Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege, and the Politics of Subjectivity

Uses post structuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories to read the poetry of Dickinson, Moore, H.D., and Rich.

Scheming Women charts a trajectory of American female poetic speakers from within a heterosexual lyric framework to bisexual and lesbian subjects outside that pervasive frame. In close readings of Dickinson, Moore, H.D., and Rich, the author makes a new argument about the division that permeates their poetic speaking subjects. Postulating a revolutionary female subject, she extends Julia Kristeva's theory of poetic language through an intertextual approach, and shows that these relatively advantaged female poets destructure the very poetic power they are able to assert. Hogue concludes that in not reproducing positions of dominance and privilege indicative of larger cultural trends, these key poets exemplify important alternatives to class, race, and gender hierarchies-persuasively demonstrating the promise of what she terms an ethical feminist poetic practice.