Is a Woman Poet Born or Made? Discourse of Maternity in Louisa Siefert and Louise Ackermann

Is a Woman Poet Born or Made? Discourse of Maternity in Louisa Siefert and Louise Ackermann Adrianna M. Paliyenko Quand sera brisé l'infini servage de la femme, quand elle vivra pour elle et par elle, l'homme, —jusqu'ici abominable, —lui ayant donné son renvoi, elle sera poète, elle aussi! —Rimbaud, 15 mai 187 Γ FRENCH WOMEN POETS had yet to emerge fully because the maternal body, bound by reproduction in the patriarchal society that Rimbaud ostensibly rebuked, essentially supplanted women's interiority and subjectivity . Social movement and increasing access to literary culture, in turn, mutually developed psychic mobility through which women (re)cultivated their inner self. Women's poetic writing in nineteenth-century France evokes their progressive liberation from domestic confinement and motherhood per se. A grouping of texts from Louisa Siefert (1845-1877) and Louise Ackermann (1813-1890) provides a provocative counterdiscourse to the historical identification of women with the biological and social function of mothering. These texts suggest that women may develop their psychic generativity by sublimating biological maternity into creativity. The complex voices of Siefert and Ackermann tell us well before Freud that individual women may be born to reproduce mothering, but women may also be(come) desiring subjects who conceive of themselves as poets.2 "La poésie a toujours tout l'avenir. Il naîtra toujours de grands poètes, hommes ou femmes."3 For Fernand Gregh, who included women in forecasting a fertile future for French poetry at the turn of the twentieth century, one is born a poet, regardless of one's sex. Gregh's dissociation of creativity and gender forms a striking contrast with the nineteenth century's biological determinism, which gained psychoanalytic currency in our century. Women were purportedly born, or destined physically, psychologically and socially, to become mothers. Medical constructions of the female sex in early nineteenthcentury France, which brought "Ie foyer génital" to bear predominately on the female brain, made reproduction and production in women mutually incompatible .4 Thinking through the reproductive female body purportedly made women sterile, since the exercise of women's brains was said to shrink their ovaries. Social and literary representations of the "second" sex similarly asserted a primal maternal instinct at the core of women's identity with the purpose of nurturing the patriarchy. 52 Summer 1999 Paliyenko The patriarchal reproduction of mothering depends on the domestic confinement of the maternal body, a repressive dominion that Freudian psychoanalysis sustains by ascribing an exclusively reproductive aim to "normal" female sexuality. Freud himself, however, conceded that psychoanalytic knowledge of women was inconclusive and surmised that, apart from the compulsion to become a mother herself, "an individual woman may be a human being in other respects."5 To know more about the nature of women, and about what they may become, Freud suggested that one "enquire from [one's] own experience or turn to the poets" (135). Nineteenth-century women poets Siefert and Ackermann wrote in the shadow of restorative domesticity aimed at repopulating France after the 1789 revolution. I want to recover their poetic response to imputed female generativity. To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir's cultural construction of gender, it may not be that one is born a woman poet, as Gregh assumed. Rather one becomes a woman poet by (m)othering the creative self. An identification with maternity links the desire to bear a child and the desire to produce a textual body.6 Artistic sublimations, which Freud's contemporary Hélène Deutsch considered specifically in women, bring into consciousness women's conflicts about motherhood while redirecting the maternal , or generative, instinct from the body to the mind.7 By turning away from reproduction to intellectual activity, the fertile minds of women, such as Siefert and Ackermann, complicate the patriarchal anatomy of their destiny. Poetic writing (which I am treating psychoanalytically as a sublimated modification of thwarted or repressed maternal desire) manifests a split between the unconscious wish to be a mother, which remains operative in cultural production , and an artist's conscious life. In Siefert's case, the "compulsive," even morbid, desire for a child, to which biographical evidence attests, is sublimated into poetic maternity. Ackermann 's written corpus reveals...