The Secret Life of the Della Cruscan Sonnet: William Gifford’s Baviad and Maeviad

Recent feminist and gender-oriented scholarship about the Victorian sonnet has attributed a pioneering role to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese in the nineteenth-century revival of the genre. Eminent literary critics such as Angela Leighton, Alison Chapman, and Dorothy Mermin agree that theSonnets, in Chapman’s words, ‘translate the amatory discourse of Petrarchanism into a vehicle for a female poet speaking from an active subject position’. Since Barrett Browning scholars themselves have played a pioneering role in reviving critical interest in the Victorian sonnet genre at the close of the twentieth century, the conviction that, as sonneteers, Victorian women poets were essentially trespassing on an exclusively masculine domain is now widely spread and has remained almost uncontested. Natalie Houston stands virtually alone with her assertion that it is ‘because the sonnet form was relatively free of gendered associations, that women poets took it up’. I would want to argue against both assumptions. By the nineteenth century, the sonnet choice was no longer straightforwardly masculine, nor was it gender-free. Rather, it had become a very complex one, coloured by old traditions, recent innovations, and intricate gendered connotations. In an attempt to overcome the psychological barrier between Victorian literary studies and the eighteenth century, this essay traces the androgynous status of the Victorian amatory sonnet back to the feminization that the predominantly masculine sonnet genre underwent from the 1780s onwards. Focusing on one group of poets in particular, the Della Cruscans, and on their primary critic William Gi·ord, I shall argue that it is impossible to outline the position of the sonnet genre within the late eighteenthcentury literary landscape and fully to grasp its legacy for nineteenth-century poets if the sonnet genre’s strictest formalities alone are taken into consideration. As The Baviad (1791) and TheMaeviad (1795), Gi·ord’s satires on Della Cruscanism, demonstrate, the sonnet in the late eighteenth century led a ‘secret’ life outside the genre’s traditional masculine fourteen-line boundaries. Newly charged with feminine overtones, it provided Gi·ord with a powerful metaphor of marginalization that would prove indispensable in his crusade against the Della Cruscans.