"Heir of All the Universe": Evolutionary Epistemology in Mathilde Blind's Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident

Abstract

In Prelude to her Birds of Passage: of and Occident (1895), Mathilde Blind tracks an autumn migration of birds in corporate motion from the cliffs of to the sacred Isle of in Nile River near Aswan, Egypt. (1) When this commonwealth in arrives at its destination some eighteen lines later and perches reverently in cracks and crevices of temples and monuments, it unites fallen gods of with men's generations that have waned and vanished into night and thus seems to bind Europe and Egypt, Occident and Orient, through common fate of human transience, symbolized in shadows [the birds] cast upon their onward flight. However, spatio-temporal organization of Blind's panorama-which encompasses Greece, Italy, and old Egypt's desert--also retraces an imperial geneology from present to past, to East, inverting conventional plot of western civilization she herself had presented in The Ascent of Man, her Darwinian epic (1889). This combination of bird's eye view and reverse chronology signals double discourse of colonialism woven into Birds of Passage. On one hand, Bird of Time from Rubayait of Omar Khayyam, which appears in book's epigraph, these birds in their transnational flight would seem to bridge distance between two cultures in their recognition of vanitas. Having arrived inside holy halls of Death and Birth, gaily twittering swallows, good tourists, hush their breath. On other hand, migration to Egypt is strangely counterproductive. The birds have traveled from falling leaves of England, past fair Sicilian ... meadows, to Nile seeking still an ampler light. But instead of this anticipated sunny, warm climate, they find Philae floating like some rapt Opium eater's labyrinthine lotos dream, strewn with twilight-litten ruins. In other words, journey ostensibly allegorizes human mortality, but it also emplots passage from to as a fascinating opportunity for Western subject vicariously to regress and, thus, re-inscribes an Orientalist theme. This discursive double-cross is one indication of how Blind's representations of Egypt, Italy, and England in Birds of Passage participate in ideologies of imperialism despite her political radicalism and her usual emphasis in her poetry on liberatory or progressive narratives. In her book Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and Cultures of Travel, Inderpal Grewal suggests that rather than debating whether middle-class Englishwomen or working-class men and women in England were anti-imperialist or not, it is more productive to examine the way they were interpellated as subjects ... through colonial discourses. (2) Blind's Birds of Passage (1895), with its balanced opposition of Songs of Orient and Songs of Occident, demonstrates how subjectivity of an independent woman in Victorian period (3)--or at least subjectivity constructed in a book of her verse-may be reliant nevertheless on binaries of East and West fundamental to imperialist ideology and produced through discourses of romanticism, comparative mythology, evolutionary science, and tourism that Blind weaves into her text. Blind's radical politics were grounded in her upbringing, developed through education, and expressed throughout her writing. She was stepdaughter to Karl Blind, a leader of Baden insurrection of 1848, and her brother Ferdinand attempted to assassinate Bismarck in 1866, subsequently committing suicide in prison. Her family moved to England after failure of revolution, and their home became a gathering place for political exiles, such as Garibaldi and Mazzini. Blind's education included study at a London girls' school, a failed attempt to crash university lectures restricted to men in Zurich, and a solitary walking tour of Swiss Alps, which she later dramatized in an autobiographical fragment that may have been part of an unfinished second novel. …