From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry (review)

In From School to Salon, Mary Loeffelholz argues that an analysis of nineteenth-century American women poets is essential if we are to understand the "cultures of poetic literacy" in nineteenth-century America (8). Responding to Mary Poovey's provocative questions about what is at stake in the critical examination of once neglected women writers, Loeffelholz draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to suggest that the analysis of canonical authors is always already shaped by the work of writers who have been forgotten. Recovery projects, therefore, do not so much require a drawing of new, more inclusive boundaries as they require a re-examination of boundaries, tensions, and influences already at work in the reception of nineteenth-century literature. Loeffelholz's insightful account joins two other recent studies that also make vital contributions to this field: Paula Bennett's Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800–1900 (2003) and Eliza Richards's Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe's Circle (2004).

In examining the reasons behind the critical neglect of nineteenth-century women poets, Loeffelholz observes that American Studies scholars have tended to view fiction as the genre best suited to the analysis of this era's broader political concerns; with its aesthetic conceits and formal commitments, poetry has often been perceived as focusing on individual emotion. Drawing on the work of Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Loeffelholz suggests that we need to consider generic decisions themselves as having ideological weight. Rather than dismissing poetry as apolitical on the basis of its thematic content, we need to consider the ways in which the decision to write poetry reflects the range of cultural possibilities for authorship in the nineteenth century. Loeffelholz's decision to cordon off (for the most part) the issue of women poets' responses to the Civil War suggests that she is—for the purposes of this study at least—most interested in analyzing poems whose aesthetic ambitions seem at first glance to be writ larger than their political ones. Avoiding explicitly ideological pieces from the war era allows her to unsettle the New Critical opposition of the "high art" poem and the populist political poem in some unexpected ways. Examining a range of both long and short poems, Loeffelholz focuses in particular on the ways in which these poems represent or enact scenes of instruction or discipline. Like Richard Brodhead's Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (1993), Loeffelholz's study attends to the relationship between sites of education and stances of authorship. Considering the ways in which women "gained access to authorship in the genre of poetry," Loeffelholz traces "a shift from reading, reciting, writing, and publishing poetry in the didactic context of primary and secondary schooling to reading, reciting, and publishing poetry in the emergent later nineteenth-century venues of autonomous high culture" (4).

Loeffelholz begins by reading the work of two early nineteenth-century poets, Lucretia Davidson and Lydia Sigourney. Focusing on the promotion of Davidson's work after her death from tuberculosis at the age of seventeen, Loeffelholz reads Davidson as the exemplar of the prodigy schoolgirl poet. Next she examines Sigourney's shaping of her own career as a writer in relation to her career as a schoolmistress. The second section of the book reads the abolitionist poetry of Maria Lowell in relation to the Reconstruction-era poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, focusing on scenes of instruction in the work of both poets. While Lowell published in elite high-literary circles in the northeast, Harper wrote for multiple audiences, both black and white, working in multiple registers to maximize the breadth of her readership. Reading the work of Emily Dickinson, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Annie Fields, Loeffelholz examines the rise of institutions of high-literary culture in the late nineteenth century, arguing that both Jackson and Fields self-consciously chose to reject didactic...