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Their aid, to reflect intensively about gender as a Romanticist variable, two complications arise. First, the figure of the artist as romantic prophet in some senses a “feminine” image: a figure who by self-definition occupies a marginal position relative to society’s power centers, who prizes innocent perception above socially initiated perception (hence the romantic reliance upon women and children as centers of value), who valorizes intuition and inspiration above rationality and sequential argument. Of course any deep discussion of these feminized attributes of the male romantic prophet-poet must reckon with the fact that at least as many aspirants to the role were misogynists like Thoreau as were would-be androgynes like Whitman, who himself imagines the ideal poet as a male persona. What initially might seem feminized sensitivity on the male Romantic’s part can quite peacefully coexist with a cozy patriarchalism, as Erik Thurin has shown in Emerson’s case. The under-explored point remains, however, that the distinctive romantic vision of the poet from the start of the period and with increasing self-consciousness occupies the traditionally feminine pole, so that beginning with Shelley’s mythification of Keats in Adonais if not before, Romanticist imagings of the nominally male artist figure become either increasingly epicene or preoccupied with the problem of retrieval or loss of masculinity.
This latter concern is of special importance to the literary history of America, given the utilitarian cast of thinking that tended to see art as inconsequential or epiphenomenal to begin with. Emerson’s preoccupation with defining the sort of action appropriate to scholars, Hawthorne’s portrait of the artist as Owen Warland, Irving’s portrait of the man of imagination as Rip Van Winkle, Whitman’s insistence of solidarity with young mechanics- these are all analogous gestures of discomfort with a role not perceived as male-identified that only at this moment are starting to be investigated with the care they deserve.
Erik Ingvar Thurin, Emerson as Priest of Pan (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1981).
See particularly two studies of androgyny as it bear on the works of Percy (and in the latter case Mary) Shelley: Nathaniel Brown, Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979): and William Veeder, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgyny (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986).
I have in mind especially the work of David Leverenz; see “Mrs. Hawthorne’s Headache: Reading The Scarlet Letter,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37 (1983), 552-75; and