Becoming Catholic, Remaining Michael Field: Desiring Disability in Mystic Trees and Poems of Adoration

Jill R. Ehnenn, Appalachian State University

Abstract

Late-Victorian coauthors "Michael Field" (Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper) are well known for their queer-feminist collaborative diaries, their innovative picture-poems in their 1892 Sight and Song, and for their revisionary poetry that creatively engages lyric traditions as varied as Sapphic verse, Renaissance songbooks, and elegy. Here I turn to two relatively unstudied Field texts that explore devotional traditions--Poems of Adoration (1912) and Mystic Trees (1913)--which were written after Bradley and Cooper's conversion to Catholicism and during the period when Cooper was dying of cancer. I examine these texts using approaches informed by phenomenology, queer theory, and disability studies; in so doing I explore how Michael Field’s experiments with devotional verse represents lived experience askance to gendered and able-bodied norms.

Ultimately, I argue that Poems of Adoration and Mystic Trees can be read as being firmly situated within Michael Field’s ongoing re-visionary and queer-feminist project, yet with new emphasis on spiritual and homoerotic love and desire specifically in context of being, and seeing, an embodied (female) subject in pain. I also assert that Poems of Adoration and Mystic Trees are most usefully considered vis-a-vis developments among the poems pre-and post- Edith’s diagnosis of bowel cancer, rather than as post-conversion texts posited against pre-conversion texts. In so doing, I use recent insights about queer and crip temporalities to demonstrate how Michael Field's Catholic poems and related diaries and letters illustrate Bradley and Cooper's shift from embodied queer subjects oriented toward “becoming Catholic” to embodied queer subjects oriented, despite physical pain and emotional distress, toward both God and Cooper’s fatal illness, yet all the while striving to maintain their union as "Michael Field."

 
Mar 31st, 3:30 PM Mar 31st, 2:45 PM

Becoming Catholic, Remaining Michael Field: Desiring Disability in Mystic Trees and Poems of Adoration

Room 220, DiGiorgio Campus Center (DiGs)

Late-Victorian coauthors "Michael Field" (Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper) are well known for their queer-feminist collaborative diaries, their innovative picture-poems in their 1892 Sight and Song, and for their revisionary poetry that creatively engages lyric traditions as varied as Sapphic verse, Renaissance songbooks, and elegy. Here I turn to two relatively unstudied Field texts that explore devotional traditions--Poems of Adoration (1912) and Mystic Trees (1913)--which were written after Bradley and Cooper's conversion to Catholicism and during the period when Cooper was dying of cancer. I examine these texts using approaches informed by phenomenology, queer theory, and disability studies; in so doing I explore how Michael Field’s experiments with devotional verse represents lived experience askance to gendered and able-bodied norms.

Ultimately, I argue that Poems of Adoration and Mystic Trees can be read as being firmly situated within Michael Field’s ongoing re-visionary and queer-feminist project, yet with new emphasis on spiritual and homoerotic love and desire specifically in context of being, and seeing, an embodied (female) subject in pain. I also assert that Poems of Adoration and Mystic Trees are most usefully considered vis-a-vis developments among the poems pre-and post- Edith’s diagnosis of bowel cancer, rather than as post-conversion texts posited against pre-conversion texts. In so doing, I use recent insights about queer and crip temporalities to demonstrate how Michael Field's Catholic poems and related diaries and letters illustrate Bradley and Cooper's shift from embodied queer subjects oriented toward “becoming Catholic” to embodied queer subjects oriented, despite physical pain and emotional distress, toward both God and Cooper’s fatal illness, yet all the while striving to maintain their union as "Michael Field."