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BOOK REVIEW

Parker, Sarah. The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889-1930. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. 219 pp. ISBN 978-1-848-93386-6. Hb., $150.

Reviewed by Donna S. Parsons.

Whether we are writing fiction, painting, or composing lieder, a muse inspires and feeds our imagination. A muse can suggest a character, a mood or a motive that influences how a particular work comes to fruition. Muses have typically been constructed as female whether it was Alice Liddell who inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland or Jane Morris who was the subject of many of D. G. Rossetti’s paintings. What is the function of a muse? Does the creative process change when the muse is male? What happens when the muse becomes the writer? How does a muse open up the page for experimentation? How does the dynamic evolve when the muse reclaims poetic ground? Does the lens change when the lesbian writer’s muse is her husband and/or female partner? Sarah Parker’s The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889-1930 breaks new ground as she unpacks the slippery notion of a muse’s function and highlights the, at times contentious, relationship between artist and muse. Focusing on the poets "Michael Field," Olive Custance, Amy Lowell, H.D., and Bryher, Parker deftly unravels previous conceptions of a muse to show that it was not just the Bloomsbury set that wrote, lived, and loved in triangles. The muses Parker examines such as Lord Alfred Douglas, Ada Russell, and Bryher play an active role in their respective poet’s lives as they do more than inspire the construction of verse or dramatic monologues. Yet, as Parker shows in each chapter, the muse’s voice has its own agency and in the cases of "Michael Field," Olive Custance, and Amy Lowell can resist categorisation. Each chapter contains a plethora of poetic examples, an astute analysis that makes the reader re-consider the impact a muse has on poetic form and experimentation as well as detailed notes.

In her introduction Parker turns previous studies of the muse on their head. She focuses on the “ethical implications” involving a living muse, how the 1890s influenced modernist writing, and explains why it is important for us to consider how lesbian poets were inspired by their male partners and friends (1, 2). Beginning with Hesiod’s Theogony Parker outlines the history of the muse through literature. Although she tends to move too fast from one idea to another, her synopses show why we need to examine more closely the lens through which female lesbian poets and their muses operated. In Chapter 1, “Historical Muse Figures, Imagined Ancestries and Contemporary Muses,” Parker focuses on the importance of Sappho and the Virgin Mary to the female poet. She posits that their “sexually ambiguous figures” allow the poets to experiment with voice, desire, sexuality, and sexual knowledge (28). In her analysis of Michael Field’s “She is One” and Amy Lowell’s “The Forsaken” Parker shows that the lesbian poet and her desires cannot be boxed into a specific category. Her discussion of H. D.’s “Tribute to the Angels” is especially compelling as she makes us reassess how silence is read and re-configured to give a subsequent generation a stronger voice. Parker has a tendency to defer to other scholars such as Homans and Gubar to validate her ideas instead of relying on the strength of her examples.

In Chapter 2, “Michael Field,” Parker critiques the ways in which Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper mediated the roles of muse and poet while sharing the male identity of Michael Field. Through her analyses of “1896 elegy for Christina Rossetti” and “I would not be a fugitive” Parker argues that, in Michael Field’s mind, Christina Rossetti erred in believing that she could only be a “muse” or a “beloved,” and that the reciprocity afforded by the combination of the two allowed for a more potent “female poetic identity” to take centre stage (45). In her analyses of Michael Field’s verse Parker rightfully stresses the importance of reading the diaries, “Works and Days,” alongside the poetry. Diary entries contain drafts of poems as well as running commentary on how Bradley or Cooper’s vision of a specific verse’s subject develops. Parker’s discussion on the importance of the male muse in both women’s work recounts their relationship with the art critic Bernard Berenson which has already been explicated by Martha Vicinus. Parker adds new light to this relationship as she moves back to summer 1892 to focus on how the two women’s viewing of him as a muse brought the poets together rather than causing a fractious divide (57). What is the difference in having a living muse who works and creates on your level instead of being someone that you admire or romanticize? Parker briefly touches on this idea in her discussion on the role of Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon in the two poets’ lives, and opens the door for further studies.

In Chapter 3, “Olive Custance,” Parker argues that more attention needs to paid to Custance’s poetry because of the way her verses anticipate the “destabiliz(ation) of gender and sexuality” found in female modernist poets (71). Custance had multiple muses which allowed her to experiment with assertions of desire and masculinity. Beginning with a discussion on John Gray’s impact on the teenage Custance, Parker moves to a detailed analysis of “The White Witch” which was influenced by her friendship with Natalie Barney. Parker links the poem’s femme fatale to Swinburne’s “Faustine” and not Wilde’s Salomè. The connection to Swinburne needs further development. Most intriguing is the relationship between Lord Alfred Douglas and Custance. Parker notes that he was the inspiration for Rainbows (1902) where the poems’ speaker “oscillat(es) hetereo- and homoerotic desires” (72). Parker claims that Douglas was attracted to Custance because she took the lead in the courtship, but after marriage the roles change(d)” (72). Douglas disliked being “an object of the gaze” which conflicted with his “identity as husband and father” (95). Parker looks at the dialogue between Custance and Douglas’s poetry after their marriage which she claims can be “read as a dialogue, in which each poet responds to the other’s charges” (93). Again Parker demonstrates that the verses cannot be read on their own as the consultation of diaries, correspondence and memoirs provide keys to poetic meaning. In Custance’s case the difficulty lies in the multiplicity of interpretations available depending upon whether the speaker is read as male or female.

In Chapter 4, “Amy Lowell”, Parker offers an intriguing study of the female celebrity muse in the actress Eleonora Duse and the private life partner muse in Ada Dwyer Russell. Issues of ventriloquism, the active enactment of desire, and the ways in which soundscapes take primacy over the visual are eloquently deconstructed in Parker’s close readings of “Eleonora Duse,” “Interlude,” and “A Sprig of Rosemary.” In her analysis of “Eleonora Duse,” Parker focuses on the equal attention given to the anticipation of watching a performance and the ways in which Duse “enacts desire herself” (107). Duse is both the active and passive muse in that she admittedly allows herself to be the conduit through which other women’s voices speak while also knowing that audience members will respond differently to her performance (108). Equally compelling is Parker’s critique of Lowell’s relationship with Russell, a reluctant muse, whose focus on domesticity allowed Lowell the time and opportunity to write. In her critique of “Interlude” Parker notes the meticulous detail of images depicted as the subject goes about her daily work and how those simple actions denote “a subtle eroticism” (113). The irony of their relationship is that after Lowell’s death, Russell kept her partner’s work alive by doing public readings of the verse. For all of Lowell’s ventriloquizing, Russell allowed Amy’s voice to remain on center stage (126).

In Chapter 5, “H. D. and Bryher”, Parker acknowledges the importance of Swinburne, Sappho, and Greek imagery to H.D. and Bryher, but what makes their take on the function of muses different is how they performed those roles for one another. Parker argues that the two women acted as each other’s “mediator” rather than as a “muse” (132). Their collaboration is particularly striking in that before the two women met their “shared influences and interests” can be found in Bryher’s Region of Lutany (1914) and H. D.’s Sea Garden (1916) [135]. It was not a matter of Bryher copying or imitating H. D., but a meeting of two similar, creative minds. Parker offers a brief discussion on how the actress Greta Garbo showed H. D. the “possibilities for reimagining female representation and self-actualization” (145), but she needs to explore this influence in more detail. Does she find a connection between Hollywood stills and films of Garbo and the photographs H. D. and Bryher took of one another in Cornwall and California? In her analyses Parker argues that their poems must be read in conjunction with viewing the photographs as they “help us understand how the objectification of the muse becomes differently (148) encoded and interrogated in words and images” (149).

Parker’s study illuminates the echoes and re-configurations of Sappho in the verses of lesbian poets, and I think more could have been done to show why her poets were more inspired by Sappho than the Virgin Mary. Also striking are the number of references to Swinburne which need further delineation in the cases of Michael Field and Olive Custance. Overall, The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889-1930 sets the foundation and tone for understanding the muse’s function in the lives and work of fin-de-siècle and modernist lesbian poets. Parker’s work will be of interest to those working on aesthetic, decadent, and modernist poets and in the milieu in which they wrote.

Donna S. Parsons is a lecturer in Honors and Music at the University of Iowa where she teaches courses on popular music and British literature. Her book project, The Beatles: Fandom, Fervor & the Cultivation of a Legend, focuses on the trajectory of fandom from the onset of Beatlemania through its mature manifestations in the 21st century. John Lennon is her muse.