The fierce earth: 'Michael Field's' pagan politics

The fierce earth: 'Michael Field's' pagan politics

Of particular interest to feminist and lesbian feminist literary critics has been the sexual politics of the Field poetry and how this constructs collaborative and lesbian ways of seeing and speaking. Beyond the poetry, however, there is a larger body of dramas which have tended to be dismissed as ornate, Victorian, and historical. It's my contention that these also are seldom what they seem; and, in this article, I explore Bradley and Cooper's paganism, not only as an expression of fin de siecle 'art for art's sake' aestheticism, but specifically the way in which the figure of the Earth Mother pushes this paganism beyond a literary and philosophical Oxford Hellenism to engage with a dark and dangerous female centred agency buried deep within-and often unsuspected by-the hegemonically masculine worlds of conventional English history.

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