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  • Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle
  • Mary Louise Kete
Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle. By Eliza Richards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 238 pp. $75.00.

Eliza Richards’s study, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle, intervenes in three critical conversations concerning nineteenth-century American literary culture: one about poetry, one about Edgar Allan Poe, and one about the construction of gender in nineteenth-century America. Each of these interventions results from Richards’s theoretically and historically informed determination to read the American “lyric in terms of its circulation” (6). Focusing on poetry’s circulation within a system that integrated the public sphere of nineteenth-century print media with the private sphere of the parlor or salon, Richards organizes her book around the literary relationships among four of the era’s most popular poets: Edgar Allan Poe, Frances Sargent Osgood, Sarah Helen Whitman, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith. At the center of Richards’s study is the historical irony that, ultimately, “Poe receives credit for fathering [End Page 166]mass culture, while the mass of women who helped make both Poe and mass culture are denied” (26). The point of the book is not, however, to claim that this or that woman poet deserves to share Poe’s particular place in the pantheon of American literary history. Nor is it an elaboration of the thesis that sentimental literature provided what Lauren Berlant calls “a textual habitus” (qtd. in Richards 6), which Richards sees as a means by which “women could both acquiesce to and critique the patriarchal public sphere” (6).

Although the title of this work privileges Poe, and although Poe figures prominently in each chapter, the book is really about the newly controversial figure of the “poetess,” for it is a study of “the collusion of genius and mimicry in the nineteenth-century lyric and its legacies,” which has suffered from a historical overvaluation of nineteenth-century models of the transcendently original male “genius” (1). Richards joins Cheryl Walker, Annie Finch, and Paula Bennett in arguing, “Any historical understanding of American poetry requires a thorough re-evaluation of the significance and influence of the nineteenth-century poetess” (59). She extends the force of this argument by offering a sophisticated methodology that draws on her understanding of lyric theory and of the work of Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler, as well as on her mastery of the rich and varied cultural history of nineteenth-century America to explore a little-known aspect of American lyric tradition. This methodology opens up previously obscure poems in rich, close readings that reveal the poetics of the “poetess” to depend upon a successful deployment of tropes of femininity, including “ephemerality, self-dissolution, and ventriloquy” in an economy privileging the demonstration of clever receptivity over original production (3).

Mimicking and exchanging their culture’s assumptions about femininity allowed women to participate in and profit from the representation of themselves as poetesses. But the position or “sign” of the poetess was as available to men—such as Poe—as to women because it was an imagined, not essential, identity. Taking on the role of poetess was a performance for both Poe and, for example, Osgood that depended upon the collaborative efforts of a group. In the case of Osgood, the performance of the hyperbolically feminine poetess (which replaces the woman with a figure) allowed her to protect her own status as a lady while facilitating her participation in a public sphere that was imagined as being open only to men. Poe’s performance of the poetess, as Richards explains, erased the actual women authors who collaborated with him to create the image or figure of Poe that has passed into literary history as a model of the American poet as “a singular, static, masculine figure” (196). Understanding the nature and function of the poetess, Richards argues, reveals the difference between the gender of poetic conventions and the sex of the historical author. Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circleoffers a model [End Page 167]of how to resist the still powerful urge to believe in the fiction of...

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