Little Songs: Women, Silence and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (review)

Amy Christine Billone's Little Songs: Women, Silence and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet extends the interest the modern sonnet form has enjoyed since Stuart Curran's ground-breaking Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986), which initiated reconsideration of the sonnet form and of Romantic appreciation and manipulation of poetic form generally. As scholars have subsequently discussed, since its late-eighteenth-century revival, the sonnet has focused poets' attention not only on strictures of form but also on the dynamics of subjectivity, voice, language, and gender. Billone's book offers the first sustained exploration of nineteenth-century women's particular claim on the sonnet form. She begins with Charlotte Smith and her early Romantic contemporaries—generally acknowledged, even by William Wordsworth himself, as central to the form's revival—and concludes with Isabella Southern and the far less obscure Michael Field at the cusp of the twentieth century. Between those historical bookends is the backbone of the study, extended readings of sonnets and sequences by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti.

The author achieves what thus far has been accomplished only piecemeal: a sustained account of how women poets altered the dynamics involved in conceiving and composing sonnets, and in doing so pointed toward an entirely different, gendered, conception of poetical agency. Billone's argument is driven by the critical observation that "women sonneteers . . . blatantly violate the strategies of compensation and redemption that were often used by their male counterparts" (157), a violation that has everything to do with the simultaneous and near-obsessive attention in these sonnets with muteness and voice. Like their male counterparts, women sonnet-writers wrestled with a difficult, restrictive form that "helped to make inexpressibility visible" (156); unlike those counterparts, for whom the compensatory strategies of the sublime were accessible, female writers confronted a paradox: "their gestures of assertion were ultimately accomplished through rhetorical constructions that insisted in the stifling of assertion" (156).

The opening chapter on Smith and other Romantic sonneteers probes a paradox that emerged with the sonnet's revival: unlike the sonnets of Thomas Gray, W. L. Bowles, and later Wordsworth, which "underscore the continuity and consolation that poetry offers in the face of sorrow," the work of Smith (and the other poets Billone examines) "activates a powerful countermovement to inarticulable and unredeemable loss" (35). This "foregrounding [of] expressionlessness" severely and provocatively complicates the backdrop of Victorian expressive models of language that "approve the projection of emotions outwards" (85), and in doing so approve the compensatory movement of so much male-authored lyric poetry. Billone effectively pressures both the sonnets themselves and earlier critical readings of those poems. Measuring the efforts of these poets against theories of expressiveness and silence, Billone shows us where and how those theories leave her subjects adrift, seeking their own understanding of voice. While Billone claims that Barrett Browning was less troubled by these difficulties she convincingly argues that for Rossetti the failure of poetry followed inevitably from an interplay of silence and expression that contemporary notions of female subjectivity simply cannot accommodate. As Billone shows us, the interplay characteristically addressed in the exploration of "grief" and its (in)expressibility becomes the obsessive subject of Victorian women's sonnets; the pathology of the sequences is rooted not so much in issues of temporality or of absence but in the problem of voice and voicing.

Moreover, Billone outlines a model of subjectivity that depends not upon the perception of the sublime but rather upon an insistence on the mute "I/eye" in the face of "blank despair" (a kind of emotional blindness), grief, and silence. She thus complicates previous readings of these sonnet writers, showing us how masculine theories of language and self fell short of their poetic needs. In Billone's reading, Barrett Browning allows for a "conversion from silence to song" (49), but Rossetti's "music of silence" leads, as that paradoxical formulation suggests, to a far more fragile conclusion...