From your reading
of the Wu Anthology would you have said that the men tended
to write differently from the women?
The period between 1780 and 1830 is generally seen in literary
terms as the Romantic period. Apart from Shakespeare, the
poets contained within this period are the most famous and
easy recognisable to even the non-reader of poetry. They were
poets that defined English Literature, men like Coleridge
and Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. Together they created a
world of imagination in nature that is now classified as a
Romantic perspective. The idea was to look within oneself
and see oneself projected onto nature 'I wandered lonely,
as a cloud'- indeed. The power of language used and ideas
discovered is undeniable in these male poets and it is very
important to ask why this happened, if we are to understand
the writing of a whole other group, that is, the female Romantics.
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In this period, women wrote novels. They were mostly romances
and were read avidly through circulating libraries throughout
the country. People were becoming more literate. English was
a rich country. These novels were not considered to be good
but silly, sometimes dangerous if one were to believe in the
exploits of the heroine, the damsel in distress. Nevertheless,
in these female-written novels, the bestseller was born and
everyone was addicted to reading.
Against this backdrop, there emerged the more serious and
literary women writers. Largely unknown until the late twentieth
century, they also wrote poetry, which is traditionally seen
as the male domain. Why did they start writing? And how do
they compare? Can writing be classified as gendered?
It is important to look at the reasons for why one might
write and it is easy to see why men, who have more time and
more education, would attempt to write their 'self'. But this
idea of writing the self must be seen anew, as it was precisely
in this period that the technique emerged, and it did because
of the social and political changes that were happening at
the time.
The French Revolution changed the way people thought about
themselves and their country. For the first time in English
history, people began to think of society as a living organism,
politically able to change.
The idea of the country became visualised and in literary
terms the upshot was the visualisation of the self in the
country, personification and objectification. Male poets of
this time such as Shelley and Keats did not agree with the
political changes happening but they did use these ideas as
fruit for their poetry.
As a cohesive idea of England became visualised in political
terms, a simultaneous idea of society which critiqued that
political ideal emerged from the Romantic poets, who were
concerned for some of the changes happening at the time.On
first glance, however, at a poem such as the famous 'I Wandered
Lonely As a Cloud',
it is the Romantic idea of the sublimity of nature that can
be seen. In the first stanza the poet is personified as a
cloud while the daffodils themselves are personified as people
'a crowd,/ a host'. They are 'fluttering and dancing' next
to 'the lake, beneath the trees.' The world is reversed in
Wordsworth's vision; the effect of that is a world that is
harmonised, that the human world and natural one are the same.
In the second stanza the impression becomes more fully explained
as one that is eternal and all-encompassing,
'Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way' (7-8)
This time he sees ten thousand, a population of daffodils,
a community, you might say. But Wordsworth does not choose
to express himself in these terms. The aim of this poem is
not solely to describe humanity to nature but to investigate
himself as a poet and as a human within nature.
In the third stanza the poet contemplates what the vision
might mean but he cannot ascribe any idea except one that
is a feeling. Ultimately, this is what the vision provides
to this poet,
'They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;' (15-16)
The pleasure he gains is spiritual and self-fulfilling. There
is no social responsibility to be gained or statement to be
made on the state of the English nation, although we know
these were concerns Wordsworth had. Yet, it is interesting
to note that, although he did not write a poem with these
intentions, his sister Dorothy Wordsworth did write of the
daffodils in these terms,
'We saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied
that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little
colony had sprung up- But as we went along there were more
and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we
saw that a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth
of a turnpike road…the simplicity and unity and life
of that one busy highway. ' (85)
Dorothy Wordsworth uses language that suggests a concern and
a need to relate to the real world. She uses 'colony', 'turnpike
road' and 'busy highway', all suggesting that more than simple
appreciation of nature are at play in her mind. She is relating
nature to the human world (its economics, the state of England
and perhaps its political ideas) which is a perspective that
comes from being distanced, rather than being spiritual involved,
or immersed in nature, as her brother was.
What is also interesting to note is that Wordsworth did not
see the daffodils first hand and immediately composed a poem
as he watched, as we romantically believe him to have done.
Instead, he read this entry, then composed the 'inward-looking'
reverie.
Another aspect to female writing, which develops the domesticity
and economic awareness that Wordsworth brings to her poetry,
can be seen in Hannah More's poetry. It is empathy for others
who are not fortunate and as women it is understandable to
see why they would find it more natural to write in this style.
This feeling of empathy does not have time to dwell on the
more ephemeral aspects of life, and this is what makes the
female Romantics interesting and important. Their major contribution
is this difference in perspective, this situating of life
in reality rather than illusion or myth.
In More's poem 'The Slave Trade', it is evident that the poet
is promoting social awareness through poetry in a technique
that educated upper class and upper middle class women would
have seen fit in this period, one that is called 'educated
hearts and minds'. This educated loving-kindness, in this
poem, finds concern for African children caught in the midst
of the slave trade. She uses a well-known play as a frame
for her poem to develop the empathy she has for the children
that is not seen in the original writing.
More asks of the reader whether colour should affect how we
treat each other, revealing an early and explicit liberal
attitude to racial divides.
'Does matter govern spirit? Or is mind
Degraded by the form to which 'tis joined?
No; they have heads to think, and hearts to feel,
And souls to act, with firm, though erring zeal;' (25-28)
In short, they are the same as her, though 'erring' in their
pagan beliefs. The hearts and minds concern is plain to see.
Her conversational tone differs from the mythical frame of
reference, the play would have taken, perhaps which mythologises
African people. All she can see is the human tragedy of the
situation.
'I see, by more than Fancy's mirror shewn,
The burning village, and the blazing town:
See the dire victim torn from social life,
The shrieking babe, the agonising wife!' (57-60)
By putting the stuff of newspaper reporting into a poem as
well as discounting the power of the male playwright as mythmaking
and therefore ineffectual for a subject that is so serious,
More achieves a new poetic voice that is socially important.
It is perhaps because of women's day to day lives which were
full of drudgery and pain, while also knowing the experience
of the mess of sickness and birth-giving, that gave the Romantic
female writers this new voice.
Indeed the concern for reality does not seem to be a concern
in male poetry of this period whatsoever at times. In Coleridge's
'Kubla Khan' which seems to define poetry of this period as
inward-looking being subtitled 'Or a vision in a dream. A
Fragment' Coleridge envisions a world that is mythical and
fantastic,
'A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!'
The voice of the poem throughout is amazed and exclamatory;
the landscapes are contradictory and subject to a constant
state of tumult and change. The humans within the poem are
unusual and certainly not real,
'..woman wailing for her demon lover!' (28)
There is a woman singing with a harp, a stereotypical vision
of mythical femininity, and a mythical male figure who is
dangerous,
'His flashing eyes, his floating hair!' (33)
This was a poem probably composed in a drug-induced haze,
as it was known that Coleridge was addicted to opium. As one
of Coleridge's most famous poems it succeeds in defining that
male Romantic achievement, the idea of the self and being
in a landscape. The mix of emotions that the character experiences
and the motifs like the woman have been defined by Kathleen
M. Wheeler as
a definitive example of Coleridge's genius for reflection
and awareness of the importance of the role of the author.
The author is there to point out the importance of imagination;
he encourages, in his Preface to the poem, to accept alternate
realities- he does this through the excessive detail of the
reality of the conception of the poem which contrasts to the
surreal detail of the poem. Both could be seen as unbelievable
but it is what you choose to believe as a reader that creates
the world of the imagination. This sense of creating the inner
imaginative world is an importance characteristic of male
writing in this period.
The contrasts that have been seen here so far between male
and female Romantic writers reveals different concerns. The
male writers were involved in the reflection of the self within
the mind while the female writers tended to relate their writing
to other people, to the social concerns of the world around
them. A clue to why this was happening can be seen, perhaps,
in the writing of who could be said to be the first feminist
of the day, Mary Wollstonecraft.
In her polemical 'Vindication of The Rights of Woman' uses the rational ideas of revolution to attempt to revolutionise
her own sex in England. In her essays, she clearly deplores
the useless upper class woman and pushes the importance of
being educated for the purpose of motherhood upon her peers.
Her applauding of 'educated' motherhood, domesticity and honest
femininity, that would help all women from the aristocratic
to the prostitute, was widely read. She herself was widely
publicised and criticised as 'unnatural'. But she was not
alone in her ideals. Female poets of this period demonstrate
a cultivation of femininity in domesticity that will soon
become a cult. Education was what women were pushing for,
ultimately. This is why, in the poetry, there can be seen
a concern for the real day to day lives of women, the drudgery
and the hardship, which is wholly different from the sometime
high-falutin language of a male Romantic.
Additionally, perhaps the exclusion of women from traditional
education which included ancient languages and knowledge of
the great works of literature led to this new type of writing.
Nancy Armstrong writes of the phenomenon of female writing,
'It is not an accident that the novel seems to have had its
roots among the lower middle classes, and among women, most
of whom had only a limited knowledge of the classics, since
its insistence on the vernacular, the immediate, and a tangible
social reality seems to have placed it at a distance from
much of the period.' (170)
But it could also be argued that women inherently write differently
to men. Their style is seen as circular, with concerns in
domesticity and bodily functions, something that is not present
in the male poets' canon. Reality is not to be written of.
This characteristic style has been seen in the writing of
Dorothy Wordsworth, particularly in her journals, where she
juxtaposes her reveries on scenes of nature with daily work,
meals she cooks, and ongoing medical conditions she has to
endure. This appreciation of life that is happening now as
well as seeing beauty in nature is also seen in the poetry
of Anna Barbauld. She, like Hannah More, disregards the male
literary frame of reference from the outset of her poem 'Washing
Day' ,
'The Muses are turned gossips; they have lost
The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrases,
Language of the gods. Come, then, domestic Muse,' (1-4)
In the first few lines of the poem she rejects what has long
been the set image of the muses and makes them real, turns
them into everyday gossiping women. She also introduces a
conversational and even irreverent tone into the poem, which
is not used at all in male poetry. This is in fact another
importance characteristic of women's style. In their writing
of pregnancy, bringing up children, washing and cleaning,
they include everyday vernacular, which would eventually become
the mainstay of the English novel. It could be seen as a reaction
to male writing, or a need to write differently because of
education or perhaps just from perspective, but the effect
of it is that there are two different types of discourses
emerging from this literary period. On the one hand is a type
of writing that looks within itself and emerges itself within
ideals of beauty and nature; while the other is concerned
for others, and sees the world as it is seen in reality, but
there is beauty in that reality. This must be due to status:
men would have been in a position to critique and philosophise,
but women would not have had the time. In their world, which
was full of sickness and suffering, it was not difficult to
understand and empathise with others. This led to writing
that was social and therefore political in subject. The voice,
which is colloquial, reflects this feeling of equality with
those that were less fortunate.
In traditional aesthetic terms, the men of this period contributed
what has become the highlight of English literature. Their
work is full of feeling and pushes the boundaries of previous
human consciousness. Yet there was no 'coming down' period
for them. It was as if it was left to the women to use that
interest in sensibility, which was current at the time, to
develop a social consciousness in literature that has now
become the characteristic voice of novels.
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