7 - The Solitary Reaper Between Men (and Some Women)

Summary

Literary tradition, influence and genealogy are overlapping tropes of historical emplotment that have been centrally important, and indeed in many instances structurally indispensable, to feminist criticism of lyric poetry over the past four decades. At the same time, as Jonathan Culler notes, while it has been both easy and productive ‘to treat novels as social and political documents that record the travails of women […] lyric poetry has been less amenable to such treatment and the question of its relationship to feminist issues and what sort of historical act or historical representation it involves remains largely unsettled’. Despite the chronologically and politically situated (and in this sense ‘dated’) impact of such forceful critical manifestos as Adrienne Rich's essays ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (1971) and ‘Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson’ (1975), or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's and Annette Kolodny's respective responses to Harold Bloom's theory of poetic influence, historical narratives of Western lyric tradition have remained relatively resistant to a comprehensively convincing feminist appropriation. If this is true even in the Anglo-American context, where practical feminist engagement with the study of literature has flourished most robustly, it has been much more manifest in Portugal, where gendered readings of the lyric and its place in the narrative of national literary history have been rehearsed only on rare occasions and by scholars either based abroad or at a distance from the academic mainstream of the field, often in departments of Anglo-American studies (as is the case of Portugal's most prominent feminist critic of lyric poetry, Maria Irene Ramalho).