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3. Poetesses
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72 3 Poetesses If the truth were known, we might very likely find that it was man rather than woman who has been the interloper in the domain of literature. —Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey As a young man [Arnold] did not like women. He didn’t comprehend them.They were things, distractions, objects which teach men only what men already know; they were vain, inconstant, mentally inferior, less able than men. —Park Honan, Matthew Arnold:A Life Matthew Arnold’s notorious misogyny, especially during the period of his greatest poetic productivity (1847–53), is perhaps most visible in his now-familiar letter of September 29, 1848, to Clough, as he explains his boredom (at last) with Pierre-Jean de Béranger’s works and compares it with a “feeling with regard to (I hate the word) women. We know beforehand all they can teach us: yet we are obliged to learn it directly from them.”1 Five years later, he wrote Clough, who was in America, a letter that contains a litany of attacks on women literary figures and intellectuals , beginning with Margaret Fuller, whom Clough had recently met and whomArnold describes as a “brazen female.” His splenetic onslaught in the letter appears irrepressible: “I incline to think that meeting with [Fuller] would have made me return all the contents of my spiritual stomach. . . . G—d what rot did You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Poetesses 73 she and the other female dogs of Boston talk about the Greek mythology! The absence of men of any culture in America must have made her run riot so wildly, and for many years made her insufferable” (Letters, 1:258). He is no kinder to Charlotte Brontë, whose recently published Villette he describes in this same letter as a “hideous undelightful convulsed constricted novel,” and he gratuitously adds that “having seen [Brontë] makes it more so. She is so entirely—what Margaret Fuller was partially—a fire without aliment—one of the most distressing barren sights one can witness.” In a letter written soon afterward, he continues— almost compulsively—with an attack on Harriet Beecher Stowe, whom, he asserts, “by her picture must be a Gorgon . . . a strong Dissenter—religious middle-class person—she will never go far I think” (Letters, 1:258–59). For Arnold “this strange disease of modern life” decried in “The Scholar-Gipsy” included, among other features, an intense male dis-ease with accomplished women and, one might well speculate, particularly with upstart and hugely successful women writers, who had in many respects come to dominate the marketplace not only for fiction but also for poetry by the time Arnold was embracing his poetic vocation in earnest. The threat women posed to literary and cultural authority, embodied in the great male-authored canonical works of the European tradition , seems to have appeared as strong, indeed as frightening, to Arnold as that of Keats or his progeny, the Spasmodic poets. Such a response may well explain an extraordinary instance of public suppression and denial on the part of this newcomer to the English literary marketplace in the late 1840s: not once in his various writings of that era does Arnold mention the names of the foremost women poets of the day, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (the newest powerful woman poet, whose fame was firmly established with the publication in 1844 of the critically acclaimed A Drama of Exile and Other Poems, which features as its title poem a bold re-vision of the concluding episodes of Milton’s Paradise Lost). In fact, only You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold 74 once in all of Arnold’s four thousand collected letters does he mention any of these women poets or their works, which he could hardly have escaped hearing and reading about, even if he himself refused actually to read them. The instance occurs in a letter of February 9, 1858, to his friend Frances (“Fanny”) Mary Blackett du Quaire as an aside to a reference to Robert Browning. In response to reading Aurora Leigh (or, perhaps, only...