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

In 2002, Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher titled their essay collection using less of a description than a command: No More Separate Spheres! It was good advice for a text focused on rethinking American cultural and gender studies, but as Tricia Lootens points out in her book The Political Poetess, the process of critically extricating ourselves from those overly simplified spheres has been anything but clean. Lootens presents us with the figure of the poetess, an enduring resident of the private sphere even in recent critical imaginings. The poetess, a seemingly sequestered, fragile, domestic creature who turns away from the bright lights of politics, has been a figure with whom few critics have bothered. She has existed at the periphery of critical scholarship, a phenomenon Lootens calls the "Poetess Parallax," which invokes the figure of the poetess only as a contrast to other, more interesting subjects. The poetess is thus dismissed as a creature of a private sphere the critic has seemingly accepted as real. No more separate spheres? Hardly.

The Political Poetess assertively confronts these lingering critical blind spots through a revisionist portrait of the poetess that works across boundaries and assumptions, the most glaring of which is that the poetess must be white. Lootens challenges the critical tendency to separate out the "political" (or "public") woman poet from the poetess, reminding us of contemporaneous white women's patriotic verse, such as Julia Ward Howe's "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the anti-slavery poetry written by black women poets such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. And while the poetess herself seems to have led a life of seclusion, hermetically sealed in the domestic sphere, Lootens points out that in fact this understanding—like the poetess herself—has always been a fiction. A poet like Felicia Dorothea Hemans, in a poem like "Casabianca," for example, challenges the definition of what is political or public. In pointing this out, Lootens liberates the private sphere's attendant literary mode—the sentimental—from its position in the critical shadows. Restoring the centrality of politics to poetry by women, Lootens links that poetry to national identity. Indeed, much of the book is a story of how the poetess's poetry, often taking slavery as its subject, was central to national identity and the "public" sphere.

Most significantly, Lootens exposes how race was and is so intrinsic to the cultural longevity of separate spheres ideology; she argues that the story of the poetess is really the story of the "racially haunted hearts of our own inherited dreams of private innocence" (1). In searching for that racialized heart, Lootens reexamines poems that have been assumed to be about something else. Hemans's "Bride of the Greek Isle" (1825), for example, is ostensibly about a Greek slave. However, reading it in dialogue with contemporaneous periodicals about the Middle Passage reveals a more immediate political tenor, whatever Hemans's intention. The Political Poetess likewise focuses on more politically overt poems by black women poets, like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's verses in Sketches of Southern Life (1872). One poetess is seemingly "private" and apolitical, the other poet not, but both offer valuable insights into the development of national identities and separate spheres.

Moving beyond individual poets, Lootens explores the broader collusion between racial and separate spheres ideology. In a particularly effective illustration of this, she reveals how critics increasingly dismissed "sentimental" poetry by women in the later nineteenth century, at the same moment when anxiety about Britain's imperialist policies threatened the abolitionist narrative so central to Victorian national identity. By trivializing the works of the poetess, who had once been the voice of the nation on anti-slavery subjects, Victorians relegated her to a "private" sphere where she was dismissed and defanged. But, as Lootens points out, the Victorians are not the only ones who have avoided the political legacy of the...