The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord

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Oxford University Press, 10.12.1992 - 296 Seiten
This provocative study of the lives and works of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Gwendolyn Brooks focuses on the historical struggles and differences among and within women writers and among feminists themselves. Erkkila explores the troubled relations women writers experienced with both masculine and feminine literary cultures, arguing that popular feminist views often romanticize and maternalize women writers and their interrelations in ways that effectively reinforce the very gender stereotypes and polarities which initially grounded women's oppression. Studying the multiple race, class, ethnic, cultural, and other locations of women within a particular social field, Erkkila offers a revisionary model of women's literary history that challenges recent feminist theory and practice along with many of our fundamental assumptions about the woman writer, women's writing, and women's literary history. In contrast to the tendency of earlier feminists to heroize literary foremothers and communities of women, Erkkila focuses on the historical struggles and conflicts that make up the history of women poets. Without discounting the historical power of sisterhood, she seeks to reclaim women's literary history as a site of contention, contingency, and ongoing struggle, rather than a separate space of untroubled and essentially cooperative accord among women. Encompassing the various historical significations of "wickedness" as destructive, powerful, playful, witty, mischievous, and not righteous, The Wicked Sisters explores the power struggles and discord that mark both the history of women poets and the history of feminist criticism.

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Inhalt

1 Rethinking Womens Literary History
3
2 Emily Dickinson and the Wicked Sisters
17
3 Dickinson Women Writers and the Marketplace
55
Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore
99
5 Adrienne Rich Emily Dickinson and the Limits of Sisterhood
152
6 Race Black Women Writing and Gwendolyn Brooks
185
Notes
235
Bibliography
245
Index
261
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Seite 153 - A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name — and therefore live — afresh.
Seite 153 - Re-vision— the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction — is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
Seite 122 - ... firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat...
Seite 9 - Taking us by and large, we're a queer lot We women who write poetry. And when you think How few of us there've been, it's queerer still. I wonder what it is that makes us do it, Singles us out to scribble down, man-wise, The fragments of ourselves. Why are we Already mother-creatures, double-bearing, With matrices in body and in brain?
Seite 121 - THE FISH wade through black jade. Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps adjusting the ash-heaps; opening and shutting itself like an injured fan. The barnacles which encrust the side of the wave, cannot hide there for the submerged shafts of the sun...
Seite 72 - Go out in such a process ; many pine To a sick, inodorous light; my own endured: I had relations in the Unseen, and drew The elemental nutriment and heat From nature, as earth feels the sun at nights, Or as a babe sucks surely in the dark.
Seite 74 - Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean And sleep, and dream of something we are not, But would be for your sake. Alas, alas ! This hurts most, this . . that, after all, we are paid The worth of our work, perhaps.
Seite 71 - I could not have defined the change Conversion of the Mind Like Sanctifying in the Soul Is witnessed - not explained 'Twas a Divine Insanity The Danger to be Sane Should I again experience 'Tis Antidote to turn To Tomes of solid Witchcraft Magicians be asleep But Magic - hath an Element Like Deity - to keep...
Seite 59 - She wrote me in October, requesting me to aid the world by my chirrup more. Perhaps she stated it as my duty, I don't distinctly remember, and always burn such letters, so I cannot obtain it now. I replied declining. She did not write to me again— she might have been offended, or perhaps is extricating humanity from some hopeless ditch.
Seite 159 - AM after rising with a wakeful child. I despaired of doing any continuous work at this time. Yet I began to feel that my fragments and scraps had a common consciousness and a common theme, one which I would have been very unwilling to put on paper at an earlier time because I had been taught that poetry should be "universal," which meant, of course, nonfemale.

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