3 - The Racialized Poetess

Summary

THE poet asks, and Phillis can't refuse

Phillis Wheatley Peters, “An Answer to the Rebus”

Along with male writers like Byron and Shelley, Romantic women writers including Felicia Hemans, Mary Shelley, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Dacre, Ann Radcliffe, and many others faced the consolidation of British national identity and the emergence of British imperialism as propellants for their writing. The white-male dominant literary tradition they entered was undergoing political, cultural, and aesthetic changes while they situated themselves and their positionalities in shifting notions and expectations of women authors. They grappled with increasingly global frameworks for literary production and placed themselves and their works within new Orientalist frameworks.

Women writers of the Romantic era tend to fall into several genres with Orientalist affinities, including the novel, the romance, and lyric poetry. Across these genres, prominent Orientalist tropes include fantasy, escapism, cross-cultural identification or sympathy, and later in the period, fear and antipathy. For many writers, Orientalist settings and representations became veiled projections of contemporaneous military and political struggles of the growing British Empire. For example, Felicia Hemans, the most widely read woman poet of the nineteenth century, was fascinated from a young age by stories of the Peninsular War. Hemans's upbringing in a military family propelled her to write Tales and Historic Scenes (1819) and Records of Woman (1828), both of which represent women speakers through culturally diffuse and oftentimes Orientalist settings. Hemans's imagined global settings raise the question of a writer's responsibility or role in cultural production. Specifically, the ethics of representation in relation to the writer's identity—who/what they can or should represent in writing—is significant in reading Hemans's poems about women speakers from around the world. These questions feed into the larger examination of literary invention versus factuality in Orientalism and racial representation.

As a celebrated “poetess” figure of transatlantic celebrity, Felicia Hemans is known for creating imagined communities of women-centered poems, but the ethnic and racial logics of her global imagination have not been fully excavated.