Byron, Barrett Browning and the Organization of Light

Abstract

Feminist readings of Casa Guidi Windows frequently invoke Canto IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage as a significant intertext for Barrett Browning, identifying in Barrett's Italy a direct retort to Byron's representation of the Italian nation as a languishing female body, which returns to it the potential agency inherent in the republican body politic. But Barrett's Italy not only challenges Byron's account of Italy as the feminine victim of masculine history, it also negotiates the obliterating glare of Byronic light. Responding to recent interpretations of the poem's windows as apertures that compromise the division between public masculine and private feminine space, this article explores the ways Casa Guidi, both the poem and the home that it describes, represent a liberal architectonics that is as concerned with resisting as it is with celebrating the subliming forces of indifferent nature and international politics. One of the ways in which that resistance is performed is via the poet's negotiation of Italian light, natural, divine and artistic, a negotiation through which Barrett describes a post-Romantic feminine poetics that realigns poetic form and the domestic, and suggests both as spaces through which light may break.