By Izzi Holmes
While scholars often note that Mary Robinson’s reputation preceded her, more recent criticism focuses on how Robinson meticulously crafted, and therefore managed to precede, her reputation. For many women writers in the Romantic period, since the word “woman” negates the male concept of a “writer,” to write was to fail as a woman, and to be a woman was to fail as a writer. Robinson is a notable exception, as she not only avoided failure in both categories during her life, but secured perennial fame as both a literary genius and promiscuous celebrity.
Scholarship from the late 1990s explores how Robinson used various writerly personas to achieve canonical success, with an emphasis on Robinson’s invocation of Sappho in 1995 (Perry) and use of Shakespeare’s Perdita in 1997 (Bolton) to situate herself in literary traditions and genealogies. A 2001 work on Robinson’s authorial reputation expands on the strategic invocation of Sappho as both a writerly persona and female ancestor to authorize her legitimacy within male-dominated canons (Cross, “Lyrical Ballads’ to ‘Lyrical Tales’”). While this proliferation of scholarship in the early millennium affirms critical interest in Robinson’s authorial legacy, critics studying Robinson’s allusive personas often prioritize her poetry over her prose.
Subsequent works, however, from 2002 and beyond, center Robinson’s rhetorical strategies in A Letter To The Women of England and explore her defense of “the literary woman” in the prose text as it constitutes a “literary-philosophical treatise” in the tradition of Shelley or Wordsworth (Cross, “He-She Philosophers,” 53). As they defend Robinson’s defense and suggest that her political prose could place her within male literary traditions, such scholars do place Robinson within these traditions, and in turn, demonstrate the success of her intertextual project. Other critics from the early 2000s investigate Robinson’s relationship to female contemporaries, and argue that in her Letter, Robinson revises the gendered tropes of the epistolary form, as well as Wollstonecraftian rhetorical techniques (Hodson). Since Robinson uses her experiences in her political writings, which directs readers to her biography, the rising interest in her prose emerges from a desire to understand how she managed to secure a position in a canon of male authors.
The 2003 Broadview Press edition of the Letter edited by Sharon Setzer arrived amid and amplified scholarly attention to Robinson’s life, letters, and Letter. While Setzer characterizes the Letter as a simultaneous defense of Robinson’s life and a proposal of a future where women could enter political discourse, she argues that Robinson’s Letter anticipates and inaugurates a new literary tradition (9). Though later scholars expand on Setzer’s arguments about biography, and explore the “self-conscious layering of allusion” (Gamer 241) and use of fashionable literary structures (Arnold) in Robinson’s work, few consider her paratexts as sites of self-fashioning. Yet since Robinson uses footnotes to interact with other authors, complicate the text, and reckon with literary tradition, a study of the Letter’s paratextual footnotes is necessary.
That scholars have yet to analyze the footnotes of Robinson’s Letter at length is likely because the canon of academic literature theorizing subterranean paratext is still relatively new. Shari Benstock’s comparative consideration of scholarly and fictional footnotes began this tradition in 1983, then made way for theories of the footnote as an art form (Bowersock), literary genre (Warner), and conscientious historical practice (Hilbert), each of which preceded Anthony Grafton’s 1997 monograph. Though his history spans scientific, philosophical, and literary traditions, Grafton does not use a single female writer as an example. Grafton’s Curious History is curious indeed: it requires that the footnote form operates according to exclusive, male logic.
Where Grafton argues that footnotes “locate the production of the work in question in time and space” to validate an author’s legitimacy (Grafton 32), Jacqueline Labbe asserts the disparities of the form in a 2000 chapter. Labbe posits that although footnotes could “perform the historian’s function” for male authors, women did not have the same chance to “display” their “knowledge and authority” (72). Female poets of “cultural marginality” like Charlotte Smith could use the “textual marginality” of footnotes to expand the “restrictive terrain” of gender (Labbe 73). Kandi Tayebi expands on this in a 2004 article, and claims that Smith uses biographical footnotes to “reinforce the idea that she has truly experienced what she is writing about” for suspicious male audiences (427). These works confirm that the marginal symmetry between female authors and their footnotes authorizes the radical deployment of footnotes for women writers: footnotes can not only articulate women’s alienation and assert authorial agency, but in doing so, afford women the opportunity to permeate canonical male literary institutions.
In her 2002 article, Cross applies this logic of marginality to the Letter’s footnotes. Cross argues that Robinson permeates the male literary sphere by inserting, interpreting, and “interrupting” direct quotations from Vossius: she parrots his claim that “the fair sex are capable of literature” in the phrase “equally capable of fine literature” (“He-She Philosophers,” 63; Robinson 42, 54). Both the notion of being “equally capable” and the modifier “fine” convey the resolve of Robinson’s project while complicating her references to Vossius, since she writes in a sarcastic footnote to the former quote that it was “reserved for modern Englishmen to question their capability” (Cross, “He-She Philosophers,” 63; Robinson 42, 54). Cross explains that the “pointed sarcasm” of the footnotes clarify Robinson’s invocation of Vossius’s catalogue as both a “political commentary” and an attempt to situate herself in a male tradition as a female author (“He-She Philosophers,” 63). This clarification, in Cross’s view, reveals that Robinson’s “primary goal” in writing the Letter was to “assert not only women’s ability to excel in literature, but also to show that men supported these abilities” (“ 63). For Cross, the quotation of Vossius functions to earnestly validate Robinson’s project for male readers, while also making “cutting remarks about women’s social positions” for female readers ( 63). By arguing that the footnotes afford Robinson the unique opportunity to speak to both male and female audiences, Cross posits the Letter’s footnotes as a multivocal, radical site.
Cross’s argument about a simultaneous address to male and female readers aligns with the Wollstonecraftian tradition Robinson places herself in. Wollstonecraft’s “moderate tone and general mode of philosophical reasoning” reveal she was writing to male readers; her subjection to “vicious ad feminam attacks” when people learned her identity proves that she achieved this male readership (Setzer 22, 19). At the same time, the existence of Robinson’s Letter is both proof of a female readership and Wollstonecraft’s radical use of paratext to speak to female readers, as the Letter emerges from and expands upon the call for female political writers that “Wollstonecraft squeezed into a footnote” (Setzer 21). Though Wollstonecraft says “I shall not lay any great stress on the example of a few women,” she cites “Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Madame d’Eon,” and “many more…reckoned exceptions” of women as “reasonable creatures” in the footnotes (Setzer 21, Wollstonecraft 145-146). Where Wollstonecraft relegates her citation of “women who defied the general rule of mental subordination” to a footnote, Robinson intersperses them throughout her Letter (Setzer 21).
According to this Wollstonecraftian logic, when Robinson says what she “will not” do because Wollstonecraft, who she calls“an illustrious British female, (whose death has not been sufficiently lamented…)” already has on the first page of the Letter, she links her project to the Vindications while distancing herself from Wollstonecraft in parentheses (41). While the word “parenthesis” means “to place in beside,” there is no criteria for what is “beside” (Williams 60). Under hierarchical (male) logic, where parentheses are a site of repression of extraneous information, Robinson’s typographical move prioritizes the “philosophical sensualist” Rousseau over her parenthetical reference to Wollstoncraft, with the former existing outside of these textual bounds, and the latter in brackets (41). By placing her expression of grief “in beside,” Robinson complies with the patriarchal belief that women should repress their feelings (Williams 60). Yet alternative reading of Robinson’s attempt to “manage the reading experience” and subsequent relegation of her own opinions to the beside reveals that she might instead use parentheses as a spotlight, to give her literary ancestor Mary Wollstonecraft the praise she deserves in an acceptable (marginal) medium for women authors (Knezevich 4).
Robinson encourages male readers to ignore parentheticals and read typography hierarchically (with parentheses as subservient to the text), while simultaneously revealing radical relations to marginal readers who attend to marginal paratext (Williams 60). This notion, however, is predicated on female subservience, and only holds if female readers are marginal. Yet contrary to Cross’s claim, Robinson does not have male readers in mind. By titling the project A Letter To The Women of England, Robinson endeavors to equip female readers with the tools their literary success requires. Though previous scholars posit that marginal footnotes can serve a radical purpose for female authors, and allow them to display anguish, assert legitimacy, and enter male literary spaces, they inadvertently perpetuate the claim that female readers are marginal in the first place. The symmetrical marginality of women and footnotes (and the subservience of both) persists in scholarship when the governing theories of form are necessarily male, which makes circumventing male legislation necessarily impossible.
Since male theories of footnotes are not applicable to texts by female writers for female audiences, and the genesis of the Letter proves Robinson’s belief in the radical potential of paratext, her footnotes deserve an alternative, female history. In his 2011 monograph The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam deconstructs patriarchal “logics of success” and imagines failure as an alternate way of life (2-3). Though his theorization of failure as a queer, artful practice arrives from contemporary examples, his notion of failure as generative is generative across periods. Footnotes, in Halberstam’s framework, are instances of failure, “narrative[s] without progress,” which means they have the potential to resist the cruel, linear logic of hegemony more than other forms, and thus require radical consideration (89). A reading of Robinson’s footnotes through Halberstam’s lens reveals that their failure within conventionally male literary spaces generates an alternative, paratextual, and female model of literary success.
If the inclusion of paratext means a text fails as a complete entity, Robinson embraces failure in the first footnote on the first page. There, Robinson writes that “[t]he writer of this letter, though avowedly of the same school,” does not purport to imitate Wollstonecraft (41). As this claim occurs in the inverted space of the paratext, Robinson’s third person statement and subsequent attempt to distance herself from Wollstonecraft not only fails, but brings the two closer together. Robinson inadvertently reveals their similarities; like Wollstonecraft, she disavows gendered tropes of the epistolary form. She does not apologize for a lack of polish, rely on first person pronouns, or use “private” verbs (Hodson). That Robinson refers to herself as “[t]he writer of this letter” (41) proves that both women writers use footnotes to “establish authority for the poet’s voice” and take on the role of a legislative editor (Knezevich 4). Yet since Wollstonecraft uses a male voice in the body text, her footnotes share “something divulged nowhere else,” her femininity, and speak directly to female readers (Bowersock 59).
Where Wollstonecraft reveals that Vindications was written by a woman in the paratext, Robinson uses her own paratext to confirm that the Letter is for women. That Wollstonecraft reproduces male forms for an audience of male readers to argue for female education not only reveals her subservient view of female forms, female readers, and paratext since she speaks to female readers in the footnotes because of their marginality. Yet in a way, she also succeeds, since “feminine success is always measured by male standards” (Halberstam 4). Robinson does not relegate female authors to the paratext to hide her identity—she already revealed herself as a woman writer through her pseudonym, Anne Francis Randall (Setzer 37). Rather than taking on the voice of one man, Robinson poses as a multitude of women writers: she refers to herself as “[t]he writer of this letter” in some instances, and the first person “I” in other footnotes (41). Instead of trying to infiltrate male traditions, Robinson transforms the citations into a communal site to situate herself in an alternatively marginal, intertextual, and paratextual female tradition.
By definition, footnotes, as “explanatory” features, should guide a reader’s understanding (Lockwood 130). Since Robinson does not refer to either Rousseau or Wollstonecraft by name in the body text of the first page, she should cite both authors in the paratext. Yet though Robinson cites a “legion of Wollstonecrafts,” she does not name Rousseau in the footnotes (41). Where “citation is feminist memory,” and helps authors both recognize “those who came before,” as well as the “materials through which” and “from which” future scholars can build, these citational differences matter (Ahmed 15-16). Since footnotes anticipate “expected readers,” they actually reveal writer’s the intended audience, so the fact that Robinson cites Wollstonecraft and not Rousseau reveals that she was writing to an audience of scholarly women (McCarthy 219). Though most educated female readers likely knew Rousseau, that Robinson does not cite him is still important because by ignoring him, she deviates from form, and breaks the citational chain. If readers do not know Rousseau, as Robinson never names him in the body text, they may never learn who he is. Yet since Robinson includes a citation for female readers unfamiliar with Wollstonecraft, and thus equips them to enter the paratextual female tradition she resides in, her unequal citation enables an “alternate ‘herstory’” to emerge from “the margins” (Knezevich 13).
The citations in Robinson’s footnotes successfully decenter men, as Robinson only refers to hypothetical men in the footnotes. Robinson first cites theoretical “husbands and even fathers” (72), then “a husband” who realizes that while he “permits his wife to act like a mad-woman,” he “does not allow her to think like a wise one” (81). By calling these men “husband[s]” instead of men, Robinson defines them by their relationship to women, and displaces the pressures male writers place on women onto these men. That these are the only instances of male pronouns in the footnotes also means that Robinson does not cite any of the male scholars she references in the body text. Though Robinson praises Vossius in the body text, for example, and states that she includes “an extract from the learned VOSSIUS…concerning illustrious WOMEN who had excelled in polite literature” for “the advantage” of her “unlettered readers,” she does not cite him in the footnote; instead, the footnote says “[a]bout a century and a half ago” (54). Robinson also does not cite Vossius when she expands his list throughout the text, though she mentions him when she says his list needs the revision she then takes up: “the list might have been very much enlarged, since the time that Vossius wrote” (54). Robinson claims his voice as her own, and “forgets” her literary ancestry in the footnotes (Halberstam 80). Without a citation, Vossius cannot validate Robinson in a male tradition, as Cross argues (“He-She Philosophers,” 63). Since we measure history in sequence, when Robinson fails to cite men in the footnotes, she “undermine[s] dominant modes of historicizing” and pursues a female history (Halberstam 74).
Robinson makes use of failure’s generative quality to establish an alternative literary canon that—in its focus on female authors and radical presentism—opposes patriarchal norms, and reveals a blueprint for what alternative citational models look like without male legislators. While a text is linear and “continuous,” footnotes turn “neither backward nor forwards” (Bowersock 54). Footnotes also have “[f]ailure built into” them since they attempt to bridge an impossible temporal gap between past and present readers (Lockwood 131). The temporal failure of the footnote affords Robinson the ability to bring historical events “into relation with the cultural and political life of [her] own time” (Bowersock 54). Though Robinson uses the past tense to refer to Cassandra Fidele in the body text, she uses the present tense when she writes in the footnote that a “Cassandra in the universities of England, at the present period, would be considered as one of those literary bugbears, a female philosopher, and would consequently be treated with ridicule and contempt” (58). Since the atemporality of the footnotes enables Robinson to ground her project in a tradition of legitimate female writers of bygone eras, she uses this unique positionality to clarify the present condition of women in England.
Once Robinson shows her female readers their circumstances in the footnotes, she makes use of the form’s temporal deviance to move her contemporaries to action. Robinson not only brings Cassandra into the “present period,” but into the future with the word “will” (58). Instead of “writing for a posterity as distant as they themselves were from the classics” like the male historian, who also uses footnotes to explain their circumstances to distant readers, Robinson imagines a near reader (Grafton 29-30). As “feminine success is always measured by male standards,” Robinson fails to adhere to conventions of narrative distance (Halberstam 4). Halberstam argues that failing to “measure up to patriarchal ideals” can bring “unexpected pleasure” (4). For Robinson, this pleasure emerges from an amplification of this failure, as she leans into the fact that footnotes explicitly signify failure in Romantic texts, especially since the era valued the autonomy of “literary artwork” and literature’s “capacity to transcend its social and historical circumstances,” a notion paratexts refute (Watson 5). Robinson transcends otherwise impermeable temporal boundaries to help female readers recognize their conditions.
Yet as she crosses these borders, Robinson does not place herself above the reader, but rather alongside them. She “revel[s] in” and “cleave[s] to” her bodily failure, that she will die one day, instead of projecting a spectral version of herself into the uncertain future (Halberstam 186) Her footnotes conjure a sense of urgency that the body text cannot convey. In another footnote, Robinson writes that “[w]e have a living proof…in the person of Madame D’Eon” (Robinson 73). In this instance, the reader Robinson imagines is so temporally near that the female writer she cites, Madame D’Eon, is still living. Though Wollstonecraft also cites “Madame d’Eon” as one of her “reckoned exceptions” of women writers, Robinson steps out of time with the word “we” to join her reader, and explicitly positions herself alongside both the writer and her readers (Wollstonecraft 146; Robinson 73). Robinson’s text therefore supposes a radical “relation to the now,” a success that centers the present (Halberstam 80). This failure to adhere to the temporal conventions of the male writer enables Robinson to address present female readers—a legion of Robinsons—in her footnotes. Robinson thus offers an alternative literary model where the primary audience is non-marginal but still necessarily female readers.
While the fact that Robinson uses the footnotes of A Letter To The Women of England to circumvent male legislation means she fails to achieve marginal success in a male tradition, this failure generates an alternative model of success that is necessarily female, and paratextual. As failure necessitates a refusal to “acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline,” that Robinson’s footnotes are paratextual “weapons of the weak” makes them strong as theoretical and radical spaces (Halberstam 88). Robinson’s footnotes reveal the potential for paratextual, countercultural knowledge because they confirm that the linear male social order is not innate. Where deploying “the concept of family” often “introduces normative understandings of time,” “forgetfulness” offers “an opportunity for a non-hetero-reproductive future” (Halberstam 70). The subsequent denaturalization of the patriarchal family structure enables the emergence of alternative family models, as well as alternative temporal frameworks (Halberstam 71).
After denaturalizing the family structure of literary patronage, Robinson poses one temporally and genealogically alternative model in the postscript list. Though, like Vossius, Robinson catalogues all of the successful women writers in England at the time, the women she lists are Robinson’s contemporaries, not her ancestors. Where both Vossius and Wollstonecraft’s invocations face backwards, and emphasize both historical distance and a return to past ideals, Robinson’s faces forwards, and disavows past forms. Her list is necessarily present, and constitutes a “narrative without progress,” like footnotes—a failure that resists hegemonic, obsessively productive logic (89). Again, Robinson disavows historical conventions of distance to forge a radical “relation to the now” (Halberstam 80). The nonlinear structure of Robinson’s list undermines the patriarchal and genealogical nature of conventional literary success.
In the footnotes to the list, Robinson further deconstructs the patriarchal, genealogical, and hierarchical logics of literary history and success. Since citation is indeed a form of “feminist memory,” the list’s footnotes are then even more radical than the footnotes to the body text (Ahmed 15). Here, Robinson explains that names in the list of female authors appear in alphabetical order to “escape the imputation of partiality” (86). Her list is not only present, but operates according to the alphabet’s random array of signifiers. An alternative, female history of Robinson’s footnotes reveal that as the “annotator” of history, “the operative cog in the great chain of literary being,” she refutes the notion of authors in a tradition as father and son, and instead suggests an alternative familial tie to literary peers: a lateral relationship akin to female friends (New 7). Robinson forges a new model for female writers to aspire to, and establishes a new tradition that prioritizes this structure and framework over past iterations.
As for Robinson’s own reputation, this investigation of the Letter’s footnotes reveals that by leaning into her failure as a woman and a writer, according to the male logic of the era, she not only preceded her reputation, but successfully constructed a new model of female authorship that circumvented male legislation. Since Robinson’s list of successful authors includes herself, the footnotes affirm her legitimacy twice over: they first confirm her positionality in this tradition as a writer, then her role as a historian as she narrates its articulation (63-64). As Robinson uses alternative, female footnotes to forge an alternative, female literary genealogy, she positions herself as a writer, historian, and both founder and center of this tradition, securing authority in all directions. Robinson’s footnotes not only reveal the potential for alternative, female authorial modes, but exemplifies this model, while equipping her readers with the tools to participate in and, in turn, perpetuate such traditions going forward. Alternative logic heeds radical results.
Though Anthony Grafton’s monopolization of footnote scholarship exacerbates the rigidity and masculinity of an already restrictive and male scholarly canon, Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure reminds us that limitation can be more generative than limitlessness, just as conventional failure can be more generative than conventional success. This contemporary framework offers tools to theorize not only radical footnotes, but paratext at large. Any attempt to theorize female paratext provides female critics with the opportunity to make use of the very model they study and forge alternative histories of equally radical forms. As this canon emerges, eventually—like Robinson with Vossius—scholars will be able to circumvent male legislators and historians entirely; they will no longer have to apply male logic to female paratexts.
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