Love Triangle with Dog: Whym Chow, the “Michael Fields,” and the Poetic Potential of Human-Animal Bonds

Animalities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Glenney Boggs
Keyword(s):  
Queer Studies ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Love Triangle

Boggs focuses on a volume of poetry titled Whym Chow: Flame of Love, which was published pseudonymously by Michael Field in 1914. While Victorian and queer studies have focused on other works produced by this author, who was actually two women—Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, both friends with Robert Browning—less attention has been paid to their later privately-published volume that commemorates their dog who had passed away several years before, a Chow named Whym. Boggs finds great potential in the poems for complicating theoretical explorations of “dog love”, and for rethinking subjectivity and kinship, particularly in terms of the queer potential of human-animal relationships. Rather than reading the poems as examples of anthropomorphism and a privileging of the human over the animal, Boggs sees them as deconstructing these distinctions, with the dog Whym as an “equal partner”.

MICHAEL FIELD AND SAPPHIC FAME: “MY DARK-LEAVED LAURELS WILL ENDURE”

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 649-661
Author(s):  
Francis O'Gorman
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
Authentic Person

Long Ago(1889), Michael Field's inaugural collection of verse, celebrated Sappho, the ancient poetess of Lesbos. The volume proclaimed the diversity of her sexuality; it saluted verse that was connected to the self; and it urged the authenticity of her creative force in ages beyond her death. Taking surviving fragments of Sapphic writing as embarkation points for new poems in her spirit, Michael Field, the joint pseudonym of the two poets Katherine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), hailed the continuing presence of the Greek in the modern age, drawing the reader back to an imagined version of Sappho's mind and experience, her desires and troubles, of which history held so slight a record. Developing ideas articulated by Robert Browning, particularly in the opening book ofThe Ring and the Book(1868–69),Long Agodiscerned in poetry a way of regenerating the energy – or of creating the illusion of such regeneration – of an almost-lost, but indisputably authentic person from the ancient Mediterranean. The volume privileged a post-Romantic assumption about the signal importance of the self behind writing, the complexities and contradictions of which I explore here, and it understood modern poetry's dealings with a nearly vanished Greece as recuperative of a nearly disappeared artist. As such,Long Agoimplicitly imagined the work of the contemporary poet as, to use Robert Browning's word, a matter of “galvanism” (Browning I.740): the calling back into the present of the lost forms of distant lives.

DISABILITY AND GENDER IN THE VISUAL FIELD: SEEING THE SUBTERRANEAN LIVES OF MICHAEL FIELD'S WILLIAM RUFUS

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
Sharon Bickle
Keyword(s):  
Women Poets ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Love Affair ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Successful Recovery ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
And Gender

When the UK'sGuardiannewspaper featured “La Gioconda” as poem of the week in January 2010, the paper's popular readership discovered what many late-Victorian scholars had known about for some time: the poetic partnership of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), known as “Michael Field.” The successful recovery of the Fields as significant late-Victorian writers – a project now in its second decade – seems poised to emerge into popular awareness driven as much by interest in their unconventional love affair as by the poetry itself. Scholars too have been seduced by the romance of a transgressive love story, and the critical nexus between sexuality and textuality has produced remarkable scholarship on the Fields’ lyric poetry: those texts in which the personas have a rough equivalence with Bradley and Cooper themselves. Yopie Prins first noted the complex engagement of multiple voices with lyric structure in Long Ago (74–111), and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Women Poets 175–95), Jill Ehnenn (73–96), and Hilary Fraser (553–56) expanded on this to uncover the transformation of the lyric's male gaze into a triangulated lesbian vision in Sight and Song (1892). In contrast to the recognition accorded their lyric verse, most critics have overlooked Michael Field's verse dramas. While there have been attempts to shift attention onto the plays, the significance of the Fields’ lesbian vision to the dramas has never been explored. This article seeks to redress this pervasive neglect and begin dismantling the boundaries that have grown up between critical approaches to the lyrics and the plays.

Lyric, Aestheticism and the Later Nineteenth Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Thain
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Katharine Bradley

Chapter 1 offers important historical and conceptual contexts for the late nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that ‘aestheticist lyric poetry’ might be usefully conceptualised ‘through the twin impetuses of conceptual expansion and formal reduction’. It then goes on to outline the context of ‘cultural modernity’, to which it is suggested aestheticist lyric poetry is responding, in order to define further the ‘crisis’ in lyric. It also introduces the three conceptual frames that set the remit for the three parts of the book; these are three key axes around which lyric poetry operates: time, space and subjectivity. Chapter 1 ends with a preliminary case study from the work of ‘Michael Field’ (the assumed name of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) to demonstrate in practice the relevance of the three frames to aestheticist poetry.

Adept Sailing before the Storm

2018 ◽  
pp. 68-100
Author(s):  
Barbara Lounsberry
Keyword(s):  
Michael Field ◽  
Outer World ◽  
Travel Diary ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Artistic Self

Woolf's next two diary books, her 1932 diary and her 1933–34 diary, help her to navigate the difficult strait between the outer and the inner conflicts. She needs these diaries’ support, for, as the gathering outer storm forms, she faces both the strains of her inner artistic self and the loss of her friends. In late November of 1933, she consciously turns from the troubling outer world to the dual-voiced diary of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the aunt and niece verse dramatists who published together under the name Michael Field. There, she finds not only lesbian playwrights and their trials but also the word “outsiders.” In February 1934, her response to a famous travel diary—Arthur Young’s Travels in France during the years 1787, 1788, 1789—shows her recoil from war.

A New Sketch of Edith Cooper ('Michael Field')

2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-82
Author(s):  
R. N. Morley
Keyword(s):  
Michael Field ◽  
Edith Cooper

Michael Field’s Fragrant Imagination

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Katharine Bradley

This chapter establishes the importance of perfume to Michael Field, the female aesthetes Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, and shows how it plays a significant role both in the poetry produced by Bradley and in entries in the women’s shared diary, especially those written by Cooper. Often exchanged in the form of gifts and scented flowers, perfume is strongly associated by both women with love but also with poetic creativity, as in Bradley’s verse, which celebrates her tender amatory feelings for Cooper but also her deep affection for the artist Charles Ricketts. The chapter concludes with a reading of one of Bradley’s most accomplished poems, which can be regarded as a poetic scented signature, expressing the essence of Michael Field.

A VISUAL FIELD: MICHAEL FIELD AND THE GAZE

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 553-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Art Criticism ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Vernon Lee ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
The Times ◽  
Cultural Connections

In 1892, Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913) published a volume of poetry with the titleSight and Songbased on their response to a series of paintings in British and Continental public galleries. Bradley and Cooper, aunt and niece, devoted lovers, who over the three decades of their writing lives produced numerous volumes of poetry and plays collaboratively under the authorial signature “Michael Field,” had already made their name with a volume published in 1889 entitledLong Ago, comprising translations and elaborations of the Sapphic fragments, which has been read as an intriguing and (for the times) audaciously explicit celebration of love between women. The concept of “translation” was as fundamental to the project ofSight and Songas it had been toLong Ago; however, in the later volume it refers not to the literal translation of poetic fragments written in an ancient and other language (asLong Agoostensibly did) but to the rhetorical act of interpreting visual images. The aim of their new collection of ekphrastic poems was, as they explained in the Preface toSight and Song, “to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves” (Michael Field,Sight and Songv). The synaesthetic complexity of Michael Field's language here suggests the multidimensional sensory experience of looking at and responding to visual art works, something the women try to capture in the various kinds of writing they undertake around the production of this volume – their journal and their letters, as well as the poems themselves – in their attempt to provide such a translation. In this essay I should like to explore howSight and Songcontinues the project ofLong Agoin the sense both of articulating their lesbian experience and of locating them in a cultural tradition, only that experience is here specifically associated with visual hermeneutics and with the circulation of the verbal and the visual, and the cultural connections they make are not with a classical lesbian heritage but with recent and contemporary aestheticians and writers on art – most notably, I suggest, with two other couples who wrote art criticism in collaboration: Bernard Berenson and Mary Costelloe, and Vernon Lee and Clementina (“Kit”) Anstruther-Thomson.

scholarly journals ‘The Eyes of an Intellectual Vampire’: Michael Field, Vernon Lee and Female Masculinities in Late Victorian Aestheticism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frankie Dytor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Difference ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Gender Variant ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Vernon Lee ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Katharine Bradley

Abstract This article reframes debate on the intersections of female aestheticism and cultural dissidence by focusing on the construction of queer masculinities at the end of the nineteenth century. Looking at the diary of Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), it examines the descriptions of Vernon Lee, Clementina (‘Kit’) Anstruther-Thompson and Maud Cruttwell during the Fields’ trip to Italy in 1895. The ambivalent presentation of these figures in the diary reveals a conflicted legacy of aestheticism, centred around the inheritance, interpretation and embodiment of queer masculinity. The article argues that the Fields developed themes associated with a previous generation of male aesthetes in order to articulate gender difference between themselves and other female-bodied aesthetes. In particular, it considers how the gender-variant Fields rejected Lee, Anstruther-Thomson and Cruttwell’s trans-masculinities as perversions of their sex.

"Sister Souls": Bernard Berenson and Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper)

2005 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTHA VICINUS
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Response ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Married Woman ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Older Woman ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Impact Of Falling ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal

In the 1890s the poet Michael Field-the lesbian aunt-and-niece couple, Katharine Bradley (1846 -1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913)-were close friends with the art connoisseur Bernard Berenson (1865-1959). Under the influence of Walter Pater,the three avidly discussed the connections uniting the artwork, viewer, and artist. Critics have long known that Cooper fell passionately in love with Berenson, but no one has examined this relationship closely. This essay uses the Michael Field poems, letters, and diaries to explore the impact of falling in love with a man on the Bradly-Cooper relationship and their poetry. Cooper felt that she and Berenson were faun-like creatures who instinctively understood each other on a deeper level than the physical. Berenson sought Cooper's ethereal independence while he was courting a married woman;Cooper turned to him when she wanted a more separate life from her aunt. Berenson never forgot Cooper's intense emotional response to visual art, a response that represented his aesthetic ideal. Cooper experienced a burst of creativity, reliving her intoxicating love in verse and prose. Bradley, as the older woman, struggled to reconcile herself to this attractive, destructive male intrusion into Michael Field's poetic and personal "oneness." The three drew on the emotions that they stirred in each other as a source of inspiration, but each discovered that emotion can outrun aesthetics.

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