Sunday, September 17, 2017

Allie on Dorothy Mermin's "Women Becoming Poets"




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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