Well I've read the later posts to this thread with interest, but still want to reply here. This surely goes back to Plato's Symposium and the concept that the beautiful is 'begotten' in the soul of the lover by proximity to the beloved, both of them male, since women as mater/materia were considered to be incapable of friendship (Aristotle) and are elided by virtue of their purely physical fecundity. The Muse is a later personification and heterosexualization of this concept of art as a "begetting" within the male artist, though the locus changes from soul to imagination, etc. And it historically has been used to grant these powers only to the male artist, genius, etc.

Best,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
-------Original Message-------
From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 05/05/03 01:55 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Sparrow&Spider, Poem Six

>
> At 11:55 PM -0700 5/4/03, Mark Weiss wrote:
>Alison: I appreciate what you're saying, but I think you exaggerate some.
>Men and women have tended to use the imagery of feminine fertility for
all
>sorts of things for a long time--fecund nature, for that matter Mother
>Nature. The idea of giving birth to art is hardly dependent upon the idea
>of the muse, nor is it necessarily theft.

Well, we'll have to agree to differ on that, Mark.  I am not
exaggerating, but it would take a book to say why.  The idea of
giving birth to art is an idea which was seized on and used by the
Romantics and, yes, it is closely connected to the idea of the Muse,
and it is closely linked to the idea of the exclusively male artist.
(The appropriation of female fertility into a male figure is much
older than the Romantics, but I am talking about that).  I am not
seeking a "victim" status for women.  I am trying to make clear a
particular paradigm, which is quite specific and very well
documented, that has been used against women poets, both in their
lifetimes and afterwards, for some hundreds of years.  The only
reason for it that I can see is to preserve poetry as a male province.

At 11:55 PM -0700 5/4/03, Mark Weiss wrote:
>Mary Shelley doesn't seem to have been
>a victim of the muse. Only idiots buy the ubermensch stuff at this date,
>and not too many of those.  Many are edited out of the picture for a time
>or forever, for a variety of reasons or just because of dumb luck--to
>ascribe this in the case of women to some kind of male conspiracy seems a
>bit over the top, especially in the modern period. Muriel Rukeyser, for
>one, never lacked for major publishers (the editors were almost
invariably
>male). In the wake of the early days of the feminist movement she became
a
>very minor celebrity--at readings (she read in various of my reading
>series' several times in her last decade) a small group of younger women
>>would gather around her--but she had never been invisible. Neither
>>was I think you
>>get my drift. I don't think any one of them worried a lot about the
muse.


You are of course talking about exceptional women; but let's look at
them.  Mary Shelley was Mary Wollstonecroft's daughter, which gives
her a rather unusual heritage for the time: she was unusually aware
of the issues of gender.  Muriel Rukeyser is by no means listed as
one of the "greats" of 20C American poetry (in the way for example
Wallace Stevens or Robert Lowell or any other number of recognisable
names are) despite the fact that the best of her poetic achievement
places her there squarely.   It is said of Rukeyser that her poetry
suffered because she was a single mother; I have often wondered why
her simultaneous persecution as a communist in the McCarthy era is
never considered as a factor in her years of silence.  If a man was
in the same position, a sole father and a persecuted political
activist, the focus would be on the presecution; the emphasis because
she is a woman is to focus on her personal life and to forget to
mention her public life.

HD is considered a minor and often eccentric figure compared to her
contemporaries and suffered from some (to say the least) harshly
dismissive reviews from Randall Jarrell, whom I otherwise admire,
because of the female focus of her later poetry (Trilogy and so on).
HD was most certainly concerned with the idea of the woman poet and
the muse.  Gertrude Stein could be admitted through the paradigm
because she was a "masculine" woman.  Adrienne Rich (who doesn't
compare with Rukeyser, imho, not that it's any disgrace) rose on the
wave of feminism, and much of her work, both poetic and theoretical,
deals with the dilemma of the female subject and its relation to the
male gaze.

Yes, men too suffer from obscurities, but not just because they are
_men_; it is because they embrace a then unfashionable mode of
writing, or some other thing to do with their work.  What I'm talking
about is not a conspiracy so much as a cluster of prejudices or
predelictions which are sadly still extant and in some places still
dominant, and which affect both the perception of women and women's
perception of themselves.

Best

A
--


Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Online
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