Women poets and contested spaces in The Yellow Book.

The Yellow Book, that most defining of 1890s periodicals, has often been approached in terms of a historical divide: B.T. and A.T., before and after the trial of Oscar Wilde. More recently, Margaret D. Stetz, Mark Samuels Lasner, and Laurel Brake have examined the periodical in terms of its marketing strategies and gender politics. (1) While they certainly note and comment on poems appearing in the journal, no sustained analysis of the gendered dynamics of poetry in this premier journal has yet appeared.

Several reasons suggest themselves for this neglect. Nineteenth-century poetry retained its prestige as the most eminent of letterpress forms, given, in Pierre Bourdieu's terms, "its restricted audience (often only a few hundred readers), the consequent low profits, which make it the disinterested activity par excellence, and also its prestige, linked to the historical tradition initiated by the Romantics." (2) But, as a market commodity, poetry was overshadowed by the rapidly expanding publication of novels and essays from the 1820s onward. (3) Because those who entered the literary marketplace to publish poems in periodicals often failed to attain "charismatic legitimation" as eminent poets, (4) scholars have tended to regard poetry as providing mere filler for periodicals, (5) making study of periodical poetry a matter of both irrelevance and tedium. Finally, Henry Harland and John Lane's eclectic editorial strategy, which was designed to market the journal and Bodley Head books to a broad array of readers, as well as aestheticism's very inclusiveness and mobility, embracing everything from impressionist nature poems to perverse sexualities, make it difficult to theorize the collective body of poems appearing in the journal. (6)

I want to suggest, however, that Yellow Book poetry is relevant to a study of the gendered dynamic of fin-de-siecle poetry and of New Woman writers, in particular. Many women poets of the 1890s, including some who published in The Yellow Book, were themselves New Women who pursued full-time careers, (7) ignored bourgeois prohibitions on female sexuality, and became vocal members of the Literary Ladies, an association formed in 1889 to promote women writers. As Stetz's analysis of Bodley Head books has demonstrated, moreover, in the 1890s Lane was astutely creating a profitable niche market for slender volumes of poems, augmenting the decade's vogue of "minor poetry." (8) The development of numerous little magazines and the visibility given poetry in such venues as Andrew Lang's "At the Sign of the Ship" column in Longman's Magazine, W. E. Henley's National Observer, and Henry Cust's Pall Mall Gazette meant that placing poems was a journalistic opportunity for women writers bent on establishing and enhancing writing careers. (9)

Within The Yellow Book itself, two circumstances suggest that poetry was a gendered, and contested, space: the first issue contained no poems by women, and no woman's poem ever fronted the volume, as did poems by Richard Le Gallienne (volume 4), William Watson (volumes 5 and 12), and W. B. Yeats (volume 13). When poems by women appeared in volume 2, this work contested the initial homosocial formation poetry had assumed in the debut of The Yellow Book, and I want to examine the patterns of women poets' representation relative to men's over the run of the journal. The content of both men's and women's poems was (as noted above) highly diverse, (10) yet some patterns are evident here as well. Most important, women's poetry helped sustain the presence of decadent verse in the journal in the aftermath of the Wilde trial, especially decadent exploration of perverse sexuality that affronted bourgeois ideology and helped foreground literary style by separating art from moral content. Though I, too, operate B.T. and A.T., I suggest that poems by women in The Yellow Book are most fruitfully approached in terms of four, rather than two, stages of publication history: an initial male-dominated phase (volumes 1-3); a second phase instigated by the journal's entanglement with decadence and the trial (volumes 4-6); an eclectic phase characterized by gender equity (volumes 7-12); and, in the final volume (13), a resumption of male domination in terms of numbers, yet accompanied by an integration of New Woman poetics, a synthesis of poetry's gendered dynamic throughout the journal's run.

Sally Mitchell has recently summarized key issues associated with New Woman writers: political efforts to enhance women's access to education, employment, and legal agency; adoption of lifestyles associated with the working class (especially employed single women living alone); women's freedom to express sexual desire; and the construction of the New Woman in the press. (11) In the late 1880s, Wilde had supported both women's educational and employment opportunities as editor of Woman's World and, while not allotting the highest place in literature to women, nonetheless endorsed "the really remarkable awakening of women's song that characterises the latter half of our century in England," which had produced poetry "of a very high standard of excellence." (12) On both counts New Woman poets had reason to remain loyal to Wilde. They were tacitly aligned with Wilde by other means as well. By exploring female desire (always potentially transgressive according to bourgeois norms), New Woman poets could extend the decadent project of "restless curiosity in research" that included "spiritual and moral perversity." (13) And, as Linda Dowling has argued, New Women and decadents were often aligned in public minds because both wanted to dismantle hierarchies of value and privilege culture over nature, in lieu of the overdetermined roles nature suggested (whether motherhood or reproductive heterosexuality). (14)

At the same time, the traditional association of the female body with nature led several French decadents who exerted influence on British writers (e.g., Charles Baudelaire and Joris-Karl Huysmans) to argue that women were incapable of artistic agency. (15) Moreover, when no clear heirs to Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, or Alfred, Lord Tennyson had established themselves, the emergence of numerous women poets who demanded consideration as poets rather than as poetesses--mere spontaneous singers--was sometimes perceived by male writers as a threat. Both points are nowhere clearer than in the review of Amy Levy's posthumous poems in the 8 March 1890 issue of Henley's Scots Observer: "In woman, indeed, the capacity of art--the faculty of selection in union with the sense of style--is rarely if ever completely developed, while a gift of lyric utterance and the lyric sentiment are frequent enough ... The Greeks once figured the Muses as women: and--for the Greeks were wise--they may well have meant to signify thereby that the Muses would endure the caresses of none but men. Certain it seems that Poetry in petticoats is only poetry on sufferance; only woman essaying to do the man's part." (16) Needless to say, such comments ignored the influence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the early Wilde as well as the sponsorship of some New Woman poets by male critics and poets. The review also failed to impede women's efforts to gain recognition as poets, so that by 1894 Le Gallienne claimed in an essay devoted to "Woman-Poets of the Day," "The barbarous word 'poetess' is seldom employed by any one with a literary character to lose." (17) But the Scots Observer review also clarified a particular challenge faced by New Woman poets and the techniques they adopted as a result. Sincere or bald statement of political content would be dismissed at once as artless expression (and shrill rhetoric). Women who wanted to be taken seriously as poets perforce adopted a mask (as had Levy in "Xantippe") or relied on indirection, especially complex allusion. By these means, they could signal their radical allegiances and exert influence while gaining admittance to key literary forums such as The Yellow Book.

Arthur Symons's poem about a prostitute, "Stella Maris," was the most notorious poem in volume 1 of The Yellow Book and has remained the best known. For my purposes, however, "Alere Flammam" ("To feed the flame"), by Edmund Gosse, is most representative, for it both enacts and enunciates the homosocial poetic practice that marks the journal's debut--a textual reproduction, as it were, of the all-male Rhymers' Club. (18) Gosse's poem was dedicated to A. C. Benson, who himself contributed four quatrains under a Greek title to volume 1 depicting a woman whose placid blue eyes show "Something horrible, grey," when she succumbs to rage ...