108 American Literature
A second line of complication suggested by feminist revisionary studies of romantic ideology results from the sharpness with which they differentiate women’s literary orientation from men’s, e.g., the argument that women writers suffer during the period from the anxiety of authorship rather than of influence (Gilbert and Gubar) or that romantic logocentrism is male construct that either silences female poets or provokes their dissent (Homans). These are valuable distinctions but in need of two sorts of refinements. One would be to recognize that the alienated positions imputed to women writers also apply in some measure to their male counterparts. Doubt about logocentricity, for example, marks even the chief expositors of Romantic prophecy, like Wordsworth and Emerson, as Paul De Man perceived when he (overzealously) accused the Romantic theory of symbolism of ontological bad faith. Conversely, not all Angle-American women writers between 1780 and 1850 were equally uncomfortable with the mode of romantic prophecy (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for one was inspired rather than daunted by Wordsworthian aesthetics), and point- Emily Dickinson, for example. Women writers of the period, in addition sometimes to imaging poesis in ways indistinguishable from male Romantic counterparts (cf. Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” and Emerson’s “To clothe the fiery thought”), also sponsored specifically female images of art as prophecy, such as the mythical figures of Cassandra and the Sibyl, and the more historical figure of the improvisator (de Stael’s Corinne being the locus romanticus).
What these considerations point to is the desirability of studying literature with gender in mind as an important if not omnipresent variable, in the expectation of finding a richer interplay of difference and confluence than either old-style “gender-blind” mascu-
“The Politics of Emerson’s Man-Making Words,” PMLA, 101 (1986), 38-56. For the late nineteenth century, a valuable stud is Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982). In back of both of these studies stands Ann Douglas’ The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977), one of whose key contributions is to dramatize the strength of the image of literature as a feminized pursuit in antebellum America.
“The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 211.