From Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical Tales: Mary Robinson's reputation and the problem of literary debt.(William Wordsworth)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University

All reputation is hazardous ... hard to win, harder to keep.

--William Hazlitt, Table Talk

Reputation is valuable; and whatever is of value ought to enter into our estimates. A just and reasonable man will be anxious so to conduct himself that he may not be misunderstood. He will be patient in explaining, where his motives have been misapprehended and misconstrued. It is a spirit of false bravado that will not descend to vindicate itself from misrepresentation.

---William Godwin, Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature

WRITERS IN LATE EIGHTEENTH--AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND shared a personal AND social investment in the necessary danger and fragile asset, reputation. As the reading market grew exponentially, authors were increasingly confronted with their inability to limit the meanings of their words and, thus, they faced an inability to control their public images. Reputation was precarious, William Hazlitt's comment implies; like money, it circulated. Its substance was determined from outside by critics and reviewers, by readers and market demands and by the literary tradition. It often had little grounding in a writer's sense of his/her own value, though it was nonetheless essential for continued publication. Like writing, reputation culminated in credit, not property, and credit implied debts. Reputation, then, signified dependence, a failure to authorize one-self Simultaneously, however, an author's value in the late eighteenth century increasingly focused on qualities of personality and originality. (1) Such an emphasis on qualities of the author seemingly extricated him/her from these increasing debts to publishers, critics, and other authors, and refigured him/her as a self-authorizing subject, a creative Genius. While the literary property debates and the defeat of perpetual copyright in the second half of the eighteenth century increased the commodification of books, as many critics have shown, this romantic myth of the Genius Author--a production of both poets and literary critics since then--rose to obscure the reality of the literary marketplace.

In an increasingly capitalist economy, no longer a world of strict patronage, this contradiction, inherent in the concept of reputation, between debt to others and demand for originality pervaded many writers' realities. As Hazlitt and Godwin suggest in the epigraphs above, reputation became an important but tenuous commodity in a competitive economy, a representation separate from the writer's self (something to be won and defended) and yet explicitly linked to the writing subject's authority (something to be "misapprehended and misconstrued" by others). A reputation that was "just and reasonable" was "valuable" in and of itself, despite its immateriality; it required maintenance through continual explanation and vindication. Such continual self-defense suggests that any reputation was always also misrepresentation, any sense of original genius always embattled, even illusory. In this light, reputation might be read as a form of dispossession, providing identity at the same time it points to the hollowness of that identity, a subjectivity that is necessarily other within itself, continually requiring elaboration, and always defined by forces outside itself. No longer self-possessed, but a copy of oneself, and a copy that must be defended in order to maintain one's reputation as original, the writing subject is continually confronted with his/her own contingency.

While romantic writers, male and female, shared this sense of dispossession, for women writers, the marketplace was especially "hazardous" and reputation even more fragile. (2) In the case of many women writers, the danger was at least double-edged: on the one hand, they needed to create enough of a reputation as writers to support themselves; on the other hand, as women, their reputations were already fixed by their gender and they had continually to defend their virtue. Reputation was always sexually coded, and verbal availability--participation in the public sphere of the literary marketplace--was linked to sexual promiscuity. Thus, in addition to the dispossession implicit in the concept of reputation generally, women writers had also to negotiate fixed notions of femininity that were equally dispossessing. It was assumed that women's writing revealed their lives; what they wrote was read as a mirror of their selves. While several women were able to exploit their experiences as women for economic gain, their reputations were thus also dependent on these narratives of self to the extent that their popularity could be defined only on such terms. (3) Women's writings, then, embodied their reputations as women and not as Geniuses.

However, as literary critics have begun to argue, women writers were playing active roles in the literary marketplace and public sphere of the late eighteenth century, roles that suggest they may also have been able to exploit the double dispossession of authorship and femininity. Women romantic writers participated, often more comfortably, in the same public. domain as men, but did not find the same urgency male writers felt to erase their literary debts. In fact, such debts may have become necessary for authorial survival. As Catherine Gallagher has shown in her work on women novelists, the attention women writers paid to "disembodiment, dispossession, and debt"--another rhetoric of female authorship--reveals the parallels between women's subject positions, economic exchange, and literary representation, parallels that need to be interpreted as a source of their strength as authors, and, perhaps, a sign of their understanding of social realities (xxi). "Literary reputations" and "debts," she argues, were two of "the exchangeable tokens of modern authorship that allowed increasing numbers of women writers to thrive as the eighteenth century wore on" (xiii). While women novelists often obscured their identities and wrote as "nobodies," however, women romantic writers could not claim such separation from their work if they aspired to Genius.

For women poets, establishing poetic authority was overdetermined by additional, conflicting factors. The double dispossession of writing and being female was reinforced by the growth of romantic narratives of poetic authority. In particular, any kind of "reputation" required the negotiation of myths of Genius that were gaining cultural value but that specifically relegated women writers to a lesser status, either by excluding the difference of their experiences or by defining their genius as lesser, These myths of Genius and natural creative power, or original authorship, are well enough known not to need elaboration here, but it is important to recall that such myths often placed women in the position of object to the poet's gaze, muse to the poet, or lady in a romance narrative. Furthermore, it was becoming review etiquette to downgrade a writer's ability as merely imitative and not the original work of Genius. Again, for women this is a highly charged criticism, which turns women's writing into a reflection of men's. To be read as "copy" was to lose the originality necessary for status as poetic genius. Given the developing concern for a national literary tradition and increasing interest in high art, to lose the status of Genius was to face obscurity. However, for a woman writer to sttand alone meant the possibility of not being read at all. Combined, these factors present a complex position for a poet, like Mary Robinson, who saw writing as a necessary exchange that created debt and as an embodiment of female Genius.

This article examines Mary Robinson's publication of Lyrical Tales in 1800 as a revisionary response to Lyrical Ballads (1798) that foregrounds problems of reputation and authorship for women romantic writers. The connection of Robinson's reputation with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads produces relations of debt that link her to male writers whose sympathies she shared and whose growing authority she helped to enhance. More specifically, the context in which Lyrical Tales was published and the poems the three poets exchanged prior to the Tales' publication present a complex web of relations that undoes the possibility of separating categories of self and other, copy and original. These intertextual relationships suggest that the poems in Lyrical Tales are themselves a self-defense--Robinson's assertion of her literary debt and her poetic autonomy; and the poems' exploration of questions of reputation and dispossession reinforces such an interpretation. Read as such, Lyrical Tales becomes an explicit challenge to a separate female literary tradition--and thus, implicitly, to a feminine romanticism.

1. Mary Robinson's Romantic Reputation "Undoubted Genius" or "Sister Whore"

There is no country, at this epoch, on the habitable globe, which can produce so many exalted and illustrious women (I mean mentally) as England. And yet we see many of them living in obscurity; known only by their writings; neither at the tables of women of rank; nor in the studies of men of genius; we hear of no national honours, no public marks of popular applause, no rank, no title, no liberal and splendid recompense bestowed on British literary women! They must fly to foreign countries for celebrity, where talents are admitted to be of no SEX, where genius ... is still honoured as GENIUS"

--Mary Robinson, Thoughts on the Condition of Women

The predecessors of an original Genius will have smoothed the way for all that he had in common with them;--and much he will have in common; but for what is peculiarly his own, he will be called upon to clear and often shape his own road:--he will be in the condition of Hannibal among the Alps.

--William Wordsworth, "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface"

It can be argued that the above two passages set forth the dominant interpretations of the positions of female and male writers in the literary world of late eighteenths-century England. Whereas the story Robinson tells suggests the marginalization of women writers by a society they cannot control, Wordsworth's narrative implies the need to reject society and stand alone in a new place. Robinson stresses the obscurity of female genius because of the very fact of sex. While there are many women of great intelligence and literary excellence, it is British society that does not allow them "celebrity" based on their genius; their identities are only "their writings." Wordsworth, in contrast, emphasizes the strong individual, a heroic figure, whose path may be "smoothed" by others, but who must finally clear his own way to create the original work of art, "peculiarly his own." Such self-possession--the virile power of the isolated male Genius confronted by the power of nature (J. M. W. Turner's painting of "Hannibal Among the Alps" comes sharply to mind here)--contrasts with the anonymity of the woman writer. The paths of Genius, then, as Robinson and Wordsworth see them, are clearly gendered, and it is relatively easy to read Robinson and Wordsworth as opposites in these terms. The male path is that of the Romantic Author; the female path is disappearance into the text. These gendered narratives of poetic development are well-established now and are in the process of being complicated and challenged as we have moved from a sense of women's obscurity to a concept of two separate traditions, masculine and feminine romanticism.

While the two passages above do demonstrate clearly gendered differences in authorship, on closer reading, however, they also reveal a critical point of connection between the two authors: an investment in the concept of Genius and a shared desire for reputation. Robinson laments that women are not remarked for Genius, not that they do not have it. Instead, they must go to "foreign countries" to have the markers of sex removed from Genius. "Known only by their writings," women writers are excluded from the circles of Genius and are not allowed to have a reputation like that of male authors. Thoughts can be read as Robinson's attempt to give women this reputation by making them apparent in literary history. In that treatise, she examines women's thwarted genius and its social causes in order to recover lost women writers, a project similar to that of today's canon-revising. Robinson clearly saw herself as capable of shaping public literary opinion at the end of her life. In 1799, the year before Lyrical Tales appeared, Robinson was especially concerned with women's social positions, with the problem of female Genius and the British literary woman's reputation specifically. Highly aware of women's different status and herown history as a public woman, Robinson must have felt the need to forge and even reinforce her own reputation, not just as popular writer but as a writer of Genius. That she writes her Memoirs, also in 1799, in addition to two novels (The False Friend in February and The Natural Daughter in August) and many poems published in The Morning Post suggests further anxiety about her authorship, or at least an attempt to take control of her image. As Linda Peterson has shown, in these memoirs Robinson tries "to present herself as an authentic Romantic author" by accommodating myths of the romantic artist as self-authorizing Genius to her specific difficulties of being a female poet. (4) While Robinson shared with all writers, and poets in particular, an understanding of the dispossession of authorship, she also worked under the constraints of female otherness. Aware of her own difference, it became increasingly necessary to assert her similarity to male writers in order not to be forgotten. The only way to affirm her own Genius was to create lines of debt that would link their writing to hers. Lyrical Tales is Robinson's attempt to authorize herself as a woman writer of poetic genius.

I am interested less here in the category of Genius, however, than in Robinson's investment in the making of poetic reputations, including her own, and her sense of a shared genius with other writers. Critically, this interest was not limited to women writers. As the Preface from Sappho to Phaon (1796) implies, Robinson saw herself as defending the Genius poet, embattled by the "ignorant and the powerful" around him who do not understand and even maliciously seek to destroy his writing:

But the Poet's life is one perpetual scene of warfare: he is assailed by envy, stung by malice, and wounded by the fastidious comments of concealed assassins. The more eminently beautiful his compositions are, the larger is the phalanx he has to encounter; for the enemies of genius are multitudinous. (5)

Robinson's interest in giving credit to other recognized writers in this earlier text reveals her sense of herself, even in 1796, as a shaper of reputations. This Preface sets forth her belief that poetry is the highest expression of Genius through an exploration of Sappho's history, whose name doubles for the classical poet and for herself. But the Preface treads a careful line between the specific plight of the woman poet and the general battle all Genius poets, male and female, face. (6) In Robinson's view, all poets share the same experience of dispossession and the same struggle for authority because of their Genius. What is equally striking about Sappho and Phaon is that in addition to establishing Robinson as a defender of poetic genius, her sonnet sequence signifies her own poetic power. Whereas the opening focuses on Sappho's Genius, the actual sonnets rely on...

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