Race and Time: American Women's Poetics from Antislavery to Racial Modernity

1. Wrappings: A Methodological Introduction

Why read poems by nineteenth-century American women through the constructs “race” and “time”? I saw race and time at work on each other in a group of poems I chose for She Wields a Pen (1997), one of several collections through which feminist scholars made freshly available the works of long-forgotten women poets as the turn of the twenty-first century approached.1 In the earliest of the poems in my anthology that touch on race, a child interrogates a naturally mummified corpse that the American Antiquarian Society put on display in Massachusetts early in the nineteenth century. The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy And now, Mistress Mummy, since thus you’ve been found By the world, that has long done without you, In your snug little hiding-place far under ground— Be pleased to speak out, as we gather around, And let us hear something about you! By the style of your dress you are not Madam Eve— You of course had a father and mother; No more of your line have we power to conceive, As you furnish us nothing by which to believe You had husband, child, sister, or brother. We know you have lived, though we cannot tell when, And that too by eating and drinking, To judge by your teeth, and the lips you had then; And we see you are one of the children of men, Though long from their looks you’ve been shrinking. Wrappings A Methodological Introduction 1 Who was it that made you a cavern so deep, Refused your poor head a last pillow, And bade you sit still when you’d sunken to sleep, And they’d bound you and muffled you up in a heap Of clothes made of hempen and willow? Say, whose was the ear that could hear with delight The musical trinket found nigh you? And who had the eye that was pleased with the sight Of this form (whose queer face might be brown, red, or white,) Trick’d out in the jewels kept by you? —Hannah Flagg Gould (1836) “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” met several of the criteria that guided my effort to create an anthology that would stretch the boundaries of how we understand “women,” “poetry,” and “American.” It represents an oddly distorted female figure, anticipates the nineteenth-century blossoming of nonsense verse, and tackles a feature of people’s relationship to the landscape that poetry in English had not confronted before its migration to North America. The poem’s silliness delighted me, especially since I found it amid page after page of serious little poems that fit more neatly into past and recent efforts to define a tradition of nineteenthcentury American women’s poetry. And I saw myself in it; I saw a likeness between the child’s interrogation of the mummy and the musty adventure in recuperative scholarship that led me to the poem. But the parenthetical reference to race bothered me. Gould published antislavery poetry, but the child’s uncertainty about the mummy’s color seemed to mark the limits of Gould’s critical understanding of race. In a tricked-out, “brown, red, or white” female figure, I saw the makings of the racially ambiguous and sexually aggressive Jezebel stereotype, a social myth rooted in the justification of slavery that still undergirds discriminatory public policy.2 And what of the maternal meaning of “mummy”—was Gould’s child an ironically shriveled and inaccessible version of a Kentucky mammy? Nervousness about race together with gender seemed almost to be the poem’s destination, the repressed worry it had to get out, the puzzle toward which its poetics drove it. Why? And why invest that anxiety in a mummy, a body whose living took place in an indistinct past? Further, what if we understand the Kentucky mummy not as a marginal quirk but 4 Introduction as somehow central to the experience of being an American woman writing poetry—or rather a white woman writing poetry in nineteenth-century New England, a condition often treated as “the tradition” in recuperative scholarship on American women’s poetry? Gould’s poem pointed me toward a thesis for this book and a methodological framework for the questions I needed to ask. I offer a full reading of the Kentucky mummy in chapter 4; in this introductory chapter, I explore the framework for...