Women Poets and the Sister Arts in Nineteenth-Century England

Classical antiquity gave us the notion of the arts as sisters, and Renaissance Italy the drama of their sibling rivalry. ¹ In the "republic of taste" of eighteenth-century Britain, poetry, painting, and sculpture were companionable sisters, so long as the family of genres reflected the social order: pastoral verse and flower painting were classified as feminine pastimes suitable for lady amateurs; and epic poetry and history painting as masculine genres for gentlemen with a classical education or professional training. ² While sculpture provided ideal forms for both painting and poetry, its practice was also considered the most masculine of occupations, requiring the skills of a workman and the study of human anatomy. Like their Romantic predecessors, Victorian women poets capitalized on the signs of cultivation and distinction reflected in the poetics of ut pictura poesis ("as a painting, so a poem") and used it to distinguish feminine amateurism from masculine artistry. This essay will suggest that it is worth exploring how the rise of professional women painters and sculptors in the nineteenth century informed various forms of sister arts verse by poets actively engaged with the concept of a rivalry among the arts. Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and a host of other male poets responded in kind. But in their embodiment of the sister arts metaphor, I want to explore some of the complexities of sisterhood and rivalry expressed by several female poets and one art critic.

As Victorian women began to appear in the culturally elite roles of art historian and academic exhibitor, women poets responded to fellow rivals as many of their Renaissance and Romantic predecessors had, asserting poetry's power to create an image in the mind's eye and to give it a voice. ³ Feminist critics have drawn attention to the way in which nineteenth-century "poetesses" transformed ut pictura poesis into ut sculptura poeta ("as a sculpture, so a poet"). ⁴ The visual and poetic representations of Sappho and Staël's Corinne in the early nineteenth century offered "both the lyric voice and the sacrificial body of the paradigmatic poetess for consumption as an aestheticized object." ⁵ One paradigmatic poetess Felicia Hemans wrote ekphrastic poems in response to drawings and sculpture of Sappho abandoned by Phaon as well and to funerary monuments of women."The Last Song of Sappho" and "The Queen of Prussia's Tomb," for example, voice the bitterness of abandonment and the sorrows of motherhood, which are sentiments excluded from the visual records. Moreover, Hemans' elegiac stanzas form verbal monuments that attest to the power of song to outlast the tomb. ⁶

Social status and gender politics have always played a significant role in a form of sister arts rhetoric known as paragone, according to Jean H. Hagstrum in his landmark account of the sister arts from antiquity to eighteenth-century England. ⁷ In Renaissance Italy, the invention of paragone, which means comparison or contest, coincides with the painter's demand for equity with poets, whose art was considered a branch of rhetoric and a higher art:

The paragone involving painting and poetry is explainable not so much philosophically, on the basis of a theoretical distinction between these arts, as sociologically: painters and sculptors were now successful enough to reject the inferior social and educational position they had occupied since antiquity and to strive for recognition of their pursuits as liberal disciplines. (Hagstrum, p. 66)

Hagstrum's emphasis on theoretical debate and sociological context opens his discussion of Leonardo's Treatise on Painting, in which the author passionately vindicates the power of the image over the word. Hagstrum places Leonardo's defense within the context of social change, but he also attends to Leonardo's claim that painting's empiricism makes the art a science: "The painter, who deals with things, is superior to the poet, who deals with words" (Hagstrum, p. 68). In paragoni of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, letterati responded to...