Reinventing Romantic Poetry: Russian Women Poets of the Mid-Nineteenth Century

3. Gender and Genre

3 Gender and Genre The previous two chapters outlined the social conditions that the poets we have been considering faced as women, as well as their varying responses to male-defined literary conventions. In this chapter I would like to consider their distinctive use of genre and themes, which, as we shall see, are interrelated. Recently some scholars have dismissed genre as arbitrary, if not meaningless: “Genre is any group of works selected on the basis of some shared feature” (Reichert, “More Than Kin,” 57). Most, however, still consider it an essential literary concept: “There can be no meaning without genre” (E. O. Hirsch quoted in Gerhart, Genre Choices, Gender Questions , 16); “genres underlie, motivate and organize all literary discourse” (Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, 5). Because literary genre is such an ambiguous and multifaceted concept—with a history extending back at least to Aristotle’s Poetics—in any such discussion it is essential to define one’s terms and approach.1 For our purposes I find most useful Alastair Fowler’s functional description of genre as “a communication system for the use of writers in writing and readers and critics in reading and interpreting” (Kinds of Literature, 256). So, for example, if we know we are watching farce, we might laugh at something that we would not laugh at in a tragedy. Fowler sensibly points out that genres change, combine, and divide over time. The epic, for example, encompasses works as diverse as the Iliad and Paradise Lost. Rather, Fowler prefers to discuss “kinds” of literature —genres of a specific period, such as the romance, picaresque novel, revenge play, ode, or dystopia—further subdividing “kinds” into “subgenres ” on the basis of their subject matter or motif. For example, within the eighteenth-century ode there are birthday odes and marriage odes; 57 within the twentieth-century novel, the factory novel, school novel, war novel, crime novel, and so on. For Fowler, then, genre and theme are interrelated .2 Fowler’s concept of genre as a communication system has been extended in recent scholarship that analyzes the ideology implicit in various genres, along with its effect on writers and readers.3 Some scholars claim that genres as “literary institutions” (Fredric Jameson quoted in Cranny-Francis, Feminist Fiction, 18) “encode [ideological discourses]” (Cranny-Francis, 18), that is, inscribe power relationships, “fram[ing] readers as well as texts”—indeed, that “genres are built on premises about gender” (Gerhart, Genre Choices, Gender Questions, 189–90) and about class and race. One thinks, for example, of the eighteenth-century neoclassical comedies such as Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme or Mozart’s The Magic Flute, in which the lower-class “comic” lovers act as foils for the upper-class “serious” lovers. Or of the “comic” African American maid, who appeared in so many American film comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, or of the inevitably terrorized or murdered young white woman in slasher films. But beyond communicating ideology, genres, according to literary critic and author Joanna Russ, are actually structured by assumptions about gender (“gender norms”), which can be seen more clearly when they are reversed. She asks us to imagine, for example, a story about two strong women battling for supremacy in the early West, or a young woman finding her womanhood by killing a bear, or a stupid but seductive heterosexual young man who represents “the essence of sex, the ‘soul’ of our corrupt culture, a dramatization of the split between the degrading necessities of the flesh and the transcendence of world-cleaving Will” (“What Can a Heroine Do?” 7). Russ concludes that a writer who does not accept the gender norms of a genre either will be reduced to silence or forced to reinvent the genre. But, she continues, writers who reinvent male-centered genres generally do not receive praise for their originality; rather, critics find such work “formless” and “inexperienced ” in comparison to the “traditional” male-centered literary conventions and myths that have been “distilled, dramatized, stylized, and above all clarified” through centuries of use (11).4 In this critical context I propose, first, to define the most important Russian poetic genres of the 1820s to 1850s, along with their gender norms; next, to consider the different ways men and women poets used these genres; and finally, to examine the implications of such differences 58 Gender and Genre for the critical reception of women poets.5 What were...