« A Woman’s Answer » : Adelaide Procter et la poésie face au genre

Abstract

To avoid being trapped in the fury of feminist claims and to spurn the traditional gender ideology, some Victorian women poets take up a third discourse, ambiguous and protean. Adelaide Procter (1825–1864) chooses neither to fight nor to accept gender ideology. Her faith-driven poetry enables her to write in-between poems, keeping away from official authoritarian discourses, which support or deny the existence of gender spheres. Thus, Procter, as a feminist, writes poems defending feminine values whilst resisting to self-deprecation and to the excessive enhancement of virtues. Converted to Catholicism in 1851, Procter, as a Tractarian, uses her poetry, both religious and feminist, as a weapon against the construction of political and poetical patterns. Being Anglo-Catholic, she can create a feminine and autonomous space from where she gives her own interpretations and turns away from official discourses.