Effigies of Self in Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry

Eliza Richards asks how we should understand the many figurations of suicide by late-nineteenth-century women poets. Strangely, these poets depict one of the most intimate acts of violence as a melodramatic engagement with a... [ view full abstract ]

Eliza Richards asks how we should understand the many figurations of suicide by late-nineteenth-century women poets. Strangely, these poets depict one of the most intimate acts of violence as a melodramatic engagement with a self that is also not the self. Violence against an effigy serves to form a new location for communication with others not bounded by the self. Poets need to stage dramas of self-deformation in order to reconfigure modes of expression that evade the dead end of “lyric,” which Virginia Jackson and others have suggested remains inaccessible to women throughout the nineteenth century. Reaching out to a readership through a dramatic staging of self-cancellation opens the speaker to an emptiness that must be embraced in order to write at all. Richards suggests that through experiments with self-cancelling via a form that resembles but is not the same as dramatic monologue classically understood, these women poets clear space that would otherwise be filled by alienated speech. In othering themselves, these poets identify with inert simulacra that serve as a reserve for new forms of utterance not bounded by unproductive social forms of personhood.