“Exchanging voices, questioning voices"…: dissention and dialogue in the poetry of early Victorian women

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which early Victorian women poets (1820-1850) have communicated through their poetry their feelings of dissention in relation both to patriarchal conventions and the masculine poetic tradition. By creating their own myths and by adopting the multivocal forms of the dialogue with the other, the dramatic monologue and the soliloquy, these female poets have managed to question traditional concepts without directly exposing themselves. For reasons of time and space, we will concentrate our analysis specifically in the poetry of Emily and Anne Brontë, with only occasional references to other contemporary authors. It was perhaps in the Brontës’ private world of Gondal, a mixture of history, literature and imagination, that the idea of the self as a godlike, creative force was born. And it was in that imaginary land that Emily and Anne created an epic that launched an extended dialogue between themselves, their gods and the rest of the world. Emily’s muse is not the silent reflection of herself that Shelley’s and Wordsworth’s is, but a vocal presence that forces her into dialogue with both the masculine poetic tradition and herself. Anne engages Cowper’s and the church’s sentiments and teachings with her own voice, at the same time that she disputes her sister Emily’s unorthodoxy. The sisters use Romantic, elegiac and devotional devices to engender their dialogues as a strategic re-appropriation of traditionally masculine formulae; these are reformed by multiple discourses that question, challenge and reshape patriarchal conventions. Both Emily’s and Anne’s personal and Gondal poems suggest that each sister sustained a complex dialogical relationship with their religious and social upbringing, each other and their personal creativity. It is through both externalised and internal dialogue that they engage and battle the dissenting voices and constant constraints put upon them.