Rewriting a new literary history through poetry: temporality and the hidden histories/ figures of Webster and Levy´s female speakers

Abstract

In their genuine interest and preoccupation with time and history, as well with how certain important concepts and figures can be revived and transformed through artistic practise or else fall into oblivious decline, Augusta Webster (1837-1894) and Amy Levy (1861-1889) not only seem to anticipate but also closely identify with the majority of the aesthete and decadent writers of the period. While Webster’s later openly aesthetic poetry, in her mature collections Portraits (1870), A Book of Rhyme (1881) and Mother and Daughter (1895), points towards a more progressive or constructive notion of temporality, Levy’s markedly decadent poetical works, like A Minor Poet (1884) and A London Plane Tree (1889), seem to fully confirm the fin-de-siècle (and queer) sense of exhaustion and pessimism. In spite of their differences, these women poets furthermore attempt to create an alternative literary history, not just by contributing to relevant literary or scholarly journals themselves (as reviewers), and by writing female biographies, but also by disinterring hidden female figures that, through their dramatic discourses, try to inscribe their unwritten, marginal voices in the partial male historical records. In deliberately looking back to the ancient classical and medieval worlds, Webster and Levy bring to the full modern light, of the later Victorian period, the forgotten and dusty images of charismatic figures, such as those of the would-be-scholar Xantippe (the infamous wife of Socrates), the formidable filicide Medea, the biblical prostitute Mary Magdalen, the medieval warrior-saint Joan of Arc, and the mythical enchantress Circe. By literally collecting, carefully dusting, and imaginatively reviving this catalogue of somewhat problematic or transgressive historical women, Webster and Levy try to demonstrate that through artistic practise, i.e. through poetry, certain preconceptions can be, or should be, changed or transformed. Their respective lives (and deaths), furthermore, enhance the notion that time is a particularly important concept for women, not only intrinsically connected with their biological rhythms that either perpetuate or interrupt the courses of life, but also with their innate capacity for remembering and recollecting. In fact, each one of their major speakers deals with a specific time-related dilemma – Xantippe bitterly documents a whole life of servitude to Socrates, Medea is unwilling to let time efface her revengeful feelings for Jason, a dying Magdalen refuses a pious redemptive afterlife while a condemned Joan wants desperately to secure hers, and the lonely Circe faces the torture of a perpetual waiting. Another complementary purpose of the paper is to temporally locate these women poets’ writings, as Webster’s and Levy’s works in general present the additional challenge of classification and periodization to scholars of Aestheticism and Decadence. As poets of two different generations (Levy was twenty years younger than Webster), they may respectively illustrate the specific development of women’s writing in the English fin-de-siècle (from Realism to Symbolism and Aestheticism to Decadence) and, thus, also help situate other women poets of the period.