Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry

By Jennifer Putzi

In Fair Copy Jennifer Putzi studies the composition, publication, and circulation of American women's poetry in the antebellum United States. In opposition to a traditional scholarly emphasis on originality and individuality, or a recovery method centered on author-based interventions, Putzi proposes a theory and methodology of relational poetics: focusing on poetry written by working-class and African American women poets, she demonstrates how an emphasis on relationships between and among people and texts shaped the poems that women wrote, the avenues they took to gain access to print, and the way their poems functioned within a variety of print cultures. Yet it is their very relationality which has led to these poems and the poets who published them being written out of literary history. Fair Copy models a radical reading and recovery of this work in a way that will redirect the study of nineteenth-century American women's poetry.

Beginning with Lydia Huntley Sigourney and ending with Elizabeth Akers Allen and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Putzi argues that relational practices like imitation, community, and collaboration distinguished the poetry of antebellum American women, especially those whose access to print was mediated by class or race. To demonstrate this point, she recovers poetry by the "factory girls" of the Lowell Offering, African American poet Sarah Forten, and domestic servant Maria James, whose volume Wales, and Other Poems was published in 1839. Putzi's work reveals a careful navigation of the path to print for each of these writers, as well as a fierce claim to poetry and all that it represented in the antebellum United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Oct 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812298093

Book preview

Fair Copy

MATERIAL TEXTS

Series Editors

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Fair Copy

Relational Poetics and Antebellum

American Women’s Poetry

Jennifer Putzi

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Putzi, Jennifer, author.

Title: Fair copy : relational poetics and antebellum American women’s poetry / Jennifer Putzi.

Other titles: Material texts.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] |

Series: Material texts | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021003607 | ISBN 9780812253467 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. | American poetry—19th century—History and criticism. | Authorship—Social aspects—United States—History—19th century. | Women and literature—United States—History—19th century. | Literature and society—United States—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC PS149 .P88 2021 | DDC 811/.3099287—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003607

To Alex, Desirée, Faith, and Theresa

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. The American Hemans: Lydia Sigourney’s Relational Poetics

Chapter 2. "The Songs Which All Can Sing": Imitation and Working Women’s Poetry in the Lowell Offering

Chapter 3. My Country: Communal Authorship and Citizenship in Sarah Louisa Forten’s Liberator Poems

Chapter 4. What Is Poetry?: Class, Collaboration, and the Making of Wales, and Other Poems

Chapter 5. Some Queer Freak of Taste: Relational Poetics and Literary Proprietorship in the Rock Me to Sleep Controversy

Conclusion. Recovering the Unremarkable

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I write these acknowledgments in the middle of a pandemic, which means that I may not see many of the people I mention here for some time. I won’t go to the archives again for months or even years. And academic conferences— at least in person—are, for the moment, a thing of the past. This absence of normality makes me especially grateful for all that these individuals and institutions have meant to me while writing Fair Copy.

I’ve been working on this book for so many years that I’m sure I will leave out people who have provided encouragement, feedback, and friendship along the way. Some (but certainly not all) of these people are Liz Barnes, Victoria Castillo, Melanie Dawson, Claire McKinney, Kathy McKinnon, Francesca Sawaya, Sara Scott, Helis Sikk, Claudia Stokes, Susan Tomlinson, and Jennifer Tuttle. I am incredibly lucky to work in supportive environments in both the English Department and the Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies Program at William & Mary and I thank Liz Losh, Gul Ozyegin, and Suzanne Raitt for their aid and leadership. My students at William & Mary deserve to be singled out: they are delightfully smart and funny and hardworking and have worked through the ideas in this book with me without even knowing it. My honors students—Maddie Benjamin, Sarah Klotz, Nora Pace, Sarah Schuster, and Robin Smith—have provided invaluable practical and intellectual assistance, and I believe I have learned as much from them as they have learned from me.

My own teachers, of course, set the stage for all of this. Nancy Huse introduced me to American women’s literature via Margaret Fuller, whose assertion that women could be sea captains in nineteenth-century America shocked and delighted me. In graduate school, Sharon Harris directed me to read nineteenth-century American women’s poetry (although she couldn’t have known then that I would write a book about it). She taught me how to do research, how to write a book, how to mentor students, and how to operate in the world of academia in a professional and ethical manner. I am forever grateful to her.

The Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW), which Sharon Harris founded, has been central to the development of this book. Along with Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, for which I’ve been an author, consultant, book review editor, and now coeditor, SSAWW has provided a supportive and nurturing environment for me and many other feminist scholars since its inception in 2000. In recent years, I’ve found another home at Rare Book School (RBS), at the University of Virginia, where Michael Winship, Jim Green, and Peter Stallybrass have expanded my thinking about books and print culture. Thank you to RBS for their high-quality programming, both in the normal world and especially during the pandemic.

I’ve presented portions of this book and related material over the years at conferences organized by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (C19), and Historical Poetics. I am grateful to these organizations for providing these opportunities for valuable feedback and intellectual exchange. I am also exceedingly grateful to a number of individuals whom I’ve met at these conferences and whose work has helped shape Fair Copy. The field of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry is quite small, but incredibly vibrant and exciting, and the work of these scholars has challenged me to make this book better. They include Paula Bernat Bennett, Michael Cohen, Eric Gardner, Virginia Jackson, Mary Louise Kete, Karen Kilcup, Kerry Larson, Mary Loeffelholz, Tricia Lootens, Meredith McGill, Elizabeth Petrino, Yopie Prins, Eliza Richards, and Angela Sorby.

This book only made sense to me when I was elbow-deep in the letters of Elizabeth Akers Allen at Colby College, and that led me to other archives at other libraries. When I couldn’t get to a library, I emailed or called a librarian begging for a photocopy or a scan, and they nearly always complied. I am exceedingly grateful to Pat Burdick at Colby College Special Collections in Waterville, Maine; Frances Lyons, Reference Archivist at the Drew University Methodist Library and Special Collections in Madison, New Jersey; and all of the librarians at William & Mary’s Special Collections Research Center. I also received invaluable assistance from the Maine Women Writers Collection at the University of New England in Portland, Maine; the Maine Historical Society, also in Portland; Special Collections and Archives at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut; and the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford.

For financial assistance in the researching and writing of this book, I am grateful to William & Mary, which, through a series of grants and awards, made it possible for me to visit archives and find time for research and writing. I’m particularly grateful to Joe J. Plumeri and Jennifer and Devin Murphy for funding awards that support Humanities scholars at William & Mary.

Michael Cohen and Eliza Richards read this manuscript for the University of Pennsylvania Press and provided generous and invaluable feedback. From the moment I began Fair Copy, my dream was to publish it in the Material Texts Series, and these readers helped me write a book that deserved inclusion there. Thank you so much. My editor, Jerry Singerman, has been nothing but supportive throughout this process. He has followed up with readers, answered questions, been understanding when he had to be, and generally made me feel like my book was worth the work that it would take to bring it out. I needed that.

My greatest thanks go to Sam, Charley, and Simon. (And, as Charley would no doubt remind me, our pets: Emily, Vinnie, Onyx, and Jet.) They have lived with me and loved me throughout the writing of this book—the highs and the lows. Charley and Sam are amazing kids: smart, creative, and hilariously funny. I am constantly impressed with how fiercely themselves they are. All of this—especially the humor—is probably due to their incredible father and my partner, Simon Joyce. Simon has taken charge of the kids so I could do research and write. He has read every word of this book several times and has talked over each chapter with me endlessly. People always ask me what it is like to have my partner in the same profession, the same building, the office next door, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. He is my best friend and I love him.

This book is dedicated to Alex Socarides, Desirée Henderson, Faith Barrett, and Theresa Strouth Gaul. These women have generously read most if not all of this book, providing feedback and encouragement, and even writing parts of the introduction when I couldn’t figure out what the hell I was doing or why it mattered. They have helped me navigate my life and career in a way that makes sense to me, putting relationships of all kinds at the center while also embracing and sharing my love for what I do. Most importantly, they have been my friends. It is not an exaggeration to say that this book would not have been written without them.

Parts of Chapter 1 are taken from Remodeling the Kitchen in Parnassus: Lydia Sigourney’s Poetics of Collaboration, and are reprinted from Lydia Sigourney: Critical Essays and Cultural Views. Copyright © 2018 by the University of Massachusetts Press. Chapter 2 is a revision of "Poets of the Loom, Spinners of Verse: Working-Class Women’s Poetry and the Lowell Offering," which was originally published in A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry. Copyright 2017 by Cambridge University Press. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. Chapter 5 is a revision of ‘Some queer freak of taste’: Gender, Authorship, and the ‘Rock Me to Sleep’ Controversy, which was originally published in American Literature, 88, no. 4, pp. 769–95. © 2012, Duke University Press. Republished by permission. www.dukeupress.edu.

INTRODUCTION

Fair Copy is a study of the composition, publication, and circulation of American women’s poetry in the antebellum United States. In opposition to a traditional scholarly emphasis on originality and individuality, as well as a practice of recovery centered on author-based interventions, I propose a theory and methodology of relational poetics—a theory that I argue shaped the work of antebellum American women poets, and a methodology derived from the archive that allows us to engage in the radical recovery of antebellum American women’s poetry as it was mediated by and contextualized in its relationships with print culture. A nineteenth-century relational poetics privileges poems over poets, and publics—of texts, readers, and writers—over individuals. Imitation, community, and collaboration are central to a relational poetics—in poems themselves, in the avenues women poets take to gain access to print, and in the way their poems function within a variety of print cultural contexts.¹

In articulating and developing a theory and methodology of relational poetics, I take my cue from the poems themselves—particularly from the many poems by antebellum women poets that we have not read (or have not read very well). In the last thirty years, feminist literary scholars have recovered and reappraised the work of nineteenth-century American women poets, turning to previously neglected primary sources to suggest that our sense of American literary history over the past century has been, in fact, incomplete and at times simply inaccurate.² Even after approximately three decades of recovery, however, efforts remain largely focused on a handful of important figures—namely, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Emily Dickinson, and Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt—with occasional attention paid to other writers. All four wrote voluminous amounts of poetry over their lifetimes and, with the important exception of Dickinson, published their work broadly in a number of different kinds of periodical venues as well as in book form. Scholarship on these writers has allowed us to think in important ways about women’s poetic authorship across the nineteenth century—the family and educational background necessary to authorship, for example, as well as the range of subjects they were able to take up and the reception of their work by critics and other readers.

However, the majority of poems written and published by women in the nineteenth century were not by poets like these and were never collected as evidence of the existence of an author. They were composed by women who may not have appeared in print before, although they likely circulated manuscript poetry; who wrote poems about familial and local occasions; and who saw in the work of published women poets a model for their own verses. In many cases, their marginal status, either as working women or as women of color, meant that their access to print was limited, with publication mediated by a number of actors including employers, patrons, editors, printers, and even readers. Investigating the work of these poets and their positioning in a network of relationships, both personal and textual, leads to a more nuanced understanding of antebellum American women’s poetry and a way of engaging this body of work that does not simply frame it as worth noting (Wow! Factory operatives wrote poetry!) but not worth reading (But it was entirely conventional and therefore uninteresting). The poetry of working women is particularly productive in this regard, as their process of accessing print was notable enough that it left archival and paratextual traces—in prefaces to books, in editorial commentary, in letters, in book reviews, in the poems themselves. Recovering this work and reading it, then, necessitates a method that combines the best of literary studies, book history and print cultural studies, and feminist studies. It also requires successive deep dives into individual case studies of poets, poems, periodicals, and books, which together point to the pervasiveness and power of relational poetics. To demonstrate both the theory and the methodology of relational poetics, then, I take as my first subject Charlotte Fillebrown Jerauld (Figure 1), a working-class poet who has not received any scholarly attention and is not included in any recent anthology of American women’s poetry.³ To many twenty-firstcentury readers, Jerauld’s poems would likely be considered conventional, imitative, and completely indistinguishable from the work of other antebellum women poets, and, for the most part, I would not argue with that assessment. This, they might go on to say, is precisely why she hasn’t been regarded as an individual author worthy of recovery. But rather than seeing this as cause for dismissal, I ask, how did this happen? What did being a fair copy of other women poets offer to Jerauld? To her editors and publishers? To her readers? How are Jerauld’s authorial identity and the poems composed by that author shaped by the print cultural contexts in which she engaged? And what critical frameworks do we use to encounter the work of such a poet in a meaningful way?

Figure 1. Charlotte Fillebrown Jerauld as author. Frontispiece, Poetry and Prose by Mrs. Charlotte A. Jerauld with a Memoir by Henry Bacon (Philadelphia: A. Tompkins, 1850). Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

I recognize the irony in introducing this approach with a case study of an individual poet: How can authorship be decentered if projects like this one take up the author as the object of study? Yet in what follows in this introduction, I am interested in what happens when authorship is just one approach among many. Here and throughout Fair Copy, I investigate the intersections and engagements between authors and poems, genres, publication strategies, and venues. I don’t disregard the question of who wrote which poem: as a feminist, I share the concerns of scholars who regard the popularity of the death of the author as at least in part a conservative response to the canon wars of the late twentieth century. As Cheryl Walker stated in 1990, to erase a woman poet as the author of her poems in favor of an abstract indeterminacy is an act of oppression.⁴ Yet just as Walker opposed the positioning of the author as the determining factor in all readings of the text, I propose that an exclusive focus on authors can prevent us from thinking about how texts really got written, read, published, and circulated in nineteenth-century America. While the erasure of women poets was no less an act of oppression in the antebellum period than it was in 1990 (and still is today), scholars have to resist the lure of anachronism and recognize that poetic authorship was configured very differently in the antebellum period than it is today. Fair Copy is intended to reposition the author in the recovery of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, not to erase her or the literary, political, or social cultures that surrounded her.

To recover a poet like Jerauld, then, or even to read her work means reconstructing her access to print. In 1850, the Reverend Henry Bacon, pastor of the Universalist Church of the Messiah in Philadelphia, published Poetry and Prose by Mrs. Charlotte A. Jerauld with a Memoir by Henry Bacon. The editor of The Rose of Sharon, a Universalist annual, and the monthly Universalist and Ladies’ Repository, Bacon had published Jerauld’s poetry and prose for three years before her death at the age of twenty-five in August 1845, immediately following the birth (and death) of her first child. As he explains in the Memoir, his initial encounter with Jerauld’s work when she was a young, unmarried woman made him feel that a new star had dawned.⁵ This discovery was especially surprising to the editor because, at the time of her first submission to the Ladies’ Repository, Jerauld was a laborer in a book bindery. Bacon explains,

Charlotte’s school-days were ended when she was at the age of fourteen, and were followed by toil-days, for we find her in the bindery at the age of fifteen. Effectually did she keep herself free from the foolish whims of a large class of minds, that imagine labor and literary pursuits are uncongenial. Her employment was folding and gathering, and like labors, in a book-bindery. Her mind thought, while her hands were busied; and she often kept a pencil and paper near her. A portion of her regular labor was in connection with the Ladies’ Repository, a literary and religious monthly of the Universalist denomination; and she thus had courage kindled to attempt something for the press, as she became familiar with the merits of some articles which, doubtless, she felt she could equal, and with others that made her aspire after like excellence. (29)⁶

Bacon represents Jerauld as both a star, a natural talent whose creativity will not be stifled by manual labor, and as a representative of a larger rule—that labor and literary pursuits are, in fact, congenial. As she folds the sheets of paper and gathers the resulting signatures into what will become the pages of the periodical (Figure 2), Jerauld is said to be composing poems in her head, which she then writes down when she has a moment to spare from her labor.

A more detailed description of the relationship between Jerauld’s labor as a poet and her labor as a bindery-girl is provided in Bacon’s explanation of how the identity of Charlotte, who had already contributed several pieces to the Repository under this name, was revealed (31). Bacon reports that Abel Tompkins, the publisher of the magazine, was disappointed to find that a hymn in honor of the anniversary of a charitable society he had hoped to print was not ready. Passing through the bindery, he jestingly asked a group of workers, ‘Why can’t you write me a hymn?’ One of them replied, ‘How long a time will you give us?’ ‘Till twelve o’clock,’ was the answer, the speaker not imagining, in the least, that there was any seriousness in the question, as he had little acquaintance with them. When the bindery-girls left for the noon repast, one of them came into his store, and brought a paper, with a hymn penciled on it, and timidly offered it for acceptance for the occasion required. She had composed it while at work, and, verse after verse, she had committed it to paper (30). While Bacon implies that Tompkins’s jest is due to his lack of familiarity with the bindery-girls, Tompkins is clearly doubting the girls’ ability to write a hymn that merits publication. In his request for the poem by noon, he might also be noting that these girls have the work of the bindery to do, not the work of poetry. Indeed, among the group of undifferentiated girls, Jerauld is the only one of them who takes up Tompkins’s challenge. Having handled and read the pages of the Repository in the course of her labor in the bindery, she is able to swiftly produce a poem that not only is worthy of appearing there but does not stand out as significantly different from the other poems in the periodical. Contrary to our critical expectations about authorship and literary originality, it is this achievement that makes her a star and merits her publication.⁷ Her intimacy with and involvement in the production of print is, then, regarded as central to her work as a poet, with the repetitive operations of ‘folding and gathering’ mirroring the way in which, verse after verse, Jerauld’s poem is committed … to paper.

Figure 2. Women laborers in a book bindery. From Horace Greeley et al., The Great Industries of the United States (Hartford, CT: J. B. Burr & Hyde, 1872). Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

Matching the handwriting of the manuscript hymn to that of other submissions by Charlotte, Tompkins and Bacon are able to determine that they are written by the same person: Charlotte Fillebrown.⁸ It is, in part, Charlotte’s handwriting that indicates to Bacon the suitability of her work for print: The handwriting is beautiful, he says of a manuscript poem written when Jerauld was thirteen. The punctuation marks are as handsome as though made with type; and this excellence she preserved through her whole life, in her letters, as in the ‘copy’ for the printer (26). In Bacon’s analysis of Jerauld’s handwriting, the poet appears almost machine-like, a printing press loaded with movable type that is reproduced on the handwritten page and then rendered into print.⁹ Indeed, Jerauld’s laboring body is represented as a superbly functioning machine. Even after she is introduced in the pages of the Repository as a poet, Bacon tells us, Her hand continued to fold the printed sheets for the reader which contained the good thoughts her hand had written (34). Reduced to a single hand here, Jerauld manages every stage of the printing process from the beginning (writing the words that will form the poem) to the middle (setting the type for printing) and finally, to the end (folding the printed sheets that will find their way into the reader’s hands).

Immersed in the world of print and printing technology, surrounded by the pages of the Repository that she reads, folds, gathers, and perhaps sews together, Jerauld is retroactively represented as perfectly suited to producing poems appropriate to the social relations and literary conventions constructed and maintained by the periodical. The hymn that Tompkins solicits, which is reprinted in Bacon’s Poetry and Prose by Mrs. Charlotte A. Jerauld as Charity Hymn, serves as just one example of her success in this regard. Written from the point of view of the members of the charitable society, the hymn insists that Our table is with plenty spread and asks God to touch each selfish heart, / And bid it with compassion glow!

And let the offering be pure;

Then shall it meet its own reward!

What cheerfully we give the poor

Is but a loan to thee, oh Lord!¹⁰

The recipients of charity are identified only as poor in the poem, but Jerauld makes a conventional sentimental appeal to her readers’ love of children and sympathy for the suffering, asking them to make use of their hands even as she uses hers to compose the poem and fold the pages of the periodical: And shall WE hear a brother’s moan, she asks, And stretch not forth a hand to aid? (133). Here Jerauld, who works in the bindery to support herself and her widowed mother, assumes the collective we of the middle-class charitable lady as well as the voice of religious authority inherent to the hymn genre.¹¹ While Tompkins and Bacon clearly delight in knowing who wrote the Charity Hymn for the Ladies’ Repository as well as the other poems signed Charlotte, authorship here is generated in and for a network of people, texts, and technologies that confound any notion of Jerauld as originating genius or the poem as an expression of individual subjectivity.¹²

I begin with this reading of Jerauld’s emergence as a poet to point to the central argument of Fair Copy: that specific gendered relations to the conditions of composition, publication, and circulation shape American women’s poetry and poetics, as well as the varied authorial stances they assume in their engagements with the public. In a series of case studies, I attempt to restore the specificity of women poets’ negotiation of the terms of authorship, while also proposing that a common relational poetics—with an emphasis on imitation, collaboration, and community—arose from these poets’ engagements with a variety of print-cultural contexts. I propose that the particulars of women’s access to print are not separate from the poems they produce: the process of publication shapes poetics and vice versa. While it is true that women poets were, as Augusta Rohrbach notes of nineteenth-century American women writers more broadly, much maligned and constricted … by reigning literary tastes mediated through and negotiated by a male dominated publishing business, I argue that it is simplistic to read women’s writing across the board as a concession to such gatekeepers.¹³ Instead, I propose that particular poems, series of poems (published, for example, in a single periodical or under the same pseudonym), or books of poems can be read through a framework of relationality as creative compromises or collaborations with a number of agents in the process of publication.

My notion of relational poetics is informed by scholars of book history who insist, along with Michael Winship, that no published text, literary or otherwise, exists in isolation: rather, it is the collaborative effort of many people—authors and editors, papermakers and printers, publishers and readers, among others—and it acts as a political force in the social and cultural worlds of these historical collaborators.¹⁴ Meredith McGill has lamented the paucity of book history scholarship devoted to American poetry … and the lack of attention given to print culture by scholars of American poetry. The concerns of book history, she explains, are generally treated as external to histories of poetic form, which continue to be told as a set of relations between and among texts, and not books, institutions, practices, markets, systems of exchange, or media.¹⁵ Her own work on the poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper has influentially demonstrated that a lack of attention to what she calls format has led to a decontextualized, even depoliticized reading of Harper’s antebellum political writing.¹⁶ Virginia Jackson points to one reason behind the artificial distinction made between book history and poetic form, arguing that the twentieth-century abstraction of poetry from its literary historical context has resulted in the modern invention of the lyric as the one genre … independent of social contingency…. By the early nineteenth century, poetry had never before been so dependent on the mediating hands of the editors and reviewers who managed the print public sphere, yet in this period an idea of the lyric as ideally unmediated by those hands or those readers began to emerge and is still very much with us.¹⁷ This privileging of the lyric went hand in hand with a dismissal of the imitative, the collaborative, and the communal, as can be seen in John Stuart Mills’s assertion in Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties that lyric poetry … is … more imminently and peculiarly poetry than any other: it is the poetry most natural to a really poetic temperament, and least capable of being successfully imitated by one not so endowed by nature.¹⁸ If lyric is imagined as ideally unmediated, then it follows that poetry written by those Mills calls not so endowed by nature is imagined to be mediated by the hands of other actors in the process of publication (832). It is this body of work that interests me in Fair Copy. What sort of poetry did these poets produce, if not the kind that is more imminently and peculiarly poetry? What part did the mediating hands of … editors and other actors play? How do we read these poems? And what does authorship look like in this differently configured, socially contingent, emphatically print culture?

The imitative, the collaborative, and the communal: these are all qualities that have, until recently, been critically disparaged and regarded as antithetical to our understanding of antebellum American literature. Yet recent scholarly interest in what Claudia Stokes has called literary unoriginality has demonstrated another way of thinking about the period that was once defined by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s cry for an original relation to the universe.¹⁹ Several recent studies—namely, those by William Huntting Howell and Ezra Tawil—have attempted to revalue the imitative in early American and antebellum literature, suggesting that imitation—or the arts of dependence, as Howell would have it—was central to the work of individual artists such as Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown, and Herman Melville, and to the larger cultural project of American literature.²⁰ Similarly, Alexandra Socarides argues that women poets’ use of conventions in their work should be seen as neither static or silencing, but as integral parts of the complicated structures, strategies, and poses almost ubiquitously employed by these poets.²¹ Rather than indicating a lack of talent or imagination, the use of conventions indicates women poets’ active participation in larger literary, familial, cultural, and historical movements (28). Kerry Larson’s work on Lydia Sigourney also points to an emphasis on the collective rather than the individual. He suggests that, rather than seeking a unique, personalized voice, American literary nationalists saw a storehouse of objects, each stamped … with readily identified and commonly shared emotions as the building blocks of an American literature.²² Taking his cue from Theo Davis’s thinking about theories of associationism, Larson reads literary nationalists as privileging a mode of authorship that resists dividing the world between originators and receivers, creators and respondents (79).²³ Thus the author serves as proxy for the reader, render[ing] the difference between authors and readers hard to see (79).

Taken together, these scholars resist the narrowing of our critical attention to the solitary author for whom, as Emerson also said, imitation is suicide, rejecting the privileging of subjectivity and emphasizing instead relationships between and among authors, texts, editors, readers, and critics.²⁴ Far from being suicide, I argue in this study, a relational poetics provided access to print that might have otherwise been denied the majority of women poets published in the antebellum United States. In using the title Fair Copy, then, I allude not only to the polished, handwritten text of a poem that an author provided her editor or publisher but to the fairness of copying itself in the antebellum United States—particularly for the fairer sex. The title also points to the way in which women poets and their poems serve as copies of one another. In this paradigm, poets replicate the same subject matter, conventions, and genres in their work, and publish in the same (or similar) venues. Authorship is only one factor in readers’ engagement with poems.

I am not suggesting that male poets did not imitate other poets, collaborate with editors and other agents in the process of publication, or write out of and for particular communities. Work by Eliza Richards and, more recently, Colin Wells indicates that although literary history has privileged a rhetoric of originality in regards to poetry by American men, male poets not only consciously imitated the work of others but orient[ed the] meaning [of their work] outward from the individual poem to other literary and discursive utterances circulating at the same moment.²⁵ Scholars have either neglected this work in favor of poems and poets who more efficiently project a sense of literary independence or recuperated for male poets the powers of innovation and the force of genius.²⁶ As Richards points out, this effaces the lateral models of creation deployed by many women poets that are less concerned with the preservation of names and the quest for literary authority (22). Throughout Fair Copy, I argue that the realities of antebellum print culture combined with cultural perceptions of women’s nature to render women poets perfectly suited to certain kinds of publication and circulation. Moreover, as Susan S. Williams says of her own study of nineteenth-century American women authors, the consideration of women’s authorship as a distinct, if not exclusive category is necessary because it existed as such in the nineteenth century, with critics, authors, and readers thinking differently about women authors than they did about male authors.²⁷ While women’s poetry was often published in periodicals alongside that of men, it was also reviewed and collected separately, as is evidenced most clearly in the publication of three anthologies of American women’s poetry in quick succession in 1848 and 1849: Caroline May’s The American Female Poets (1848), Thomas Buchanan Read’s The Female Poets of America (1849), and Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s The Female Poets of America (1849). Simply put, in the antebellum United States, women poets were read, first and foremost, as women.²⁸

Despite decades of scholarly recovery of and research on nineteenth-century