ABSTRACT
Margaret Homans's chapter on Emily Brontë should be read in the context of her overall argument about the position of the woman writer in the Romantic poetic tradition. The case of Brontë takes the argument a step further: the 'male muses' in her poetry are imaginative embodiments of the same genius figure. As Homans points out, gender reversal is never symmetrical: a male muse is not as tractable as a female one, and operates to undermine and silence Brontë's female poetic subjectivity. Brontë is troubled by the apparent otherness of her mind's powers, which she imagines as a series of masculine visitants who bring visionary experience to her. Brontë's masculine visitants are comparable to a masculine poet's muse. The development of a masculine muse by a woman poet should not logically be surprising, but the phenomenon is new with Brontë and represents a first step toward the internalization of poetic power.
