Bennett’s Archive I: Lydia Sigourney

Nineteenth-century American women’s poetry has recently come of age. With the arrival of new anthologies and critical volumes, critics have built on Paula Bennett’s pioneering archival work.¹ In fact, her landmark Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology (1998) both predates the newly-reconstructed standard American literature anthologies and underscores the aesthetic achievement of many once popular writers, among them a key nineteenth-century woman poet: Lydia Sigourney. Responding to the views of early critics, such as Fred Lewis Pattee in The Feminine Fifties (1940), who disparaged women writers as hack sentimentalists, Bennett’s scholarship also establishes a new way of reading their poetry that emphasizes their legacy within a broad cultural framework. This essay will explore the many ways that Bennett’s anthology and her monograph Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (2003) advanced the critical conversation. Based on her extensive archival research, Bennett’s essays on Sigourney’s poetic achievement and generic experimentation have inaugurated a full reassessment of her influence.

Countering an earlier essay by Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson, Bennett’s 2007 article, “Was Sigourney a Poetess? The Aesthetics of Victorian Plenitude in Lydia Sigourney’s Poetry,” takes issue with the newly recovered term Poetess and asks whether it should be applied so widely to American women’s poetry.² Prins and Jackson’s “Lyrical Studies” responded to various projects recuperating and interpreting transatlantic Victorian women writers, Bennett’s among them.³ They claim that the Poetess occupied a role constructed around well-understood aesthetic conventions. By resurrecting the term, Prins and Jackson seek to dislodge the feminist orthodoxy that the lyrical self embodied in the speaking subject or “I” might be read wholly as the poet’s personal self. Rather, they question the degree to which female authors might be able to identify with the emotion traditionally expressed by speakers within the lyric and argue that the Poetess instead comprises “not a speaker, not an ‘I,’ not a consciousness, not a subjectivity, not a voice, not a persona, not a self.” Unlike Bennett, Prins and Jackson define the theory of women’s writing as “lyrical,” rather than focusing on the “lyric” genre, in order to question the limits to which the Poetess must subscribe but which also doom her to obscurity.⁴ They claim that British women poets, such as Christina Rossetti, L. E. L., Caroline Norton, George Eliot, Michael Field, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning invoke Sappho, both as harbinger of a female literary tradition rooted in a classical past and as a figure of disappointed love and spendthrift emotion. In doing so, British women poets initiated a Poetess tradition of what Bennett terms “succinctly, self-enclosed poems aestheticizing woman’s pain” that proved both highly popular among readers and effective at reducing the poets themselves to empty ciphers.⁵

In contrast, Bennett claims that American female poets not only resisted the term Poetess, but that they wrote other types of socially relevant poems.⁶ In America, editors and publishers, rather than aesthetes and literary historians, shaped publication history by responding to the literary market, thus creating a more competitive environment for poetry than existed in Britain. Perhaps women in America wrote Poetess poetry, Bennett insists, but so did American men, and their poetic production far exceeded this one type.⁷ Indeed, while in Britain female poets referred to themselves more often as poetesses, in America, female poets eschewed this term—as they largely also eschewed the Sappho figure—in favor of viewing themselves as working professionals without pretensions to literary aestheticism—as Sigourney describes herself, “a schoolmistress and a literary woman.”⁸ Unlike in Britain, where women poets responded to aesthetic views, in America the reigning model emphasized literary production and the marketplace forces that made poets, among them Sigourney, household names.⁹ Given Sigourney’s widespread notoriety and public renown, for instance, the publisher of Godey’s Lady’s Book paid the poet $500 per year simply to list her name on the masthead, capitalizing on her reputation.¹⁰ And if male editors and critics in...