Susan J. Wolfson

Reading for Form

As the winter of the Starr inquiry daily dissolved the Clinton presidency into scandals involving Gap dress and power tie, the New York Times offered relief with a foray into the subculture of teenage fashion. “Cracking the Dress Code: How a School Uniform Becomes a Fashion Statement” provided a less lurid moment of cultural formation.1 “It’s how you want to look,” said one student, unflapped by the prescription at the School of the Incarnation for white blouse, navy skirt, or slacks for girls, white shirt and navy slacks for boys. With the dressers performing as both critics and artists, the basic material proved negotiable, the dress code itself an inspiring resource. Subtle accessorizing ( just cautious enough to evade a bust) was one route, a use of artful supplement, perhaps so artful that only the wearer knew for sure. The school uniform itself proved multiform, its deformation the syntax of fashion-statement: the arrangement of collars and cuffs, the interpretation of white, the use or nonuse of sweater buttons, the number of rolls to take in a skirt waistband, form-fitting to baggyslouching pants, knotting the tie, indulging the frisson of unseen underwear—all opportunities to perform with and within the uniform. One student’s gloss on this material culture casually and cannily fell into the form of an irregular couplet (I render the lines):

Hemans and the Romance of Byron

‘One of her favourite ornaments till the Memoirs of the poet appeared’, reports Hemans’s friend and later memoirist H. F. Chorley, was a brooch with a small lock of Byron’s hair.1 Chorley continues, ‘after having heard those beautiful stanzas addressed to his sister by Lord Byron — which afterwards appeared in print — read aloud twice in manuscript, she repeated them to us, and even wrote them down with a surprising accuracy. On two lines... she dwelt with particular emphasis, — “There are yet two things in my destiny, / A world to roam o’er, and a home with thee”’ (vol. 2, pp. 21–2). Thus closes the first stanza of an epistle to Augusta Leigh (‘my Sister — my sweet Sister’) written in summer 1816, in the wake of separation from Lady Byron.2 Certainly after 1818, when Hemans’s own husband left home and children for permanent residence in Italy, the parallels would be poignant. Yet it is not with Mrs Byron that Mrs Hemans identifies; it is with the perfect soulmate Augusta.

Introduction: Representing Felicia Hemans 1

Taylor and Francis Ltd GERR_A_152068.sgm 10.1080/10509580500520859 Europe Romantic Review 50-9585 (pri t)/1740-4657 (online) Original Article 2 06 & Francis 7 0 00Janu ry 2006 Professor Sus Wolfson wol son@pr eton.e u This conversation began at the first Modern Language Association convention after 9/11, in New Orleans, December 28, 2001, and it appears after the disaster that struck New Orleans in August 2005. How does Romanticism, and more particularly the poetry of Felicia Hemans, register with us during these particularly poignant years? In New Orleans, Hemans was our focus, and the questions we address may apply generally to any recently recovered writer whose reputation went into eclipse after the Romantic period, in particular women poets who were all but programmatically excluded from the official literary histories and classroom anthologies, until the 1990s. In the reconfiguration of Romantic studies over the last twenty years, among the most notable of returns has been Felicia Hemans, a popular poet in her own day and for most of her century, then in near eclipse until a revival in the late 1980s. Hemans has now claimed a significant place in our critical assessments and in classroom anthologies, not only of the Romantic period (in volumes edited variously by David Perkins, Duncan Wu, Anne Mellor and Richard Matlak, and Paula Feldman) but also in survey-course anthologies, notably The Longman Anthology of British Literature and The Norton Anthology of English Literature. And at last there are carefully prepared editions to meet the needs of scholarship: Paula Feldman’s (1999) of Hemans’s most popular lifetime volume Records of Woman and Other Poems (1828), and my Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, and Reception Materials (2001). This new wave has also brought forth Julie Melnyk and Nanora Sweet’s pioneering anthology of critical essays on Hemans (2000). This forum initiates a conversation about the fun, the difficulties, the challenges, and the possibilities of “Representing Hemans.” How do we write about her and teach her, both in relation to the “Mrs. Hemans” sentimentalized, celebrated, and despised by the end of the nineteenth century, and in relation to the issues of gender, nation, canon,