Fabienne Moine

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Italian Poetry: Constructing National Identity and Shaping the Poetic Self

After Elizabeth Barrett married the poet Robert Browning in 1846, the newly-wed couple settled in Italy, a soothing place for Elizabeth’s poor health and a land of psychological independence, very unlike the prison-like house of Wimpole Street where her father had kept her away from any suitor. From her Florentine windows in Casa Guidi, the famous poet contemplated Italian history in the making during the Risorgimento. There she wrote one of her best poems, Aurora Leigh (1856), an aesthetic autobiography in verse. This epic poem would hardly have been so successful had she not previously writ- ten her political verse Casa Guidi Windows. In the two parts of this poem committed to the birth of the new nation, Barrett Browning reveals how deeply engaged she is in the Italian cause. Indeed, the last fifteen years of her artistic life were dedicated to the country which welcomed the poet and opened new perspectives in terms of poetical writing. From 1846 onwards, Barrett Browning unceasingly appealed to and supported the Italian people and openheartedly fought for the freedom of the country in her poems: Casa Guidi Windows, Poems Before Congress, and Last Poems published post- humously and after she had been buried in the English cemetery in Florence. Barrett Browning had a personal approach to Italy entirely different from her husband’s who could stroll about Florentine streets. She would stay behind her windows, as the title of her political poem indicates, but would never- theless invest her own poetical energy in the transcription of historical events she experienced as metaphors of her own inner life.1 Although she considered herself a simple witness to the Italian events, in her 1851 preface to Casa Guidi Windows she also admitted that her poems are ‘a simple story of per- sonal impressions, whose only value is in the intensity with which they were received, as proving her warm affection for a beautiful and unfortunate coun- try’.2 I shall keep in mind throughout this study the emotions involved in her Italian poetry because they make it more than poems merely witnessing

1. For interpretations of the window metaphor see Isobel Armstrong, ‘Casa Guidi Windows: Spectacle and Politics in 1851’, in Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, ed. by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manches- ter: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 51–69. 2. ‘Advertisement to the First Edition, Florence 1851’, in The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ware: Wordsworth, 1994), p. 340. All references to Barrett Browning’s po- ems, apart from Aurora Leigh, are taken from this edition. 124 Fabienne Moine events. Contemporary critics overlooked her political poetry claiming that, at the time, she was suffering from bouts of madness since a woman poet should never enter the forbidden masculine territory of political writing. This is the reason why most of her last poems have been neglected or misunderstood. I shall consider the echoes and comparisons between Barrett Browning and allegorised Italy, since both seem to suffer from a long illness that has weakened them. Suffering women in her Italian poetry allow the poet to ana- lyse the power of pain as the condition for the construction of a new identity. Italy comes alive and is incarnated in her poetry which questions stasis and suffering as conventional motives for women and war. The poet performs Italy when she refuses to write an emotionless historical poem. I wish to examine how the Risorgimento mirrors Barrett Browning’s own poetic strug- gle. When she starts writing a new type of poetry, combining politics with poetics, the form and rhythm of her Italian poetry dramatise the struggle outside the windows as well as inside her own brain. How does Barrett Browning manage to go beyond the respectable limits of her windows and her status as female poet, turning into a real actor performing on the Italian political scene? When Barrett Browning settled in Florence in 1846, she had been ill for nearly half her life. Consumption and a spinal disorder had made her a bed- ridden cripple with only books for company. The exchange of love letters with her future husband, which gave way to the writing of Sonnets from the Portuguese had radically altered her reclusive existence, restoring life in this death-like chamber of hers in Wimpole Street. The rest of the story has be- come legend: Elizabeth Barrett marrying Robert Browning in secret and travelling to Italy to benefit from the healing virtues of the Italian climate. Beyond this romance we cannot help noticing the similarities between the crippled lady rapidly recovering and the Italy of the mid-1850s also suffering from the pangs of inner conflicts. Italy became for the poet not only the coun- try of freedom from paternal power but also a place of rebirth, a land of emo- tions, a sort of feminine body experiencing sensations that the poet had not dared acknowledge and accept before. It is, then, no surprise that Barrett Browning’s fictional double, Aurora Leigh, ends her artistic and personal quest in Florence. The feminised Italy that is described in detail in Casa Guidi Windows most particularly, and in emotional terms in Aurora Leigh, is predicated upon the allegory of a woman now suffering in birth pangs, now enduring wounds caused by the violence of men, but in both cases her body is alive, ready to give birth, either to nourish the future offspring or to recover from painful episodes. In the central Book 5 of Aurora Leigh, which deals with the nature of art and poetry, Aurora reaches the ultimate conclusion that there is no other destination but Italy to experience her long expected rebirth: