Journal Article

Victorian Women Poets

Witcher, Heather Bozant

2021

Overview

The roundtable participants, responding to their own anger over the congressional hearing in which Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified about her sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh, turn to the nineteenth-century dramatic monologue for its rendering of extreme emotion, psychological intensity, and the poetic \"I.\" In doing so, they offer a new understanding of the dramatic monologue as a genre best suited for social critique and, arguably, as the poetic structure most appropriate for today's feminist struggles. Mew's work has been subject to a critical division \"between poet and speaker, depth and surface, authentic feeling and artificial performance-divisions that have their origins in nineteenth-century reading practices that have shaped twentieth-century (mis)readings\" (p. 361). The Fields use the book-object to collaboratively reimagine Mary Stuart, arguing that affective connection between audience and subject structures history-much like the theatrical performance. Immersion into the historical past through archival research and museumgoing also afforded Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge the opportunity to consider the representation of women's labor in the nineteenth century in their special issue \"Picking Up Threads: Women and Labour in the Nineteenth Century\" (Women's Writing 27, no. 4 [2020]).

• Publisher: West Virginia University Press,West Virginia University Press, University of West Virginia,Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: 19th century / 20th century / Anger / British history, 1815-1914 / British poetry / Feminism / Ford, Christine Blasey / Genre / Mew, Charlotte Mary (1869-1928) / Monologues / Poetics / Poetry / Poets / Sex crimes / Social conflict / Theater / Victorian period / Women / Women poets / Works / Writing