Warrington: *A Brightening Influence*
I begin my discussion o f the political aspects o f Barbauld’s poetry somewhat paradoxically with ‘Verses Written in an Alcove’, a poem that explicitly rejects the social or public realm and which imagines instead a fantastic, asocial world o f the imaginary. The reasons for this choice are twofold. Firstly, as one o f Barbauld’s earliest known poems - written probably in the early 1760s - V erses’ serves to render more overt the shift from an emphasis on pleasure to politics in Barbauld’s poetics. Secondly, and more importantly, my reading o f this poem will demonstrate the extent to which even Barbauld’s least apparently public poetry can be read in terms o f a political agenda by an analysis o f its subtle involvement with contemporary social and cultural discourses, in particular those associated with the Enlightenment. This poem is a useful starting point since it also sets up the complex issue o f eighteenth century women’s relationship to the Enlightenment, a theme which dominates much o f Barbauld’s early poetry and which underpins the darker political vision o f her later works.
Verses’ is particularly relevant to an analysis o f Barbauld’s political poetry since it establishes the issue o f politics and poetics very clearly, and on this occasion Barbauld turns away from the poetry o f politics in favour o f the pastoral and fanciful. Political subject matter which she would later refuse to turn her back on, such as war and empire is here rejected; hers is
N ot the Muse who wreath’d with laurel, Solemn stalks with tragic gait,
And in clear and lofty vision Sees the future births o f fate;
N o t the maid who crown’d with cypress Sweeps along in scepter’d pall,
A nd in sad and solemn accents Mourns the crested heroe’s fall[.] (37)1
Along with political subject matter Barbauld’s female muse also rejects the high status o f poet-prophets and is ‘All unknown to fame and glory’ (49). While drawing on the popular Augustan concept o f druids as poets, with her description o f the ‘rustic temple’ (55) in which these poetic ‘notejs]’ (35) are ‘Tune[d]’ (36), Barbauld alters certain key characteristics o f this pagan poetics and rejects others. Male Augustan poets such as William Collins in his ‘Ode to Liberty’ (1746), use druid temples as a symbol o f British freedom; Barbauld’s temple does function as a site o f freedom, but that freedom is feminine not national. Moreover, Barbauld rejects the exalted construction o f the druids as both bards and priests put forward by poets like Collins, who depicts the druid-poets singing the ‘Triumphs’ (112) o f ‘The Chiefs who fill our A.lbtonis Story,/In warlike weeds, retir’d in Glory’ (109).2 Barbauld is appropriating key symbolism from Augustan poetics here but her use o f this imagery functions to undermine its conventional meaning, suggesting that even in these early poems she is actively seeking to construct an original poetics which would reflect her own interests.
The rejection o f the political in ‘Verses’, both overtly and through the poem’s imagery, could be seen as an attempt to figure a feminine poetics, and indeed the poetry which the chosen muse inspires is feminised by being figured in terms o f Burke’s gendered category, the beautiful.3 Burke links ‘sweet’ and ‘beautiful sounds’ and the music which is produced in Barbauld’s ‘temple’ is described as ‘Sweeter, sweeter than the m u rm ur/O f the distant water fall’ (23), ‘Sweeter than the breath of love’ (32).4 Burke goes on to suggest that
the beautiful in music will not bear that loudness and strength o f sounds, which may be used to raise other passions; nor notes which are shrill, or harsh or deep; it agrees best with such as are clear, even, smooth, and weak. (Burke, p. 112)
This description is echoed by the poetics which Barbauld advocates in the poem, and in her female temple, ‘Every ruder gust o f passion/Lull’d with music dies away’ (25). In her allegiance to these gendered categories o f private and beautiful for her
construction o f a feminised poetics in the poem, Barbauld would seem to be placing this in opposition to a masculine poetics o f the public and sublime. Moreover, Barbauld’s poem is set at night, and in several early poems she uses the conventional gendering o f the sun as masculine and the moon as feminine, to appropriate night for women, as a space which functions outside the rules o f day and patriarchy. Barbauld describes the poetics imagined in this nocturnal feminised space through the concept o f pleasure which is set in opposition to ‘Care’, a term that is used to represent the seriousness associated with patriarchal strictures, since ‘Care was only made for day’ (12).
William McCarthy, in his semi-biographical reading o f Barbauld’s early poetry, suggests that the construction o f pleasure in these early poems is set against and in reaction to, the ‘self-denial, rationalism, and emotional low temperature’ o f dissent.5 However, while Barbauld does reject care and seriousness in these early poems, she does n ot reject the rationality and intellect associated with the dissenting project in Warrington. The community o f women figured in the poem, made up o f the narrator, the female muse and ‘Lissy’, are no t merely wasting their hours away, but are writing poetry; they are in fact a female literary community. The poetry produced by these women is described as ‘Easy, blith and debonair’ (50), which echoes Milton’s description of the allegorised figure o f Mirth in ‘L’Allegro’ and suggests the pleasure that their literary enterprise engenders.6 The same language is also used in a letter written by Barbauld to her cousin Elizabeth Belsham, describing the social group in Warrington and persuading Elizabeth to join them; she writes ‘[w]e have a knot o f lassies just after your own heart, - as merry, blithe, and gay as you could wish them, and very smart and clever; two o f them are the Misses Rigby’.7 One o f the sisters in this actual female circle is Elizabeth Rigby, who features in the poem ’s imaginary group as ‘Lissy’. The emphasis in the description o f this female group in the letter as in the poem, is on carefree joyousness, however, there is a significant addition to the description in the letter, since these women are ‘very smart and clever’ as well. This statement would suggest that Barbauld does n ot seek to place pleasure in opposition to rationality, but rather that her concept o f pleasure combines both gaiety and intellect.
‘Verses’, like the other poems o f this period, in fact presents us with extremely subversive images o f women, in which they are repeatedly connected to pleasure, intellect, laughter and liberty. In both this poem and ‘The Invitation’, female communities are established in which the rules and power relations o f the social world do n ot apply. In this sense these communities operate in a manner similar to the carnivals depicted by Bakhtin, which are ‘organized on the basis o f laughter’ and in which the people enter a ‘utopian realm o f community, freedom, equality, and abundance’.8 The female communities which Barbauld imagines function in precisely such a way for these women. The temporal and spatial zones in which her female figures meet - night and hidden natural enclosures - operate as does carnival time, in that they provide ‘temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order’ through a ‘suspension o f all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions’ (Bakhtin, p. 10). In these spaces the oppositions o f the social world, in which women are unequal to men and are excluded from Enlightenment learning, do no t apply and the women are free to think.
There is still a tendency to construct eighteenth century women poets in opposition to the spheres o f rationality and intellect, but Barbauld consistently refuses to maintain this opposition and she destabilises it here and elsewhere in her poetry. In another early poem, ‘The Mouse’s Petition’, on which Marlon Ross has written usefully o f Barbauld’s appropriation o f the political form o f the petition, Barbauld presents Joseph Priestley with a humorous plea for Liberty on behalf o f a mouse.9 The poem is read by Stuart Curran as ‘a direct assertion o f the claims o f sensibility against male rationality’ and a similarly conventional reading is put forward by one o f the earliest reviewers o f 'Poems',; the Critical Review depicts the poem as a plea o f a lady’s humanity’ and ‘sensibility’ against the ‘cruelty practised by experimental philosophers’.10 Barbauld responded to this interpretation o f the poem by adding a footnote in later editions o f the collection in which she writes that, ‘[t]he Author is concerned to find, that what was intended as the petition o f mercy against justice, has been construed as the plea o f humanity against cruelty’, and she argues that ‘the poor animal would have suffered more as the victim o f domestic economy, than o f philosophical curiosity’ (cited in Poems, p. 245). Barbauld’s correction unsettles the complacent alignment o f women with domestic affections and sensibility both then
and now. Her argument makes clear that she viewed scientific experiments on animals no t as cruel but as necessary and reasonable, a claim which effectively positions her on the side o f rationality and science.
In ‘Verses’ Barbauld’s desire to place her female group and pleasure not in opposition to the Enlightenment but within its project, is also suggested by the title, in which she informs us that the poem is written in an ‘Alcove’, a spatial location which appears again in the body o f the poem and appears to be where the female figures meet. This alcove has a specific geographical significance since it is identified by Betsy Rodgers and McCarthy and Kraft as a summerhouse in the garden o f Warrington academy, and as such is a suggestive location for her female literary group to gather, since it positions them not outside but within the perimeters o f this space o f Enlightenment learning.11 Placed in the garden they are both inside the academy’s boundaries and yet outside its official centre, on the margins, and so the alcove becomes a fitting emblem o f women’s position in relation to the Enlightenment project. There are problems in the realisation o f this spatial location however, for while the title announces that these are Verses Written in an Alcove’, the poem goes on to establish ‘Here’ as a space ‘between the opening branches’ (5) and the alcove as elsewhere, since we are told that the fairies ‘play’ in lyon cool Alcove’ (10, [my emphasis]). It becomes difficult to fix the actual space from which the poet writes and where the female figures meet, hinting not only at some authorial anxiety about the ideological space from which the woman poet enters the literary scene, but also at the tensions inherent in Barbauld’s positioning in relation to the Warrington Enlightenment.
Gendering the Enlightenment
Along with allusive references to the Enlightenment in Barbauld’s early poetry there are also moments in which she explores key developments in the progress associated with that movement in a more overt way, through images o f science, technology and canal building. Although I have argued that Barbauld wanted to associate herself with the intellectual changes she perceived to be taking place in Warrington, as a woman she is problematically positioned in relation to the Enlightenment and this emerges as a tension in her poetry. In a recent work on the European
Enlightenment, Dorinda Outram suggests that ‘[cjolonialism, the exotic, and the exploitation o f nature were inextricably linked in the eighteenth century, and provide verification o f the contention that Enlightenment and the control o f nature were parts o f the same project’.12 While overtly seeking to validate the Enlightenment project, a number o f Barbauld’s poems make the connection Outram identifies - between progress and the exploitation or control of nature - through the use of increasingly riven or contradictory imagery. A clue to the significance o f this complex representation o f progress is in the gendering o f these tropes, in which an Enlightenment which allows access to women and which suggests freedom is gendered feminine, while a darker oppressive version which excludes women is gendered masculine. This subtle gendering, achieved through a clever, and often unconventional, use o f abstractions and personifications, may point to an awareness that women were themselves victims o f the darker, exploitative agenda within the European Enlightenment. Through an analysis o f two key poems, ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ and ‘The Invitation’, I want to point to a movement in Barbauld’s poetry from a figuring o f the Enlightenment as an emblem o f freedom to a representation in which the imagery symbolising that project is riven with contradictory meaning.
‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ is in execution the most accomplished and sophisticated poem o f this early collection. It is also the most transgressive and exhilarating o f the poems, imagining as it does a flight into the ‘trackless deeps o f space’ (82). Here Barbauld figures a positive representation o f scientific enquiry which is used to develop a greater understanding o f the natural world and implicitly to engender radical social change. The fashion for using contemporary scientific developments - such as more readily available telescopes and knowledge about new planets - in poetry, was fairly common in the eighteenth century and probably the earliest predecessor for the poem was Anne Finch’s ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ (1713). Barbauld’s poem bears a much closer resemblance however, to James Thom son’s Summer (1727) from The Seasons, but in crucial ways Barbauld rewrites the power structures o f the spatial territories which Thomson imagines. Before exploring the changes which Barbauld makes to Thom son’s vision o f the planetary system, it is
worth exploring the metaphorical and practical significance o f astronomical study for women at this time.
Although the discourses o f science and technology in the late eighteenth century were dominated by men, the developments in science which had taken place throughout the century and earlier, did filter down to middle and upper class women. Discussions o f astronomy appeared in The Spectator and other journals perused by the leisured classes, and numerous science books appeared explaining the rudiments o f astronomy, several o f which were intended for a female audience. With Warrington academy’s emphasis on the sciences in teaching, the library would have owned several scientific textbooks, and from the structure o f the poem it seems likely that Barbauld had read one o f the English translations o f Bernard le Bovier, Sieur de Fontanelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralite des Monies (1686), o f which four versions appeared in Britain, the latest being by Aphra Behn in 1715 and published as Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. Fontanelle’s work takes the form o f a conversation between a Marquise and a scientist, and according to Patricia Phillips is significant in that it promotes the idea that women were ‘particularly receptive to an understanding o f the newest scientific theories’, as well as presenting ‘an important image o f a lively female intellect grappling with scientific problems’.13
Fontanelle’s text book bears a close relation to the structure o f Barbauld’s poem, and although his discourse on the planetary systems takes place over five moonlit summer nights rather than one, he covers the same trajectory o f exploring and describing the planets, as well as discussing the possibility o f man’s travel into space. Phillips notes that Fontanelle ‘sought to convey a sense o f a vastly expanding universe o f knowledge whose foothills only had yet been explored’ and ‘at the same time he made it plain that women, too, could join in this new and exciting investigation’ (Phillips, p. 88). Fontanelle’s work, with it’s emphasis on women’s involvement in astronomy and his seductive descriptions o f flights both imaginative and physical into outer space may well have provided the theoretical model for Barbauld’s own meditative journey. In 1773, the year that Barbauld’s poem was first published, an important and in many ways similar interest in women and astronomy was also exhibited by Hester Mulso Chapone in her Letters on the Improvement of the
Mind. Chapone, whom Barbauld later met and became friends with, had elsewhere argued against the subjection o f daughters to fathers, claiming that Svomen, as rational and accountable beings, are free agents as well as men’.14 Her later exhortation to women to look to the skies with a ‘philosophic eye’ in order to ‘enlarge your mind’ reminds us that the subtext to this use o f science is broadly speaking feminist, in that it seeks to extend women’s educational horizons.15 Chapone writes that it is ‘impossible to describe the sensations I felt from the glorious, boundless prospect o f infinite beneficence bursting at once upon my imagination’ (Chapone [1808], p. 100), an experience which corresponds quite closely with that which Barbauld attempts to describe in the poem. For both women the contemplation o f space offers them an emblem o f freedom at its most exhilarating, which is both desocialised and at the same time firmly rooted in Enlightenment notions o f progress, and the real social change this promised.
Barbauld’s deployment o f astronomy in the poem reflects then the interests nurtured at Warrington Academy and hints at the tantalising possibilities raised for women by Enlightenment learning. Once again it is night which heralds the scene o f female intellectual activity; during the day ‘Contemplation’, which is gendered feminine, is only to be found in:
... .sunless haunts,
the cool damp grotto, or the lonely depth O f unpierc’d woods. (18)