"Bird, Jewel, or Flower?": On the Tokenization of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry

Abstract

"Bird, Jewel, or Flower?"On the Tokenization of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry Kylan Rice During the first half of the nineteenth century, women's poetry grew in popularity and gained unprecedented visibility as it circulated on both sides of the Atlantic in literary annuals and gift-books.1 Collecting prose and poetry by both male and female writers, these expensively produced volumes were marketed as gifts for women that could be presented as souvenirs or tokens of love.2 Frequently used by men as "courtship objects" or "physical mementos of desire or intimacy," literary annuals bore titles like Forget Me Not, Token of Remembrance, Souvenir, Keepsake, Leaflets of Memory, Memorial, or Remember Me, often including poems and frame texts that petitioned the recipient to remember and permanently cherish the romantic affections of the giver.3 In this way, they helped to codify a gendered expectation that obliged nineteenth-century women to perform memory-work while tacitly granting men the freedom to forget. Given its "reflexive" nature, where the contents of each volume were designed to provide "instructions" that "model[ed]" to recipients how they should consume it, many of the individual poems included in literary annuals and gift-books show women performing their commitment to men by preserving tokens of love.4 It was not uncommon for these poems to be written by female poets. For instance, appearing in a gift-book called The Moss-Rose, A Parting Token (1840), the American poet Lucy Hooper's "The Turquoise Ring" is a narrative poem that describes a woman who is "made to preserve" a turquoise ring given to her by a lover before separating from each other for an extended period of time.5 In Hooper's poem, the woman's "fervent … belief" in the "power" of the ring as a memento that "link[s] the future to all the past" is "met with its appropriate reward"—her lover's continued faithfulness and eventual return, a conclusion suggesting that a man's fidelity is contingent on the woman who cherishes his gifts.6 For readers of annuals, this insight also applied to "tokens" like The Moss-Rose [End Page 767] which featured poems by female writers like Hooper, who modeled the gendered dynamics of gift exchange that drove the circulation of literary annuals, portraying women as repositories of romantic memory. However, even as they adhered to the conventions of a literary gift economy, writing poems that show women performing requisite memory-work, some female poets also challenged this charge, recognizing that the occupation of remembering made it easier to be forgotten. For instance, in "Medallion Wafers" (1823), a series of ekphrastic poems representing images impressed in paste by an intaglio seal, the English poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) critiques what she identifies as "woman's weary lot," which is "to love" and then, in the aftermath of love, to "be forgot."7 If, as Landon complains, "love, love is all a woman's fame," then failing to love or falling out of love is as good as falling into public oblivion, at least in the context of a literary marketplace that sanctioned the circulation of women's poetry under the guise of intimate gift exchange.8 Printed in The Literary Gazette in the same year that the first English annual was published, and read by critics as a commentary on the same "bourgeois demand for inexpensive mass-produced art objects" that contributed to the rapid diffusion of annuals and gift-books throughout early nineteenth-century popular culture, Landon's "Wafers" foreshadow Hooper's poem seventeen years later, showing how women were expected to remember, to "prize the slightest thing / Touched, looked, or breathed upon" by a lover, using their own poems to perform or model this cherishing in an attempt to avoid being forgotten by lovers and readers alike.9 Of course, as Landon presciently observes, forgetting was bound to happen anyway, even as a direct consequence of honoring the terms of the "forget-me-not": doomed to remember, women are damned to the past, while the rest of the world forgets and moves on. And indeed it did forget, if current scholarship is any indication, guided as...