Women Beware Women

...Writers & Writing WOMEN BEWARE WOMEN BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Women have an ancient and distinguished history as poets, traditionally dating back to Sappho in the 7th century b c The few of the Greek poet's amorous lyrics that have been preserved are sufficiently overpowering in emotional intensity and mastery of form to make her more venerated than any of her contemporaries except Homer Centuries later, legend describes one of the Irish ollaves (whose command of a complex discipline of symbolism and learning made them quasireligious functionaries) training his daughter, Liadan, to hold her own with the best of the men Marie de France, a trouvere to the court of England's Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitame, has left to posterity a collection of Arthurian lays and fables that continue to be as charming to the general reader as they are valuable to scholars None of these women, or the many others like them, wrote a brand of poetry unique to their sex They were simply poets Emily Stipes Watts, author of The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (Texas, 218 pp , $13 95), an historical examination of feminine themes and imagery, would have us believe otherwise She has created an entity of "woman's poetry," juxtaposing it with a corresponding American male genreverse informed by the "nationalistic Adamic myth with its cosmic (mystical) implications and the admitted egocentrism of the male hero " (Since Watts doesn't elaborate much beyond this, it may make little sense without you have read a book by the name of The American Adam Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century by R W B Lewis, but if you haVe, you may still wonder just what she has in mind ) It seems "Emersonian transcendentalism" is engaged in a private war against technological progress that would make life easiei for women and allow them to create more than babies Where male poets have retreated into obscurantism of language and thought, "women's poetry has been both popular' and vital because, from the verv first, the American woman poet has been communicative Her poetry has not been obscure, obviously or arrogantly erudite, or even written in a language which people must 'learn ' The conflicts are expressed, not resolved, the problems are universal, not simply American " Watts begins her survey with our country's first reputable poet Anne Bradstreet, who was hailed by her optimistic publisher as "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America " The reality of Bradstreet's verse falls considerably short of the billing, but she suits Watts' purposes perfectly The poet naively acknowledges herself "obnoxious to each carping tongue/Who says my hand a needle better fits," and in this concern with her status as a woman, in her use of domestic imagery and preoccupation with the mother/child relationship, she is, for Watts, prophetic of her feminine descendants The author goes on, in the body of the book, to examine the "feminine poetry" of the 19th-century women's magazines The samples she offers are certainly not "arrogantly erudite " In fact they are often, in Watt's own phrasing, "positively antuntellectual," with a "bias against reason and logic " Watts shows a strong preference for light verse, particularly examples that flirt with trend\ issues of masculine domination, or the nature ot temale sexual desire This is not incomprehensible The polished cleverness of a writer like Frances Osgood (best known for her friendship with Poe) is somewhat less objectionable to 20th-century tastes than the preachy sentiments ot Elizabeth Oakes Smith (author ot "The Sinless Child") ot Emma Lazarus (who composed the lines inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty), if only because we are less allergic to flippancy than to pietism, moralizing and bathos And many versifiers have the capacity to amuse, though they lack the power to move us more strongly The contemporary polemicists of what may be termed the woman's poetry movement have an ideal of what poetry should be, and it usually looks pretty much like a composite of the work of Ms Plath and Ms Sexton, with perhaps a dash of Adnenne Rich's anger for spice Watts, an enthusiastic devotee of the school, hails any expression of remotely feminist opinions from an earlier era as the seeds for a glonous harvest Ella Wheeler Wilcox, for instance, a turn-of-the-century Rod McKuen, described sex as "all the tiger in my blood Once having tasted human flesh, ah' then/Woe, woe unto the whole rash world of men " Watts quotes her approvingly, arguing, "In her own way, she foreshadows the verse of Edna St Vincent Millay and, later, Sylvia Plath"a critical judgment that might make some of Plath's admirers wince, but that strikes me as surprisingly apt Coming to our own century, one might suppose that Watts would stop hunting for unappreciated genius among the sob-sisters and pay tribute to some of the number of fine women poets who flourished before 1945 But no Marianne Moore is outH D is in Moore is "unlike those women poets such as Millay" because she does not "threaten" men (who therefore admire her verse) The best Watts can say for her is that she does not "sacrifice" herself to male "cosmic' qualities " Otherwise, the "narrow realism'" of her "maidenly verse" will "ultimately be unacceptable " Obviously an exquisitely delicate, feminine tone that beguiles the hearer into accepting the shrewdness of the poet's vision is less to be valued by femimsts than man-eating tigers in the blood, or Lady Lazaruses who rise from suicide to "eat men like air " Fools rush in where angels fear to tread In her war against the male literary establishment, Watts particularly singles out that most benign of antagonists, Emerson, for roughest treatment Excerpting his remark, "The people fancy they hate poetry," she tells us he means "the people hated his kind of poetry," not the popular productions women wrote for hymnals and magazines of "polite literature " His "arrogant exclusiveness," she continues, "thus invokes a judgment against both middle-class readers as well as women poets " Emerson's own thoughts are as follows "The schools of poets, and philosophers, are not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the populace with theirs See the power of national emblems Some stars on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest, or the most conventional exterior The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics " (Italics mine P P ) Far from being exclusive, our great democrat of the American Dream is "cosmically" generous enough to include the symbolic hoopla of every political rally and Independence Day parade into his definition of poetry He does this in order to more largely identify with a populace that rejects the effusions of "polite literature," and is insufficiently literate to "meditate aloud in verse " Because Watts is so intellectually muddled, it might be possible to argue that her faulty reasoning is not attributable to feminism Consider, then, a statement made by Adnenne Rich, a more provocative and articulate spokesperson "To be a female human being trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination " We know well enough that the demands of the imagination take some kind of toll from all writers But Rich, like Watts, goes wrong in believing literature to be the microcosm of a patriarchal society, where Man dominates as Master over his victim Woman (an image related to "Daddy," Plath's poem depicting father/lover as "panzer-man," and woman/poet as Jew) Whatever this perspective may lead to in personal relations, for the reading of poetry it leads to inevitable and blatant reduction Rich's argument that women cannot find acceptable models for themselves in the female creations of male poets is as perversely silly as Watts' understanding of Emerson Surely women can recognize that Dante's Beatrice, or Poe's Lenore, or Yeats' Pre-Raphaelite conception of Maud Gonne (the last two examples are used by Rich) are not, despite their living prototypes, meant to be real women They are a part of the poet's self, what Wallace Stevens termed "the Interior Paramour" ("paramour" being, by the way, a word applicable to either sex) The muse that inspired Emily Dickinson's "New Englandly" vision of self-reliance was male, and Rich sees the Amherst poet as "masculine in single-mindedness " Watts, by contrast, believes that she is truly a woman's poet Both, however, reduce her for the sake of argument Emily Dickinson's responses are very feminine God deprives her of pleasures like an angry Calvimst father, Death comes as her suitor in a carriage (bringing "Immortality" as a chaperon), snakes make her feel "zero at the bone " Still, to hear the complete strength of her voice, we must transcend gender and feel fully what she feels Like a true transcendentalist, she has been born again through her "Election" as a poet into a realm of the imagination where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage And when the dew chills through her gossamer gown in the face of eternity, our flesh quivers at that cold, too The Poetry of American Women, masquerading as literary criticism, is really a piece of propaganda whose arguments degrade not "the cosmic Adamic myth," but poetry itself Men, to whom this feminist thesis offers nothing, are probably immune from its distortions, women as poets and readers should beware...