"Bird, Jewel, or Flower?": On the Tokenization of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry

IF 0.2 2区 文学 0 LITERATURE
ELH Pub Date : 2023-09-01 DOI:10.1353/elh.2023.a907208
Kylan Rice
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Given its \"reflexive\" nature, where the contents of each volume were designed to provide \"instructions\" that \"model[ed]\" to recipients how they should consume it, many of the individual poems included in literary annuals and gift-books show women performing their commitment to men by preserving tokens of love.4 It was not uncommon for these poems to be written by female poets. For instance, appearing in a gift-book called The Moss-Rose, A Parting Token (1840), the American poet Lucy Hooper's \"The Turquoise Ring\" is a narrative poem that describes a woman who is \"made to preserve\" a turquoise ring given to her by a lover before separating from each other for an extended period of time.5 In Hooper's poem, the woman's \"fervent … belief\" in the \"power\" of the ring as a memento that \"link[s] the future to all the past\" is \"met with its appropriate reward\"—her lover's continued faithfulness and eventual return, a conclusion suggesting that a man's fidelity is contingent on the woman who cherishes his gifts.6 For readers of annuals, this insight also applied to \"tokens\" like The Moss-Rose [End Page 767] which featured poems by female writers like Hooper, who modeled the gendered dynamics of gift exchange that drove the circulation of literary annuals, portraying women as repositories of romantic memory. However, even as they adhered to the conventions of a literary gift economy, writing poems that show women performing requisite memory-work, some female poets also challenged this charge, recognizing that the occupation of remembering made it easier to be forgotten. For instance, in \"Medallion Wafers\" (1823), a series of ekphrastic poems representing images impressed in paste by an intaglio seal, the English poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. 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引用次数: 0

Abstract

"Bird, Jewel, or Flower?"On the Tokenization of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry Kylan Rice During the first half of the nineteenth century, women's poetry grew in popularity and gained unprecedented visibility as it circulated on both sides of the Atlantic in literary annuals and gift-books.1 Collecting prose and poetry by both male and female writers, these expensively produced volumes were marketed as gifts for women that could be presented as souvenirs or tokens of love.2 Frequently used by men as "courtship objects" or "physical mementos of desire or intimacy," literary annuals bore titles like Forget Me Not, Token of Remembrance, Souvenir, Keepsake, Leaflets of Memory, Memorial, or Remember Me, often including poems and frame texts that petitioned the recipient to remember and permanently cherish the romantic affections of the giver.3 In this way, they helped to codify a gendered expectation that obliged nineteenth-century women to perform memory-work while tacitly granting men the freedom to forget. Given its "reflexive" nature, where the contents of each volume were designed to provide "instructions" that "model[ed]" to recipients how they should consume it, many of the individual poems included in literary annuals and gift-books show women performing their commitment to men by preserving tokens of love.4 It was not uncommon for these poems to be written by female poets. For instance, appearing in a gift-book called The Moss-Rose, A Parting Token (1840), the American poet Lucy Hooper's "The Turquoise Ring" is a narrative poem that describes a woman who is "made to preserve" a turquoise ring given to her by a lover before separating from each other for an extended period of time.5 In Hooper's poem, the woman's "fervent … belief" in the "power" of the ring as a memento that "link[s] the future to all the past" is "met with its appropriate reward"—her lover's continued faithfulness and eventual return, a conclusion suggesting that a man's fidelity is contingent on the woman who cherishes his gifts.6 For readers of annuals, this insight also applied to "tokens" like The Moss-Rose [End Page 767] which featured poems by female writers like Hooper, who modeled the gendered dynamics of gift exchange that drove the circulation of literary annuals, portraying women as repositories of romantic memory. However, even as they adhered to the conventions of a literary gift economy, writing poems that show women performing requisite memory-work, some female poets also challenged this charge, recognizing that the occupation of remembering made it easier to be forgotten. For instance, in "Medallion Wafers" (1823), a series of ekphrastic poems representing images impressed in paste by an intaglio seal, the English poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) critiques what she identifies as "woman's weary lot," which is "to love" and then, in the aftermath of love, to "be forgot."7 If, as Landon complains, "love, love is all a woman's fame," then failing to love or falling out of love is as good as falling into public oblivion, at least in the context of a literary marketplace that sanctioned the circulation of women's poetry under the guise of intimate gift exchange.8 Printed in The Literary Gazette in the same year that the first English annual was published, and read by critics as a commentary on the same "bourgeois demand for inexpensive mass-produced art objects" that contributed to the rapid diffusion of annuals and gift-books throughout early nineteenth-century popular culture, Landon's "Wafers" foreshadow Hooper's poem seventeen years later, showing how women were expected to remember, to "prize the slightest thing / Touched, looked, or breathed upon" by a lover, using their own poems to perform or model this cherishing in an attempt to avoid being forgotten by lovers and readers alike.9 Of course, as Landon presciently observes, forgetting was bound to happen anyway, even as a direct consequence of honoring the terms of the "forget-me-not": doomed to remember, women are damned to the past, while the rest of the world forgets and moves on. And indeed it did forget, if current scholarship is any indication, guided as...
“鸟,宝石,还是花?”论19世纪女性诗歌的符号化
“鸟,宝石,还是花?”19世纪上半叶,女性诗歌越来越受欢迎,在大西洋两岸的文学年鉴和礼品册上流传,获得了前所未有的知名度收集了男性和女性作家的散文和诗歌,这些制作昂贵的书籍作为礼物出售给女性,可以作为纪念品或爱情的象征经常被男人用作“求爱对象”或“欲望或亲密的实物纪念品”,文学年鉴有诸如“勿忘我”、“纪念纪念品”、“纪念品”、“记忆传单”、“纪念”或“记住我”之类的标题,通常包括诗歌和框架文本,请求接受者记住并永远珍惜送礼者的浪漫感情通过这种方式,他们帮助编纂了一种性别期望,这种期望迫使19世纪的女性进行记忆工作,同时默认地给予男性遗忘的自由。鉴于诗歌的“反射性”,即每一卷的内容都旨在为接受者提供“指导”,为他们应该如何消费提供“模型”,文学年鉴和礼品书中包含的许多诗歌都表明,女性通过保存爱的象征来履行对男性的承诺这些诗是由女诗人写的,这并不罕见。例如,美国诗人露西·胡珀(Lucy Hooper)的《绿松石戒指》(The Turquoise Ring)是一首叙事诗,出现在一本名为《莫斯-玫瑰,一种离别的象征》(1840)的礼品册中,它描述了一个女人在与情人长时间分离之前,“被迫保存”情人送给她的绿松石戒指在Hooper的诗中,女人对戒指作为“连接未来和过去”的纪念品的“力量”的“狂热信仰”“得到了适当的回报”——她的爱人持续的忠诚和最终的回归,这一结论表明男人的忠诚取决于珍惜他的礼物的女人对于年刊的读者来说,这种见解也适用于“象征”,比如《青苔玫瑰》(The Moss-Rose),它以像胡珀这样的女性作家的诗歌为特色,她模仿了推动文学年刊流通的礼物交换的性别动态,将女性描绘成浪漫记忆的仓库。然而,即使她们遵守文学礼物经济的惯例,写诗展示女性进行必要的记忆工作,一些女性诗人也挑战了这一指控,认识到记忆的职业使人们更容易被遗忘。例如,在1823年出版的《大奖章》(Medallion Wafers)中,英国诗人利蒂夏·伊丽莎白·兰登(Letitia Elizabeth Landon, l.e.l.)用一组生动的诗歌,描绘了用浮雕印印成的形象,她在诗中批评了她所认为的“女人疲惫的命运”,即“去爱”,然后在爱之后“被遗忘”。如果像兰登抱怨的那样,“爱,爱都是女人的名声”,那么,不爱或失去爱就和被公众遗忘一样好,至少在一个文学市场的背景下,这个市场允许以亲密的礼物交换为幌子传播女性诗歌兰登的《华夫片》在第一本英文年刊出版的同一年刊登在《文学公报》上,评论家们认为这是对同样的“资产阶级对廉价批量生产的艺术品的需求”的评论,这种需求促成了19世纪早期流行文化中年刊和礼品书的迅速传播。兰登的《华夫片》预示了17年后胡珀的诗,表明女性如何被期望记住,“珍惜最轻微的东西/触摸,观看,他们用自己的诗来表现或模仿这种珍惜,试图避免被爱人和读者遗忘当然,正如兰登有先见之明地观察到的那样,遗忘无论如何都是注定要发生的,即使是作为尊重“勿忘我”条款的直接后果:注定要记住,女人被过去所诅咒,而世界上的其他人则忘记并继续前进。事实上,它确实忘记了,如果当前的学术研究有任何迹象的话,被引导为……
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ELH
ELH LITERATURE-
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