The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres by Tricia Lootens (review)

Tricia Lootens's new book, The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres, rests on an important claim: that the moral authority attributed to Victorian women and their writing had its origins in women's largely effective activism in the anti-slavery campaigns of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Both that earlier moment and the poetry written in its wake, Lootens argues, require us to suspend what the Victorians urged as the separation of men's and women's spheres (the isolation of the public, economic, and political from the feminine, domestic, and private). Citing, unusually, G. W. F. Hegel on woman as the necessarily constitutive "internal enemy" of the State, Lootens elaborates a version of an argument that goes back at least to Mary Poovey's Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1988): that the so-called spheres were never really separate, but rather tightly imbricated because the private space of innocence and family feeling served as an essential and enabling prop to the political (and economic) projects of the state, even as the state also sacrificed, wounded, and disrupted that familial home (83). What's fresh and often startling in this book, however, is its focus on slavery as both an historical source of (white) women's influence and an occluded, but continuing and often disturbing presence in their poems.

Lootens focuses on work that is often dismissed as merely sentimental and popular, written or read under the aegis of the partly mythical figure of a Victorian Poetess who wrote with the heart in the name of "Womanhood" (1). As Lootens notes, Poetess was a denomination occasionally claimed, but more often imposed, either by contemporary critics or, as she shows in an interesting chapter (chapter 2), by twentieth-century ones, including male poet-critics and second-wave feminists suspicious of sentimental poetry by women. The poets on whom she focuses—Felicia Hemans, Dinah Mulock Craik, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Frances E. W. Harper—were engaged in what she calls "Poetess performance" (4). They performed the role of that semi-mythical figure by invoking the moral authority of Womanhood in poems that activated feelings rooted in family and home to address contemporary political events, including war and slavery. Lootens finds these poems, in the case of Hemans and Craik, haunted by a violence she reads as a kind of repressed, indistinct cultural awareness of slavery as a continuing problem. Her own slow reading is devoted to reliteralizing the gothic imagery of fire, blood, chains, and bodies with which this sentimental poetry abounds, even when it is ostensibly viewing national events through the lens of family feeling. Lootens reads Barrett Browning and Harper's poems, on the other hand, as much more knowing deployments of both sentiment and violent imagery in the name of as-yet incomplete projects of national and racial liberation. Poems by these two poets are the book's, and its author's, touchstones—Barrett Browning's, I suspect, generating the project, while Harper's serve as its climax and conclusion.

Like some other recent studies by scholars associated with the Historical Poetics group, The Political Poetess rests on just a handful of actual poems: Hemans's "Casabianca" (1826); three poems by Craik on the Crimean War; Barrett Browning's "A Curse for a Nation" (1856); and two poems by Harper (the African-American poet, journalist, and anti-slavery speaker) on the Spanish-American War and the 1899 peace conference called by Nicholas II of Russia. Here the readings, which are both slow and literalizing, proceed less by formal analysis than by extensive, interpretive paraphrasing intended to make us physically aware of unsuspected realities hidden under what might seem to be merely figures of speech. The book's real subject is a history of reading, or rather, the historical contexts in which these poems were written and read (or...