106 American Literature
Cross-sectional religiocentric vision based on Stowe’s equivalent of Whitmanian “adhesiveness” as the bond. To work with these texts in triangulation is to become convinced that all three are somewhat impoverished if treated without reference to the others.
Here is a more extended example of the kind of project I have in mind.
A few years ago, I was seriously tempted to undertake a study of the figure of the Romantic artist as social prophet, a study that would combine my prior knowledge of the formative period of American writing with the knowledge I had later acquired of British Romanticism and was then acquiring of some of the newer English literatures of the developing world. I was struck by the fact that the Miltonic-Romantic conception of art as prophecy has tended either through transplantation or fortuitous analogy to thrive in the literary nationalisms of developing countries, from the Transcendental aesthetic in America to the literary activism of pioneer Indian English novelist Mulk Raj Anand (heavily dependent upon Shelley’s Defence of Poetry for rhetoric if not for substance) to the reformulation of African aesthetics by Wole Soyinka. Proceeding down the path of study and speculation, I was halted by the realization that my subject was an overwhelmingly male-sponsored ideology. All the major manifestoes, all the exponents I had in mind, were male. I, who had prided myself on taking Harriet Beecher Stowe and Elizabeth Stoddard seriously sooner even than a number of my women colleagues, might be on the verge of committing myself to a long-term study of a rarefied form of literary sexism.
What enabled me to see this were two concurrent studies of nineteenth-century women writers’ difficulties with the Miltonic-Romantic tradition: The Madwoman in the Attic, by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Women Poets and Poetic Identity, by Margaret Homans. Both books clearly establish that Romantic prophecy has historically been a male project.
At the same time, the vigor and clarity with which they make that case open a space for further investigation. As on begins, with
Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976): Mulk Raj Anand, Apology for Heroism (Bombay: Popular, 1957), pp. 86-92.
The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979); Woman Poets and Poetic Identity (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980).