TRANS Nr. 17: 5.1. - Adina Ciugureanu: Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh

Italian Culture, English Heritage:
Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh

In the nineteenth century, the interest of writers in journeying to Italy both as pilgrimage and for health or cultural reasons seems to have increased. The grand tour of the eighteenth century was still respected, but the Victorians showed deeper attachment to Italy and more interest in its political issues mainly in what was known at the time as the Italian Risorgimento. Italy thus became a trope which continued and subverted the metaphorical connotations of the actual geographical and cultural space which Italy stood for with Victorian writers. These connotations continued because the figure of bella Italia or of the bel paese, bearing, at times, a substantial Romantic touch, was still vivid in the Victorian mind. They were also subverted because Italy acquired new political and economic meanings as a modern space. Discussing modernity and politics in Italy in the nineteenth century, Leigh Coral Harris argues that, in figuring Italy, Victorian women seemed to be more advanced than their male contemporaries in the sense that they managed to replace the Romantic view of Italy with “a non-mythic, recognizable modern, and implicitly liberal view.” In this way, Italy was seen as a developing modern nation “with legitimate claims to independence.” (1)) Harris’s view that Victorian women writers employed the female metaphor of Italy as a means to represent this geographical space mainly as a political identity opposes Sandra Gilbert’s argument that Victorian women used the gender metaphor of Italy to turn it “from a political state to a female state of mind, from a problematic country in Europe to the problem condition of femaleness.” (2)) Interestingly, in discussing the relationship between politics and femaleness, both refer to the Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s figuring Italy as well as to her views on freedom, whether national and personal.

This presentation will focus on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s image of Italy and England as a mixture of politics and culture, of the public and the private, of home and abroad, with the various meanings which both sides of the pairs may entail. Representing Italy as womanhood (both virginal and fallen), which Barrett Browning’s poetry undoubtedly reveals up to her own identification with it, is both completed and subverted by the poet’s Romantic view of Italy, for which she is mostly indebted to Byron (Childe Harold), Wordsworth (The Prelude), and Carlyle (hero-theory). To this, Elizabeth Browning adds her own interpretation of Italy as freedom and fulfillment, as barrier breaking and mind opening, which create a composite, symbolical representation of the place in the Victorian age and an alter-ego image for the poet. As Gilbert argues, in the overall image of Italy, Elizabeth Browning encompasses the idea of mother, matrix, and motherhood as opposed to father and fatherhood, which England generally stands for her. (Gilbert, 36). Thus, while in Casa Guidi Windows, Elizabeth Barrett interweaves the political and the cultural and seeks to define the nature and role of ‘citizenship, through an enthusiastic discussion of the concept of freedom, both as a national and personal issue, in Aurora Leigh, she creates a different image of Italy: as birthplace and home in opposition to adolescence and exile (which England represents) and as maturity, love, and fulfillment in opposition to corruption and suffering (which England also stands for). Yet, I will argue that by choosing to live in Italy as an expatriate, by becoming involved in Italian politics, by making wide use of her English heritage and European cultural background mainly in Casa Guidi and Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Browning uses the trope of Italy not only as her alter-ego, but also as a means of reconciling the mother-father figures through the two cultures she had been exposed to: Italy and England.

Casa Guidi Windows, whose first part Barrett publishes in 1851, is a personal, therefore subjective, account of the 1848 events in Florence, dwelling on the concept of freedom, revealed to the reader through the speaker’s senses: seeing, hearing, and feeling. Thus, Book I starts with the description of a demonstration which the speaker watches through the window of the house, looking down the street. The critics have already speculated about this image, by comparing it to the Lady of Shallot’s similar indirect perception of the world through the mirror. Elizabeth Barrett herself points out in the “Advertisement” to the poem that “it contains the impressions of the writer upon events in Tuscany of which she was a witness. ‘From a window’.” (3) The window image offers the speaker not only a non-participatory, indirect way of appraising and interpreting the events, but also shelter and protection (the speaker is behind the window in the room). Moreover, the reader is granted a double exposure: looking with the speaker at the events and looking at the events through the speaker’s words, which, according to Richard Cronin, reveals the text as a “double poem.” (4)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes what she sees, hears and feels without any direct, physical implication in the act. Therefore, the first connecting link between herself and the people’s demonstration is the singing of a child, whom the poet can hear, but not see:

Apart from the Romantic connotation of the child image, reminding the reader of Wordsworth’s paradoxical “the Child is father of the Man” line, the child in the text obviously represents the young stage of Italy’s independence process. As a metaphor for Italy, the child, a true Tuscan Gavroche, is opposed to a large range of cliché de métaphores, envisaging Italy as a woman, which Barrett Browning refers to, but consider as obsolete under the new circumstances: an “enchained” woman, “widow of empires,” “a shamed sister,” and also “Cybele,” “Niobe”, “Juliet of nations.” (5) All the metaphors correspond to an older cliché of imagining the country as a woman, with all the adjacent images that may be related to it: purity, but also depravity, virginity, but also motherhood, and generally, victory through conquest and/or abuse.(6)

By apparently rejecting the images inherited from English culture (Byron’s description of Italy) as no longer corresponding to “Italy today,” Elizabeth Barrett looks for metaphors in her newly adopted Italian culture. To the poet, Italy becomes a palimpsest, a conglomerate of cultural images ranging from Giotto (il campanile in Florence) and Michelangelo (his “Night and Day and Dawn and Twilight” statues) to Fra Angelico, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and from Christian churches and cathedrals, built and painted by Italians, to contemporary politicians (Savonarola, Garibaldi, Duke Leopold II, Pio Nono). By opposing the old metaphors to a palimpsestic Italy represented in cultural and political layers, Elizabeth Barrett draws on European heritage and creates a multi-faceted image of a geographical space which she also endows with symbolical meaning.

The boy’ singing his song of liberty “’Twixt church and palace of a Florence street” (I:10) not only refers to the geographical placement of the street between the Pitti Palace, the Duke’s residence, an allusion to the secular and the civic, and the Florentine Cathedral, an allusion to religion and the church, but also sends to the iconic image of Dante and his habit of spending his evenings on a chair in front of the church where people were now demonstrating:

The stone is described as the holy ground where Dante sat to “pour alone / The lava of his spirit when it burned” (I:605-6). The reference to Dante is double-layered as Dante is perceived both as a cultural icon and as a liberal thinker who had suffered for his views (“a banished Florentine,” I:608).(7) With Barrett Browning, Dante becomes the embodiment of politics and culture, of ideology and spirituality from beyond the grave, an inspiring hero who aligns with Caesar, Cicero, Boccaccio and Petrarch in his endeavor to better the world. The Risorgimento which Elizabeth Browning describes sitting at her window gratifies Dante’s earthly struggle, while the poet rightfully enjoys the pleasures of heaven (“For Dante sits in heaven and ye stand here,” I:649).

Barrett Browning’s use of Dante as an icon or as the most complete and complex symbol of Italy, a hero-like figure and source of inspiration to people is in accordance with the Victorian belief that changes in the world are the work of an ideal leader, a hero, an “Able-man,” as Carlyle describes him in his lecture “The Hero as King” (1840). The glorification of ideal leaders with the Victorians is reminiscent of the Romantic view (such as Byron’s) on the one hand, and of the rise of patriotic feelings by the French revolution and mainly by Napoleon III’s exploits, on the other. In this respect, Elizabeth Barrett is more European than English, because she never ceases to believe in the emergence of a hero endowed with the qualities which Carlyle envisaged in his famous description:

This may account both for Barrett’s enthusiastic exploration of the possibility that the Duke or the Pope might become the ideal leader to accomplish the unification of Italy in Part I and for her overt disillusion in Part II of Casa Guidi when she realizes that neither of them was able to fulfill the Tuscans’ dream of liberty and deliver Tuscany from the Austrians.

The poet’s disappointment in Part II (written three years after the events in Part I had been consumed), reveals more than sadness at the Tuscan failure to fulfill their ideals; it reveals the sad realization that the two people whom she truthfully believed that they could raise to hero stature were false, coward and mean. While in Part I she exults herself at the sight of the Duke’s children at the window of the palace (“They too should govern as the people willed,” I:560) and describes the greatness of the Pope, half-man, half-statue (“â¦ a man! His heart beats warm”, who “sits in stone and hardens by a charm / Into the marble of his throne high placed,” (I:1035, 1037-8), in Part II, she sadly depicts the Duke as a false man (“I believed the man was true!,” II: 64-65) and, later, she calls him “an illegitimate Caesar” (II:86). The Pope has a similar treatment: her high praise of him as a great man in Part I turns, in Part II, to overt criticism (he shames “Peter’s chair,” II:445) and future dismissal (“Pope Pius will be glorified in none,” II:441). However, Barrett’s idealism and her Romantic side support her distorted view on politics and political changes whose possible achievement, as she sees it, should be hero-driven.

Just as she described the Risorgimento from a window, she looked upon politics through the framed glass of Romantic idealism. This may also have accounted for the favorable reception of Casa Guidi in America and the unfavorable criticism which the poem received upon its publication in England. One should not forget, perhaps, that the windows of Casa Guidi are not just any windows, but the windows of Barrett’s home, therefore her implication in what happens out of them is multiplied not only by her being a poet and liberal thinker but also by her being a ‘citizen’ of Florence. To her Florence represents the place which has gratified her with a new home, a blissful marriage, and the prospects of motherhood. Therefore her approach to the Risorgimento acquires, what Margaret Linley calls, a “gendered bifurcation of public and private, as necessary to the emergence of the modern nation.” (9) By mixing the private with the public, Elizabeth Barrett stands both behind the window and out of it, both in her house and in the street. In doing this she mixes the discourse of poetry, private, subjective, with that of journalism, public, seemingly objective, but highly exhibitionist. True to her cultural heritage, Barrett Browning cannot resist revering the past, but her newly-acquired European identity makes her confidently turn towards the present and the future rather than exalt a dead past forever. Just as the public, with everything it may entail, has invaded the privacy of her English-Italian home and family, the private, as she lives it in Casa Guidi, cannot ignore the public which has transformed her. If other Victorian female writers, such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, two women poets whom Elizabeth Barrett highly praised, oscillated between the private and the public in their poetry, creating a dialectics which was rather difficult to reconcile, Elizabeth Barrett manages to interweave the public and the private in a poetic tapestry in which she finds room to accommodate the two opposing drives. Casa Guidi starts and ends with the image of a child. Yet, while at the beginning the child is emblematic for the rise of nation and citizenship, and thus represents the public, at the end, the child she describes is her own, thus standing for the private:

Through the image of the child, Elizabeth Barrett shifts from the public to the private and back to the public in her allusion to the Jewish temple (“the Vail”) as well as to Christianity and the merciful Christian God.(10) She thus turns poetry from its domestic dimension or from artifact and ornament, which it was supposed to represent at the time, to a national and political manifesto, which visibly enlarged its out-of-the-door dimension, without completely effacing its ‘primary’ role as domestic (the reference to her own child). On the other hand, by tackling a public subject, such as the Italian Risorgimento, in which she never ceases to believe and which she foresees as an accomplishment in the future, Elizabeth Barrett becomes a poet-prophetess in the line of English and European Romantic visionaries and prophets.(11)

Elizabeth Barrett’s openly expressed divided consciousness between home and abroad, between past and present and between the private and the public is more widely revealed in Aurora Leigh. Known as a novel in verse, Aurora Leigh is actually a revisited epic, as Elizabeth Barrett uses the high form (epic) and ‘abuses’ it with an apparently low subject matter (the story of a prostitute). She shows once again her indebtedness both to Homer (her European heritage) and to Carlyle (her tribute to her national culture) for his lament in the 1840 lecture about the existence of so few heroes in the present times. Hitting the epic, which had been the privilege of male writers, Elizabeth Barrett fills it with a new type of hero: the fallen woman.(12) That she does it on purpose is obvious in her repeated assertions one may find in her December 1856 through February 1857 letters, written after the publication of her epic, that she would have expected “to be put in the stocks and pelted with the eggs of the last twenty years’ singing birds as a disorderly woman and freethinking poet,” (13) for having abused the high literary form never before approached by a woman.

The “fallen woman” thread of the plot is interwoven with two other destinies: the transformation of a prejudiced, practical Englishman and the rise and formation of a woman-artist. Therefore, as an epic poem, highly dialogical in form, Aurora Leigh is both a Bildungsroman, which places Barrett Browning among the Victorian writers interested in the shaping and progress of a personality, and a Künstlerroman, which discusses the role and maturation of the artist-poet. The reading of Aurora Leigh as a Bildungsroman connects it very strongly to another novel about the development of a lady’s personality from her orphaned childhood to her adulthood and completion as a woman through marriage and motherhood, Jane Eyre. Though critics have rightfully compared the two texts (Charlotte BrontÃ«’s novel was published in 1848, Elizabeth Barrett’s in 1856) and though Elizabeth Barrett re-read Jane Eyre after reviewers had mentioned certain similarities between the two, the texts are actually comparable in the use of the Bildungsroman pattern as a successful Victorian formula and in the suggestive blinding of the male character at the end of the novel. Apart from that, the two texts are different, as in all other respects, Aurora differs from Jane: she is half English, half Italian, born in Italy but raised in England and she develops not only into a caring, philanthropic woman, but also into a reputed artist. Her progress is opposed by the ill-fated life of a less fortunate girl, Marian Erle who becomes, like Tess, later, in Hardy’s novel, a victim of the society, having been forced to prostitution.

As a Bildungsroman, Aurora Leigh weaves the fates of three characters (Aurora, Marian, and Romney, the triangle later used by Hardy and James) and places itself among the Victorian novels concerned with the shaping/self-shaping dichotomy in the development of a personality. As a Künstlerroman, the text draws on the Germanic eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romantic tradition (Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1795-1796, and Bildung philosophy), but introduces the making of the artist from childhood to maturity for the first time in English literature. It is known that Elizabeth Browning read German (14) as it is also known that Goethe had a strong influence on Browning’s formation as a poet (as early as 1838, she writes and publishes the poem “To Bettine, the Child-Friend of Goethe” (15) in the volume The Seraphim, and Other Poems, in which she glorifies Goethe as highly as Bettine von Arnim had done). Once again, Elizabeth Browning is divided between her English culture and the European heritage mixing European Romanticism with English Victorianism and the highest form of poetry with mundane subjects. The poet’s Victorian background and deep implication in the hottest English issues of the time, such as the woman’s role in society, prostitution, and, generally, the Condition of England, offered her the topics and themes for her epic. Yet, Elizabeth Barrett should be seen above and beyond her Englishness, as in her divided consciousness between England and Europe (e.g. Italy), between the English tradition and the European heritage (Greek, German, and French), she reveals a double mind, or a “double vision,” which she finds hard to reconcile. In the “Bettine” poem, she repeatedly uses the phrase “the second sight” which she appropriates from the German lady’s book, and which precedes her use of “double vision” in Aurora:

Undoubtedly tributary to Robert Browning’s use of the phrase “a double faculty of mind” in his discussion of Shelley’s poetry, Elizabeth Browning’s “double vision” not only represents a prerequisite for attaining artistry in poetry, a “second sight” which all poets must possess, but also stands for Elizabeth Browning’s double consciousness, her oscillation between two main-stream cultures and her struggle to become woman and artist, both complete. In offering a double reading, Aurora Leigh combines tradition with experiment, convention with non-convention as well as the poet’s quality as an artificer with that of a seer. She thus exposes her prophesying qualities once more.

Planning to write the novel, Elizabeth Barrett wrote the following formula, a frame against which she apparently built up the plot:

It becomes obvious, therefore, that the text itself is based on oppositions, on dualities: “education against development,” “system against instinct,” “the Ideal against the practical.” The formula reveals the hidden core of the epic which is based on the widely discussed opposition between idealism and pragmatism in the nineteenth century against the larger pool of debates concerning the use of reason and the use of sentiment, which actually draws us back to the Enlightenment-Romanticism battle. Yet, what Elizabeth Browning intends to achieve is the reconciliation of the two worlds, absolutely obvious in her use of and and against in the England-Italy pair.

Elizabeth Barrett’s “double vision” reveals a double-faceted, twofold world in which England and Italy (and by extension the continent), the ideal and the real, the spiritual and the natural are reconciled or at least co-existent as the two halves of a sphere:

Aurora, whose name is most symbolical to the rise of woman and artist, is compelled to leave Italy at a juvenile age because she is orphaned by both Italian mother and English father. She is raised by her aunt in a hostile environment in England, against which she develops her personality as a full grown woman and as a poet. At the age of twenty she rejects the marriage proposal by Romney Leigh, a distant cousin because she considers Romney too practical, unable to understand her sensibilities and doubting her intelligence (“You generalize / Oh, nothing, - not even grief!,” II, 183-4) and because she feels “incomplete” as “woman and artist” (II, 4). When a few years later she meets Romney again, everything has consistently changed: Romney has been punished for his pure pragmatism and mistakes in life by blindness, while Aurora has reached fame as a poet and has become wiser and more understanding towards people’s suffering (e.g. her protective attitude towards Marian). The circumstances are ripe now for the match and happy marriage. Romney’s acceptance of Aurora as a free thinker and talented poet signifies his acceptance of the invasion of the private or domestic by the public. Moreover, to come full circle, Aurora moves to Italy where she re-discovers fulfillment, disrupted long ago by the death of her parents, in marriage, sisterhood and, future motherhood. The public and the private become thus reconciled both internally (Aurora finds peace and happiness within herself as woman and poet) and externally (she is accepted by Romney in her both hypostases).

Yet, where is Aurora’s home? In Italy or in England? I would argue that it is in both because both represent ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ to her. She is born in Italy, but matures in England. She goes back to Italy, but brings along both Marian Erle and child and Romney Leigh, who in various ways represent her father’s land. Through her return to Italy, she re-legitimates herself as Italian (Aurora),(17) while through her marrying a Leigh, she re-legitimates herself as English (Leigh, her father’s and husband’s name). In this way she balances or reconciles the home and abroad question. Moreover, with an Italian mother and an English father and husband, Aurora engenders a mother-father pair which had been completely at odds with her growing personality, but seems to have found peace with her return and marriage. Her return to Italy does not mean abandoning the father figure, but reconciling the mother-father opposition and accepting the double roots between which she has oscillated. This leads us back to the “twofold world” image whose meaning is once again revealed: two countries, two cultures, two convergent personalities. The reconciliation of the two cultural backgrounds in Aurora Leigh is more than significant for the double reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry as mapping European culture and English heritage.

2 Sandra Gilbert, “From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Risorgimento”, in Victorian Women Poets (A Critical Reader), Angela Leighton, ed. London, Blackwell, 1996, p. 35.

4 See Richard Cronin, “Casa Guidi Windows: Elizabeth Barrett’s Browning, Italy and the poetry of Citizenship,” in Unfolding the South (Nineteenth-Century British Women artists and Artists in Italy), eds Alison Chapmen and Jane Stabler, Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2003, p. 41, in which the author discusses Casa Guidi Windows as “a double poem.”

5 The first five metaphors allude to Byron’s description of Italy in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV, while the “Juliet of nations,” with its clear Shakesperian echo, refers to Auguste Barbier’s poem “Le campo vaccino” (“Divine Juliette au cercueuil étendue”).

6 In her article “From Patria to Matria,” loc.cit., Sandra Gilbert describes the trope of Italy with Victorian writers as follows: a land that feeds (a nurturing mother), a land that feels (an impassionate sister), a land that creates (a home of art), a land that transforms and integrates (a magic paradise), a land that has been rejected or is rejecting (a dead, denied and denying woman). Elizabeth Barrett uses most of these tropes in Casa Guidi both because she identifies to Italy to a great extent and because she owes her images to her European culture with which she completely integrates. Actually, all the visual images that circulated in Europe during the 1848 revolutions represented the respective country enflamed by the revolutionary spirit as a woman unchaining herself and/or showing a bare breast, which interestingly offered a combined image of motherhood and abuse.

8 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, ed. Michael K. Goldber, Joel J. Brattin and Mark Engel, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California, p. 169

9 Margaret Linley, “Nationhood and Empire,” in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, eds Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, Antony H. Harrison, London: Blackwell, 2002, p. 430. Linley uses the phrase in connection to the poetry of Felicia Heman and Letitia Landon, but, I think, it can perfectly be applied to Elizabeth Barrett, too.

10 See Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Casa Guidi Windows, loc. cit., p. 114, note 783, in which the editor mentions a letter by Barrett to John Kenyon, her publisher, in 1851 that “vail” in the last line alludes to the Jewish Temple and that unless it is spelt with capital V, “nobody can catch any meaning.”

12 See Rebecca Stott, “’Where Angels Fear to Tread’: Aurora Leigh, in eds Simon Avery and Rebecca Stott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London: Longman, 2003, p. 204, for a discussion on Barrett’s use of Homer and Carlyle.

13 Margaret Reynolds (ed.), Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Aurora Leigh (Authoritative Text Backgrounds and Contexts Criticism), New York, London: Norton, 1996, p. 342. The quotation above is from Elizabeth Barrett’s letter to Anna Jameson (Feb. 2, 1857), though references to bad criticism on the grounds of her genre mixture are also to be found in her December 1856 and January 1857 letters)

15 The poem is based on a book by a German lady, Bettina von Arnim (1785-1859), Goethe’s Correspondence with Child (1835), in which she openly declares her worship for Goethe. As Bettina was known to have a bright intellect, but be somewhat libertine and a free-thinker, she may have offered a model for Elizabeth Browning’s Aurora.

For quotation purposes:
Adina Ciugureanu:Italian Culture, English Heritage: Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh - In: TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften. No. 17/2008. WWW: http://www.inst.at/trans/17Nr/5-1/5-1_ciugureanu17.htm/

	Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften	17. Nr.	Dezember 2011

Sektion 5.1.	A common place: national cultures, European heritage Sektionsleiterin \| Section Chair: Adina Ciugureanu (Ovidius University Constanta, Romania) Dokumentation \| Documentation \| Documentation