Symmetrical womanhood: poetry in the woman's building library.

Late-nineteenth-century women poets shed midcentury sentimentality unevenly and at some cost, losing a sense of privacy, a (Christian) frame of reference, and an "imagined community" of women who shared their worldview. They also gained more public, secular, and professional sources of identity. The exact nature of this postsentimental self was unclear. Postsentimental poets often wrote in the "genteel tradition," which trumpeted eternal truth and beauty while working from a position of subjective instability. Ultimately, their verses must be seen as powerfully fluid and transitional, registering (like the Woman's Building Library) women's struggle to inhabit more public forms of authority.

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The Court of Honor at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition was dominated by a perfectly proportioned, sixty-five-foot-tall woman: the Statue of the Republic, with her arms held aloft, echoed "the almost perfectly symmetrical arrangement of the architecture" around her. (1) The most au courant American poets of the 1880s and 1890s were also in thrall to principles of balance and symmetry, seeking to perfect their mastery of established forms. Readers wanted, and rewarded, conventional themes and predictable prosody, just as visitors to the fair wanted to see spectacular renderings of familiar neo-Renaissance design principles. (2) Machines (such as the Ferris wheel) could provide the shock of the new, but art was supposed to gesture toward eternal Arnoldian values of sweetness and light. Thus, inspired by a telescope, Lillian Rozell Messenger wrote in "Star Depths" (1891):

   Ah! who may limits yet  define   Of large, or great, or small,   Since the Unseen is the Real,  Divine,   And the Symbol is key to all?   Who measure endless or finite  being   When spirit through riven veils is seeing   Springs of life,  beyond eye of sense,   That flash to Mind's omnipotence?  Forever  there stealeth on, apace,   The rhythm of law and truth: all space   Is  rhythmic-bound, and music-fed.   The Ideal is spirit-robe of fact   Seen  or not, that clothes all things! (3) 

Messenger's professed secular faith in an eternal "rhythm of law and truth" is typical of many late-nineteenth-century poets. This vagueness (what law? what truth?) hints at the transitional quality of much late-nineteenth-century poetry, which is no longer grounded in antebellum assumptions but is not yet fully modern either. The contemporary poetry in the Woman's Building Library, poetry published in the 1880s and 1890s, registers--like the fair itself--the struggles between the residual norms of midcentury sentimentalism, the dominant ideologies of late-nineteenth-century genteel idealism, and the barely emergent innovations of modernism.

To trace these uneven developments and their effects on female subjectivity I examined all of the American poetry that was identified as such in the Woman's Building Library catalog and that was published after 1882, that is, in the ten years leading up to the fair. Some poets (Cornelia Huntington, b. 1805) were ending their careers in the 1890s, while others (Ruth Ward Kahn, b. 1872) were just beginning. But taken together, these ninety-plus volumes are a fair sample of what was acceptable "contemporary" poetry in 1893. Paula Bennett has argued that nineteenth-century women's poetry was a form of public speech, even when framed within the intrasubjective lyric mode. (4) Taking her point, I read each of these volumes as a bid for public agency. Through their collecting and cataloging efforts the library organizers were constructing--at least theoretically--a public sphere for women poets. However, the library's actual historical functions as a public sphere were limited, since the books were locked up under glass and not really in conversation with one another or with readers. Moreover, as I read the volumes--bringing them into belated dialogue with one another--an even more deep-seated problem emerged: the idea of a public sphere presupposes the existence of individuated, authoritative speakers. (5) And yet these qualities--individuality and authority--are only faintly present in the late-nineteenth-century female lyric voice. Because it is so dependent on established forms, American poetry of this period--perhaps more so than fiction or other forms of writing--shows the external and internal obstacles that women writers faced in their bid to establish themselves as legitimate authors.

Issues of individuality and authority also arose among the Board of Lady Managers as they organized the Woman's Building. If women's art were displayed in its own building, would this "separate sphere" automatically undermine its authority as art? Conversely, if women's art were integrated with men's art, would it gain more mainstream respect, or would it just become invisible? Bertha Palmer describes the conflict in "The Growth of the Woman's Building":

   Upon the  assembling of the Board of Lady Managers in Chicago, we found   that the  most important duty to be settled was whether the work of   women at the  Fair should be shown separately or in conjunction with   the work of men  under general classifications. This was a burning   question, for upon  this subject every one had strong opinions, and   there was great  feeling on both sides, those who favored a separate   exhibit believing  that the extent and variety of the valuable work   done by women would  not be appreciated or comprehended unless shown in   a building separate  from the work of men. On the other hand, the most   advanced and radical  thinkers felt that the exhibit should not be one   of sex, but of merit,  and that the women had reached the point where   they could afford to  compete side by side with men with a fair chance   of success, and that  they would not value prizes given upon the   sentimental basis of sex.  (6) 

The poetry of the Woman's Library is as ideologically split as the Woman's Building organizers themselves. While all of the poets agree--implicitly, by the very act of writing--that women should have a voice, their voices are mediated by their conflicting assumptions about the sources and limits of their power. Most, though not all, of the poets fall into one of two categories: they are sentimental poets who construct a lyric voice on the basis of their domestic credibility; or they are genteel idealist poets who reject domesticity to speak the more "universal" language of art for art's sake. These two imperfect choices reflect a broader question that was implicitly posed by almost all of the Woman's Building's programs: what forms of female agency were imaginable--and what forms remained unimaginable--in 1893?

Among the participating state committees, the women of Connecticut were given a special award for their carefully chosen book collection. (7) Harriet Beecher Stowe, the state's most famous writer, was allotted her own cabinet full of translations and editions. But second only to Stowe was Lydia Sigourney (the "Sweet Singer of Hartford"), who was honored by the inclusion in the library of original leaves from her diary and an oil portrait as well as her Selected Poems (1838) and Illustrated Poems (1849). Like Stowe, Sigourney advanced the ideology of domestic sentimentalism even as she trumpeted the national issues of abolitionism, Native American rights, and temperance. Sigourney's speakers situate themselves within an imaginary private sphere ("imaginary" because her lyrics are, of course, public speech acts), and from within this sphere they engage in moral suasion and emotional appeals. Thus "Erin's Daughter" (1849) addresses the plight of an Irish servant:

   Poor Erin's Daughter cross'd  the main   In youth's unfolding prime   A lot of servitude to bear  In this our western clime. (8) 

Sigourney's poems present compelling types: "the mourning mother," "the suffering girl," "the rapturous nature lover." As types they represent what Jane Tompkins calls nodes within a network, "expressing what lay in the minds of many or most" antebellum poetry readers. (9) Sentimental conventions led to commercial viability because they reinforced the sentimental consumer's already-firm convictions and validated her sense of self-worth as a socially confined but morally superior Christian woman. Sigourney was popular because she told her antebellum readers what they already knew--about her, and about themselves.

As a literary progenitor Sigourney is a towering but problematic figure in the context of the Woman's Library. On the one hand, her sentimental approach continued to operate as a powerful force within American women's poetry, even in the 1880s and 1890s. If sheer numbers are any indication, then the women poets in the library, right up to 1893, found Sigourney's model of the (feminine, domestic) self worth emulating. But on the other hand, the Woman's Library, the Woman's Building, and the Congress of Women were organized by mostly forward-thinking leaders who sought to contain, or at least to redirect, the cultural power of sentimentalism. Ambivalence toward Sigourney emerges in Laura E. Richards's chapter on literary history in Art and Handicraft in the Woman's Building. Richards mentions her almost reluctantly: "Next we must mention Mrs. Sigourney, a writer of wide repute, though little read today. 'Pocahontas and Other Poems,' 'Lays of the Heart,' 'Tales in Prose and Verse,' the very titles breathe of bygone days and thoughts; yet Mrs. Sigourney was a noble and lovely woman, and one might spend an hour much less profitably than in making or renewing acquaintance with her writings." (10)

Richards's attitude toward Sigourney is ironic because so much of the poetry in the Woman's Library--poetry published much later than Sigourney's--can also be said to breathe of "bygone days and thoughts." If Richards, the urbane daughter of Julia Ward and Samuel Gridley Howe, could see Sigourney as "bygone," her fellow writers in the provinces had not advanced far enough to perceive the sentimental worldview as anachronistic. As I read the poetry volumes from the library, then, I was reminded of the perils of periodization. The vast majority of poets, right up to 1892, draw on what is generally understood to be the midcentury cult of domesticity. They pose as amateurs (even when aspiring to professional publication); they posit their use-value as noncommercial (even as they pen salable volumes); they seek affiliation through conventional tropes (rather than aspiring to distinction through innovation); and they somewhat paradoxically claim authority through a "common language" of Christian resignation.

Sentimental poetry, as Mary Louise Kete has argued, derives much of its power from its social use-value: it is based on an ethos of sharing gifts and empathizing with sufferers. (11) These poets imagine communities through "intimate" public dedications; thus Josephine Pollard's Vagrant Verses (1892) is "dedicated to the Home Circle," Louis J. Hall's Verses are offered "to my friends quite conscious that there is not a…