Poetic Acts: Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry, 1840-1880

Abstract

My dissertation explores representations of performance (theatrical, oratorical, domestic, and social) in works by canonical poets Emily Dickinson and Sarah Piatt, popular performers Fanny Kemble and Adah Menken, and Spiritualist trance lecturer Achsa Sprague. I consider the work of women poets within the context of a highly performative mid-nineteenth-century American culture - one rich not only in traditional forms such as drama, oratory, sermons and musical performances, but also emerging and developing forms like the revival, public lecture, literary and dramatic recitations, breeches performances, and spiritualist demonstrations. Along with new forms came new media, technologies, and venues for public performance, as well as novel opportunities for women to participate. The prevalence of performance, and the power of its rhetorical techniques and strategies to both inspire and influence audiences, had a profound effect on female writers and their own creative acts. My approach applies current work in several disciplines - cultural studies, theater history, performance theory, feminist theory, American oratory, and literary studies - to a genre and period combination largely ignored by scholars. Focusing on the period 1840 to 1880, I develop careful analyses of many poems while situating them within developments in mid-century performance culture, from changes in the gender and class standing of audiences, ideas about performance's intended purpose (didactic instruction, sympathetic connection, cathartic entertainment, or impassioned social action), and new technologies and media for its expression, advertising, and distribution. I argue that reading for performance, as subject matter and setting, encourages us to engage more directly with performative aspects of the work itself, particularly as they help to expose tensions within contemporary discourses. A performance reading allows us to historicize and theorize at once, with implications not only for studies of mid-century women's poetry, but also the poetic form and related considerations of lyric subjectivity and sociality.