As I review my notes, I find my dispproval of most of the method here strong enough that I may offend. I agree that women should be free to determine and appraise themselves as thinking subjects, and that they should feel free to appraise men too, just as men appraise women. I agree that many women write wonderful things that should be canonical in whatever sense any canon should exist. I hope all of this may remain obvious.
Writing of women's gradual and partial triumph over stereotypes, Ostriker cites voluminously and makes interesting observations but analyzes little. This is by no means a habit unique to her or to feminists. It seems a broad assumption of many critics that taking formal characteristics of texts into consideration subverts or distracts from their polemical concerns. Reading many, including Ostriker, I find myself alternately agreeing and disagreeing with qualifications of various authors and incidents without feeling entirely certain as to the initial aesthetic assumptions.
With Ostriker, my disagreements usually come when she describes as characteristically female things that are not. For instance, the ambiguities of Dickinson are "duplicity" (38). The term may not hold for Ostriker all of its usual stigma, but she goes on to discuss it as a strategy that Dickinson follows because of primarily male prohibitions against full female feeling and expression. Dickinson, for example, "wrote that she was Nobody at approximately the same moment that Walt Whitman was claiming to be everybody" (39). Dickinson's response is taken as "what many women were feeling," and Ostriker does treat such responses, rather mysteriously given her straightforwardly positive evaluation of Dickinson as a poet, as lacking (40).
Further clues may come in the discussion of Adrienne Rich's early work.
"Throughout her early poems, Rich explains, 'Formalism was part of the strategy -- like asbestos gloves, it allowed me to handle material I couldn't pick up barehanded.'She was following, in other words, the intellectual line in women's poetry, which required distancing of personal feeling and cautiousness regarding public issues" (57).
Ostriker appears to assume that there are blanket prohibitions against feeling that apply to women and not to men, and that these are more extensive than those that apply to men, that men primarily enforce these while women may to varying degrees internalize them. Perhaps as a consequence, she seems to believe that women's art, and probably art in general, consists of the expression of the emotion of the artist, with more direct expression making for fuller or more satisfying art. I'm not sure how she would qualify the latter idea because she does not bother to state it, at least not here.
Again, there are a lot of responses against feminist ideas that I would take care to not resemble. I don't doubt that prohibitions against activity and against feeling inhibit women who are artists as well as other women and other artists, and I'm willing to engage the idea that this is a particular difficulty for people who are both women and artists. However, even leaving Ostriker's mischaracterization of WW's narrative persona aside as a glib moment she may not have intended seriously or rigorously, if prohibitions against women's feelings in general in the 1800's were stricter, more extensive, or less forgiving than those against those of male homosexuality, the observation requires support. Perhaps a homosexual male is not a good example, but her comparison is Walt Whitman. Is Whitman's "Calamus" less duplicitous, in any common sense, than the fascicles? Leaving aside comparisons with Ginsberg's "Howl" or Genet's Notre dame des fleurs, we probably agree that Whitman could not have written in the style of Elizabeth Barret Browning and named his lover without reprisals more severe than being dismissed as less than serious.
The restrictions that Ostriker discusses in relation to Rich and the various female poets of from about 1910-1970 or so appear to those formulated by T.S. Eliot as the framework of the New Critical school. The critics she quotes as dismissing women (and they do!) are of the later TS Eliot's camp. But neither Eliot nor his movement limited criticism of sentiment to female sentiment; Eliot took out after Shakespeare and Milton as well. Eliot's verses do seem squeamish about sex, touch, and affection; and his criticism seems squeamish about sentiment in ways that somewhat tar passion, as passionate as his verse remains. But I have seen no argument to join his aestheticism with his asceticism intellectually, even if they may be joined biographically. And not even Eliot asked us to take on his life.
The New Critics were worth revolting against. Many did so, mostly from the 1950's into the '60's; thus we have the Beats, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, Concrete poetry, and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school and various fellow-travellers, Not only has New Criticism now long fallen into disrepute, other formalisms have replaced it, so that by engaging TSE & the boys, Ostriker confines herself to anthropological observation that cannot simply be levelled against contemporary formal innovation. For decades in the US now, innovative verse has in terms of its poetics followed not Eliot, but a train through Saussure or Peirce via the Russian Formalists or French structuralists into one or another form of post-structuralism. In terms of antecedents, most follow Pound rather than Eliot and perhaps Williams more than Pound, and HD more than one seems to read anywhere (spare couplets as in her Trilogy have become extremely common). To engage formal elements in American poetry after 1950, Ostriker might do this -- thereby reaching after something of the theoretical base of American poets like Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Rae Armantrout, Lynn Hejinian, and Leslie Scalapino.
But Ostriker's progressive, as of 1986 at least, has to do with expression, so progress hails from beat-related Wakoski and Diane Di Prima (Jayne Cortez might be a nice addition); politically engagé Levertov, Rich, and Atwood; confessional fellow-travellers Plath, Bishop, and Sexton. It does not apparently progress from any of the more formally progressive authors.
"We have moved from from Dickinson's "Mirth is the Mail of Anguish," from Marianne Moore's humorous acceptance of a need for self-protection in her many poems on armored animals, and from the protective creatve images of shells and cocoons in Mariane Moore and HD.
Since such progress is clearly social, whether that means as opposed to poetic or and therefore, poetic, doesn't it require social rather than poetic or at least as well as poetic support? And if this social liberty is a matter for poetics, why doesn't its explication require an integration of poetics? My concern here, please note, is not to bar social considerations from analysis of poetry, but to mourn the lack of integration of formal aspects of poetry in its evaluation, whatever social or political agenda one may involve. After all, if understanding ourselves and our circumstances means narrating our mythology, then surely we all must engage in our own narrations, and our own appraisal of our own narrations must be part of the recursive refrain involved in that. But can proper criticism of these forms be accomplished in innocence of reflexive consideration of the act of consideration? If anything is to be gained besides the incidentals of one or another story, clearly not.
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