Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Politics of Childhood

Abstract

Aarmazed that despite her prolonged invalidism and two previous miscariages she was able bear child at age forty-three, Elizabeth Barrett Browning viewed her son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning--nicknamed Pen--as something akin fairy changeling, and her prolific letters document remarkably indulgent attitude toward the behaviors and capacities of children. She believed that children should never be forced study, that they would come all that is needful their own time. She admonished her sister Henrietta, herself the mother of young son, rush the boy's studies, for a child learns most when he plays. (1) Rather reluctantly, she began teaching Pen read at age four only he chose it himself, and to give him the opportunity of amusing himself with story-books, fairy tales and the rest-but she emphasized, not beginning his education!--the fairies forbid it. I have forgotten my liberty-plans. (2) Her educational philosophy was decidedly non-utilitarian--when she planned teach Pen something useful, she realized with amusement that she was thinking of mythology. (3) Pen himself sometimes demanded practical skills: nearly six and envying his male cousin's accomplishment, he asked his mother teach him count 100. She refused, though Robert (naughty Papa), she noted ruefully, provided the instruction out of spite. (4) For some biographers, references differences between Robert and herself on the subject of childrearing--especially on Pen's education, hair, and clothing--represent evidence only of breaches the Brownings' marital harmony, but also of EBB's irrationality, foolishness, even hysteria. (5) Certainly her plentiful and detailed accounts of Pen document maternal adoration which might have seemed excessive anyone who was Pen's mother. (6) But besides illustrating her devotion--often delightfully leavened by humor--her letters about Pen actually map finely observant, coherent, sophisticated, and remarkably modern or post-modern attitude toward childhood. Moreover, her discussions of Pen delineate her deep understanding of the politics of childhood: they reflect her developing ideas of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, on the one hand, and of the constructed nature of gender, on the other. As Dorothy Mermin observed her groundbreaking study of the poet, the more unusual aspects of Pen's upbringing arose from EBB's honor the rigid distinctions of gender, nationality, and class that she hated the English and her desire raise him what she termed a citizen of the world. (7) My discussion will trace these threads EBB's correspondence about Pen, and then consider several poems and letters which she relates her politics of childhood her own politicized woman poet. Deirdre David, Gary Kelly, and Lynda Nead, among others, have written persuasively about nineteenth-century uses of motherhood powerful symbol for nationalism-representations which, Elizabeth Fay remarks, the symbolic mother is generally employed as metaphor for nationalism melding her private role mother with her public of mothering the nation ... way that is reassuring rather than transgressive. In EBB's work, however, be mother is have immensely transgressive potential, for Fay observes relation Romantic writers, whereas in the middle-class perspective, maternity produces gentlemen and ladies ... radical society, maternity is somewhat dangerous because it produces citizens. (8) EBB's insistence on the importance of play and refusal set her son Pen organized study of reading and math expressed her view of the boy essentially joyous and attuned transcendent values. In these respects her attitudes echo familiar Romantic tenets, and, particularly, the educational philosophy advanced by Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose writings helped revolutionize conceptions of the child. …