Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry

Conclusion: Poetry Matters

Conclusion Poetry Matters My aim in The Gendered Lyric has been to demonstrate that gender is not only implicated in, but central to the transformations ofpoetry. Nineteenth-century France witnessed an important period of poetic renewal, a moment that crystallized the synonymy of "lyric" and "poem," a time when traditional forms were c·ontinually under attack. When the century began, conventional and restrictive gender ideology dominated the lyric genre, which by· the century's end had gained the potential for multivalent subjectivity. As with any time of change or any genre in flux, the vagaries of gender signification cannot be expected to have fixed values. It was deployed by traditional critics and poets to preserve poetry as a masculine domain, naIvely evoked by some, and playfully explored by others aiming to unhinge confining binarisms in order to redefine the lyric. By foregrounding rather than erasing gender in the discussion ofmale-dominated movements , my study highlights the complexity ofthis body ofpoetry and permits the recuperation of women poets long forgotten by literary critics. A feminist retelling of the history of nineteenth-century French poetry implies not only the re-evaluation ofmovements, poets, and poetic practice, but also the interrogation of gender studies itself, which has, paradoxically, neglected an area of inquiry that illuminates so many questions fundamental to the discipline. I hope to have convinced my readers not only that gender matters to modern French poetry, but also that poetry matters to gender studies. I began by pointing to work by feminist critics on Englishlanguage poetry and would like to evoke them again as I close, 247 Conclusion for I believe that French Studies has much to learn from them. They show us that poetic issues, such as the history of movements , lyric subjectivity, poetic conventions, rhetorical language, and experimental poetics, are feminist issues. They suggest to us as well that central concerns of Women's Studies and Gender Studies (including representation, female literary traditions, canon formation, genre theory, gendered textual practice, cultural studies, sexuality studies) need not be confined to the narrative sphere; that in fact the inclusion ofpoetry in such disciplines complicates our understanding of these very topics. Ironically, the influx of French feminist theories of female subjectivity has, as Lynn Keller and Christianne Miller show, become "central to many Anglo-American discussions of women's poetry" (6) since the early 1980s, giving such discussions a more theoretical bent and moving them away from earlier tendencies toward thematic and biographical analysis. I would hope that, in tum, Anglo-American discussions ofwomen's poetry inspire more feminists to re-evaluate the French poetic tradition. As specialists of English-language poetry such as Margaret Homans and Jan Montefiore have shown, female-authored poetry is by no means limited to an intimist tradition and yields fascinating results when subjected to close reading. I have aimed to demonstrate that this holds true in the French context as well. Until now critics of French poetry have considered women's poetry as a translation of female experience, while continuing to read men's poetry as opaque language. We,need not associate female poetic production with Romanticism and transparency, and therefore deem it unworthy of rigorous study. We must address the problem of difficulty and oppose assumptions that associate "high" literary qualities (including but not limited to erudition, opacity, density, and abstraction) with a masculine poetics. My goal in these pages has been to reconcile an uncritical love of poetic language with a rigorous analysis of its pretensions , my tendency to give priority to poetic voices and to listen for their differences. And yet one message I have done my best to ignore is Desbordes-Valmore's and so many other women poets' plea to remain "dans l'ombre et sans me nommer." Although both poets and critics have used fluidity so forcefully as a metaphor for change (in the guise of both femininity and 248 Conclusion the acceptance of alterity-or rather the repudiation of limits and boundaries), I end with a caveat about what I think of as the Awakening syndrome. By this I mean the tradition in nineteenth -century women's literature to end by drowning (which is self-abnegation). Kate Chopin did it, as did Colet with her "femme du peuple": "Elle fendit la foule, et, courant au rivage, / S'elanc;a dans Ie fleuve" (Stanton 144). And even the very masculine Ackermann: "A deux mains j'ai saisi ce...