Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry

Preface

Preface Gender played a determining role in the aesthetic and ideological values associated with the dominant poetic tendencies of nineteenth -century France. From Romanticism through Symbolism, both the sex of the author and textual inscriptions of gender shaped poetic doctrine and practice in inextricably related ways. Men manipulated "woman" as a poetic symbol and, in tum, women poets on the edges of nineteenth-century French poetic communities challenged dominant poetic discourses with strategies ranging from assimilation to satire and outright defiance. Female poetic production was thus shaped by its milieu, but succeeded in questioning the very foundations of its own context.. The Gendered Lyric juxtaposes male- and female-authored poetry in order to explore the reciprocal influence of dominant and marginal poetic traditions. It questions prevailing assumptions that women writers (whether through poor education, innate incompatibility, or disinterest) were somehow at odds with this elite and difficult genre, or that the lyric provided a poor medium for the translation offeminine subjectivity. While forming a decided minority, women did in fact participate in predominantly male poetic communities. They produced fasci- . nating texts, largely unread today, that illuminate the play of sexual difference in canonical poetry. I contend that nineteenth-century critics and poets rebuffed women poets' attempts to become writing subjects because the prevailing conception of lyric poetry was predicated 'upon the objectification of woman. Indeed, the analysis of poetic subject positions through the optic of gender shows that sexual difference functioned symbolically to define lyricism itself. From the fictional representation of the poet to the articulation of poetic voice and choice of trope and form, gender is intricately connected to the production of poetic meaning. This study traces the chronological development of lyric poetry through the three major movements of the nineteenth century: Romanticism (Part l),Parnassianism (Part 2), and Symbolism (Part 3). I focus on the critical and literary production of the chief poetic schools and the works of women poets in relation to them. In this I follow Nancy K. Miller's insistence on temporal and cultural context: "it is important to locate any ix Preface poetics of feminist writing in relation to a historicized national and cultural production; [...] a 'poetics of location' is the only way to work against the universalizIng tendencies of a monolith of 'women's writing'" ("Men's Reading, Women's Writing " 44). My introduction serves two contextualizing functions, first sketching out the nineteenth-century poetic environment in France, and then situating the problematic of the gendered lyric within the context of contemporary theories of the subject , of poetics, and of feminism. The relationship between gender and lyric poetry creates a fabric of unfolding, intertwining stories. The story spun out in time starts with the rebirth of lyric poetry with Romanticism. I begin in chapter 1 by retracing the terms of this poetic renaissance . The first to provide a vocabulary for the Romantic experience was Germaine de Stael,-who described the new aesthetics of spontaneity and emotive effusion. Her work points to a poetic revolution in expression, the desire to break out ofconstraints by privileging unrestrained, forward-rolling narratives of the self. Indeed, literary historians define French Romanticism in terms of a small number of male poets whose work involves the exploration of the self and the liberation of sentiment.·The canonical poets Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, and Musset consistently proffered masculine lyric subjects and'spoke to masculine ambition, and yet their very emotiveness suggests both implicitly and explicitly the exploration offemininity. Although Romanticism invariably represented a male, heterosexual poet, this figure underwent a curious feminization during the period. Even the most robust of the Romantics, Victor Hugo, describes the "soft" qualities of the poetic persona. The Romantic construct of the poet offers the best gauge of the gendering of lyric expression and helps explain why stories of female Romantic poets often go untold. In chapter 2, I focus on the-works ofDesbordes-Valmore, one ofa number ofRomantic women poets who enjoyed popular success during their lifetimes . Although these women confronted significant cultural obstacles, these were less considerable than for women poets ofother eras, since the reigning Romantic style, associated with passionate effusion and spontaneity rather than formalism, accorded relatively easily with the myth of the Eternal Feminine . The very acceptability of Desbordes-Valmore indicates x Preface her collusion with such myths. And yet my analyses of the metaphoric and prosodic features ofher work, as ofher manipulation of subject positions, reveal her attempts...