Performing poetesses
Creators: name: Madden, Caolan
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2017

description: This dissertation traces the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century history of what I call “Poetess theatricality”: a highly gendered literary mode that imagines the poem as a space for collective, spectacular theatrical performance. As a corrective to popular and critical depictions of the Poetess’s solitary suffering, and as an expansion of more recent accounts of the Poetess as an “empty” and abstract figure, this dissertation argues that Poetess performance was understood by Victorian audiences to be multiply embodied: a chorus not only of voices but of gesturing, costumed bodies whose performances invoked the material profusions of popular print cultures, the crowded, often messy realities of social life, and the possibilities of social reform. Drawing on recent work in nineteenth-century poetics on the gendered, citational performances we now associate with the figure of the Poetess, as well as on scholarship on the significance of spectacle in the Victorian theater, this project revises existing understandings of the relationship between Victorian poetry and dramatic form: while the most significant poetic innovation of the period, the dramatic monologue, has ensured that Victorian poetry has always been associated with the theater, this study argues for a collective, spectacular theatricality that the genre of dramatic monologue does not accommodate.    The period covered by this dissertation (1823 – 1922) saw the consolidation of the Poetess as a familiar figure in nineteenth-century print culture. As the popular success of seemingly chaste and moral Poetess writers such as Felicia Hemans made print publication more respectable for women poets, the role of Poetess became increasingly distinct from the more dangerously public, sexually compromised roles of “playwright” or “actress.” This dissertation shows, however, that the figure of the actress was never fully detached from the figure of the Poetess; instead, the collective, corporeal, spectacular aspects of theatrical performance reappear, continually reconfigured, as a major feature of Poetess writing throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in the sprawl of feminine bodies, objects, and texts in Hemans’s Records of Woman; the casually citational, shape-shifting figures that circulate in gift books compiled by Letitia Elizabeth Landon (otherwise known as L.E.L.); the elaborately stage-managed crowds of working-class and aristocratic supernumeraries who threaten the heroine’s narrative control in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh; the poet-housewives and sympathetic audience-actors in Augusta Webster’s essays and dramatic monologues; and the characters, readers, and performers who form temporary communities through their recitation of the portable, quotable catchphrases in the work of Charlotte Mew. In directing critical attention to the theatricality of the Poetess, this dissertation works to connect recent work in Victorian poetics with the gendered, embodied experiences, performances, and stuff that have been the object of so much important feminist criticism.