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  • Poisonous Politics: Gender and Metaphor in Jacksonian America
  • Marcia D. Nichols (bio)
Sara L. Crosby. Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America. Iowa City, IA: Univ. of Iowa Press, 2016. 258pp. $65 cloth, $65 ebook.

Sara L. Crosby’s Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America could not have come out at a more apropos time. Although Jacksonian America has long been a popular topic among scholars, our current president’s frequent praising of the seventh president and our tumultuous political arena make Crosby’s book particularly relevant. Its incisive analysis of the female poisoner as a dominant metaphor in popular and literary discourse offers new insights into Jacksonian-Democratic hegemony before the 1850s that, perhaps, bear lessons for our own day.

Crosby argues that the ubiquity of the figure of the female poisoner in antebellum literary culture should be understood in the context of the ongoing debate over the “shape and legitimacy of popular print and popular authorship.” According to Crosby, the poisoner-as-muse “associated authorship with the popular, with the voice of the people, a de-centered authority, the celebration of which became almost sacred dogma in the Jacksonian era” [4]. In Poisonous Muse, she identifies five primary types of poisonous women: the British lamia, the American lamia, the partisan poisoner, the humbug poisoner, and the vengeful poisoner, who is touched on only briefly in the epilogue. The first half of the book examines the lamia as envisioned by Keats and Poe. Crosby begins her analysis in Britain with the traditional, patriarchal image of the lamia—the evil snake-woman whose attempts to seduce and murder the young hero are thwarted by the vigilance and authority of the philosopher. Crosby argues that John Keats, in response to criticism that his poetry lacked “Burkean” (that is, masculine) sublimity, creates the “Romantic lamia” [34–35, 31], the belle dame sans merci who combines beauty with sublime power. While Keats and his potent romantic poisoner should have appealed to American audiences because of the association with popular authorship, Crosby notes that the characterization of his work as effeminate affected Keats’s reception, and he was overshadowed by Byron and other “manly” romantic poets. Poe, however, preferred Keats and envisioned an American romantic lamia, to which we will turn in a moment. [End Page E12]

In the second half of her book, Crosby contends that the strong cultural association between women, fluidity, snakes, and poison meant that all female poisoners were represented as lamia-like. Two other poisonous female figures, she suggests, influenced Jacksonian discourse to a greater extent than Poe’s romantic lamia: the partisan poisoner and her near relation, the humbug poisoner. Placing the partisan figure at the center of Jacksonian discourse, Crosby argues that Jackson himself established the trope in his defense of Margaret “Peggy” Eaton, the new wife of Secretary of War John Eaton, during the “petticoat affair.” As a tavern-keeper’s daughter with a questionable sexual history, Peggy was snubbed by the wives of the Washington elite. By championing Peggy, Jackson cultivated the image of a selfless hero who put the interests of the common person before his own; indeed, he linked the attack on an “innocent” woman with an attack on democracy and the people at large. This set the stage for a rhetorical trope that cast the Democrats as defenders of virtuous womanhood against the calumny of malicious patriarchs (namely Whigs). Crosby’s claim that the innocent poisoner played a prominent role in Democratic rhetoric, however, is not entirely convincing, as she tends to gloss over or ignore actual political activity in which many women of the era engaged. Nevertheless, her treatment of the newspaper coverage of the criminal trial of Hannah Kinney, who was accused of poisoning her husband, is fascinating.

The second figure, the humbug poisoner, arose from the popularity of the partisan version in the form of over-the-top true crime hoaxes (what we might term “fake news”) that relied on discerning readers to separate truth from fiction. Crosby makes the case that these humbugs threatened to undermine Democratic hegemony by questioning the truthfulness of...

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