| This project recovers the primarily pseudonymous literary criticism of the Rhode Island poet and essayist Sarah Helen Whitman (1803--1878) in a critical edition for the first time, demonstrating that she should be studied with such established critics as William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Edgar Allan Poe. Whitman explicates transcontinental idealism within the context of American considerations of immorality, pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory, German Naturphilosophen , and the occult in her essays on Emerson, Alcott, Goethe, Shelley, and Poe. She argues that these writers utilize literature, science, and philosophy to recover individual spirituality in a time of inadequate traditional theology and doctrinal malaise. Almost invariably, Whitman defends her subjects from American critics who consider the byproducts of this secular faith irreligious or immoral. Scholarly neglect of this sophisticated and daring literary criticism can be understood in the context of Whitman's performative "passing" through private writing. The private correspondence and genealogical scrapbook of Sarah Helen Whitman illuminate a minor woman writer's programmatic attempt to publish a deviant, male-gendered authorial identity through private acts of performative self-fashioning. Such private, literary cross-dressing supported her published defenses of Poe and Byron; enabled her critical transition from intellectual elitism to popular entertainment; and then contributed ironically to her critical neglect. This analysis of Whitman's texts complicates the question of women writers' "separate sphere" ideology and corrects the misconception that Fuller contrasts singularly and anomalously as a literary critic with the greater number of antebellum women poets and novelists. It participates in the recovery of nineteenth-century women writers, provides additional contexts for Poe biography and antebellum literary criticism, and develops theoretical considerations about gender, authorship, and power in public and private writing. |
