From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Risorgimento

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.”