Table Of ContentTHE POSTHUMOUS VOICE IN
WOMEN’S WRITING FROM
MARY SHELLEY TO SYLVIA PLATH
Lon E. Ussery
in memoriam
The Posthumous Voice in
Women’s Writing from
Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath
CLAIRE RAYMOND
First published 2006 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright © Claire Raymond 2006
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1988, to be identifi ed as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Raymond, Claire
The posthumous voice in women’s writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath
1.English fi ction – Women authors – History and criticism 2.Voice in literature 3.Dead
in literature 4.English fi ction – 19th century – History and criticism 5.American poetry
–Women authors – History and criticism
I.Title
823’.00923
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Raymond, Claire.
The posthumous voice in women’s writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath / by Claire
Raymond.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-7546-5535-0 (alk. paper)
1. English fi ction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Women and literature—
England—History. 3. American poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Women
and literature —United States—History. 5. Death in literature. 6. Feminism in literature.
I. Title.
PR830.W6R38 2006
820.9’9287--dc22
2005033635
ISBN13: 978-0-7546-5535-0 (hbk)
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Permissions vii
Introduction 1
1 Spectral Gardens: Pastoral Tradition and Feminine Self-Elegy 31
2 Lethe’s Shore: Mary Shelley’s Sacred Horror 69
3 Eating Eternally Deeper: The Posthumous Voice in Wuthering Heights 95
4 Emily Dickinson as the Unnamed, Buried Child 127
5 Rossetti’s Late Suitors: The Death Lyrics and the Speaking Body 169
6 Hooks and Ladders: Sylvia Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher” 187
Conclusion 219
Bibliography 235
Index 249
Acknowledgments
At the inception of this book, when it was a dissertation, my dissertation advisor
and committee at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York were
unusually inspirational and supportive. Professors Meena Alexander, Anne
Humpherys, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Joseph Wittreich were exemplary mentors,
and I am most grateful to them.
Professors Anne Humpherys and Wayne Koestenbaum encouraged me to develop
the dissertation into a book, and for their continuing help I am so thankful. Anne
also offered practical advice as I developed the book, for which I am deeply
appreciative.
I am grateful to Ann Donahue, of Ashgate, for her patient and sustained support of
this project.
The librarians of Rockport Public Library in Rockport, Maine, were inimitable in
their support of my research, turning a small-town library into a university library
through their assiduous application of interlibrary loans. Alison Vander Zanden
helped at Bates College Library.
Ruth Homrighaus helped to scrupulously prepare the manuscript.
Thanks also to my husband, Mark Raymond, who assisted with footnotes, and to
my little son, Yanni, who went to preschool at a tender age so that I might have a
few mornings a week to write.
This book is dedicated to my grandmothers, Claire and Louly, and to the memory
of Lon E. Ussery—“memory eternal.”
All mistakes are mine.
Permissions
Part of chapter 4 appeared in modified form as the essay “Emily Dickinson as the
Un-Named, Buried Child,” The Emily Dickinson Journal (2003).
Introduction
The Flesh - Surrendered - Canceled - / The Bodiless - begun -
Emily Dickinson, “Departed - to the Judgment”
How can a dead woman speak? Why does she have to be dead in order to be able to
speak?
Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry
In a gesture at once apologetic and absolute, Peter Sacks places the elegy in what
he terms an exclusively “male domain” in The English Elegy.1 If traditional elegy,
that positionally ultimate text spoken by the male poet for a fallen friend, is crucial
to patriarchal discourse, then what I will call the “feminine self-elegy”—a troped
posthumous elegy in which a dead speaker mourns herself—is an ironic turn on the
form’s discourse of mastery. The elegy narrated by a dead speaker for herself is
ironic in the way that Walter Benjamin defines irony: it tears down a given form,
what Sacks calls “male” elegy, to make a space for a new form, a feminine self-
elegy, that differs from male elegy only in its ironic emphasis on the privateness
and privation of the speaker presented as at once dead and bereaved.
Reevaluating Sacks’s influential work on the elegy from a vantage of some
twenty years, I not only point to the difference of feminine self-elegy from what
Sacks calls traditional male elegy but also distinguish the formal gesture of self-
elegy from the mourning poem, the sentimental memorial that is located in current
critical discourse under the conceptual rubric of the Romantic poetess.2 The
importance of this second distinction is that it makes room for my disengagement
from biographical readings of the writers on whom this book focuses—Mary
Shelley, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath—and allows me to look
at the formal implications of a rhetoric that places a narrator’s fictive death before
her text’s narration. Such a trope may very well parallel the biographical fact of
posthumous publication, yet the ultimate mimesis of text and life remains all the
more ironic and transgressive in its inverted and proleptic bearing. The aesthetic
of anticipatory self-elegiacs seizes the ambiguous rhetorical orientation of
posthumous acclaim in order to subvert the traditional claims of elegiac
commemoration and recuperation.
The term female elegy has been proposed by Patrick H. Vincent in his analysis
of the conflation of the persona of the tragic poetess with the oeuvre of the woman
writer.3 Vincent’s female elegy differs, however, from what I am reading as the
