Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege and the Politics of Subjectivity. - book reviews

Style, Spring, 1996 by Timothy Morris

Cynthia Hogue's new book Scheming Women constitutes (in Thomas Kuhn's terms) "normal" feminist literary criticism. It works in the established paradigms of poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and recent feminist theory; its references are familiar; the ground it stakes out is predictable. Hogue treats Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, H.D., and Adrienne Rich. She recuperates the three earlier poets as proto-poststructuralist feminists and sees Rich as a polymorphous deconstructor of the masculine tradition of the monologic lyric.

In her first chapter, Hogue presents a lucid summary of theoretical constructions of the masculine lyric. From Ovid to Whitman to Yeats, the male voice has seized the center stage of lyric discourse and silenced or annulled women's voices. The problem of women writing lyric poetry has troubled poets and theorists alike, to the extent that recent feminist theorists like Julia Kristeva and Teresa de Lauretis have not been able to theorize beyond the restrictions on poetic voice imposed by dominant binaries of gender.

As the reader might predict, at least in Hogue's analyses, canonical women poets have been able to reorder the gender imbalances of the lyric situation. Through negation, Dickinson wrests female territory from the lyric realm. Through quotation, Moore upsets the masculine linguistic orders of the lyric. And through reinscription of myth, H.D. complicates the narrative contexts of lyric tradition, in her Helen in Egypt.

It is easy to see how Rich has embarked on similar projects in her poetic career, and Hogue's chapter on doubled voices and doubled visions in Rich's work is her most convincing argument. The chapter on Rich does not work by means of recuperation; Rich can be read directly as self-conscious participant in feminist projects. The three middle chapters work by deconstructing and reconstructing the poetry of the earlier canonical poets (Dickinson, Moore, H.D.). That is precisely the problem with these chapters, and the central problem of Scheming Women as a whole: their readings are overdetermined by a necessity to show these basically conservative women writers as precursors of Teresa de Lauretis.

Now, gender is certainly a problem in the work of Dickinson, Moore, and H.D., all of whom had complicated relations with feminists and feminisms of their own day. And Hogue is to be commended for rereading these older poets from the position of the feminist cutting edge of our own day, especially the film theory of de Lauretis, Laura Mulvey, and Tania Modleski. But it is in the nature of cutting edges that they tend to find their own traditions, their own primordial flaws and rifts as it were, in the sanctioned high traditions of the past. The canonical monuments of that past - Dickinson, Moore, H.D. and others - become precursors of any possible future, if enough hermeneutic energy is expended on them; in the process we lose a sense of their historical specificity and the distinctiveness of their individual voices.

Perhaps the most interesting moment in Scheming Women is Hogue's quotation of Muriel Rukeyser's poem "Myth," a startling feminist revision of the Oedipus story that locates the hero's tragic flaw in his erasure of the female from his famous answer to the Sphinx's riddle: "Man." More than any other text that Hogue quotes, this Rukeyser poem brilliantly illuminates the potential for feminist re-readings of the masculine lyric tradition. Why not go back to a genuine mid-twentieth century radical, Rukeyser, to find foreshadowings of late-century theory? The light no sooner goes on, however, than it is extinguished in tenebrous critical exercises performed on texts by another conflicted, canonical conservative: Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Hogue's use of Rukeyser's "Myth" sets one wondering: wouldn't Scheming Women be far more provocative and far less predictable if its four central authors were Sarah Piatt, Muriel Rukeyser, Genevieve Taggard, and Ai? (Or many other quartets a reader might put together from the margins of the canon.) Yet the realist in one counter-wonders if such a manuscript would draw any interest from a university press. Scheming Women highlights an institutional, structural problem in academic criticism that feminist theory shows little tendency, even in the mid-1990s, of being able to overcome: disciplinary discussion of canonical authors leads to more and more disciplinary discussion of the same canonical authors.

The problem is not just with university presses, of course; Hogue's 1990 Arizona dissertation was on feminine subjectivity in Dickinson, Moore, and H.D., and doctoral programs typically channel students' work toward the subjects that job search committees will recognize as certifiably major. At every point, scholars' interests, and the material they teach their students, is constrained by canonical forces that respond only slowly - whatever the fears of the culture warriors - to various calls for upsetting the canon.

There is nothing wrong with reading Marianne Moore, nor is there anything seriously wrong with Scheming Women. It is simply an ordinary book. Although Hogue is herself a poet, her language here is the ordinary and somewhat formulaic idiom of the academic book after poststructuralism, with its brackets, parentheses, and puns. One might recommend this book to a graduate student interested in the current state of feminist criticism. Advanced undergraduates looking for a crystallization of their thoughts about the male language of lyric might find Hogue's first chapter useful; on the other hand, they might be put off by its theoretical phrasing. I would not, despite its advertised concerns with the strategies of poetic language, recommend this book to most readers of Style. Those wary of feminist theory will remain just as wary, and those sympathetic to feminist criticism will simply not learn anything new here.