The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath

This provocative book posits a new theory of women's writing characterized by what Claire Raymond calls 'the posthumous voice. 'This suggestive term evokes the way that women's writing both forefronts and hides the author's implied body within and behind the written work. Tracing the use of the disembodied posthumous voice in fiction and poetry by Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath, Raymond's study sounds out the ways that the trope of the posthumous voice succeeds in negotiating the difficult cultural space between the concept of woman's body and the production of canonical literature. Arguing that the nineteenth-century cult of mourning opens to women's writing the possibility of a post-Romantic 'self-elegy,' Raymond explores how the woman writer's appropriation and alteration of elegiac conventions signifies and revises her disrupted relationship to audience. Theorizing the posthumous voice as a gesture by which the woman writer claims, and in some cases gains, canonicity, Raymond contends that the elegy posed as if written by a dead woman for herself both describes and subverts the woman writer's secondary status in the English canon. For the woman writer, the self-elegy permits access to a topos central to canonical literature, with the implementation of the trope of the posthumous voice marking a crucial site of woman's interaction with the English canon. This provocative book posits a new theory of women's writing characterized by what Claire Raymond calls'the posthumous voice.'This suggestive term evokes the way that women's writing both forefronts and hides the author's implied body within and behind the written work. Tracing the use of the disembodied posthumous voice in fiction and poetry by Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath, Raymond's study sounds out the ways that the trope of the posthumous voice succeeds in negotiating the difficult cultural space between the concept of woman's body and the production of canonical literature. Arguing that the nineteenth-century cult of mourning opens to women's writing the possibility of a post-Romantic'self-elegy,'Raymond explores how the woman writer's appropriation and alteration of elegiac conventions signifies and revises her disrupted relationship to audience. Theorizing the posthumous voice as a gesture by which the woman writer claims, and in some cases gains, canonicity, Raymond contends that the elegy posed as if written by a dead woman for herself both describes and subverts the woman writer's secondary status in the English canon. For the woman writer, the self-elegy permits access to a topos central to canonical literature, with the implementation of the trope of the posthumous voice marking a crucial site of woman's interaction with the English canon. "This provocative book posits a new theory of women's writing characterized by what Claire Raymond calls 'the posthumous voice.' This suggestive term evokes the way that women's writing both forefronts and hides the author's implied body within and behind the written work. Tracing the use of the disembodied posthumous voice in fiction and poetry by Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath, Raymond's study sounds out the ways that the trope of the posthumous voice succeeds in negotiating the difficult cultural space between the concept of woman's body and the production of canonical literature."--BOOK JACKET. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Dedication 3 Title 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 Acknowledgments 7 Permissions 8 Introduction 10 1 Spectral Gardens: Pastoral Tradition and Feminine Self-Elegy 40 2 Lethe's Shore: Mary Shelley's Sacred Horror 78 3 Eating Eternally Deeper: The Posthumous Voice in Wuthering Heights 104 4 Emily Dickinson as the Unnamed, Buried Child 136 5 Rossetti's Late Suitors: The Death Lyrics and the Speaking Body 178 6 Hooks and Ladders: Sylvia Plath's "The Rabbit Catcher" 196 Conclusion 228 Bibliography 244 Index 258 This book is about women writers writing Self-Elegy. That is, they write elegies for themselves as if they were already dead when they were writing-- though of course they're still alive when writing their self-elegies! The book asks why self-elegies were a popular form of writing for a few important women writers in England and America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The book focuses on Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, and Sylvia Plath, with some chapters on Mary Shelley's novella Matilda, and Christina Rossetti. Traces the use of the disembodied posthumous voice in fiction and poetry by Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath. This study sounds out the ways that the trope of the posthumous voice succeeds in negotiating the difficult cultural space between the concept of woman's body and the production of canonical literature.