Dorothy Mermin, "Women Becoming Poets," English Literary History 57 (1990): 335-55. (Allie Bennett)
Mermin’s
article provides a brief history of important female poets of the seventeenth
century and explains why appearing in print was relatively risky. For women
during this time, writing was equated with self-display, which dictated the
amount of intimacy that could be portrayed, especially that having to do with
sexuality.
In England
before the nineteenth century, women poets where nonexistent in society because
of cultural suppression of the female voices. The three most important women
poets during this time was Katherine Philips (1631-1664), Aphra Behn
(1640-1689), and Anne Finch (1661-1720).
Behn was a
playwright, poet, translator; she was a woman trying to make in a man’s world.
Many people believed she was a staunch Royalist, a spy, and a scarlet woman who
was condemned for her loose morals. Behn was also the first Englishwoman to
earn money while writing literature and plays. Many of her plays were
tragicomedies and then later in the 1670s her plays were more comic. In the
early 1680s she began to produce fiction into her poetry and translations.
During her years she had relationships with two men named Will Scott and John
Hoyle, who were presented in her fictional poetry.
Philip’s often
used a pen-name when writing poetry, which was Orinda. She often wrote about
friendships and didn’t want her relationships going past the intellectual
level. Some speculation was drawn that she was a lesbian love poet. Orinda is
known for her elegant poetry that can be rapid; she writes simply and
straightforwardly, and she also exhibits her strong feelings towards her
writings. Orinda was known as a “safe: female poet for men to praise (Dryden)
and women to read.
Finch
modeled her behavior after Philips and Behn, she published a number of poems in
1713 and her reputation then diminished. She did enjoy some fame during her
time after the passing of James II and William III, the general political
climate approved and Queen Anne was more acceptable as a sovereign. Her work
includes private thoughts and her personal struggles, and demonstrated her
fluent use of Augustan diction and forms; along with her awareness of the
social and political climate of the era.
Each of
these women had different subjects and styles but the circumstances they
underwent enabled them to write. These women did not prefer to write iambic
pentameter, formal odes or epics, exalted diction, or classical allusion; they
preferred fables, conversational tone, small and ordinary themes, and they also
talk in self-deprecating, low-keyed tones because they were women and were
remote from politics and power. They provided what women poets needed most: not
just freedom to write but subjects to write about, places within poetry where a
woman could situate herself to speak. Politics and religion where more
masculine but the subject of love poetry had been dominated since Sappho’s time
by male subjectivity, women where often talked about as silent objects of male
desire. Philips, Behn, and Finch created imaginative poetry that was about
different genders and erotic relationships and based on their life experiences.
Dorothy Mermin’s purpose for writing “Women Becoming Poets” was too make
publicly aware that the task of woman poetry was redefined because of these women,
and instead of a world with masculine views they made their own settings and
themes that expressed female desire and evade the domination of men. “Both
Philips and Finch feared publication as a kind of sexual self-display, a fear
that Behn’s career amply justified” (336-37).
Sources:
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/finch/finch-anne.html
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