Sarah Helen Whitman As Poet And Critic, Part 3
by Brett Rutherford
Her Published Criticism
Poe's most recent biographer, Kenneth Silverman, was one of the first scholars to acknowledge that Helen was a formidable intellectual match for Poe. Unlike the mostly dilettante female poets Poe knew in New York, Silverman observes, "Sarah Helen Whitman was a woman with sophisticated philosophical and literary interests — after her friend Margaret Fuller, perhaps the leading female literary critic in America" (Silverman 347).Although she had no opportunity for formal education other than a brief period at a Quaker school on Long Island, Whitman was a well-read classicist, and her critical articles put her squarely in the league of the Harvard-trained Boston writers and reviewers. She knew Virgil and other Latin authors. She read Shelley and the Romantics, and she translated German supernatural ballads, as well as Goethe, and, from the French, Victor Hugo. Her many correspondents included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Stephane Mallarmé and other British and continental writers, as well as domestic writers and editors.
Noelle Baker, who prepared the first critical edition of Whitman's critical articles, characterizes her subject thus: "[S]he should be studied with such established critics as William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Frederic Henry Hedge and Edgar Allan Poe. Whitman explicates transcontinental idealism within the context of American considerations of immorality, pre-Darwinian evolution theory, German Naturphilosophen, and the occult in her essays on Emerson, Alcott, Goethe, Shelley and Poe. She argued that these writers utilize literature, science and philosophy to recover individual spirituality in a time of inadequate traditional theology and doctrinal malaise. Almost invariably, Whitman defends her subjects from American critics who consider the byproducts of this secular faith irreligious or immoral" (Baker, iii).
Susan P. Conrad says that Whitman's essays "rank with those of Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody as the most important literary criticism produced by women — and men — in the period [1830-1860]" (Conrad, 223).
Choosing "Break every bond" as her motto (Baker 12), Whitman intentionally chose some of the most controversial literary figures to write about. She defended Shelley's atheism, refused to throw out Byron's poetry even if he did have an affair with his half-sister, and championed the writing of Goethe even if Werther and Faust did seem to approve of seduction, vice, suicide, and bargains with the Devil. As Baker is quick to note, Whitman beat a trail-blazing path to Goethe's writing: "Whitman read German, and with Margaret Fuller produced the only American women's published analyses of German language and literature at a time when even most male critics read the Germans through Coleridge and Carlyle" (Baker, 3).
In her last years, Mrs. Whitman admired Swinburne's poetry, and in her correspondence with Mallarmé she offered the French poet advice on translating "The Raven" (Lloyd 103). She became "one of the most important mediators Mallarmé found between himself and Poe" (Lloyd 104). The French poet advised Whitman on her own translation of his "Tomb of Edgar Poe" (Ticknor 268-270).
Baker calls Whitman's criticism "a minor woman writer's programmatic attempt to publish a deviant, male-gendered authorial identity," but Baker seems to make too much of Whitman's pseudonymous publications. Her somewhat labored commentary about Whitman's attempts to "pass" as a male critic seem off the mark to me on three counts: first, criticism of the period tended to be highly intellectualized and almost genderless. Critics did not write as men or as women but as critics. Second, two of Whitman's key essays were published with the female pseudonym "Egeria," and most of Whitman's articles were circulated in manuscript among the literati and her identity was well known.
The name "Egeria" comes from Roman history. This is the name given to the prophetess (or, some say, consort) of the Roman king Numa Pompilius, the great Roman lawgiver. Since Whitman was the wife of a young Boston lawyer at the time, "Egeria" was a suitable name for the wife and muse of a young man who might hope some day to be a judge or lawmaker. Both articles by-lined "Egeria" appeared early in her widowhood, and this may have added to her reticence.
This raises yet again the question of the extent to which Whitman's literary fame was stifled or limited by her gender. The male writers and editors who encountered Whitman, from the Harvard circle, the Transcendentalist circle, and from New York, implored her to submit articles and poems for publication. According to Baker, Orestes Bronson "offered her an equal share in the profits of his Boston Quarterly Review if she would contribute an article to each number."
The discouragement that Whitman received from family and Providence society seems to have been mostly of female origin. In fact, men are not mentioned much at all in the family history, except when a male is required for legal purposes, such as arranging property transfers. Ticknor, Whitman's first biographer, alludes to family pressures that discouraged Whitman in her early years. Two of the original documents are at the John Hay library at Brown University — two letters from an older cousin who had been a "second mother" to Whitman during her stays on Long Island. Here we can see, first-hand, the kind of admonishment that Whitman had to endure in her teens, precisely when her passion for poetry was reaching its apex:
I am still as much your mother as ever. How do your studies come on? Do you go to school or not? if not, I hope that you study at home. Do not neglect this important facet of your life. It is now the springtime with you, my dear, and recollect that if you attend more to its enjoyments than its cares; if intent only on its flowers and birds, its fragrance and its harmony, you neglect the toilsome preparation and … your summer will be without fruit and your winter dreary indeed.Two months later, Whitman's cousin reinforces her argument in another letter:
Of this be certain, that the only earthly foundation for permanent satisfaction is the utilization of the intellectual and moral faculties. Devote yourself, in the first place, to God, read his book, pray unto him and endeavor to increase in his knowledge. This, my child, is the only safe refuge in affliction, the only firm support in prosperity as well as in adversity, the only course of temporal as well as eternal happiness.
In the next place, cultivate a taste for solid and substantial knowledge; this only will tend to make you the sort of character I wish you to be. Poetry and novels, delightful as they may be to a youthful mind, are not only nugatory, they are not only void of all useful instruction, but they positively contaminate, and they occupy the time that ought to be devoted to better things (Marsh, Ms 204, HA1388).
This is probably the kind of regurgitated sermonizing that young Sarah Helen would have heard from her mother and the social circle of genteel old families into which she was born. Rebellion had its price, but the young poet was clearly drawn to the rebels' side. She exulted when her father, in his seventies, took up arms in the Dorr War and was briefly jailed. She chose a "conventional" husband, but her mother may not have known that John Winslow Whitman was actually a freethinker who had scandalized his class at Brown by giving a commencement address titled "The Atheist."
I hear from your own account that you read too much poetry, dear Sarah. Indulged in to excess it becomes almost if not quite as pernicious as novels. Any kind of reading which tends to excite the fancy and raise up visions of romantic feelings unknown to this world is dangerous, except occasionally as a relaxation (Marsh, MS 204, HA1387).
-- to be continued --
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