Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being I

7. Precious Objects: Laura Riding, Her Tiara, and the Petrarchan Muse

7 PRECIOUS OBJECTS L A U R A R I D I N G , H E R T I A R A , A N D T H E P E T R A R C H A N M U S E Becky Peterson Unlike many women poets who subvert the Petrarchan male poet–woman muse dynamic by writing poems in which the authorial voice is female and the “inspiration” male, American poet Laura Riding collapses the entire poetic subject-object structure by depicting herself as both subject and object, poet and muse. In this way, she rejects the system of domination present in the traditional Petrarchan model. Riding’s decision to assume the muse/object role—in her poetry and in her attention to dress and ornament —locates her in the company of several of her modernist contemporaries.1 Riding ’s position on subject-object relations extends from a revision of Petrarchan poetics toward a radical view of feminism and a highly individualized expression of her position as a woman artist. Throughout her career, Riding made significant use of literal and figurative “precious objects.” In this essay, I focus on two types of precious objects: the elusive female muse (the inspiring, objectified figure in Western poetic tradition), and the presence of jewelry in Riding’s art and life, as represented in her poetry and in a gold tiara she owned and wore.2 Riding employs these elements to articulate the condition of otherness—by positioning herself as an object, and by paying close, serious attention to trivialized decorative objects, she talks implicitly about marginalization, particularly the marginaliza- tion of women artists. Riding theorizes the objectified Other in various forms—poetry, fiction, essay—from a position of negativity and impersonality. For many Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth century and their children (Riding was one of these children), Jewishness was something imposed from outside.3 Female poets at this time occupied a similar position—women were defined as muses, not writers. Riding’s work asks: How might we talk about otherness from this position of passivity? How can we read in a way that makes room for the “precious object”—including the person treated as a precious object—to speak? Hovering behind my argument that Riding self-consciously positions herself as object/muse/Other is poetry’s übermuse, the Laura of Francesco Petrarch’s Rime Sparse. Investigating the figure who haunts Petrarchanism shows how Riding responds to a specific established cultural sense of what it means to be a woman in the world of poetry and publishing: an anomaly , a muse who frustrates by not only inspiring but writing. Riding, the daughter of secular Jewish socialist garment workers in New York, eventually stated her dislike of the communist movement and established literary alliances with the conservative editors of the journal Fugitive. Riding’s father, Nathaniel Reichenthal , managed a chain of clothing stores, and Riding was president of Cornell’s Socialist Society while an undergraduate there.4 Her passionate belief in the “truth” of poetry and formalist literary critique echoes the idealism of her father’s socialist devotion. Both Riding and her father locate their truths in language and are committed to stripping words of hypocrisy. Jeanne Heuving, pointing to Riding’s impact on New Criticism and the practice of close reading, notes that the presence of her Marxist father could recon- figure how we view the intersections of these critical movements. Heuving discusses the two possible ways Riding may have influenced the formation of New Criticism. She mentions Riding’s book A Survey of Modernist Poetry, cowritten with Robert Graves, and its eƒect on William Empson. She also describes how Riding’s father trained Riding to read newspapers with an eye for capitalist subtext. Of Riding’s close reading with her father during childhood, Heuving notes that “if (Riding) Jackson is right [about her influence on New Criticism], a curious footnote to literary history would be the leftist derivation of a practice of reading that enabled the politically conservative New Criticism.”5 1 0 9 / P R E C I O U S O B J E C T S Riding’s first book, The Close Chaplet, was printed in 1925 by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Her poems caught the attention of Robert Graves, and she began a long-term literary and personal relationship with him. Their Seizin Press...