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From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Risorgimento

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Sandra M. Gilbert
Sandra M. Gilbert*
Affiliation:
University of California Davis
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Abstract

Though some Victorian readers believed that Elizabeth Barrett Browning's partisanship for “the cause of Italy” led to a failure of inspiration, I argue that for a complex of reasons Italy became the embodiment of this woman poet's aesthetic and utopian desires: through her commitment to Italy's revolutionary struggle for political identity, Barrett Browning reenacted her own struggle for identity, a risorgimento that was, like Italy's, both an insurrection and a resurrection. Moreover, by using metaphors of the healing of a wounded woman/land to articulate both the reality and the fantasy of her own revitalization, Barrett Browning located herself in a re-creative female poetic tradition that descends from Christine de Pizan to H. D. Infusing supposedly asexual poetics with the dreams of a distinctively sexual politics, these women imagined nothing less than the transformation of patria into matria and thus the risorgimento of the lost land that Christina Rossetti called the “mother country.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 99 , Issue 2 , March 1984 , pp. 194 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1984

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