Soft Canons: American Women Writers

The Conversation of “The Whole Family”: Gender, Politics, and Aesthetics in Literary Tradition

In 1849 tireless anthologist and literary guru Rufus Griswold separated his bestselling The Poets and Poetry of America into two collections. The first, with the same title, contained only male poets. The second, The Female Poets of America, expanded the selection of increasingly popular women writers. The implications of this division were clear: male poets represented “real” poetry, while their female counterparts occupied a separate category — what Robert Frost would later call “sentimental sweet singer[s]”— appealing largely to a female audience.1 If from one angle Griswold’s gesture celebrated the achievements of his female contemporaries — and if Griswold worked personally to advance the reputations of many women poets — from another perspective this separate publication emblematized and helped inaugurate the bifurcated consideration of American male and female writers, of “masculine” and “feminine” traditions, that is still very much with us. A central goal of Soft Canons is to explore connections, discuss mutual influences, and propose theories of difference or alliance, attempting to bring together these separate spheres of criticism and to create a more richly textured account of American literary history.2 At this point one might well ask, what are masculine and feminine literary traditions? These terms are of course constantly in flux, negotiating with ideas of canon and criticism that, as I will outline below, have themselves changed dramatically over time. Moreover, although such traditions may have had a degree of internal coherence (with varying degrees of self-awareness) at the The Conversation of “The Whole Family”: Gender, Politics, and Aesthetics in Literary Tradition karen l. kilcup moment of their elaboration, they are also created and transformed retrospectively by readers who tell different stories of their development. To speak of them as actual facts rather than virtual events in some sense falsifies them. We also need to recognize that both writers and critics were involved (sometimes differently ) in the creation of literary traditions and that literary criticism identified itself as a “discipline” only in the opening decades of the twentieth century, when the evaluation of literary texts moved from the broader (“popular”) culture into the academy.3 In addition, what was masculine to one generation would sometimes prove feminine to another: the gendered quality of literary production varied, depending on the position of the critic and his or her historical moment. Finally, “aesthetics” and “politics” have been intricately connected in American literary history. I wish to suggest here that literary criticism has not only severed feminine and masculine traditions, it has done so in a way that has made a genuine reintegration of the canon more difficult. By often conceptualizing women’s writing in opposition to male writing, this scholarship, some of it feminist, has opened a gap that is difficult to bridge.4 In some sense, the impetus for discussions about the canon in recent years has emerged from an ongoing debate about the appropriate situation of “the aesthetic” (often, in a political move, identified with the masculine or the male) and “the political” (often identified with the feminine or the female) in American literary tradition.5 Another important goal of Soft Canons, then, is to work toward a model of criticism that closes these fractures. Critics’ oppositional stance may in fact emerge from the structure and protocols of literary criticism itself , and, in particular, “the use of argument as the preferred mode for discussion.” The adversarial strategy demands that we distinguish ourselves from our predecessors, that we clear our own intellectual space, “establishing credibility or cognitive authority ”;6 such a strategy almost determines an adversarial rather than a dialogical stance. At the same time, as I point out in more specific terms below, it may be necessary for a group attempting to identify its tradition at least initially to demarcate an aesthetic and/or cultural terrain in distinction from the “mainstream” in order to achieve an acknowledged presence in literary history. We need to ask, however, how long such a separate identity is useful, for opposing the “mainstream” necessarily reiterates its centrality. 2 : gender, politics, and aesthetics The essays in Soft Canons suggest that it may be more beneficial at this moment of cultural fragmentation in the United States to inquire into the conversations between, and even the meshing of, “traditions”— here principally masculine and feminine, but also black and white, straight and gay, Western and Eastern — while continuing to value the particularity of...