field' must be numbered among the many victims of the Elizabethan drama. . . . This worship of a dead convention has produced an infinite mass of still-born literature, and the dramas of 'Michael Field' are among its most melancholy results" (23). Michael Field's sole attempt at topical relevance, their attempt to seize "that raw material of now," was a failure: they were victims of form, trapped within "dead convention[s]" but also within the overly formal "diction and versification of 1590 or thereabouts" (23).

This harsh critical response aggravated Michael Field's longstanding concern about their public reception. Back in 1888 they sought the protective patronage of their mentor Robert Browning, who urged them to be patient: "'wait fifty years,'" he said, for your day to come (qtd. in Field 2: 5). A century after Browning's prediction, critical recognition did at last arrive for Michael Field—but under circumstances they would never have anticipated. The writers may not have been of the "modern" 1893 vintage, but they are absolutely right for the critical moment, vintage 2006. It was nothing new, of course, for women writers to publish under the pseudonymous claims of masculinity, but the fusion of two women artists into one male poet offers a more unusual contribution to, and commentary on, the conventions of Victorian authorship. So, too, the private relationship between Bradley and Cooper: they were aunt and niece, lifelong lovers, "closer married," as they said, than the Brownings themselves (Field 1933, 16). In the journal they kept jointly for thirty years, in eight volumes of poetry, and in twenty-seven plays, Michael Field invoke formal conventions of family and romance, as well as art, domesticity, sexuality, parenthood, religion, and marriage, and they adapt each for their unique purposes.

Just when the need to be heard, to have an effect, seems even more urgent for literary critics than it did for Michael Field in February 1893, Caroline Levine advocates "strategic formalism" as a new way to sharpen some trusty old tools on the cultural critic's belt. The motivations underlying Levine's intervention differ dramatically, however, from those underlying Michael Field's. From a troubled global political environment to an institutional context in which humanistic scholarship is under attack, humanities...