Amy Lowell's Keats: Reading Straight, Writing Lesbian

For someone situated as Amy Lowell was--coming of age in 1890s Boston, in a wealthy, straitlaced family with strong intellectual traditions--it may well have been easier to see oneself as a lover of poetry and even as a poet in the making than as a lover of women. That a person should become a poet from reading other poets is a familiar story, but we know less about other effects of reading canonical poetry, including its power to precipitate readers' discoveries about their sexualities or indeed to constitute those sexualities. If literary conventions can have the insidious effect of limiting what human beings can imagine by way of acceptable relationships (every girl must marry her prince), might they not also have anti-conventional effects, or at least lend support to socially deviant impulses? By looking through the contemporary analytical lenses of gender and sexuality at a traditionally literary historical topic (the relation between an earlier and a later poet), this essay investigates the particular and highly mobile ways in which Keats's work and imagined person, as subjects for identification and objects of both adoration and critique, supplied and possibly also helped to create the changing needs of Lowell's life and literary career, including her recognition of her desire for women and her identification across an array of gendered positions.

In Lowell's day there was no proper or even widely used term for a woman who loved women. To call her "sapphist" or the then less familiar "lesbian" would have been merely to refer her sexuality to that of a poet whose identity as a lover exclusively of women was largely a misogynist invention of the late nineteenth century. ¹ The more often used "invert" referred to mannish style and covered feminist political activists as well. According to Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, there was no positive, non-pathologizing discourse of sexual expression for women who loved women, as there arguably was for male homosexuals. ² Moreover, Lowell was writing and living with Ada Dwyer Russell--her companion for the last and most productive decade of her life--during a period of unevenly developing discourses about homosexuality. Lillian Faderman shows that during the first three decades of the twentieth century in the U.S., an earlier, non-stigmatized "romantic friendship" or "Boston marriage" model of what would now be called lesbian relationships gave way to a post-Freudian, sexualized, and pathologized view. ³ For women of Lowell's and Russell's generation and respectability, however (Lowell's pedigree was impeccable and Russell was a nice widow ten years her senior who also worked as Lowell's secretary), the Boston marriage model appears to have persisted beyond its lifespan elsewhere. ⁴ Assumptions were hardening but not yet fixed about the correlation between sexual orientation and gendered style: a woman who smoked cigars, played the part of Lord Goring in a home production of Wilde's "The Ideal Husband," and spoke out in public as Lowell did might be "mannish" (although she switched from suits to dresses around 1910), but a Boston marriage and a mannish style were not yet necessarily signs of sexual deviance. The bisexual themes and in-your-face style of Lowell's younger contemporary Edna Millay belonged to a different milieu from Lowell's: Boston was no Greenwich Village, a place Lowell--who stayed at the Plaza when in New York--detested. ⁵ But Lowell kept herself up-to-date on Freudian views of human sexuality, and she told Havelock Ellis, "I am one of the greatest admirers of your own work, and always read every new book as it comes out." ⁶ It cannot simply be said that Lowell was either behind the times or self-censoring in terms of sexual expression. We cannot assume that we share or can easily recognize the vocabulary in which Lowell's gender and sexuality took form.

If Lowell is beginning to be read again...