Understanding Media with L.E.L.: Women Poets, New Media, and the Petrarchan Gaze

Abstract

Understanding Media with L.E.L.: Women Poets, New Media, and the Petrarchan Gaze Christie Debelius (bio) At the beginning of Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s “The Improvisatrice” (1824), the poem’s titular speaker— a talented painter and poet-performer— sings of her first painting, a representation of the meeting between the Italian poet Petrarch and the beautiful, yet often silent, Laura.1 As she does so, she engages in a complex act of what media scholars call remediation, transposing one medium into another: employing her own assortment of artistic talents, the Improvisatrice transforms Petrarch’s poetry into painting and then back into poetry again when she ekphrastically describes her own work.2 By recounting her re-encounter with Petrarch, Landon’s speaker inserts herself into an established artistic tradition wherein women have conventionally played the role of silent objects to be gazed upon. Ultimately, though, the remediation of her painting back into verse ensures that she, unlike Laura, can still claim the poet’s speaking role. For Landon, this literary re-encounter with Petrarch is more than a simple homage. It represents one facet of a complex theory of gender and media in a media ecology saturated with texts that demanded visual— rather than oral or aural— engagement. Questions of intermediality, or the relationships among media, were a career-long fascination for Landon, who was one of the most prolific writers for “the nineteenth century’s newest media,” including annuals.3 Sometimes referred to as gift books, these ornately decorated periodical volumes placed engraved images side by side with text, creating a newly charged connection between visual and verbal media and “an increasingly visual bibliographic experience.” 4 Because of the central role that looking played in both writing for and reading these publications, the relationship between Petrarch and Laura remained an important frame for Landon’s understanding of this developing new medium. By examining Petrarchism’s role in Landon’s writing for annuals, this essay shows how Landon found within long-standing literary traditions a framework for understanding the workings of new media and their [End Page 245] implications for women writers. In her theory of media, Landon anticipated the work of present-day media theorists, whose explorations of the relationship between media and systems of power center on how our encounters with media technologies can be shaped by gendered power dynamics. In recent years, scholars of the nineteenth century have increasingly turned to approaches informed by media studies to revisit the works of women poets.5 Sarah Anne Storti advocates for the sophistication of Landon’s poetry specifically in these terms, suggesting that Landon ought to be viewed as “a brilliant media theorist and practitioner” who “leveraged an experimental role in early nineteenth-century print media to explore the affordances of representational art in an era of mass production” (Storti, p. 533).6 I follow Storti in using the language of “theory” to highlight both Landon’s sustained engagement with these ideas and the sweeping nature of the philosophy her poetry puts forth. For a writer working in the new medium of the annual, a medium whose production process required poets to write texts that would accompany engraved images, the writing of poetry depended on the artist’s ability to gaze upon an object and respond to what they saw. Harriet Linkin has shown how Landon carefully explores “the roles available to women in poetic tradition: either they function as the objectified beloved whose beauty fixates the male poet or they serve as the spontaneous performer who captivates her audience.”7 For Landon, though, it is not just poetic traditions that are complicit in the objectification of women in these roles: it is the media technologies that transmit and preserve these traditions as well. In this essay, I examine how the Petrarchan informs Landon’s exploration of the workings of new media in her 1828 poem “Verses” before turning to Landon’s “Corinne at the Cape of Misena” (1832)— inspired by Germaine de Staël’s wildly successful novel Corinne, or Italy (1807)—to show how Landon explores her position as a contributor to, and shaper of, new media.8 Written from the perspective of a woman poet...