Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry,1800–1900 by Paula Bernat BennettReview by: Janet GrayLegacy, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2004), pp. 99-100Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679489 .

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and dismissed from our traditions is a disrup tion of purposeful losing, a revolt against mem

ory based on suppression," goes to the heart of

the work of recovery (182). Her subsequent

description of the painstaking labor of "literary detection," and the resulting bibliography of

Blake's work, including more than fifty uncol

lected periodical writings, is extremely valu

able. Farrell has recovered a writer who deserves

our notice; it is now up to us to read and study Blakes body of work and to establish her place in our tradition.

Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry,

1800-1900. By Paula Bernat Bennett. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.264 pp.

$55.oo7$22.50 paper. Reviewed by Janet Gray, The College of New Jersey

In Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets:

An Anthology, Paula Bernat Bennett enriched the

field with discoveries from her extended immer

sion in venues where womens poems most

abundantly went public: the periodicals, many of

them local, specialized, and ephemeral, that

flourished during the rise of American print cul

ture. In Poets in the Public Sphere, Bennett

unfolds her close engagement with a broad selec

tion of these poems, at the same time advancing the critical discussions of poetry, sentimentality,

womens cultural production, and the histories

of gender and race. Setting her readings amidst

the past several decades of debate in cultural the

ory and literary history, Bennett fills her book

with provocative supporting arguments that are

too rich in implications to summarize here,

claiming, for instance, that a failure to value what

'"ordinary' women" published in the nineteenth

century has contributed to a scholarly overem

phasis on the discursive production of women as

passive victims of ideology. Poets in the Public Sphere begins with a

moment that will be familiar to anyone who has

interrogated the gendering of the nineteenth

century American literary canon: the moment

when we face the question of why among women poets we have studied only Emily Dick

inson for so long. In her preface, Bennett tells of

being confronted with this question by an exter

nal reader for her book Emily Dickinson: Woman

Poet (1991)?one of two books (and much

more) that Bennett herself contributed to femi

nist reclamations of Dickinson. Nineteenth

Century American Women Poets and Poets in the

Public Sphere together represent the depth and

breadth of Bennetts approach to the scholarly and critical challenges of this question.

Bennett's response departs from many others

in that she does not centralize Dickinson. Nor

does she take for granted that sentimental and

genteel poetry constitute the remainder of the

field. Much of her reading focuses on works that

had already fallen into neglect well before the

twentieth-century formation of American liter

ature as an academic field, at the hands of nine

teenth-century canonizers such as May, Read,

and Griswold. Her eight chapters, divided into

two parts, first demonstrate how women writ

ing during the decades of high sentimentalism

resisted, subverted, exposed, and exploited its

tropes, then how poets worked their way to an

ironized affect that led to modernism. Bennett

illuminates each of these themes with a variety of

angles of approach, with readings of poets now

well advanced in canonicity, such as Frances

Osgood and Frances Harper, alongside still

almost unknown and anonymous writers. Not

surprisingly, the sixth chapter, "Irony's Edge: Sarah Piatt and the Postbellum Speaker," is the

books centerpiece; Bennett has led the way in

recovering Piatt's remarkable work, and her

finely nuanced readings, particularly of "Giving Back the Flower," show her intimate knowledge

Book Reviews 99

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of Piatt's place in the transition from sentimen

tality to modernism.

Bennett persuasively demonstrates that dif

fering views of sentimentality in recent critical

literature reflect fissures in sentimentality itself as a historical movement. Engaging with debates over the merits of the cultural work of womens

sentimental writing, Bennett highlights the in

justice of holding women fundamentally respon sible for sentimentality. Early in the book she

returns us to The Sorrows of Young Werther, and

women poets' ripostes to Goethe, to locate

domestic sentimentality as a male bourgeois fan

tasy of family, nation, and class, one that tends to

empty "woman" (in the person of Werther's

adored Charlotte). Womens productions of sen

timental discourse then represent their efforts to

negotiate compliance with and resistance to a

male discourse that does not recognize them as

subjects and agents. In the end, I read Poets in the Public Sphere as

a book about nation building, offering as it does a close record of how marginalized voices enter

ed public debate over the vexed intersections

between gender, race, ethnicity, and class amid

the evolving hegemonic stakes of "nation." Ben nett shows how even poets like high sentimen

talist Lydia Huntley Sigourney lost faith in and

ultimately undermined sentimentality as a strat

egy for political change and, decades later, how

the self-assured "new woman" qua modernist

poet, purging the sentimental-as-feminine from

her craft, rejected her foremothers' rhetoric and

wound up with tightly controlled expressiveness and no political practice or history?the same

absences that scholars who brought feminism

into the academy faced later in the twentieth

century. In a text full of new questions?some

perhaps rhetorical, but many that must impel new directions in scholarship?Bennett restores

the songs of a still incomplete emancipatory

project.

Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States. By Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002.279 pp. $34.95.

Reviewed by Pattie Cowell, Colorado State University

In An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America (1992),

political scientist Benjamin Barber points to an

inextricable link between twentieth-century American schools and participatory democ

racy. He goes on to develop a persuasive case

that public education should be education for

citizenship. In Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States, Janet Eldred

and Peter Mortensen explore the historical

roots of this connection between education and

democracy for women. Focusing on the dec

ades between the Revolution and the Civil War,

they ask how liberatory civic rhetoric in the

new nation shaped womens education, espe

cially as that education manifests itself in writ

ing pedagogy and practice. After an introductory chapter that sets his

torical contexts and defines a tradition of civic

rhetoric, Imagining Rhetoric uses fiction, essays, textbooks, and journals to explore the rhetori

cal and pedagogical ideas of Hannah Webster

Foster, Judith Sargent Murray, Mrs. A. J. Graves, Louisa Tuthill, Almira Phelps, and Charlotte

Forten. These six writers shared a belief that

neoclassical civic rhetoric should be a key com

ponent of education generally and womens

education in particular. They saw this libera

tory civic rhetoric as an attempt to foster a full

literacy, one that went beyond the passive

reception of ideas and values to develop female

expression as well.

Despite that common ground, however, these

women had remarkably divergent ideas about

how and why a civic rhetoric should be taught.

Writing in an era of revolutionary nationalism,

ioo legacy: volume 21 no. 1 2004

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