The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness (review)

Catherine Maxwell's The Female Sublime From Milton to Swinburne swells the stream of recent critical works treating the feminization of poetical character in nineteenth-century English poetry. In what is now the most familiar literary-historical version of this narrative, poets become generically feminine in the nineteenth century with capitalism's division of life into gendered separate spheres. With demand for, and consumption of, literature increasingly identified with the domestic sphere under women's rule, not only do women writers emerge in numbers to take advantage of their new access to the literary, but literary men too are swept into the century's "general feminisation of culture and of intellectual labor," forced either to align themselves with feminine values or to fashion ever more muscular forms of resistance to them (4).

Maxwell's study, however, takes issue with this narrative's fundamental assumptions of causality, asking whether poets "might not be just as much affected, if not more so, by literary rather than social factors" (4). In Maxwell's reading, the feminization of nineteenth-century British poetry stems less from capitalism's emasculation of culture than from the autonomous necessities of "a poetic tradition which has always, through various types and images, identified lyric song with femininity" (4). Acknowledging Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia as her project's intellectual begetters, Maxwell, like Bloom, projects a self-reflexive tradition of male authors that propagates itself through time as poets reproduce its central figures and repeat its scenes of instruction and election. But where Bloom famously asserts that male poets enter this tradition by rebelling against castration—setting out to slay their precursor-fathers in order to possess the mother-muse—Maxwell argues instead that submission to castration is "the essential mark of poethood": "To write and envision as a lyric poet is to give up masculine status, and, far from the penis being a metaphorical pen, it is its lack rather than its presence that is the sign of the visionary writer" (6). Male poets in Maxwell's tradition, which ranges from John Milton to Algernon Swinburne via Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, and Alfred Tennyson, are feminized not by virtue of their contingent historical association with nineteenth-century capitalism's domestication of letters, but rather in the course of being arrested, blinded, and subjugated by poetic figures of overmastering female power—"the female sublime," as Maxwell terms it.

The "female sublime" of Maxwell's title, then, is a visionary experience linking a tradition of male poets rather than being the property of women poets—with the equivocal exception of Sappho, on whose ancient model of suffering song male lyric poets can "appear to 'come out' as women" (33). Maxwell's emphasis on Sappho's centrality for Victorian poetry echoes Yopie Prins's exploration of the same theme in her Victorian Sappho (1999), and the result for both studies is a canon of Victorian poetry that culminates in Swinburne. As Maxwell reads him, Swinburne openly glories in his own submission to the female sublime, making explicit the masochism and feminization implicit in the male poetic tradition of ravished nightingales that runs from Milton's Il Penseroso (1632) through Shelley's "To a Skylark" (1820) and Tennyson's half-dissolved Sapphic speaker in "Eleänore" (1832).

Tennyson appears in this tradition as the "proper feminine" to Swinburne's "improper" (181). Although figures like Ida in The Princess (1847) extend the female sublime's line of lofty women who shed a light that blinds or overpowers the male gazer, Tennyson's idyll in the end cuts his sublime princesses down to the domestic dimensions of pastoral— even though doing so "makes Tennyson argue not only against Ida but against himself, taking issue with his own favourite figures of imagination" (126). Browning, on the other hand, against the grain of his reputation for hearty masculinity, emerges...