Erin McClamroch's Awesome Essay

Erin McClamroch

Foss

Channel Firing

April 21, 2011

“Michael Field”(s)

The stigmas in place for both men and women in the Victorian Era created a caste like structure to society, enforced by others that were born and bred into these ideals. As stated in the Longman Anthology, “most ladies and gentlemen endeavored to conform to the ideology of separate spheres that dominated Victorian thinking about gender” (Damrose and Dettmar 1520). These general spheres were defined as female being resigned to the domestic, or home, sphere and the men being privileged to the public sphere. Some of the strictest examples of these spheres are shown in the poetry and literature of this period, where women as authors were almost completely forbidden. In some cases, to forego these boundaries, women authors would venture to publish poetry under pseudonyms of men in order to gain acceptance and acknowledgement of their poetic abilities. By tapping into the controversies of gender in their poem “Second Thoughts” Michael Field(s) have justly paid their dues to have this specific poem introduced into the British Victorian Literature canon. Most readers of the Victorian Era would read the poem as having a male narrator which leads to one distinct reading, but once you find out that the author of this poem was one of two women known as “Michael Field” it leads the reader to a completely different and more progressive reading.

“Michael Field” was a joint venture of two female poets Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, who in their lifetime were not only family member but were also lovers. This fact was not known to the public until after their death, and even though this poem was published posthumously it probably still would have been initially read as a male narrator. In reality the poem under discussion is said, by the footnotes, to be about Cooper from the perspective of Bradley (Blain 228). If the assertion that the speaker of the poem is a male then one could read the poem as a whole as keeping the woman of the subject that is referred to as “her” in the first line as the poem contained to the private sphere of Durdans, the home that Bradley and Cooper inhabited (Blain 228). Furthermore, the woman subject fits the stereotype of the time of women being obsessed with fashion and little else as she is described wearing a typical fashion of the time in line 12 “A face in a border of fox’s fur” as many wore the whole pelts of hunted animals. This compounds with her silence throughout the piece and her physical description in line 24-26 with “…the love at her lips, combined / To shew me what folly it were to miss / A face with a thousand things to say.” This pathetic fallacy of her face having things to say, but not allowing these things to be said shows how little respect the narrator has for the woman as an individual without thoughts that would be worthwhile to share with the audience. Though it would seem that the fact that the narrator finally comes to the conclusion in lines 29-30 “not for a single day / Could I leave her! I stayed behind”, in truth it shows how little the narrator trusts the woman on her own to fend for herself.

On the other hand, if the poem is read from the viewpoint of a modern reader who is equipped with the knowledge that “Michael Field” is not a man, but two women it would lead to a very different reading. Looking at line 9 of the description of how the narrator “…lifted her face in my hands to kiss” it shows the progressive idea of romantic love between two women that is shown unabashedly. If one were to pair that with lines 24-26 that describe “the love at her lips, combined / To shew me what folly it were to miss / A face with such a thousand things to say” one would be painted a picture of the narrator as one who deeply cares about both the physical appearance of her lover and the emotional and intellectual prowess that are hidden below the exterior. Looking at the fashion-minded argument that men have about women from the eyes of a woman makes one read line 12 “A face in a border of fox’s fur” as a more progressive move made by the subject since, as noted in the footnotes, at the time a fox was viewed as a vermin and thus would not have been seen as fashionable to wear (Blain 228). This representation of her daring moves involving, but not limited to, having such a blatant relationship with another woman that has a familial bond shows how different Cooper was in her thought and her action. This was then translated into an extreme admiration by Bradley for her niece’s bravery in a time of such strict moral and social codes.

When modern readers endeavor into a piece of literature, they are fortunate enough to have footnotes and background information for most of the pieces that help them in understanding and interpreting the work. Readers in the Victorian Era were rarely given many, if any footnotes that were not from the author and were left to use their own judgments to interpret the work. In this case, it would have meant that most people would have read this poem as a man talking about a woman that he is quite enamored with when in reality it is a deeply emotional and sensual poem from one woman to another. In a normal Victorian concept it fits the mold of how men would view a woman as an angel of the house. However, when one views this poem in its true form it shows a very new way of viewing a homoerotic love that defined a couple of intellectual and famous, under their pen-name, poets and deserves a spot in the British Victorian Literature’s canon.

.