Father’s Place, Mother’s Space: Italy and the Paradisal

Abstract

In the nineteenth-century, Italy functions as a privileged trope, as the metaphorical site where issues of the past, political revolution and the exotic coalesce.² For Victorian women poets, however, Italy is also invested with particularly acute and gender inflected questions of identity and homeland. Angela Leighton reads this concern as the reaction of female poets both to the post-Romantic formulation of the home as a stable feminine sphere and the associated feminisation and interiorisation of poetry. Summarising Felicia Hemans’ reaction to this discourse of Italy as homeland, Leighton argues that ‘In many of her poems, home is either empty of its main figurehead, the father, or else home is somewhere else: in Italy, in the south — paradoxically, in one of those places still subject to the convulsions of political change.’³ Leighton’s anthology of Victorian women poets, edited with Margaret Reynolds, demonstrates the fascination with and importance of Italy as a reclaimed alternative feminine home. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s conception of Italy as a homeland in Aurora Leigh and Casa Guidi Windows is well documented, but other poets pursue the connection further and in different ways. Poems such as Alice Meynell’s ‘The Watershed’, for example, testify to the transformative and enabling potential of this trope to forge a replenishing sense of feminine place and belonging as an alternative to the patriarchy of Victorian Britain:

But O the unfolding South! the burst

Of Summer! O to see

Of all the southward brooks the first!

The travelling heart went free

With endless streams; that strife was stopped;

And down a thousand vales I dropped,

I flowed to Italy.⁴

We cannot fathom these mysteries of transplantation.

Edmund Gosse.¹