Canonicity, Marginality, and the Celebration of the Minor

Victorian poetry as a field tends to be among those subdisciplines least affected by theoretical and historical developments in literary study. In the eighties and early nineties, our field was certainly changed by demands to "open up" the canon. ¹ Particularly with women poets, these investigations had an effect; any roster of poets from the nineteenth century now includes Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and Michael Field —both in pedagogical anthologies like the Longman, Norton, and the Broadview, and in scholarly attention. At the same time, for all the talk about opening up the canon, the canon has shifted rather than expanded; certain authors on the edges (say, Patmore and the poets of the nineties) have been quietly or nearly dropped to include new objects of study. In addition, the scholarly canon has changed far less than it could have; scholars are not necessarily writing about newly rediscovered work as about works familiar to them. In the last decade and a half there was an explosion of articles on Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, which was hardly in danger of being ignored.

My point here is to talk about what we do beyond the easy assumptions of our own effects. We have added women poets to our classes' reading lists (other categories of marginalization, like those of race, are not so easy to find in Victorian poetry). But that may be all we have done. The binary division into "marginalized" and "canonical" may not be very easy. John Guillory has most famously examined how complex the relationships are among canonicity, class, and cultural access, and the effects of his groundbreaking work have yet to be felt throughout our field. For Guillory, the project of reflecting upon the canon involves much more than "opening" it up to once-excluded or "marginal" authors; he investigates the ways in which a particular work might gain "cultural capital" through an interplay among what it means, what it embodies, how it is produced, and how it is received in an historical moment. ²

In the case of Victorian poetry, for example, women poets have been rather easily found and decanted into the critical and pedagogical canons. But sexual dissidence is a more intricate category that does not align itself comfortably in relationship to either the "canonical" or the "marginal." As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has pointed out ("Who was the gay Proust?"), the relationship of gay male writers to the canon has not exactly been one of marginalization. ³ Gay and Lesbian studies has not really added many "marginalized" poets to our reading lists; instead, it has largely looked again at poets who were already read, like Christina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Michael Field may be the exception that proves the rule. Few study the poetry of John Addington Symonds or Lord Alfred Douglas or Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson outside of some biographical interest. We could frame these omissions as a question of "quality" or of canonicity, but actually they are questions of poetic minority; their poems are thunderingly derivative (Symonds and Douglas of Keats, Dickinson of Shelley). And other writers, too, have pointed out the limits of our attention to certain kinds (race and gender especially) of marginalities. The working-class "spasmodic" poets have not received sustained attention since the nineteen-fifties. The burgeoning approach of disability studies has yet to approach the blind Pre-Raphaelite Philip Bourke Marston. Jonathan Freedman has called attention to the diminished place for Jewish writers in the literary canon, too, though in the work of Cynthia Scheinberg and Linda Hunt Beckman, this is an area where scholars of Victorian poetry are ahead of the curve. ⁴

We may be in need of a third term, and we do not have to invent a new one. My point here is to make a plea, and a prediction about our field: the celebration of the minor. "Minor," I think, is a term to commemorate, or at least investigate, rather than avoid...