I’ll be presenting again this spring at the The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900. The abstract:
Title: “Susan Howe’s Mis-taken Male Mentors”
This presentation will examine Susan Howe’s engagement of male mentor figures in her book-length encomium of Emily Dickinson, My Emily Dickinson. My Emily Dickinson is well-known for its attempt to correct feminist readings of Emily Dickinson that emphasize the disabling effects of patriarchal authority over Dickinson’s poetic genius. Such readings, she suggests, are complicit with the patriarchal authority they would oppose. My Emily Dickinson contains, then, corrections of both masculinist dismissals and feminist curtailings of Dickinson’s work. The problem is, as Stein has it in The Making of the Americans, opposing rather than insisting. Instead, she works in an economy of love of poetry and poets similar to that described by both H.D. and Robert Duncan. Despite this, criticism of Howe’s poetry often emphasizes the elements of her feminism that oppose both patriarchy and the male poets whose work is seen to embody patriarchal authority. Alternatively, critics often will locate the source of Howe’s critique of both patriarchy and feminism in an antinomian individualism.
I will argue that the origins of Howe’s double critique and her antinomianism lie in her deep affection for both male and female poetic forebears. This view is encouraged by the fact that My Emily Dickinson begins in dialog with William Carlos Williams’s either wrong-headed or mis-taken assertion in the “Jacataqua” section of In the American Grain that America has never seen a poet, save, and only then almost a poet. And that’s Emily Dickinson, “starving,” as he says, “in her father’s garden.” Howe’s criticism of Williams in My Emily Dickinson contrasts with her criticism of critics like Gilbert and Gubar, who, rather than reading Dickinson as starving, depict her in their Madwoman in the Attic as emotionally stunted. Howe favors Williams’s wrongness over that of Gilbert and Gubar, taking his outcry as indicative of a sympathy for and love of Dickinson’s work, in essence reading Williams’s seeming misogyny as embittered advocacy.
I’ll continue by showing how such a reading of Howe opens up her other texts, particularly her earlier work, The Liberties, in which the two female characters Stella and Cordelia deform and transgress gender boundaries in a quest for personal liberty. I’ll conclude by pointing out that Howe’s love of Williams is comparable to her love of Duncan and H.D. by contrasting her encounter with Williams with her critique of Charles Olson in two early essays— “Where Should the Commander Be” and “Since a Dialogue We Are”— in which she finds Olson’s misogyny irredeemably chilling or killing to female creativity. Given time, I will offer brief comparisons between her treatment of Williams in the opening of My Emily Dickinson and her treatment of Duncan in her valediction for him (“For Duncan”).
If you study in this time period, this is a great conference. The size is just right. You can meet people. And some really good people attend it. This year you can see Mary Jo Bang and Michael Davidson.
I present on Thursday 2/18 at 1:30:
Chair: Victoria Brockmeier, State University of New York, Buffalo
Mark Scroggins, Florida Atlantic University
"The 'Half-Fabulous Field-Ditcher': Ruskin Pound, Geoffrey Hill"
J. P. Craig, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
"Susan Howe's Mis-Taken Male Mentors"
Ruth Williams, University of Cincinnati
"Palimpsestually Yours: Illuminating Absence in Sappho and the Urban Landscape"
James Wheeler, Mississippi State University
"Palimpsestually Yours: Illuminating Absence in Sappho and the Urban Landscape"
