Transnational Republican and Feminist: The Political Ethics of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Soul Poetics

Saville, Julia F.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-52506-8_2

Julia F. Saville³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Abstract

This chapter studies the border-crossing democratic texture of Barrett Browning’s civic soul as she experiments with forms that aspire to voice the hardships, frustrations, and aspirations of disenfranchised communities at home and abroad. Calibrating lyricism with dissonance, the poet uses her imitative harmonies to urge factory reform (“The Cry of the Children” [1843]), protest against slavery (“The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” [1847–8]), and support the Italian quest for liberty and self-governance (Casa Guidi Windows [1851] and “Napoleon III in Italy” [1860]). Moving her Anglo-American reader-listeners literally and figuratively with her poetry, she encourages them to imagine caring transnational communities of free and equal citizens. In the process, EBB’s own soul—inflected by an unshakable Dissenter’s belief in Christian love—emerges as a force for faith in an ethical politics, despite the increasing cynicism and opportunism of pragmatist politicians.

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Notes

1.
Swinburne, PACS, 2:47. Because there is no well-annotated scholarly edition of Swinburne’s works equivalent to the masterful Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Sandra Donaldson et al., I draw on three editions of his poems. For citations from Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866) I use Kenneth Haynes’s Penguin edition for its exemplary scholarly notes (abbreviated Poems and Ballads). For the “Prelude” and “Hertha” from Songs Before Sunrise (1871) and Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) I use the readily available edition by Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh (Major Poems and Selected Prose), who usefully include line numbers and notes. For all other poems, I use the London 1904 edition, Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, by Chatto and Windus. Because it does not provide line numbers, the abbreviation (PACS) is followed by volume and page number. For prose works, I use the Bonchurch edition unless otherwise stated.
2.
Tucker, “Hips,” 175–9. Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor especially note the priority she gave to the sonnet “The Soul’s Expression”: “In arranging her works for publication in 1844 and thereafter, EBB consistently introduced her sonnets with this poem” (Selected Poems, 95).
3.
Aurora Leigh, 1.850–2 (WEBB, 3:22).
4.
“Hips,” 175.
5.
“L’Homme Qui Rit,” Bonchurch, 13:209.
6.
“Victor Hugo: L’Année terrible,” Bonchurch, 13:247.
7.
See, for example, Chapman, “Risorgimenti”; Cronin, “Casa Guidi Windows”; Gilbert, “From Patria to Matria”; Harris, L. C., “From Mythos to Logos”; Phelan, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi”; Matthew Reynolds, Realms; Schor, “Poetics.”
8.
See, for instance, Stone, “Garrisonians,” and Susan Brown, “‘Black and White Slaves.’”
9.
See Keirstead, Challenge, and Taylor, “Transnationalism.”
10.
Rudy, Electric Meters, 182; Tucker, “Glandular”; Blair, Heart.
11.
Among the few critics who recognize the republican bent of EBB’s politics are Stone (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 60–1) and Leigh Coral Harris (“From Mythos to Logos,” 120–3). Caroline Levine makes brief reference to her “republican inclinations” (“Rhythms,” 241). Alison Milbank (Dante and the Victorians) and Catherine Maxwell remark on EBB’s influence on Swinburne, both as a poet and as his “chief progenitor in the cause of Italian freedom” (Maxwell, Swinburne, 61). Neither notes the specifically republican sensibility that connects the two poets.
12.
For instance, BC, 3:261, 10:66; LTA, 1:155, 229.
13.
BC, 3:224.
14.
BC, 10:61. Mitford herself was an informed interlocutor, since she was forced to read the entire daily paper, “[Parliamentary] debates and all,” to her ailing father (BC, 5:188n2, 275). She recognized her own conflicted allegiances—“I am an inconsistent politician…with my aristocratic prejudices and my radical opinions”—and expressed impatience with Whig defensiveness: “All the Whigs seem to me, in all their measures, afraid of the people—afraid to make any popular concession” (BC, 5:304). Yet beset with domestic and financial hardships, Mitford seldom encouraged the kind of vigorous political discussion that EBB relished.
15.
BC, 15:66–7.
16.
BC, 15:66; LTA, 1:166.
17.
Avery, “Telling It Slant”; Cronin, “Casa Guidi Windows,” 37; Leighton, Victorian Women Poets; Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 15–16.
18.
Kaplan, “Introduction”; David, Intellectual Women, 98; Brophy, “Politics of Interpretation,” 275.
19.
Shires, “Cross-Dwelling,” 331.
20.
BC, 10:61; BC, 15:59.
21.
Prochaska, Republic of Britain, xvi–xvii.
22.
BC, 19:11–12.
23.
Casa Guidi Windows, 1.546–50, WEBB, 2:507–8.
24.
Lewis, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Spiritual Progress, 99.
25.
Prochaska, Republic of Britain, 61.
26.
Prochaska, Republic of Britain, 82–5; Homans, Royal Representations, 17–33.
27.
Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 15.
28.
Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 4.
29.
Stone offers an illuminating discussion of EBB’s evolving thoughts on women’s rights and her ties to the Langham Place feminist activists, such as Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, esp. 46, 172–8).
30.
Stone notes that similar moral outrage, especially among women, followed the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s biography in 1798, sidelining the republican feminist’s oeuvre for decades (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Victorian Versions,” 129).
31.
BC, 9:280–1.
32.
Chapman, “Poetry, Network, Nation,” 275.
33.
BC, 13:253. In her letters, EBB frequently uses ellipses which her editors standardize with a double period. I indicate my own ellipses with the customary three periods.
34.
Dieleman, Religious Imaginaries, 23–4.
35.
BC, 13:284.
36.
Dieleman, Religious Imaginaries, 26–9.
37.
Stone, “Heretic,” 11.
38.
BC, 11:10.
39.
BC, 5:186.
40.
Martineau’s frequent references to “Dr. Channing” in her essay The Martyr Age of the United States (1839) indicate the breadth of Channing’s transatlantic reputation for moral leadership, especially his protests against the spread of slavery through expansionism (Martyr Age, 16).
41.
BC, 9:120.
42.
Casa Guidi Windows, 1.959–60.
43.
BC, 13:253; EBB’s ellipses. Dieleman, while recognizing that EBB “looked beyond any single church for what she called Truth and Love,” is at pains to show that it was the liturgy and ethos of the Congregationalist Church and the Free Church of Scotland that shaped the “religious imaginary” of her poetry (Religious Imaginaries, 29).
44.
BC, 19:25.
45.
BC, 10:193; EBB’s emphasis.
46.
Stone and Taylor, Selected Poems, 95.
47.
BC, 5:7.
48.
Tucker, “Hips,” 169, 175.
49.
I refer to Aurora Leigh, 1.845–53; “Bianca Among the Nightingales,” l. 107; and “The Forced Recruit,” l. 40, respectively. Various critics have discussed the paradoxical corporeality of EBB’s spiritual poetics. Rudy, for instance, intuits the presence of psuchē when he argues that “her poetry is as much physiological as it is ‘spiritual’” and that EBB “telegraphs a spiritual ideal through the palpitating, eroticized flesh of the poet’s physical body” (Electric Meters, 183).
50.
Reynolds describes this technique as a “vigorous way with images” and explains that “In all her verse it is common for the vehicle of a metaphor to be more physically solid than its tenor” (Realms, 91).
51.
WEBB, 2:53.
52.
“Earth and Her Praisers,” ll. 153–4, WEBB, 1:473.
53.
Moser, “Youthful Feminism”; Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 39–41.
54.
WEBB, 5:416–19.
55.
Early poems such as the “Fragment” (c. 1822; Hoag, “Fragment,” 7) and “An Essay on Mind” (1826) suggest EBB’s familiarity with debates about the sources of “right feeling” that had absorbed writers such as Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Wollstonecraft, and the young Wordsworth during the political crises of the 1790s (Schor, Bearing, 73ff.).
56.
Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 23.
57.
Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 8.
58.
Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 40.
59.
Wolfson, A Lesson in Romanticism, 350.
60.
Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 65.
61.
Mermin, Origins, 23.
62.
Canto 4; Avery and Stott, Barrett Browning, 162.
63.
BC, 5:308.
64.
“The Little Vagabond,” Blake, Complete Poems, 127.
65.
BC, 14:301.
66.
Flinn, After Chartism, 57.
67.
Shelley, Defence, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 517. Weiner provides an insightful study of Shelley’s Defence in its 1820s political context (Republican Politics and English Poetry, 35–65).
68.
Shelley, Defence, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 512.
69.
Shelley, Defence, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 517; Smiles, “Self-Help,” 315–21.
70.
BC, 4:233, 235.
71.
BC, 5:60.
72.
Shelley, Defence, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 517.
73.
BC, 6:243.
74.
BC, 5:60.
75.
Greek Christian Poets, WEBB, 4:372.
76.
Aurora Leigh, 9.881–90.
77.
BC, 5:266.
78.
Benhabib, Situating the Self, 3.
79.
Young, “Asymmetrical,” 343.
80.
I borrow here from Benhabib’s pointed reminder that “in politics, it is less significant that ‘we’ discover ‘the’ general interest, but more significant that collective decisions be reached through procedures that are radically open and fair to all. Above all these decisions should not exclude the voice of those whose ‘interests’ may not be formulable in the accepted language of public discourse, but whose very presence in public life may force the boundaries between private needs and public claims, individual misfortunes and collectively representable grievances” (Situating the Self, 9).
81.
Mike Sanders offers a seminal study on the role of working-class poetry production in the Chartist movement. See in particular his chapter “‘A Jackass Load of Poetry’: The Northern Star’s Poetry Column 1838–1852” (Poetry of Chartism, 69–86).
82.
Parry, Patriotism, 56.
83.
Stone and Taylor, WEBB, 1:435–6; Henry, “Sentimental Artistry,” 542–3.
84.
Dillon, “Barrett Browning’s Poetic Vocation,” 516.
85.
Parry documents the discrepancy between the republican freedoms for which Chartists called and the “liberty” touted by self-congratulatory Whigs, especially in 1848 after the collapse of Chartism (Patriotism, 60–1).
86.
Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, 94.
87.
Stone and Taylor, “Introduction: ‘Confirm my voice’,” 394–5; WEBB, 5:641–2.
88.
WEBB, 5:642.
89.
Stone and Taylor, “Introduction: ‘Confirm my voice’,” 394–5.
90.
Harris, From Mythos to Logos, 119–20; Julius Caesar, act 3, sc. 2, ll. 13–17.
91.
Levine, “Strategic,” 640–4.
92.
Parry, Rise and Fall, 11.
93.
Phelan, Music of Verse, 143–4.
94.
Tucker, “Tactical,” 90; “Over Worked.”
95.
For a detailed study of the “full repertoire of religious devices” (including biblical allusions) on which EBB draws, see Henry, “Sentimental Artistry,” 548–51.
96.
Henry Morley in Freedgood, Factory Production, 262.
97.
Stone and Taylor, Selected Poems, 192.
98.
BC, 16:200.
99.
Levine, “Strategic,” 640.
100.
Helpful here is Anderson’s carefully calibrated defense of ethical universals as an antidote to “a too-protectionist approach to assertions of identity or primary affiliation” (“Cosmopolitanism,” 266).
101.
Keirstead, following Carol A. Breckenridge’s lead, attributes EBB’s effort to bring the domestic into the public sphere to her “cosmofeminism” (Challenge, 67). I would attribute it more specifically to her perception of herself as a womanly republican for whom border crossing is one characteristic practice.
102.
Mermin, Origins, 154–6; Cronin, “Casa Guidi Windows,” 37–8.
103.
BC, 10:61.
104.
BC, 10:61–2.
105.
Such epistolary evidence—continually expanded by the appearance of new volumes of the superbly edited Brownings’ Correspondence—demonstrates EBB’s explicit radicalism and gives the lie to the views of critics such as Deirdre David, who argues that EBB “implicitly affiliates herself with the land-owning classes” and dedicates “her talent to conservative androcentric ideals” (Intellectual Women, 113, 110).
106.
Stone, “Garrisonians,” 34–5.
107.
Stone, “Garrisonians,” 41; BC, 7:302.
108.
Martineau, Martyr Age, 43.
109.
Goodlad, “Imperial Woman,” 200.
110.
Martineau, Society, 1:3.
111.
Martineau, Society, 1:6.
112.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 67.
113.
Tucker notes Margaret Fuller’s comparable race and gender rhetoric in her 1844 poem “Double Triangle, Serpent and Rays,” describing the logo she uses a year later for Woman in the Nineteenth Century: “When the perfect two embrace, /Male & female, black & white, /Soul is justified in space, /Dark made fruitful by the light” (ll. 5–8). See Tucker, “Hips,” 180n6.
114.
All citations of this poem are from WEBB 1:409–30, edited by Stone and Taylor. Here I cite ll. 22–3.
115.
Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty, 5.
116.
Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty, 23–32. Here I also build on Susan Brown’s work in her insightful essay “‘Black and White Slaves’: Discourses of Race and Victorian Feminism.” Brown observes a number of ways in which EBB avoids appropriating the position of the slave for her own rhetorical empowerment (127); for instance, the poet does not silence the slave but allows her a “post-structuralist” self as “subject in process” (129).
117.
Bristow, “Whether ‘Victorian’ Poetry,” 101. See also Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 7–8; and Stone, who recognizes the hybrid status of “The Runaway Slave,” describing it as a dramatic monologue with ballad traits (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 103).
118.
BC, 16:200.
119.
I draw here on Robert Langbaum’s study of the dramatic monologue’s “way of meaning” as it induces sympathy while suspending judgment (Poetry of Experience, 77; Langbaum’s emphasis).
120.
See Slinn, Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique, 57. Because she repeatedly misses the parody, satire, and biting irony in this poem, Sarah Brophy misreads its radical politics: for instance, “The presentation of the Pilgrim Fathers and God as stable authorities also suggests that ‘The Runaway Slave’ engenders a conservative politics” (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘The Runaway Slave’,” 278).
121.
Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty, 18.
122.
Tindall and Shi, America: A Narrative History, 725.
123.
Martineau, Society, 1:133–4.
124.
Review of “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” New York Literary World, February 1, 1851 (cited in WEBB, 1:414).
125.
The Compromise of 1850 amounted to a cluster of five bills, ostensibly aimed at easing tensions between North and South over whether territories acquired during the Mexican War (1846–8) would be slaveholding; however, one of the provisions of the revised Fugitive Slave Law required “free” states to assist in the capture and return of escaped slaves. This only aggravated Northern resentment of Southern incursions on their free soil. The Kansas–Nebraska Act, passed on May 30, 1854, exacerbated this resentment by ruling that citizens in newly acquired territories could themselves decide by vote whether their states should be slaveholding. (See Loughran, Republic in Print, 371–4, for an astute synopsis of this legislation and its implications for federal-state relations.)
126.
Hume, cited in Richardson, “Colonialism,” 239–40.
127.
Avery and Stott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 40.
128.
This refusal of racial essentialism is particularly interesting in light of Phelan’s penetrating critique of racial speculation in contemporary biography, especially as it relates to the Brownings (see “Ethnology”).
129.
I am indebted to Stone and Taylor for this source (WEBB, 1:414, and Selected Poems, 343).
130.
Foreshadowing Whitman’s 1855 exhortation to aspiring poets to “flood” themselves “with the immediate age” (“Preface 1855,” Leaves, Comprehensive, 726), EBB urges them to “Shun not the haunts of crowded cities then; /Nor e’er, as man, forget to study men!” (“Essay on Mind,” ll. 980–1). Later she declares that “every life requires a full experience, a various experience—& I have a profound conviction that where a poet has been shut from most of the outward aspects of life, he is at a lamentable disadvantage” (BC, 10:171).
131.
In her review of Poems (1844), “SFA” points out that legislative reforms had already improved working conditions for child laborers in factories and mines; the poet’s energy might therefore be better spent on the unrecognized sufferings of city slum children (BC, 9:375). EBB followed this advice in “A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London.”
132.
BC, 14:146, 172, 92. To my knowledge, EBB’s reference to Italy as the “land of souls” first appears in Aurora Leigh (7.467). RB subsequently uses the phrase in his correspondence with Isa Blagden (Dearest Isa, 239, 244).
133.
All citations of Casa Guidi Windows are to part and line numbers in WEBB, volume 2, edited by Stone and Taylor.
134.
Wordsworth “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” l. 109, Major Works, 300.
135.
Leopold granted permission for the Florentine people to form a civic guard for the protection of their own property, a liberal gesture which many viewed as recognizing their potential for self-governance.
136.
For a concise account of the division and government of the Italian states at this time, see Stone and Taylor’s “Editors’ Notes,” WEBB, 2:482.
137.
Harvie, Lights of Liberalism, 101; Beales, England and Italy, 34.
138.
Under this dispensation, existing princes, such as King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia and Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany, would retain power, balanced after 1848 by new constitutions. This option, first envisaged by Vincenzo Gioberti in his Il Primato of 1843 (Hales, Pio Nono, 39–40; Reynolds, Realms, 89), was pursued energetically in 1847–8 by the pope’s prime minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi. Initially, when the Brownings first settled in Pisa (BC, 14:112), neo-Guelphism had considerable public traction, for Pio Nono, Italian born and from the Romagna, was enjoying a wave of public popularity. On first coming to office in 1846, he had passed various liberal reforms, including tariff reform, special religious dispensations to Jews, and prison reform. These were optimistically interpreted, especially in Rome, as sympathy toward popular democracy but proved to be merely instances of autocratic benevolence (Hales, Pio Nono, 62–4).
139.
Hales, Pio Nono, 96.
140.
Represented by the relatively liberal but nonetheless anti-revolutionary king, Charles Albert, this option became seriously viable in the 1850s when Charles Albert abdicated to his son Victor Emanuel II, following his defeat by Austria at Novara in March 1849. Aided by Cavour, who became prime minister in 1852, Victor Emanuel was to preside over the partial unification of Italy in 1861.
141.
BC, 17:245; emphasis and ellipsis are EBB’s.
142.
Armstrong, “Casa Guidi Windows,” 66n35.
143.
Keirstead, “Bad Patriot”; Taylor, “Transnationalism,” 78–9.
144.
“Advertisement,” WEBB, 2:491.
145.
Phelan, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi,” 141, 142.
146.
Hales, Pio Nono, 80.
147.
BC, 15:54, 59.
148.
Hales, Pio Nono, 48.
149.
As Eugenio Biagini notes, “Anglican ascendancy in Ireland and Roman Catholic despotism in Italy…were opposed not for the religious principles they propounded, but because they were ‘tyrannical’ and politically incompatible with…popular radicalism” (Liberty, 16).
150.
Dieleman, Religious Imaginaries, 23–4.
151.
We might say that at this point, EBB reaches the necessary limit of tolerance discourse when, to borrow Wendy Brown’s phrase, “a generalized language of antiprejudice” meets the specific need to articulate critically important ethical differences (Regulating Aversion, 5).
152.
These failures included the assassination of papal prime minister Rossi, the pope’s flight and temporary exile from Rome at Gaeta, Leopold II’s flight from Tuscany and return under Austrian military protection, and Charles Albert’s defeat by Austria at Novara.
153.
Segments of the poem like these give the lie to Maurizio Masetti’s claim that EBB “shed few tears over the collapse of Mazzini’s Roman Republic in 1849” and put pressure on her husband to modify his views (“Lost in Translation,” 24–5). On the contrary, after the revolutions of 1848, she writes with great sympathy for the fallen Roman Republic—“there is much to go to one’s heart in the condition of Rome” (LTA, 1:254). She also writes warmly about the Venetian republic under Daniele Manin, where no unruly element (like “Ciceruacchio” and his son Luigi) introduced violence and assassination. Thus, she writes, “Where are the helpers of Venice? Yet Venice struggles on still, heroic without a crime: the crime of no Rossi cries out from her” (LTA, 1:255).
154.
Hales, Pio Nono, 123–4, 127.
155.
Cited in Hales, Pio Nono, 132. Historically, many Italians continued to regard Roman Catholicism as integral to their cultural identity. Contemporary Italian historian L. C. Farini, summing up the situation in Rome, describes Young Italy’s challenge to Roman Catholic leadership in 1849 as precisely contrary to popular sentiment: “they [the republicans] will have against them the masses, who will brook, perhaps, any and every oppression except that which tramples on religious conscience.” Because of such pressures, the triumvirate leading the new Roman republic, among whom Mazzini was the dominant figure, declared Catholicism to be the official state religion (Smith, Mazzini, 68) and were generally protective of the clergy (Hales, Pio Nono, 128–9).
156.
The provenance of references to Louis as a “Sphinx” is provided in Woolford, Karlin, and Phelan’s “Editors’ Notes,” PB, 4:462–3, and the excellent doctoral dissertation of Kian Soheil (Browning’s Player-Prince, 129–34).
157.
Beales, England and Italy, 3.
158.
Parry, Patriotism, 226. Britain feared that Piedmont-Sardinia would cede Savoy, Nice, and even Sardinia to Napoleon III, thereby expanding his power in the Mediterranean and threatening British naval supremacy in the region.
159.
LTA, 2:411.
160.
Beales, England and Italy, 38. The treaties sustained the balance of power, while Austria’s presence and influence in Italy provided a safeguard against French resurgence, allowing Britain to maintain its Mediterranean naval dominance and shipping routes to the East (Davis, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, 9; Chamberlain, ‘Pax Britannica’?, 95). Liberals such as Palmerston, foreign minister Lord John Russell, and chancellor of the exchequer William Gladstone, while all personally sympathetic to Italy, opted for neutrality. It was a moral imperative, as Gladstone reasoned in the Quarterly Review of April 1859: “If we cannot assist Louis Napoleon without the fear of promoting piracy, so neither can we help Austria without the certainty of becoming the tools of tyranny” (“Foreign Affairs: War in Italy,” 563).
161.
Gladstone, “Foreign Affairs: War in Italy,” 563; EBB, Letters (Kenyon), 2:315.
162.
See respectively, EBB, Letters (Kenyon), 2:312; LTA, 2:400, 448, 447, 438.
163.
Arnold drew considerable criticism from the British media but strong approval from his friend Clough, who was “this time satisfied, even delighted” with Arnold’s views, which were usually more staid than “Citizen Clough’s” (Arnold to Clough, 148).
164.
EBB, Letters (Kenyon), 2:309.
165.
LTA, 2:400.
166.
EBB, Letters (Kenyon), 2:315.
167.
EBB, Letters (Kenyon), 2:311.
168.
EBB, Letters (Kenyon), 2:360.
169.
The “Congress” of EBB’s title has various possible meanings. After the Franco-Piedmontese alliance led by Victor Emanuel II and Napoleon III had defeated the Austrians at Solferino in June 1859, Napoleon III brokered the Treaty of Villafranca, which troublingly appeared more in France’s and Austria’s interests than Italy’s. Read historically, “Congress” might refer to a subsequent international convention supposed to have taken place in the winter of 1859 to work out a compromise for the fate of the central Italian states. In fact, this congress never took place. Read figuratively, “Congress” refers to any legislative body convened to decide the fate of a people, including the U.S. Congress, at whom “A Curse for a Nation” is directed.
170.
EBB, Letters (Kenyon), 2:334.
171.
All citations of “Napoleon III in Italy” are to the edition in WEBB, 4:556–70, edited by Donaldson herself. Katherine Montwieler rightly treats Poems Before Congress collectively as a series of speech acts that successively “bless, seduce, comfort, mock, criticize, predict, and curse” (“Domestic Politics,” 295). Elizabeth Woodworth follows her precedent, treating the volume as a whole (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”).
172.
Woolford, Karlin, and Phelan, “Editors’ Notes,” PB, 4:464–5.
173.
EBB frequently alludes to Psalms 146:3 to indicate her distrust of monarchs and emperors, as she does, for instance, in Casa Guidi Windows, 2.75, and BC, 15:280.
174.
LTA, 2:448.
175.
Woodworth offers an illuminating discussion of this connection (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” 544–6, 552–3), and Golicz a readable account of the historical context into which the reactions of Patmore and Tennyson fit.
176.
Comparing the two odes, Linda Hughes astutely notes the provocation in EBB’s decision to write an ode “to the nephew of Wellington’s arch-enemy” that includes an allusion to his lineage: “the line /Broken in a strain of fate /And leagued kings of Waterloo” (ll. 7–9; Hughes, Cambridge Introduction, 52, 50–2).
177.
The first phrase is Victor Hugo’s title for his 1852 polemic against Louis Napoleon as destroyer of France’s Second Republic; the second is from Swinburne’s sonnet “A Counsel,” the tenth of the Dirae [Curses] against Napoleon III published in Songs of Two Nations (1869/1875; l. 13 [PACS, 2:302]).

Bibliography

Martineau, Harriet. The Martyr Age of the United States. Boston: Weeks, Jordan & Co., New York: John S. Taylor, 1839.
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References: Chapter 2: Transnational Republican and Feminist

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Saville, J.F. (2017). Transnational Republican and Feminist: The Political Ethics of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Soul Poetics. In: Victorian Soul-Talk. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52506-8_2

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