Period Pains: The Changing Body of Victorian Poetry

The biggest single change to the body of Victorian poetry in the last fifteen years has come from the long overdue restoration of women poets to the canon. So profound and far-reaching are the implications of this change that the subject can never again be viewed as it was during most of the twentieth century. The subject itself has metamorphosed, it has grown up, it has gone through its menarche. My student years in the 1960s, first in Australia and then at Oxford, saw Victorian poetry defined as a syllabus and therefore as a subject almost entirely within the parameters of men's poetry: Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold being the big three, variously accompanied by Hopkins, Swinburne, Hardy, D.G. Rossetti, and Morris: Christina Rossetti was sometimes allowed a modest peep through the door. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was mentioned, disparaged, and set aside. How much has changed! There is now so much interest in the work of women poets from younger Victorian scholars that they almost threaten to swamp the men. To me, this represents a huge upheaval in the subject, a radical transformation in what it is that we are dealing with when we speak of "Victorian Poetry." For it is not just an addition of women, it is a transformation of the men too, when they are seen in the context of the women. The impact of the upheaval in the body of Victorian poetry caused by such recent recognition of women poets will continue to have multiple ripple effects for decades to come.

And in the wake of the women has come the recognition of the gays and queers, in a way closely echoing recent changes in western cultural mores. In the wake of feminism came the quest for gay liberation, and in the wake of feminist studies came cultural studies, which was soon to be fuelled by a feeling of exclusion in certain quarters from the women-only agenda of early feminism.¹ Later, gay and lesbian studies were followed by the rise of queer theory, and debates sprang up about the interrelation of all of these trends. However, I cannot agree with Hartman that queer theory has rendered gender conceptually redundant;² debates around queer theory grew out of debates around gender issues and cannot be separated from them, as the work of Judith Butler, "Queen of Queer," has so eloquently shown.³ The queering of Victorian poetry is probably long overdue. And what next? Perhaps a new push toward re-opening religious debates from a new knowledge base and a newly sensitized perspective which seeks somehow to put the religion back into the poetry.⁴

Alongside these changes has come an increased impatience with the confinement or shaping of the body of what we have known as Victorian poetry entirely according to the years of a single monarch's reign. As Isobel Armstrong has eloquently put it, "in addition to being a purely descriptive historical marker [the term Victorian] can be an insidiously homogenising and deeply unhistorical term, encouraging the search for some quintessentially Victorian ethos."⁵ Increasing emphasis is being placed on the "long nineteenth century" as a way of dissociating the cultural production of a period with the perceived limiting characteristics of notions of Victorianism deriving from the figure of Queen Victoria, and of expanding the cutoff points for the period so as to encourage a new focus on a wider timespan as historical context. Perhaps it is no more than nostalgia, but my view is that "Victorian" is too valuable an epithet to lose—it allows us to place the cultural production of the period into a certain perspective that, despite its evident limitations, continues to gather richness even as it recedes into the past. Of course, it has been changed since the turn of the millenium by suddenly pushing it back a century. When I began my studies in the Victorian period, it carried with it a feeling of being too...