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The Ambivalence of Ann Yearsley: Laboring and Writing, Submission and Resistance

2005; Routledge; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08905490500444015

1477-2663

Julie Cairnie,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes [1] Jeremy Hawthorn, in his study of twentieth‐century working‐class writers, explains that “[b]ecoming a writer can cut someone from the working class off from his or her roots” (vii). [2] Landry does explore the tension between Yearsley the “working‐class writer” and Yearsley the “bourgeois subject.” While she acknowledges that ambivalence can be read as a political strategy, Landry is far more interested in ambivalence as a complex identity. [3] For comprehensive examinations of this eighteenth‐century phenomenon, see Robert Southey’s The Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets (1831) and Betty Rizzo’s “The Patron as Poet Maker.” [4] Even as late as 1796, in her dedicatory epistle to The Rural Lyre, Yearsley tells her second patron, Frederick Hervey: “[M]ental accomplishments were considered as incompatible with my laborious employment. This, my Lord, was not your opinion” (qtd. in Landry 156). [5] Yearsley articulates these requests in the “Narrative” to her subscribers for Poems, on Several Occasions. [6] Here Yearsley refers to the poem titled “To the same [Hannah More]; on her accusing the Author of Flattery, and of ascribing to the Creature that Praise which is due only to the Creator,” which appears in the first collection of verse. In this poem she seems to prepare More for her disobedience when she writes, “For mine’s a stubborn and a savage will” (line 8). [7] Yearsley’s unpublished poems, edited by Ferguson for Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, are strategically ambivalent. In a brief statement which acknowledges both her “resentment” and her “generosity,” Yearsley introduces these poems: The following lines were composed immediately after Miss H. More’s haughty treatment of the Author, Time and Resolution having calmed Resentment in the bosom of the latter, Generosity forbade the publication of several Pieces which were written in these painful moments. (31) [8] Waldron explains that Yearsley’s patrons “did not seek to raise her to a higher social level.” This fear was because there was “a greater fear of social mobility among women than men” (Lactilla 37). [9] Rizzo’s suggestion that More and Montagu share a “secret agenda” is relevant here. Yearsley does not write on cue, as Waldron believes; instead, she seems to be aware of the motivation of her patrons which, according to Rizzo, involves “combating the patriarchy’s prescriptive definitions of literary excellence, a definition proscribing all contenders but privileged males” (262). [10] See Stephen Duck’s “The Thresher’s Labour” (1736) and Mary Collier’s “The Woman’s Labour” (1739). [11] A number of recent critics have attempted to situate Yearsley as an early Romantic. See Waldron (Lactilla); Cole and Swartz; Burke; and Favret. [12] The first three lines of the second stanza are particularly saccharine: “O, Montagu! forgive me, if I sing / Thy wisdom tempered with the milder ray / Of soft humanity, and kindness bland” (30–32). [13] In her “Narrative” Yearsley uses this phrase to describe the tone of her text. [14] Several critics have studied the complexities of More’s work amongst the poor. See Mitzi Myers; Dorice Williams Elliott; and Christine Krueger. [15] See Ferguson’s discussion of the production history of More’s and Yearsley’s poems in Subject to Others. [16] Waldron argues, “Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Yearsley’s poem politically is the author’s real alignment … with Hannah More. There was very little between them ideologically” (Lactilla 171). [17] Ferguson explains that “abolitionist texts did not customarily acknowledge the frequent slave rebellions that contextualize Luco’s adversarial posture” (Subject 170). [18] In this respect I disagree with Ferguson’s claim that Yearsley writes for a “disenfranchised” audience: “Yearsley exhorts Africans and all disenfranchised people to resist” (Subject 171). Yearsley’s audience is primarily the middle‐class and upper‐class residents of Bristol. The poem was unlikely to be read as a call to resistance by African slaves and English workers. [19] Gender discrimination seems to be of no consequence in this poem. Yearsley participates in the myth that all slaves are men. As Ferguson demonstrates in Subject to Others, eighteenth‐century women’s antislavery discourse typically represented slaves as men. It is possible, however, that Yearsley’s portrayal of a slave is intended to dissuade readers from reading too many similarities between Luco and Lactilla. [20] I refer to Spivak’s discussion of Christophine, Antoinette’s nurse in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, in “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Spivak points out that Rhys does not know how to write Christophine fully into the story and so inexplicably extricates her from the text. I suggest Yearsley does something similar with Luco.