SOURCE: Gilroy, Amanda. “From Here to Alterity: The Geography of Femininity in the Poetry of Joanna Baillie.” In A History of Scottish Women's Writing, edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan, pp. 143-57. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Gilroy offers close readings of three poems by Baillie set outside her usual Scottish domestic milieu in order to show how the poet explores the limits imposed on women in life and literature.]

I

The course of Joanna Baillie's long poetic career, from the late 1790s to the middle of the nineteenth century, corresponds with an increasingly rigid gender ideology, grounded in the doctrine of separate spheres, an ideology by which she, like other women poets, is both constrained and empowered. She inhabits a dominant paradigm of the ‘poetess’, for she stays at home, literally and poetically, writing, as she puts it, about ‘homely subjects’.¹ The author of the ‘Life’ that prefaces her Complete Works of 1851 tells us that ‘[s]he lived in retirement from the first hour to the last’ (Baillie, v). Neither her Scottish dialect nor her English poems normally stray outside the parameters of the domestic and the devotional. However, I want here to explore three poems in which the female figures move outside the British domestic circle. In order to place these poems in the context of their cultural terrain, I will examine a number of other discourses which speak to the ideology of femininity, notably reviews of Baillie's poetry, conduct literature, and Frederick Rowton's 1848 anthology of women poets (in which Baillie has a prominent place).² These texts share a number of discursive features which help to show how Joanna Baillie negotiates the boundaries of the space allotted to femininity in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Feminist critics in recent years have been careful to analyse gender differences in conjunction with other socio-cultural differences, such as race, religion, class, sexual preference. I want to invoke at the outset Baillie's nationality, her Scottishness, for this would seem the most obvious ‘other’ difference for the feminist critic to analyse along with that of gender. The signposts to ‘double marginalization’ are securely in place. The poems to look at on this route would be the dialect poems and the poetic representations of rural Scotland, both of which often have a thematic focus on sexual politics. These poems would certainly repay further attention, not least for the factoring in of class that any analysis would have to undertake, for the dialect poems remain writing about the people from a position of class superiority. We are aware of the separation between Baillie's voice and her material, in much the same way that we notice the gap between William Wordsworth and his idiot boys and mad mothers. What is problematic is the ease with which these poems encourage the placing of Baillie within a masculine tradition which limits Scottishness to the purely local. This cultural delimitation is demonstrated by the way Baillie is represented in Jennifer Breen's influential anthology, Women Romantic Poets. She includes nine poems from Baillie's expanded Fugitive Verses of 1840, though six of these are from the 1790 volume. The longest pieces are ‘A Summer's Day’ and its companion piece ‘A Winter's Day’, which are naturalistic descriptions of the people and places of Lowland Scotland. Breen argues that ‘these poems are as distinctive as any poem by Burns or Wordsworth, her nearest rivals in subject matter and form’.³ Baillie's use of the Scottish vernacular in ‘Hooly and Fairly’ is part of the widespread attempt to break away from the formality of eighteenth-century poetic diction, but Breen also points out that ‘her adaptation of the ballad for literary purposes, … echoes Robert Burns's literary treatment of Scottish songs' (Breen, p. xxvi). Baillie is placed in a secondary position, both female and Scottish, her work a belated echo of Burns's.

I would like to suggest that perhaps Baillie's ‘Scottishness’ rests, paradoxically, in her going away—from Scotland to London, of course (where she lived from 1784-1851), but also away from the pastoral and the local. The tradition of leaving Scotland might be seen as endemic to the Scottish psyche; one of Scotland's most successful exports has always been its people. Frequently this exile is a response to socio-political constraints, such as the Highland Clearances, but it also has to do with a less tangible sense of what is beyond the specificities of the here and now. The question of Scottish identity is displaced to the margins in this chapter; indeed, in locating Baillie within the parameters of gender ideology, I attend to the ‘rhetoric of place’ rather than the particularities of local context (though national difference turns up in a different frame in the later sections).

II

The first poem I want to consider is ‘The Legend of Lady Griseld Baillie’ published in Metrical Legends in 1821. The legend is, significantly, part of Baillie's own family history, and it constructs a politics of the family, centred on the notion that helpful daughters make happy homes. The family domain is doubly emphasised for Baillie tells us that ‘the account we have of her [Griseld] is given by her own children’ (Baillie, p. 708). Even the reader's attention is predicated on the identification of women with their familial, domestic roles: those readers who have tender memories of their mother, wife, sister or daughter are apostrophised to read or listen to the following ‘short and faithful lay’. The Preface to this volume emphasises separate gender spheres—there may be some cross-over of masculine and feminine characteristics, but reversal carries the threat of deformity. The poem itself opens with a eulogy to ‘Woman’, who is defined by her difference from man. While man acts, she waits. She is malleable—‘of gentler nature, softer, dearer’—but not mobile: ‘With generous bosom, age or childhood shielding, / And in the storms of life, though moved, unyielding’.⁴

After this build-up, it comes as no surprise to find that Griseld is a ‘damsel sweet’ (st. ii), and her journey through life an ‘unwearied course of gentle deeds’.⁵ Visiting imprisoned father-figures, Griseld brings ‘sweet’ tales of home into alien spaces, familiarising Gothic surroundings; the years between her visits to Mr Baillie in prison and those to her father, in hiding in a burial vault, are passed in ‘useful toil’. After the execution of Mr Baillie, Griseld's father flees to Holland, where he is joined by his family. Griseld bravely returns to Scotland to collect her ailing sister and is ‘sweetly … repaid’ by parental blessings. All this travel does not change her. Though the family are ‘outlaws’ in ‘[a] stranger's land’, she sets about making ‘a humble home’ out of their ‘alter'd lot’: we find her sewing, cooking, looking after the children, ‘with ready hand and heart, / Each task of toilsome duty taking’ (st. xxxi). She ‘clings’ to her family (st. xliv), and after their return to Britain declines the offer to become a maid of honour to the Queen. She also declines the hand of a wealthy neighbour to wait until it is possible to marry Jerviswood, the son of the man she visited in prison as a girl. The duties of a daughter are not erased by those of a wife and mother, and she remains ‘subject to his [her father's] will’ (st. xlix) in a relationship of paternal monogamy. She goes abroad one last time, hoping to see the ‘homely house’ (st. li) where her family resided during their exile, prompted, we are told, by ‘[m]aternal love, / Active and warm, which nothing might restrain, / Led her once more, in years advanced, to rove / To distant southern climes’ (st. l).⁶

This short tour of the landmarks of the legend demonstrates Griseld's place in the gender ideology of Baillie's time. Even when she goes abroad, our heroine takes with her so much cultural baggage that travelling is just like staying at home. For an ideal woman, to go away is not to experience otherness, but to confirm the continuity of the same, the ‘homely merit’ of a ‘helpful Maid’.

Reviewers of Metrical Legends pick the story of Griseld Baillie (rather than those of Columbus or William Wallace) as ‘the most pleasing tale in the book’, and confirm, in various ways, the hegemony of a certain pattern of femininity.⁷ Moreover, the rhetoric of the reviews places this poem in the sphere of what is appropriate for a woman to write. The Monthly Review takes issue with what it perceives as Baillie's attempt, ‘to reconcile the literal record’ of heroic deeds ‘with poetical effect’; according to the reviewer, this is ‘to rob from prose … its own implicit truth; and to gain the effect, without paying the tax, of the essential decorations of verse’.⁸ Though ‘Griseld Baillie’ is not exempt from this criticism, this strange discourse of economics—implicitly off-limits to a lady, and perhaps betraying subliminal anxiety about women in the literary marketplace—is replaced by a chivalric attitude to the female character and female poet. The reviewer quotes two passages, one which displays Griseld in her role as wife, and the other as daughter; these lines are ‘most delightful’ to the writer ‘for they present an endearing image of affection, sense, and virtue’.⁹ He concludes with a chivalric flourish:

We … make our most courteous bow to the distinguished authoress whose work we have been examining; assuring her that, whatever unwelcome remarks our duty may have inflicted on her ‘Metrical Legends’, she has few more firm and decided admirers than ourselves.¹⁰

Polite censure and chivalry inscribe the superiority of the reviewer and limit the domain of the woman poet. Significantly, the reviewer observes that ‘the manner in which Miss Baillie has related the … most touching instances of filial affection, in this her family-heroine, does infinite credit to her heart as well as to her poetical genius.’¹¹ It is crucial that poetical genius is enmeshed in the domestic affections.

This latter point is made at greater length in the Scots Magazine of the same year, with the reviewer making a characteristic elision between the woman writer's life and her text. The positing of this symbiotic relationship, which recurs again and again in reviews of women poets, is part of the apparatus of ideology—it marks a set of parameters for the woman and the poet, enforcing ideals of femininity both at home and on the page. The Scots Magazine confirms that both Baillie and her heroine are models of domestic virtue. The latter is described as a woman who,

meek, unassuming, perfectly feminine, and little dreaming of celebrity, was, nevertheless, a bright example and ornament to her sex, possessing, in a pre-eminent degree, those humble virtues, and those fond and faithful relative affections, which render duties delightful, and hardships and difficulties tolerable, if not easy.¹²

The review includes a long quotation from the introductory verses which sketch ‘the true feminine character’. Significantly, we are told that ‘[i]n the pleasing task of recording congenial virtues, Miss Baillie seems quite at home, and peculiarly inspired by her subject’. She is poetically at home because her own character mirrors that of her heroine. Indeed, the reviewer theorises that the poetic production implicitly depends on the private life of the writer—‘a negligent, or, … a fashionable daughter’ could not have drawn this portrait. The review continues,

It gives us pleasure to add, … that our admirable authoress, … was herself a pattern of filial duty, exalted, tender, and devoted, like that of her heroine … We could not, possessed of this knowledge, withhold such a lesson, we may add, such a triumph from the sex. To know that, the object of general admiration for powerful and original genius has, in the quietest seclusion, practised in their full extent all those homebred and homefelt virtues that she knows so well to describe, is praise beyond what genius itself could either deserve or bestow.¹³

A number of important points are made here. The rhetorical emphasis on ‘home’ (‘homebred and homefelt virtues’) picks up on the earlier comment that ‘Miss Baillie seems quite at home’ with her subject, so that home becomes both the place where virtue is engendered (and where [female] gender is contingent on virtue) and the locus of the poetic text: the text of the poem is home. The life of the poetess, as purveyed to us by the reviewer who peeks into ‘the sacred recesses of domestic privacy’, is a ‘lesson’ to other women, just as the textualised life of her heroine is a ‘pattern’ to be followed: at the end of the poem, Baillie's speaker addresses the ‘polish'd fair of modern times’—the woman reader is clearly meant to identify herself, in terms of nationality and gender, with the ‘British fair’ who show ‘kindred sympathy’ with the ‘modest worth’ of the heroine.¹⁴ Thus, Baillie plays a role in mediating the ideology of femininity, her public text celebrating and perpetuating private virtues. I will return later to the significance of this point.

The most extensive account of this volume is by Carlyle in the Edinburgh Review (October 1821). His use of tropes of spatiality reveals some of the implications of the ‘placing’ of the woman poet. Where the critic in the Monthly Review objected to the mixing of verse and prose, Carlyle argues that Baillie unsuccessfully invades the ‘debateable ground’ between two genres, history and poetry. Her material is the stuff of history, but she fails to attain ‘a sublime view of mental greatness’, for ‘her store of imagery, [and] her range of feeling, are both circumscribed’.¹⁵ Though Carlyle does not explicitly invoke a gender agenda, it is the portraits of Christopher Columbus, and especially, of William Wallace, to which he objects. Carlyle finds the single legend which tells a woman's story ‘by far the most successful in the volume’: Baillie's ‘matter-of-fact poetry is here in its proper place’.¹⁶ In the course of his review of this poem, Carlyle includes two substantial quotations: the first is from the picture of ideal womanhood in the introductory stanzas, the second is the account of Griseld's household tasks in Holland. This ideal figure has no place in history and her mind and situation are the stuff of Miss Baillie's ‘every-day thoughts … and such as afforded room for employing the most valuable and uncontested faculties of her genius’.¹⁷ This limited literary space is the best place for the woman poet, who details the ‘simple doings’ of ‘a meek, unambitious creature’.¹⁸ Again, there is a slippage between life and text, so that Griseld and Joanna Baillie become almost interchangeable, and Carlyle regards both with ‘affectionate admiration’.¹⁹ Baillie's poetry does not work by ‘inflaming our hearts or expanding our imaginations’—it does not transport us anywhere—but it ‘brighten[s] … our common existence’.²⁰ In legislating the terms on which women's writing will be valued, the reviewers annotate the geopolitical realities of women's lives: the good woman, the poetess, and her text, are denied a passport to the wider sphere of life and literature. The poetess is circumscribed within the parameters of the home, the space of domesticity and femininity, but, crucially, this circumscription is the key to public success.

III

The second poem, ‘Sir Maurice: A Ballad’, published in Fugitive Verses (1840),²¹ is more exotic; the narrative departs from the narrow domestic circle into inappropriate spaces. The heroine seems initially to embody the transgressive agenda of much recent feminist criticism, her cross-dressing and exotic travel may be read as emblematic of an attempt to escape from the constrictions of bourgeois society. But the movements across cultural boundaries enacted in this poem need to be charted in some detail in order to assess how far they subvert the ideology of femininity. The poem opens with Sir Maurice gathering his troops for departure to the Holy Land; he notices a band from ‘Moorham's lordless hall’ led by the ancient Seneschal. Moorham's lord has been supposed killed in battle. Sir Maurice advises them to return home to ‘defend’ their castle and their lady, but a ‘gentle page’ insists that Moorham's lord is still alive. Sir Maurice quickly sees through the page's disguise, and is keen for the cross-dressed page to return to her proper sphere, explicitly linking movement away from home with sexual impropriety:

To thine own home return, fair youth!
          To thine own home return; …
War suits thee not if boy thou art;
          And if a sweeter name
Befit thee, do not lightly part
          With maiden's honour'd fame.

(st. 17, 18)²²

By the time he has convinced himself that ‘a stripling's garb, / Betrays not wanton will’, and acknowledged ‘a maiden's pride’ in ‘[a] daughter's love’, the ‘page’ and her band have departed.

The scene then moves to Syria: Sir Maurice after much fighting is dangerously wounded and faints away. He awakes to find himself in a Saracen castle where he sees in turn the ‘ancient Seneschal’, Moorham's lord and finally the Saracen chief. The Saracen chief explains that since he has ‘wedded an English dame’, he will not keep an Englishman captive. Moorham's lord now appears again to explain his presence in the Saracen's castle. His daughter, dressed as a boy, ‘boldly’ crossed the sea with wealth to buy her father's freedom. Captured herself, she sought out her father, and her grief betrayed her sex. The Saracen chief then fell in love with her—and she married him to save her father.

Curiously, if the page's grief betrays her sex, it also betrays the textuality of sex: the woman who ‘sorely wept’ mimics Sir Maurice himself, who ‘sigh'd and wept full sore’, while he, of course, in an act of linguistic transvestism, echoes Keats's ‘Belle Dame Sans Merci’. The tearful mimicry going on here is more than a sign that the legacy of sensibility facilitated the sympathetic tears of Romanticism's ‘new men’. To add one more layer to all this dressing-up, we might note that the Quarterly Review calls Baillie ‘the mistress of a masculine style of thought and diction’.²³ For a brief moment, then, the poem holds open some alternatives to the homely demarcations of gender.

The limitations of this other space should be apparent: girls can pass as boys only in a foreign place, and only until they cry, while the fluid femininity of all this weeping takes place in the context of imprisonment. Indeed, the metaphors of the prison and of slavery are traditional for the condition of womanhood, so that the floating femininity I have described is as much a function of bondage as of the deconstruction of essence. In any case, more traditional distinctions soon reassert themselves. Moorham's daughter, who remains unnamed, in marrying the Moslem lord to secure her father's freedom, pays a ‘fearful price’ (st. 52)—not the traditional currency of sexual virtue, but racial and religious purity (though it is hard to see this as completely disengaged from the inscription of sexuality). Consequently, she refuses to marry Sir Maurice after the death of her husband. Sir Maurice dons his ‘warlike mail’ and goes off to prove his ‘prowess’, while she becomes a nun.

Baillie's cross-dressed page is not an unfamiliar figure in Victorian women's writing. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Sand, amongst others, expressed the desire to be Lord Byron's page. Byron's heroine Kaled in Lara provided a model of emancipated androgyny, though importantly any hints of eroticism are effaced: as Caroline Franklin points out, Kaled's unwomanly behaviour is in ‘the service of the “feminine” virtue of selfless devotion’.²⁴ Elizabeth Barrett Browning's ‘The Romaunt of the Page’ rescripts Lara from the page's perspective; in 1838 she writes that ‘My ballad containing a ladye dressed up like a page and galloping off to Palestine in manner that would scandalise you, went to Miss Mitford this morning’.²⁵ Her page is a married woman in pursuit of her Crusader husband. She dies fighting to save him from enemy Turks, but not before her husband has rejected her displaced self-representation—she tells him her story as though it were her sister's—as ‘Unwomaned’; the wife he mythologises is an angelic creature, not a cross-dressed fighter. Barrett Browning debunks Byron's glamour: Byron's Kaled succumbs to the female malady—madness—while Barrett Browning's heroine is sacrificed to Victorian bourgeois ideology. Baillie's heroine does not die, but her journey perhaps displays most clearly the circumscriptions of ideals of femininity, for here it is the woman, not the man, who articulates the platitudes of propriety. Though the heroine of ‘Sir Maurice’ has a more complex relation to the domestic than Griseld Baillie, she remains within a patriarchal plot: she moves from north to south, crossing the boundaries of gender, race and religion for her father's sake, and even her refusal of a romantic plot is generated by the ideals of domestic ideology. As a nun, she moves outside the home, in a role which suggests a possible alternative to being a wife or a page, but the poem does not emphasise sisterhood; rather, it charts a place for her that is made accessible through the idiom of separate spheres: she is enshrined as a type of angel in the house, tending the ‘helpless’, serving in her ‘separate … state’—more as dutiful daughter than bride of Christ—the ultimate patriarchal authority (st. 67 and 68). At the end of the poem, what is emphasised is ‘her meek worth’ (st. 68).

‘Sir Maurice’ functions as a confirmation of ‘woman's sphere’ and the hegemony of female virtue. But the poem also works as a more oblique comment on the social place of the woman writer. The discourses of fame and of economics locate the text in an ideological marketplace in which the relation between public and private spheres, and gender, is at issue. I want to suggest that there is an analogy between the concerns of the text and concerns about the public display of the woman writer (and her text). The problem for Baillie's heroine is that in moving out of her proper sphere, she becomes the object of the gaze, ‘scann'd’ from ‘top to toe’ by Sir Maurice (st. 15), and she subsequently trades her feminine ‘fame’ for her father's life. Because her motives are unsullied, the narrative trajectory is recuperative, and she is replaced in an appropriate sphere. For nineteenth-century women writers, fame and femininity exist in an uneasy relationship. The ‘public’ act of representation threatens to undermine gender and class identity by making a spectacle of the writer, and figuratively forging links between poetesses and prostitutes, both of whom display their wares in a marketplace ordered by men. The question, then, is how to negotiate the crossing from private to public, to write within the geography of the feminine.

For writers such as Mary Robinson and L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), putting themselves on display is a risky marketing strategy—they both write poems in which women artists are the object of the male gaze, and their own lives are the stuff of gossip columns. Baillie travels a different route. Her exemplary public poetic status depends on the perception of her unviolated privacy. The overlap of the discursive domains of female virtue and public success, the two meanings of ‘fame’, is made clear in an Athenaeum review of 1841:

Though residing within reach of the metropolis, the flattery of the coteries has never tarnished the freshness of her inspirations; nor could accumulated and increasing honours tempt her to leave the peaceful quiet of her home circle; she is personally scarcely known in the literary world, though with a fame and reputation on the strength of which any woman, less womanly in the best sense of the word, would have stared in effigy out of every print-shop window, and figured in the diary of every superficial Prince Puckler, or sprightly American, who thought fit to publish his fathomings of our literature, or his pencillings of our distinguished authors.²⁶

Baillie's untarnished ‘reputation’, her standing as a virtuous woman, grounds her poetic reputation (even if her poetry was less good than it is, she would ‘rank high’ as an ‘example’). She retreats from any compromising display of herself, a display that would make her a shopworn commodity. As the prejudices of the passage reveal, such display would compromise not only her gender identity but also her class and national status. For the ‘womanly’ woman (the tautology makes clear, for late twentieth-century readers, that this is a cultural construct), the personal cannot be public, except within the textual parameters already indicated (home as the subject of the poetic text). But this ideology is not simply constraining: Baillie's ‘womanly’ behaviour means that she resists being appropriated as the object of the gaze and being written into a (foreign) script that she cannot control.

Contemporary critics emphasise Baillie's conformity to a very limited private and poetic space—Baillie takes to heart her own lessons about woman's place in the home. In 1851, The Athenaeum declares: ‘Never has woman more honourably adorned womanhood by the unobtrusive privacy of her life, and by the noble forms and features of her poetical creations’.²⁷ The Dublin University Magazine reflects that ‘living in the seclusion of a quiet, narrow, domestic circle, without practical experience of the world's doings, “she kept the noiseless tenor of her way,” unchequered by stirring incidents to disturb or excite a tranquil, uniform course of life’.²⁸ There are references elsewhere to her ‘serene seclusion’; a ‘life … passed in tranquillity and seclusion’; a ‘domestic circle of the highest moral purity’ in which Baillie's most binding relationships are with her mother and her sister (Baillie pp. v, x, xii). Another critic supposes Baillie's library as circumscribed as her life: ‘Out of the fulness of a true heart her works have been written, rather than from any vast or precious store of book-learning’.²⁹ With this writing from the heart, Baillie conforms to a model of inner- not inter-textuality which limits her poetic horizons.

Other women poets (in particular Felicia Hemans) are praised in similar terms to Baillie. A Blackwood's reviewer writes that only Joanna Baillie disputes pre-eminence with Hemans. Hemans's ‘attachment to the privacy of life, her wise dislike and avoidance of the éclat of literary renown, and the dull, dry, fever-heat of fashionable circles, tend to complete her qualifications as a fitting representative of her fair countrywomen’.³⁰ The review shows how discourses of gender are always inflected by other discourses, especially that of nationality: Hemans's virtues ‘all speak of the cultivated woman bred under English skies, and in English homes’³¹ (significantly, Hemans writes a poem entitled ‘The Homes of England’). As the trope of travel suggests, this is also an issue in Baillie's poem: what happens there, I think, is that the question of sexual (im)propriety is displaced onto that of racial miscegenation, and this problem is then recuperated within a conservative gender ideology (though it is significant that the heroine remains displaced—she does not literally return home).

IV

The separate gender spheres, emphasised at the end of ‘Sir Maurice’, are the explicit theme of Frederick Rowton's Introduction to The Female Poets of Great Britain (1848), and the principle that structures his selection of poems. Of the ninety-odd poets represented in this influential anthology, those allocated the highest number of poems are: Joanna Baillie, Mary Russell Mitford, Mary Howitt and L. E. L. (revealingly listed under her married name, Laetitia Elizabeth Maclean).³² Rowton's Introduction is worth examining in detail, for it suggests a solidifying of the cultural terrain, a stricter drawing of the boundaries of gender, of the demarcation between public and private spheres. He demonstrates the production of a woman's world that provides the complement and the cure to the public, political, inherently male, sphere. Arguing against ‘[t]he doctrine of woman's intellectual inferiority’, Rowton claims, however, ‘that the sphere of woman's duty requires powers altogether dissimilar from those which are needed by man’.³³ Her sphere is defined by ‘INFLUENCE’ (man's by ‘FORCE’), and is characterised as follows:

Her province is to soften, round off, smooth down, the angularities of life and conduct … Home is her empire, and affection her sceptre. It is hers … to inspirit, to reinvigorate, to sustain … [Man] comes in contact with villainy and selfishness: it is hers to keep alive in his bosom the generous flame of virtue.³⁴

He goes on for some time in this vein, and then sums up in a number of ‘broad distinctions’, or, as we would say today, binary oppositions: ‘Man is self-relying and self-possessed; woman timid, clinging, and dependent … He thinks; she feels … Intellect is his; heart is hers’.³⁵

Rowton's notion of male self-possession recapitulates the contours of Romantic ideology, an ideology of masculine (self-)mastery which is predicated on the figurative silencing of women, who function as muse or as mute poetic object in so many Romantic poems. The paradox is that the very existence of the anthology speaks to speaking rather than silent women. There is no space here to discuss the legacies of Romanticism; more important in the present context is Rowton's figurative expansion of woman's domain to an ‘empire’, so that the trope of the limited circle of femininity takes on global resonances. Woman's ‘influence’ is far-flung. Judith Newton posits that there is a shift from eighteenth-century conduct texts such as John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774) which aestheticise femininity in the service of a male consumer to those from the latter part of the century onwards wherein there is a new type of reference to women's influence. James Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women (1766) speak of ‘an influence … an empire which belongs to you … I mean that which has the heart as its object’; as Newton argues, by the nineteenth century women's ‘separate sphere is important less as a realm in which they may demonstrate good taste than as a dominion in which they exercise a special potency’.³⁶ This trend culminates, she argues, with Sarah Ellis's declaration of the social significance of women's influence at the beginning of The Women of England (1839): ‘You have deep responsibilities; you have urgent claims; a nation's moral worth is in your keeping’.³⁷

The implications of this domestic imperialism may be focused by a closer look at the image and ideology of the domestic circle, within which Baillie is so frequently located. This figure places the woman at the centre of the private sphere; for the woman writer, it is an image of the ideological constraints on the production and reception of women's texts. But the question of female ‘influence’ rearticulates the significance of this trope, widens the parameters, so to speak. Sarah Ellis in The Wives of England (1843) proposes that ‘the English wife should … regard her position as a central one’; ‘it is not so much our private precepts which have weight’, she argues, ‘and perhaps still less our public ones, so much as the influence of individual character upon a surrounding circle, and through that circle upon the world at large’.³⁸ There is a ripple-effect whereby one good example inspires others to create their own circle, each one with a woman as its moral centre. The domestic woman, without leaving the sanctity of the home and the concerns of the heart, spreads her influence ‘from heart to heart, into a never-ending future’.³⁹ In other words, at the same time that gender oppositions are becoming more rigid and woman's role increasingly circumscribed (at least rhetorically, for one must allow for the gap between theory and practice), a new type of power accrues to women, which might constitute an early version of female ‘networking’.

The work of the ideal woman writer displays a similar circular logic. In the words of Mary Russell Mitford, in a pair of essays on Joanna Baillie and Catherine Fanshawe, the ‘pattern of what a literary lady should be … abstain[s] from the wider sphere of authorship’, but from her domestic literary sphere she circulates ‘sympathy’.⁴⁰ Women's role in literary production, as Mary Jean Corbett has recently demonstrated in her reading of Victorian womens' autobiographies, is to nurture the values of society.⁴¹ Rather than producing wide-ranging texts, Mitford's model writer reproduces leisured, middle-class existence (this woman does not have to write for a living), she reproduces the bourgeois sensibility that has its roots in aristocratic gentility (remember the disdain of many eighteenth-century aristocratic women for publication). More significantly, the woman writer, and her circulating texts, inspire women to preserve their realm of tranquil domesticity, each woman, as in Ellis's example, creating her own circle, and reinvigorating men after their experiences in the public arena. Within this seemingly constraining patriarchal model, women are empowered as cultural producers, for they reproduce cultural values (this is a subtle modulation and expansion of earlier figurings of the woman writer and her relation to public and private discourses).

The metaphor of reproduction has further resonances, given the idealisation of motherhood, from Ann Taylor's tracts of the second decade of the century through to Harriet Beecher Stowe's invocation to the ‘mothers of America’ in Uncle Tom's Cabin (to cite a text published the year after Baillie's Complete Works).⁴² The ideal Victorian mother is Victoria herself; as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems ‘The Young Queen’ and ‘Victoria's Tears’ reveal, Victoria's command of her ‘grateful isles’ is predicated on her feminine sympathy. Joanna Baillie, of course, is not literally a ‘wife of England’ (or of Scotland, for that matter), nor is she a mother, though she functions as a poetic mother for a generation of women poets—Felicia Hemans's 1828 volume Records of Woman is dedicated to Baillie. Rowton foregrounds Baillie's status as honorary mother, as the reproducer of domestic ideology, by placing at the head of his selection the poems entitled ‘To a Child’ and ‘A Mother to Her Waking Infant’. Both are popular texts, already in circulation: ‘To a Child’ was published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1821, and reprinted in Fugitive Verses in 1840; in the preface to that volume, Baillie tells us that ‘A Mother to Her Waking Infant’ (published in the 1790 edition) had found a place in Mrs Barbauld's Choice Poetical Extracts (1820). The circumstances of publication mean that both are likely to have been reproduced elsewhere, at least in commonplace books. The poems demonstrate Baillie's ‘natural sentiments’ and ‘womanly tenderness of feeling’.⁴³ Rowton continues with a ‘sweetly plaintive’ song,⁴⁴ before turning to Columbus and extracts from the plays. But Baillie's sphere of influence is clearly signalled.

V

Before I turn finally to Ahalya Baee, a poem printed for private circulation in 1849 and published for the first time in the Collected Works of 1851, I want to make a brief detour to a text which appeared between these two dates, and which speaks with succinct eloquence to the issues I have been discussing: fame, femininity and maternity, and the social significance of separate spheres; what is also exposed is the colonial subtext of the metaphor of ‘Empire’. In the first volume of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, a publication full of fashion plates and good advice for the women of America (though its paradigms of femininity were modelled on the women of England), one article (on the writer Jane Porter) begins thus:

The frequent observation of foreigners is, that in England we have few ‘celebrated women.’ Perhaps they mean that we have few who are ‘notorious;’ but let us admit that in either case they are right; and may we not express our belief in its being better for women and for the community that such is the case. ‘[C]elebrity’ rarely adds to the happiness of a woman, and almost as rarely increases her usefulness. The time and attention required to attain ‘celebrity,’ must … interfere with the faithful discharge of those feminine duties upon which the well-doing of society depends, and which shed so pure a halo around our English homes … The strength and glory of England are in the keeping of the wives and mothers of its men; … Happy is the country where the laws of God and nature are held in reverence—where each sex fulfills its peculiar duties, and renders its sphere a sanctuary! and surely such harmony is blessed by the Almighty—for while other nations writhe in anarchy and poverty, our own spreads wide her arms to receive all who seek protection or need repose.⁴⁵

It is no coincidence that it is foreigners—here represented as undifferentiated ‘others’—who note the paucity of celebrated (or notorious) women in England. In a quite common manoeuvre (it is a staple of travel-writing, for example), national identity is asserted and confirmed in opposition to cultural otherness. But what is most interesting here is the marriage of the discourses of gender and nationality: the geography of femininity, that hallowed space of domesticity, is mapped on to, and secures, national boundaries. Happy homes are equivalent to a happy country. National peace and prosperity are predicated on the ideology of separate spheres, which function in gracious harmony. In this national idyll, England functions ultimately as a maternal figure, nurturing the orphans of those dark places where the light of domestic ideology never shines. Though Harper's is an American publication, all the fiction in the first number is British: the high cultural value attached to the deposed imperial power enables British domestic ideology to cross the Atlantic and recolonise the new country. A similar expansionist mode implicitly shadows the movements of Baillie's heroines in the poems I have considered above, for they take with them the manners and the mindset of British domestic ideology into other places.⁴⁶

Ahalya Baee constitutes, I suggest, a type of counter-discourse to English imperialism and the accepted geography of gender. Baillie chooses to work in a gender-specific genre, for since the heyday of Byron and Southey, the oriental tale was associated with sexual politics. In the two other poems I have looked at in detail, the heroines' voyages out are ultimately voyages in, which reinscribe the female self within the definitions of the poet's own national culture; Baillie's heroines are always the women, wives and daughters of nineteenth-century Britain, though what they advertise is the transcultural ‘essence’ of femininity. For the first time, we have a non-British heroine, the narrative being based on Sir John Malcolm's account of the life of an Indian queen in his Memoirs of Central India (1823), an authority that Baillie invokes throughout her text, both in the preface and the extensive footnotes to the poem. The overdetermined emphasis on national and religious difference (Ahalya Baee arms herself for battle, she is a worshipper of Brahma, and attempts to exorcise a malevolent spirit from her son)—and the extreme situations in which she is placed (she witnesses her daughter's suttee at a time when British ‘women were beginning to be considered too delicate to bear the public rituals of death’)⁴⁷—constitute the frame within which Baillie examines the construction of the feminine.

The heroine is not, however, simply an exotic ‘other’ to Baillie's home-loving girls.⁴⁸ Rather, this poem, written near the end of her career, poses an alternative to her earlier texts, testing out their plots of femininity and questioning Western cultural attitudes by going outside their parameters. The reinscription, or rescripting of the familiar, of home, is made possible within the inscription of difference. Ahalya Baee's first act transgresses the boundaries of gender: she refuses inducements to give up her sovereignty, and gives a ‘display of warlike preparation’ to her enemies (Baillie, p. 841). However, as the footnote to this section points out, she ‘sent him [her opponent, the venal chief, Ragobah Duda] a message not to make war on a woman, from which he might incur disgrace, but could never derive honour’ (p. 841). In other words, she manipulates the characteristics of masculinity and femininity, both arming for war and disarming her enemies through ‘a politic display’ of womanliness. This is an altered pattern of femininity.

It is crucially Ahalya Baee's role as a mother that is subversive. Normatively, the mother is the figure at the centre of domestic ideology which radiates out from her as ‘influence’. Ahalya Baee is a biological mother with recognisable responses to her children, but she is also the mother of her country. Her most significant act displaces the discourse of maternity and of familial politics current in Britain, and has far-reaching implications for the allocation of gender spheres. In Britain, the familial relations of the monarch were replicated in the political sphere—in the wake of the Queen Caroline affair, the royals were expected to be caring mothers and fathers in their own homes (Victoria was the model of wife and mother for the middle classes) as a type of personal guarantee for their political role as mothers and fathers of the nation (the ultimate paradigm of this expansionist rhetoric is Britain as the ‘mother’ of the Empire). Ahalya Baee inverts this movement from the literal to the figurative family. She begins with the figurative role, and fabricates an appropriate family for the political scenario. ‘She must adopt another son and heir’ to succeed her dead child, and she nobly chooses ‘a soldier tried and brave’ (pp. 841-2). She is much younger than her new son, an unnatural mother for whom the personal political: ‘They were a state-constructed Son and Mother’ (p. 842). At a time when ‘motherhood was regarded as the most valuable and natural component of woman's mission’, when all the ideological state apparatuses operated so that this ‘specific historical construction of femininity was made to seem natural and universal’, Baillie reveals the making of the maternal.⁴⁹

Reconstructing the maternal puts pressure on the prescriptiveness of nineteenth-century gender ideology. Baillie's figures maintain separate spheres, ‘distinct, and, … distant spheres of action’, according to the footnote (p. 841), but these are separate spheres with a difference: Ahalya Baee and her ‘son’ are ‘United firmly to their native land, / She the considerate head, and he the ready hand’ (p. 842). He goes away to deal with wars on ‘distant frontiers’ and she stays at home, but the hierarchical valuation of these acts is reversed. The traditional (Western) dichotomy of mind over matter remains in place, but the coordinates of gender onto which this is mapped are inverted.

This odd couple represent a potential alterity at the heart of British domestic ideology. That Baillie is testing out her own culture's account of the feminine is confirmed by her reworking of the notion of separate spheres and her revision of the familiar figure of the circle, which, as we have seen, is a central trope of domestic ideology. Ahalya Baee ‘dispens[es] justice with impartial skill’ from ‘her seat of sway’ which is located within ‘a charmed circle’ (p. 842).⁵⁰ Here the woman wields direct public power, not indirect influence. Woman's empire is no longer confined to the heart and the home, but spreads out to form a wider circle, the feminine topography of the country itself which lies within a ‘guarded girdle’ (p. 844).

This is as far as Joanna Baillie ever travels in her exploration of the geography of femininity, and her evocation of difference has implications for the women back home. In conclusion, I return to the issue of female ‘influence’ and to the separate spheres posited in the Harper's article. We recall that the stability of a whole series of oppositions—foreign/domestic, public/private, stability/anarchy—are contingent upon women's ‘faithful discharge’ of ‘feminine duties’. The imperialist agenda that is implicit in the writer's idealisation of England's embrace and assimilation of other nations rests on domestic security in a type of international version of separate spheres. Joanna Baillie is at home in this historical moment: her texts, and the cultural terrain within which they find a place, are complicit with the intertwined ideologies of gender and imperialism. Indeed, two of Baillie's closet dramas, The Martyr and The Bride, are produced in Ceylon and translated into Singhalese under the patronage of the Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Johnston, in an evangelical attempt to eradicate the vices of the natives.⁵¹Ahalya Baee, however, provides the material for a detour from the hegemony of home, allowing me to end with a post-colonial fantasy: Baillie's poem, set in India, the heart of the British Empire, comes into English homes to be read by the wives and mothers of England, and thus its alternative paradigm of the feminine may be reproduced through the network of female circles of influence. This reversal of British colonialism potentially casts the shadow of sexual-political anarchy on the pure halo around our English homes.⁵²

Notes

1. Joanna Baillie, The Dramatical and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie, 2nd edn (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, London, 1853), p. 771. All subsequent references to Baillie's work (including the ‘Life of Joanna Baillie’) are to this edition, cited as Baillie, followed by page number(s); references to ‘The Legend of Lady Griseld Baillie’ and ‘Sir Maurice: A Ballad’ are to stanza numbers.

2. Frederick Rowton, Female Poets of Great Britain (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, London, 1848).

3. Jennifer Breen (ed.), Women Romantic Poets, 1785-1832 (Dent, London, 1992), p. xxii.

4. The prefatory stanzas are unnumbered; references to the poem ‘proper’ are to stanza numbers.

5. The quote comes from the last stanza of the poem, which forms part of a concluding address to British women.

6. For details of the journey undertaken by the family, see Robert Scott-Moncrieff ed, The Household Book of Lady Grisell Baillie 1692-1733 (printed by T. & A. Constable for the Scottish History Society, Edinburgh, 1911).

7. Article XII: Miss Baillie's Metrical Legends', Monthly Review 96 N. S. (1821), pp. 72-81 (p. 78).

8. Monthly Review, 96, p. 78 (italics in original).

9. MR [Monthly Review], p. 80.

10. MR, p. 81.

11. MR, p. 79.

12. ‘Remarks on Miss Baillie's Metrical Legends’, Scots Magazine 8 N. S. (1821), pp. 260-5 (p. 263). The comment is placed in a national context: ‘Of this character our Scottish maids and matrons have been allowed to partake in no common degree’ (pp. 263-4).

13. SM [Scots Magazine], p. 264.

14. Though they are rejected, the fact that alternative models, including a caricature of the Blue-stocking, are represented, demonstrates that this legend of a good woman is not the only possible narrative of femininity.

15. Carlyle, ‘Article V: Miss Baillie's Metrical Legends’, Edinburgh Review 2 (1821), pp. 393-414 (pp. 401, 393).

16. ER [Edinburgh Review], p. 410.

17. ER, p. 412.

18. ER, p. 411.

19. ER, p. 412.

20. ER, pp. 412-13. Carlyle shifts briefly to another model of the poetess when he speaks of Baillie's language displaying ‘a witching coquetry … which it is as impossible to resist as to describe’ (p. 413). It is hard to see Baillie as anything other than a supporter of domestic ideology. The only possible escape route for the contemporary feminist reader is that the gender oppositions are so fixed—in ‘Wallace’ and ‘Columbus’ the men are so manly and the women are so marginal, while Griseld's bravery seems merely another household task (Baillie's retelling of the legend suppresses Griseld's heroism)—as to prompt the question whether Baillie is espousing or exposing gender ideology.

21. This is a revised and expanded edition of Fugitive Verses (1790); ‘Sir Maurice’ does not appear in the earlier edition. Typically, reviewers of the 1840 volume find the ‘affectionately familiar’ mode of Baillie's poem to her sister (‘Lines to Agnes Baillie on her Birthday’) makes it ‘the happiest composition in the book’ (see, The Athenaeum 691 [1841], pp. 69-70 [p. 69], and The Quarterly Review 67 [1841], pp. 437-52 [p. 449]). Other poems in this volume in a similarly affectionate mould include: ‘Recollections of a Dear and Steady Friend’, ‘Two Brothers’, ‘Verses Sent to Mrs Baillie on Her Birthday, 1813’. ‘On the Death of a Very Dear Friend’ locates the friend (Justina Milligan) in ‘her home of rest, / Where inmates dear were ever found / And sisterly affection sweetly fenced her round’ (Baillie, p. 832).

22. The stanzas are unnumbered in the text; I have numbered them to aid easy reference.

23. p. 437.

24. Caroline Franklin, Byron's Heroines (Oxford, 1992), p. 86.

25. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2 vols (London, 1897), I, p. 62.

26. Athenaeum 691, (1841), p. 69.

27. The Athenaeum 1211 (1851), p. 41.

28. Dublin University Magazine 37 (1851), pp. 529-36 (p. 529).

29. Athenaeum 691, p. 69.

30. ‘Mrs Hemans,’ Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 64 (1848), pp. 641-58 (p. 641).

31. BEM, p. 641.

32. Howitt has ten poems, and the others nine each; Mitford is allocated the most pages.

33. Frederick Rowton, Female Poets of Great Britain (London, 1848), pp. xxi, xxii.

34. xxiii. Rowton's model implicitly suggests that male authorship is dependent on the spiritual sustenance of a woman in the home (quite apart, one might add, from more mundane domestic economy).

35. pp. xxiv-xxv. Rowton does not live up to his proto-Derridean claim that ‘[he is] not at all prepared to say that “difference” means “inferiority”’ (p. xxii).

36. Judith Lowder Newton, ‘Power and the Ideology of “Woman's Sphere”’, Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J., 1991; Macmillan, London, 1992), pp. 765-80 (p. 766; Fordyce cited on this page).

37. Quoted in Newton, p. 766.

38. Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Wives of England (Fisher, Son & Co., London, 1843), pp. 344, 345.

39. Ellis, Wives, p. 342.

40. Mary Russell Mitford, ‘Female Poets: Joanna Baillie—Catherine Fanshawe’, Recollections of a Literary Life; or, Books, Places, and People, 3 vols (R. Bentley, London, 1852), I, pp. 241-65 (pp. 242, 249). Those of Fanshawe's poems included in Mitford's essay were originally published in a volume of poems edited by Baillie in 1823.

41. Mary Jean Corbett, ‘Feminine Authorship and Spiritual Autobiography in Victorian Women Writers' Autobiographies’, Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 18 (1990), pp. 13-29. I am indebted to Corbett's analysis of women's reproduction of dominant ideologies.

42. On Victorian ideals of motherhood, see, especially, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Hutchison, London, 1987), and Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Blackwell, Oxford, 1988).

43. Rowton, pp. 297, 298. Other poems addressing infants are: ‘To Sophia J. Baillie’ and ‘To James B. Baillie’ (see Baillie, pp. 804, 821).

44. Rowton, p. 301.

45. ‘Memories of Miss Jane Porter’, Harper's New Monthly Magazine 1 (1850), pp. 433-8 (p. 433).

46. Equally, foreigness is to be kept out of Britain: Baillie's patriotic ‘Volunteer's Song, Written in 1803’ asserts that ‘Nor fiend nor hero from a foreign strand, / Shall lord it in our land’ (p. 823).

47. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, p. 408.

48. A colonial discourse reading might choose to foreground Baillie's domestication of the ‘other’, her imposition of sameness onto cultural difference. We first encounter the heroine as the iconic object of the gaze: ‘Behold that female form so meekly bending / O'er a pale youth’. She is ‘of gentle mind’, and spends much womanly time alleviating ‘Woe, want, and suff'ring’; even the lowliest of her subjects can depend on their claim ‘[u]pon her heart’. Her religion, which may seem ‘strange … to those / Who in a better, purer faith were born’, nevertheless demonstrates her piety and her role as a ‘humble daughter’ (to Brahma). It would be possible to argue that these details gesture towards a global femininity that transcends geographical differences.

49. Nead, Myths of Sexuality, pp. 26-7.

50. Baillie's note from Malcolm confirms that this public transaction of affairs is not improper for Hindoo women, for they are not confined or compelled to wear veils.

51. See Baillie, xvii. Fugitive Verses (E. Moxon, London, 1840) also includes school rhymes and devotional songs for negro children, who are idealised as happy and carefree, basking in God's love.

52. My anglocentric references are allusions to the Harper's article; in today's political climate one would, of course, be careful not to make England a synecdoche for Britain, thus consigning Scotland, for example, to invisibility.