Not Just Filler and Not Just Sentimental: Women's Poetry in American Victorian Periodicals, 1860-1900.

Paula Bennett

[ In Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America (Charlottesville, VA, US: University of Virginia Press, 1995), pp. 202-219: ]

In "Not Just Filler and Not Just Sentimental: Women's Poetry in American Victorian Periodicals, 1860-1900", Christopher Wilson observes that publishing history has generally relied "upon the accounts (and the yardsticks) of newer progressive elites" for its version of "Gilded Age magazines." As a result, he writes, "the magazine revolution of these years is described rather one-dimensionally as the overthrow of a stale and narrow-minded tradition in favor of Progressive politics and literary 'realism."¹ Wilson's remarks were directed toward publishing history’s treatment of emergence of early-twentieth-century naturalistic fiction (Jack London, Upton Sinclair, et al.). But his words apply equally well to the way in which the emergence of early modernist women’s poetry is conventionally depicted. Here, too, we are told that "a stale and narrow-minded tradition" -- usually identified with domestic sentimentalism and, somewhat later in the century with genteel style -- was overthrown by a progressive elite that, writing for small avant-garde magazines, brought to poetry, as Suzanne Clarke put it, "the revolution of the word."

The enormous stylistic achievement of early modernist women poets not be gainsaid, and I have no wish to do so. Nevertheless, the thrust this argument depends on comparisons worked in reverse, and it distorts accordingly. No matter how stultifying the domestic ideology of early-nineteenth-century sentimentalists may seem to us or how limited their poetic range, these women were bold, new voices in their own day. They, no less than their politically active sisters, helped transform the social and moral values constituting their sphere into a discourse of power that justified women’s active participation outside as well as inside the home. And late-nineteenth-century women poets were the direct heirs and perpetuators of this discursive commitment to claiming new ground for women. . . .

The erasure of this poetry from cultural memory has, therefore, been one of the most thoroughly disruptive events in the history of women’s writing in the United States. . . . History as, Cary Nelson observes in his "Not Just Filler and Not Just Sentimental: Women's Poetry in American Victorian Periodicals, 1860-1900", "is never simply given but is always politically, rhetorically, and institutionally constituted."² In literary history as elsewhere, we read the version of those who won. In describing the emergence of strong women’s poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century, literary historians have colluded with the early modernist women whose triumph they record – a triumph that rendered not just old-fashioned but unread the work of hundreds of earlier women poets. In the process, these historians have helped early modernist women "kill the mother."³ That is, they have effectively silenced earlier generations of women writers, from whose poetry early modernist women wanted to distinguish their own verse.

If this silence is to be ended -- the silence not of women but of the history of women’s words -- and if we are to understand how a large number of highly professional and competitive American women poets were able to assume a leading role among the next generation of writers, female and male, then we must first recover the knowledge of what, in Nelson’s succinct formulation, "we no longer know we have forgotten" (3), appreciating late-nineteenth-century women's poetry not just for its precursor status but also for the substantive stylistic and developmental achievement it represents in its own right.

The story of late nineteenth-century women’s periodical poetry begins, of course, a good fifty years earlier in the host of national and regional women’s magazines (Carl Degler estimates about a hundred) that sprang up between 1784 and 1860, magazines such as the "Not Just Filler and Not Just Sentimental: Women's Poetry in American Victorian Periodicals, 1860-1900" (1819), "Not Just Filler and Not Just Sentimental: Women's Poetry in American Victorian Periodicals, 1860-1900"(1828), "Not Just Filler and Not Just Sentimental: Women's Poetry in American Victorian Periodicals, 1860-1900" (1830), "Not Just Filler and Not Just Sentimental: Women's Poetry in American Victorian Periodicals, 1860-1900" (1834), "Not Just Filler and Not Just Sentimental: Women's Poetry in American Victorian Periodicals, 1860-1900"(1837), and so on. Made viable by the enormous increase in bourgeois women's literacy through the first half of the century⁴ and by the felt need on the part of America's new citizen class to educate itself -- largely through the instrumentality of educated mothers -- these magazines flourished well into the 1860s and '70s. Not only were they read by thousands of women, but, more important for my purposes, they were written, edited, and -- albeit far more rarely -- published by women as well, thus making a significant number of bourgeois women professional or money-making writers for the first time.⁵

If by 1860 women had engaged in every aspect of the writing game, no facet was better suited to their gifts than the writing of poetry, according to the gender theory of the day. Given that women had been designated by domestic ideology the empresses of the heart, not the head, the lyric expression of religious, domestic, and even political (i.e., nationalistic) affections seemed, inarguably part of their domain. ⁶ And once women poets had staked out this turf -- or had it staked out for them -- they produced poems in great numbers. Made familiar to editors and publishers through their regular appearance in women’s magazines (and in local newspapers), these poets were soon picked up by main-ream publications as well: "Not Just Filler and Not Just Sentimental: Women's Poetry in American Victorian Periodicals, 1860-1900"(created in 1833), "Not Just Filler and Not Just Sentimental: Women's Poetry in American Victorian Periodicals, 1860-1900"(1840), "Not Just Filler and Not Just Sentimental: Women's Poetry in American Victorian Periodicals, 1860-1900"(1850), among others. In a new country, hungry for a literature as well as an identity of its own, books followed and reputations were built: Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Hannah Gould, Anna Maria Wells. Maria Gowan Brooks, Lucretia Davidson, Frances Osgood, the Cary sisters, to name a few. . . .

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