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Научни трудове на Съюза на учените в България - Пловдив. Серия A. Обществени науки, изкуство и култура. Том V, ISSN 1311-9400 (Print); ISSN 25349368 (Online), 2019, Scientific works of the Union of Scientists in Bulgaria - Plovdiv. Series А. Public sciences, art and culture. Vol. V, ISSN 1311-9400 (Print); ISSN 25349368 (Online), 2019
COPY AND ORIGINAL (BASED ON ELIZABETH BARRETT'S THE DEATH-BED OF TERESA DEL RIEGO)
Yana Rowland University of PlovdivPaisiiHilendarski
Abstract: This paper offers reflections on the matter of authenticity versus imitation based on one of Elizabeth Barrett's early works, The Death-Bed of Teresa del Riego. While focusing on a single poem, I endeavour to suggest ways of interpreting the writer's inter est in the past as part of her translation of time as a cultural and ontological variable. I also dwell on the palpability of authorial intention in Barrett's treatment of the grief of a real widowed woman whom she did not know in person. Teresa's suffering becomes a hologram of the literary act as a non-finalizable performance of lived and living experience in need of interpretation, i.e. representation in the process of building sense as a non-solipsistic entity.
Key words: Elizabeth Barrett, memory, originality, reproduction, empathy, identity, the
past
Critical and cultural (re-)examination of the (literary) past is a notable feature of Elizabeth Barrett's poetics. In her entire work otherness - cultural, textual, and sexual - rises as a definitive field of self-recognition. This feature is easier detected in Barrett's formative period, which includes the poetic collection Prometheus Bound, and Miscellaneous Poems (1833), where we find a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (first - 1833, second, revised - 1850) - a distinctive exploration of the range, depth and creative efficacy of temporal distance. Perceiving understanding to stand for "constant movement" and extension of one's own knowledge as well as the boundaries of literature, the poetess pored over the past voraciously, self-unsympathetically, self-critically, embracing "foreign" stories on various subjects. As she arrived at the notion of the tactility of time through textual representation, she found herself dwelling within knowledge as received inheritance, to begin with. To this effect contributed Elizabeth's own father - canonical archetypal power of masculinity, education and social norm. Thus, Greekness (in translation, imitation and critical investigation) became a portion of herself in being thanks to otherness. Nonetheless, the poetess appears to have remained immune to tautology in interpreting "the great past". Sense developed in the eventness of historical effect: it occurred in the uniqueness of her closeness to the book as lived and living experience.1 Yet, as she affirms in her own Preface to her Prometheus, "it is the nature of the human mind to communicate its own character to whatever substance it conveys, whether it convey metaphysical impressions from itself to another mind, or literary compositions from one to another language" (Barrett Browning, 2010, 4: 179, emphasis added). This communication she also calls wearing "various-coloured spectacles (...) since
1 Consider: "Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have passed in my thoughts ... poetry has been a distinct object with me - an object to read, think and live for. ... The Greeks were my demi-Gods, and haunted me out of Pope's Homer until I dreamed more of Agamemnon than Moses the black pony." (Elizabeth Barrett to Mr. R. H. Horne, 5 Oct, 1843, Barrett Browning, 1897: 3, emphasis added)
Aesop's time and before it" - one's own colour is one's own "individuality" (ibid. emphasis added). Elizabeth Barrett's hermeneutical inclinations are visible as she endeavours to gauge sense as movement between primary substance and product, authentic matter and representation, original composition and translation as transfer and increase of sense across time. By interpreting, she absolutized yet undermined the tension found in the literary work as an ex-centric resolution of time as at once external fact and internal choice. An insight into the poem The Death-Bed of Teresa del Riego, of the said collection, may help us reveal the inter-dependency between poetry and actual life from a hermeneutic perspective: original survives as content interpreted in time, post-facto, through the response of the poet as survivor who transforms "marks ... back into meaning" (Gadamer, 2004: 389).
Ostensibly beaten into obedience, Elizabeth Barrett wished to detach herself from spineless imitation of traditionary role models: "... I do not ask, I would not obtain, that our age should be servilely imitative of any former age. " (Preface to Prometheus..., Barrett Browning 2010, 4: 180). Although aged eight, in an address to her at that time sick sister Henrietta, she describes herself as "a chatting parrot" (An Epistle to Henrietta, 1814, l. 16), she would neither blindly reproduce stories of eminent men and women, nor replicate literally conventional forms of poetic address. Her own 26 notes accompanying her translation of Prometheus Bound serve as sufficient evidence of her scholarly interest in the matter of interpretation as both contribution to, and improvement of, primary excellence (e.g. note (a), Barrett Browning, 2010, 4: 215). The poetess was sympathetic to stories of human will, independence of mind, and faithful yet liberating love - a tendency not at odds with the climate of growing feminine self-assertion in 19th-century England.2 Those stories yielded a rich palette of poetic narratives of suffering where, as Marianne Van Remoortel perhaps too judgementally concludes, the thinking self dwells in "voluntary imprisonment", oscillating between mastery and slavery, self-aggrandizement and self-denial (Van Remoortel, 2011: 91, 104). Barrett domesticates an other's tragedy and makes it her own. Self-enclosure does not preclude intentionality in terms of establishing contact with the external world. The poetess' humanitarian inclinations would urge her to "thieve" singular stories with a strong communitarian element as she grew convinced in the impossibility of a poet's self-comprehension in isolation. The poem The Death-Bed of Teresa Del Riego is a pars pro toto fulfillment of the real person, whom the poetess knew through a token. Teresa had sent a lock of her own hair to Elizabeth Barret in gratitude for her poetic commemoration of her husband, Spanish revolutionary Rafael del Riego y Nunez (executed in 1823), whom Teresa outlived by one year. Barrett activated the inherent potential of a historical occasion by dynamizing a given cultural potential (Cf. Iser, 1972: 283-285, 290): she wrote the story of a widow mourning her husband by way of restricting yet releasing content through especial topical and narrative accents (gaps, in Iser's idiom). She reconfigured martyrdom by immortalizing the woman - an emblem of the plasticity of identity in devotion.
The poem implies the metaphoricity of comprehension as at once original composition and interpretation - both depend on temporal distance (see also Iser 1972: 286). To Elizabeth Barrett literature was living event: she narrated the story as she saw it. The description of the widow is achieved as if the poetess was witness. The abrupt, elliptical beginning is suggestive in its accomplice confidentiality cautiously intimating contact between researching subject and object of research: "The room was darken'd; but a wan lamp shed / Its light upon a half-uncurtain'd bed / Whereon the widow'd sate. Blackly as death / Her veiling half hung down round her, and no breath / Came from her lips to motion it. ..." (ll. 1-5). Inspired by John Hayes' portrait of Teresa, displayed in the Royal Academy's 1824 exhibition (Donaldson, 2010, 4: 152), Barrett heroizes the
2 Female education in the Classics being tentative, women were tamed to enjoy literature originally produced in, or translated into, English. For women, accessible education could differ from desirable/desired education, or the one a woman would be capable of (Cf. Williams, 1997: 164). A woman's decision to master a Classical language, for instance, signified a will to broaden her intellectual and spiritual horizon, but also to expand the limits of her gender and class definition (Cf Wallace, 2015: 243-244).
woman, rather than the man - an occasion of cognitive importation of sense across politics and culture. The widow is entrapped in her grief for her husband, now dead; the poem hints that sense gets born in denial of solitary existence which may be seen to corrupt sense as dialogue (consult also Gadamer, 2004: 109, 113-14, 129). Both Elizabeth Barrett and her husband, Robert Browning, got involved in Teresa's story by private memorialization: the poetess - in her composition, and her husband - in his commentary concerning the origin of this poem which he penned on the envelope where a lock of Teresa's hair was kept - once possession of his wife (Donaldson, 2010, 4: 252, prefatory note 1). In such historical mediation between past and present the degree of authenticity may not be easily confirmed. Similar is the case with other poetic dedications based on acquaintances actual and/or imagined. Thus, Riga's Last Song, also of the said collection and one depicting the valour of a Greek in his native state's war of independence, establishes connections between the contributions of Elizabeth Barrett and Lord Byron in their passion for the cause of liberty. On a Picture of Riego's Widow (from the Essay on Mind 1826 collection)3, Felicia Hemans, L. E. L. 's Last Question, To Mary Russell Mitford, On a Portrait of Wordsworth by B. R. Haydon, the two sonnets on George Sand (published in 1856), the three sonnets on Hugh Stuart Boyd, Catarina to Camoens, and certainly Sonnets from the Portuguese -they all defend derivativeness as a prerequisite for poetic expression, original and copy remaining within the instability that humanitarian interpretation implies (Cf. Gadamer, 2004: 159, 290-291). Insofar as it presents, the text gains "the truly ontological character of an event" — the other's story is embedded in the poet's own intentionality in the poetic narrative as a non-solipsistic, consequential rendering of time (Gadamer, 2004: 421, 439-440).
In translation, the epigraph to the poem The Death-Bed of Teresa del Riego is a reading of Giovanni Battista Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, or The Faithful Shepherd, 1590: "If everything else were mute, at the end my death will speak, and death will tell you my suffering" (Mermin qtd. in Donaldson 2010, 4: 253-254). Death, being an event externally confirmed and never self-verified, could be taken as a more eloquent demonstration of identity appreciated than the perfunctory impressions gained of a person when he/she still lives. The poetess declares her affiliation with the past as textual reality. In the Prometheus Bound collection (1833) this exhibits, also, Elizabeth Barrett's mastery of foreign languages and cultural contexts (the Bible, and literature originally non-English). All her epigraphs here come from works composed by men: prefaced thus, her own poems may only superficially appear humbled down by the patriarchal canon. Not simply imitative, or derivative, they condense yet develop self-acknowledgement through an external, cultural referee - a case of ex-centric expansion of the poet's own living milieu. Further examples may be seen in: The Tempest, A Sea-Side Meditation, Minstrelsy, The Image of God, and Hymn. A key to the story inside, an epigraph may not be shy of a writer's desire to demonstrate literary expertise, but such as would prohibit the autocratic notion of ultimate self-sustenance within "a hermeneutics of indeterminacy" and insufficiency whereby a text's theme and meaning remain unfinalizable (Gray, 2010: 41). Being meta-narratives, epigraphs may disclose a dose of fear on the part of the woman writer. On the other hand, they declare a poet's taste, philosophical orientation, and genre preferences. Highly expressive and self-expository, rather than self-restrictive, Barrett's performance never loses count of context and its subsequent modulations. Recognition of the temporal contingency of the existence of the literary work seems to have been a chief component in the poetess' efforts to express content as historically effected event. With a temporal abyss between an event and the time of the act of its interpretation, the above phenomenon becomes the more prominent.
3 The poem depicts Teresa as a symbol of national pride ("Daughter of Spain!" l. 1). Her face conveys her patriot husband's woe (l. 7). Despite Riego's ignoble death ("And he who lived the Patriot's life, / Was dragged to die the traitor's death!" ll. 23-24), it is suggested that his widow might kindle a sense of national identity in "Britons" whose own, "British soul" is activated through the knowledge of an other's suffering. Thus, the own, in the relation between wife and husband, one nation and another, or poet and life, emerges as a post facto consideration of exteriority which itself gets verified.
Elizabeth Barrett's preoccupation with suffering and death is well known yet this particular poem seems to have somehow escaped critics' vigilant eyes. The question is not only to what extent the poetess has been able to convey truthfully the "original" character of Teresa Del Riego and her grief, but to what extent she has managed to account for an "original" event she had no personal knowledge of - death. In Being and Time Martin Heidegger declares:
"Dasein is essentially Being with Others. In that case, the fact that death has been thus 'Objectively' given must make possible an ontological delimitation of Dasein's totality. ... when we speak of "Being-with," we always have in view Being with one another in the same world. The deceased has abandoned our 'world and left it behind. But in terms of that world ... those who remain can still be with him. Death does indeed reveal itself as a loss, but a loss such as is experienced by those who remain. In suffering this loss, however, we have no access to the loss-of-Being as such which the dying man 'suffers'" (Heidegger, 1962: 281-282). Heidegger accentuates the terminal validity of death, making it an integral part of human knowledge which includes the non-elective awareness of another person's death - the only death knowable and the farthest reach of the human mind and imagination. Both Heidegger and Barrett deny independence of knowing: any one man may never really function as an ultimate source of cognition as the notion of the end remains, always, a possibility and a shared activity. There could be no singularity, originality or totality in cognizing - the poetess indulges in the past as she acknowledges the primacy of the external over the internal. Writing of grief and death, she declares her burdensome status of survivor as a platform for the literary act. Like other poems exemplary of Barrett's discursive appreciation of time as shared being and demonstrative of the ontological validity of presentation (The Picture Gallery at Penshurst, The Autumn, and To a Boy, and the poetic dedications to father Barrett and to other members of her own family) this one claims at once dependence on the past and an intention to revise the premise of cultural heroism:
The room was darken'd; but a wan lamp shed Its light upon a half-uncurtain'd bed, Whereon the widow'd sate. Blackly as death Her veiling half hung round her, and no breath Came from the lips to motion it. Between Its parted clouds, the calm fair face was seen In a snow paleness and snow silentness, With eyes unquenchable, whereon did press A little, their white lids, so taught to lie, By weights of frequent tears wept secretly. Her hands were clasp'd and raised - the lamp did fling
A glory on her brow's meek suffering. Beautiful form of woman! Seeming made Alone to shine in mirrors, there to braid The hair and zone the waist - to garland flowers -
To walk the sunshine through the orange bowers -
To strike her land's guitar - and often see In other eyes how lovely hers must be -Grew she acquaint with anguish? Did she sever
For ever from the one she loved for ever, To dwell among the strangers? Ay! And she, Who shone most brightly in that festive glee,
Sate down in this despair most patiently. Some hearts are Niobes! In grief s down -sweeping,
They turn to very stone from over-weeping, And after, feel no more. Hers did remain In life, which is the power of feeling pain, Till pain consumed the life so call'd below. She heard that he was dead! - she ask'd not how -
For he was dead! She wail'd not o'er his urn,
For he was dead - and in her hands, should burn
His vestal flame of honour radiantly. Sighing would dim its light - she did not
sigh.
She only died. They laid her in the ground, Whereon th' unloving tread, and accents sound
Which are not of her Spain. She left behind, For those among the strangers who were kind
Unto the poor heart-broken, her dark hair.
It once was gauded out with jewels rare;
It swept her dying pillow - it doth lie Beside me, (thank the giver) droopingly, And very long and bright! Its tale doth go Half to the dumb grave, half to life-time woe,
Making the heart of man, if manly, ring Like Dodon&an brass, with echoing.
(emphasis added)
Teresa's grief is not really copied hereby: it emerges textually, in presentation, responsibly and self-critically. The poetess stresses the contingency of sense as historical movement of which poetic picturing also partakes. "... the world that appears in the play of presentation does not stand like a copy next to the real world, but is that world in the heightened truth of its being" (Gadamer, 2004: 132). Literary story and actual fact are ontologically inseparable (Gadamer, 2004: 134), for in the aesthetic game scholar and object of research are mutually inclusive (Cf. Gadamer, 2004: 138). Teresa and Elizabeth Barrett included each other.
The story is so vividly narrated and the description is so efficient that it would be fairly easy to claim that the poetess has appropriated this tragic story in a wish to declare fidelity, self-sacrifice and love as her own outstanding features of self-presentation. Returns back in time of this sort typify the "fractured, doubting Victorian self' - evidence, also, of the impossibility of adhering to a linear model of history much promoted in the 19th century (Williams, 1997: 148-149. Memory - a conductor of continuity within mutually defining relationships between humans -makes a priority of the past (Cf. Williams, 1997: 156-157) and endorses the retrospective nature of aesthetic appreciation. To achieve verity, the poetess seems to transpose herself into what she investigates - as narrator, conversationalist, and commemorator. Narrativity implies an informed rendering of time as a knowable item. The narrated story is part of reality itself and the two references to Old Greek culture this poem contains broaden the dimensions of the reader's perception of reality (see esp. notes 2 & 3, pp. 254). Originality of content includes the artist's glance which imparts life to otherwise voiceless traces. The oscillation between verity of primary story and reality of presentation in a literary work could be phrased in hermeneutic terms: "transposing ourselves ... always involves rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other" (Gadamer, 2004: 304). Narrating and picturing, Barrett defends her desire to understand life in its many forms and reveals the ontological premise of the literary act. Presentation is both preservation and alteration, and it is by being pictured only that a truth can be. Verity presupposes non-coincidence and difference: it could be grasped through conversation as temporal journeying.
The remoteness of the named events embedded in the texture of The Death-Bed of Teresa del Riego may be less conspicuous and striking if we were to see it as part of the poetess' fidelity for the theme of liberty, nuanced by a cross-cultural awareness of anti-absolutism, equality, and fraternity. The dedicatee of the poem is not the actual man, but his wife, Teresa, who died in London in 1824. It is Teresa's silent, dignified, humble, self-contained suffering that outlines the spectral presence of her husband as she becomes a paragon of identity - incomplete, doomed without the other, an identity confirmable upon death only. As survivor, the poetess comes into both these deaths. Teresa is meaning in relation to her husband, but so is her husband. The seemingly unobtrusive "she did not sigh. // She only died" (ll. 33-34) complicates the scholar's effort to peruse the image of Teresa del Riego, as a gap comes to be. Teresa's death may suggest apathetic abandonment to the irreversibility of fate which has befallen her: the death of the dearest person. Or, it may suggest a staunch refusal to yield to a world the woman does not expect to be granted understanding from (ll. 29-34). By yielding, she would die defeated and her husband's deed would be forgotten. As we question things hermeneutically, we may admit to alterity as part of the sameness of sense, always intended for another to discover and continue. Consider: the poetess dedicating a poem to a foreign woman; husband Robert Browning finding that very woman's lock of hair amidst his wife's private possessions; the epigraph ushering in an extra poetic layer of emotional power regarding the matter of the unfinalizability of one's identity upon expiration (Il Pastor Fido is concerned with mutual affection and fidelity). All this suggests the
historical contingency of the production of sense as an entity in which each current point of accounting for a past has a share. Gadamer's idea about portraiture and reproduction, as part of the living, eventful existence of sense formed in the act of interpretation, applies to our wish to appreciate the content of Elizabeth Barrett's work as cultural necessity yet unique intentionality: "the subject matter appears truly significant only when it is properly portrayed for us. ... [it] presents different aspects at different times or from different standpoints. ... Our historical consciousness is always filled with a variety of voices in which the echo of the past is heard" (Gadamer, 2004: 285; 271).
Remembering Teresa del Riego is a cultural act: by exemplifying and explaining, it enhances the production of sense as legacy. Teresa leaves her hair behind, as she dies, and a lock of it - to the poetess: "... her dark hair/ ... / ... doth lie / Beside me, (thank the giver) droopingly, / And very long and bright! Its tale doth go / Half to the dumb grave, half to life-time woe, / Making the heart of man, if manly, ring / Like Dodon&an brass, with echoing" (ll. 38-45, emphasis added). Two things to note. First, the varied tint of the colour of Teresa's hair - naturally dark, one might assume, but bright for the interpreter - signals change as emergence of meaning across time and space as cultural variables.4 Second, Teresa, metonymically, as does heir hair also, half goes to the grave, half to life - waiting to be prolonged, i.e. interpreted and understood, with an echo heard behind.5 An ostensibly hackneyed expression of femininity, the hair acquires the meaning of temporal longevity, of upgradability of sense as content shared between two.6 The aberrant colour
4 Variation, inconsistence and inconstancy in the description of an element of a character's physical appearance in a literary work may arouse anxiety, depending on whether a reader's criterion for a writer's mastery involves the expectation of greater or lesser accuracy and objectivity in presentation. A digression toward discussing literary thoroughness/licentiousness a famous post-modern English novelist makes might take us to 19th-century French literature. In chapter 6 of Flaubert's Parrott, Julian Barnes reveals one of the signs of critical helplessness (critics are seen as "failed creators" "by nature carping, jealous and vain," Barnes, 2012: 74) to be the inability to appreciate authorial nuances in the mien of a person. Flaubert's take on his female protagonist's eyes may (not) suggest the author's "carelessness", defined, also, by the verdict of a professional critic and a lay reader. The latter "can forget", whereas the former gets trapped as "the books they teach and write about can never fade from their brains: they become family" (Barnes, 2012: 75). It would appear that interpretative acuteness is contingent not only upon professional coached scholarship, but upon man's natural skill to forget.
5 A further explanation in the editor's note 3 on p. 254 of the volume of Barrett's work quoted hereby sheds light on the relationship between this poem, the Bible and Greek mythology, as contained in the phrase "Dodon&an brass ... echoing". Divination of sense is related to the notion and skill of hearing and being heard, to sonic waves, to the effect of an echo as continuity and modification, rather than as cessation.
6 Hair has been a matter of cultural debate, with some outstanding studies emphasizing its historical significance. Two emblematic examples stretch the range of interpretation between scholarly understanding of 19th-century femininity and post-modernist critique of the absurdities of memorializing. In one such instance - Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot - the narrator rues the naivety of enthusiastic readers ("the believers, the seekers, the pursuers") who are said to have readily bought "enough of [R. L. Stevenson's hair] to stuff a sofa", his "business-minded Scottish nanny" having announced to have been in possession of a lock of the writer's hair (Barnes, 2012: 12). Profiteering on the past cannot be assumed to have been part of a business plan of either of the Brownings. Yet Victorian mentality sought empirical evidence in estimating the value of the past. Elizabeth Barrett fetishized memories and their material expressions which yielded splendid elegiac and contemplative verses. A lucid and in-depth informative guide, Galia Ofek's Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture (2009) defines the place of hair as part of the formation and demonstration of gender in "a complex system of signification and differentiation in Victorian society" (Ofek, 2009: 147). Hair is part of a complex aesthetics whereby "beauty and death were enmeshed" within Victorian obsessions with orderliness and sexuality (ibid. 150, 152). The length and colour of a woman's hair could suggest her social status. The cropping of a woman's hair could be a sign of control (over a fallen woman), a manifestation of a widow's comportment, or generally, a trace of the imposition of extreme restrictions over a female individual. Cutting one's own hair could symbolize self-assertion, self-possession, self-reflection, or self-destruction (ibid. Cf. 152, 158, 177). So, the passing on of a lock of hair - woman to woman to man (as was the case with Teresa del Riego's lock which eventually ended up in the possession of Robert Browning) - functions as a joined sample of original, essentialist (i.e. anatomically inherited) and interpretatory, socio-politically constructed femininity. At once corporeal and incorporeal, it could be touched and read as an in-text citation and an out-of-text evidence of woman's presence (the widow and the poetess). Donated, hair is a metonym of internal and external femininity: both bear contaminated signs of liberation and (self-)restraint, of legibility and covertness (ibid. Cf. 179, 181, 190). Ownership and interpretation, in a vaster scope, are inherent prerogatives of a survivor's relationship with the past as materiality and metaphysics. Hair in this poem calls for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magic realism. In Del amor y otros demonio, the story of Sierva Maria de Todos Los Angeles relates of a 12-year old girl whose incredible hair continued growing after her death
of the hair of one and the same person manifests understanding: "it is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all" (Gadamer, 2004: 296). I could not be more genuine in declaring my agreement with Gadamer's perception of reproduction as contribution to, rather than damage of, the active existence of an original, as I would like to stress the temporal relativity of understanding as dependence facing two ways - the object of research and the researching subject between which no clear divide could be drawn in the humanities: "The being of the work of art is not a being-in-itself that is different from its reproduction or the contingency of its appearance" (Gadamer, 2004: 470). The lock of hair and the poem, within the temporal metonymic leap between originator and trace left behind, share a similar fate - neither could be ultimately authentic or finally complete. Shorn of the effect of posterity they invoke (the faithful wife mourning her husband, the poetess admiring this faithfulness, the poet-husband remembering his poetess-wife), they could be said to be in danger of losing their methodological dignity. Insufficiency lurks behind each "original" piece of art and each act of interpretation.
The Death-Bed of Teresa del Riego revisits the notion of the life-sustaining power of interpretation. Consider the discreet stillness, subdued sorrow and suppressed suffering in Teresa's posture in the initial lines of the first stanza: "the room was darken'd", "a wan lamp", "a half-uncurtain'd bed", "the widow'd sate. Blackly as death / Her veiling half hung round her, and no breath / Came from the lips to motion it. Between Its parted clouds, the calm fair face was seen / In a snow paleness and snow silentness, / ... / wept secretly. / Her hands were clasp'd and raised' (ll. 1-12, emphasis added). The impenetrability, restriction, and scarcity of motion implied emphasize the woman's stoicism, faith, and devotion to her husband. In Barrett's poem Teresa gets enlivened and heroized, yet the words italicized indicate the poetess' hesitancy over declaring absolute or original knowledge as sound and sight appear compromised. The woman acquires lifelikeness in what could be defined, across temporal distance, as a non-singular entity of mutual appreciation: wife - for her husband, the poetess - for Teresa. Identity is outwardly bound because it is made possible through external evaluation: until then it remains but a project, a "form:" "Beautiful form of woman! ... In other eyes how lovely hers must be" (ll. 13-18, emphasis added). The grief Teresa is stricken with is a catalyst for her individuation. This poetic work implies that the ethic and aesthetic core of a narrative is the story of another person, not the self taken in isolation. The pain eventually consumes the mourner, yet it helps achieve a more feasible perception of reality: "[Her heart] did remain/ In life, which is the power of feeling pain" (ll. 2627). Empathy, visible in the immediacy of the narrative and the vividness of description, is foundation for the emergence of the authorial I which feels for, but does not rescue, Teresa from death. In hermeneutics terms: "commiseration and apprehension are modes of ekstasis, being outside of oneself, which testify the power of what is being played out before us" (Gadamer, 2004: 126-7). Empathy implies an assumption upon oneself of the other's pain. However, the literary act could never fully compensate for that which remains deficient per se in actual life.
Elizabeth Barrett's poetic dedications constitute a part of her input in the theme of originality, of authenticity of content - a theme much in tune with a Victorian dread of the fleetingness of time. In her work grasping the past is a strategy for maintaining continuity of sense. Woman and daughter (and, later, wife and mother), the poetess had a (literary) memory which (re-)awakened and (re-)created otherness as measurement of creativity. The parallel with the metaphoric containment/release of the lock of hair seems obvious: the envelope it was found in kept at least three stories - of Teresa, of Elizabeth Barrett's poem on the occasion, and of her husband's precious memory of her. Writing as recording experience - actual and imaginary, with a permeable boundary between the two - thrives on both gain and loss. Yet it would appear that loss
so that its length of 22 m and 11 cm, 200 years upon her expiration, challenges the narrator as an ultimate metaphor for historical incompletion (Cf. Márquez, 2012: 10-13). Conventionally symptomatic of femininity, hair is an option for debating the lastingness and type of attraction the past may hold for an interpreter. A modestly sized lock of hair may convey the possibility of measuring a wife's fidelity for her husband, a poet's cultural memory and a husband's sense of duty for his poetess wife.
is an especial stimulus for poetic composition as it induces a feeling of emptiness that could get addressed and compensated for by verbal fulfillment.7
Where poetic imagination recognizes its dependence on previousness, i.e. on time, originality in the production of sense appears hard work. The historical responsiveness of Elizabeth Barrett's early poetry reveals her enviable awareness of the past which she wished to convey analytically, contributively and self-critically. Her prefaces, annotations and epigraphs indicate her perception of the continuity of sense beyond the boundaries of form and genre which she challenged yet obeyed. Her preferred themes - family, children, memory, suffering, woman's lot, education, creativity, orphanhood, death - deny single-mindedness and categorical judgement. Interrogating and self-interrogating, she conversed with life. Barrett's portraits, devotional poems, descriptive lyric pieces, confessional verses, and translations in her 1833 poetic volume urge the reader to consider the need to understand time as constant movement whereby absolute authentication of human experience and ultimate totality of knowledge and of sense remain but a chimera. Hence the poet's inability and unwillingness to draw a clear divide between thing and subsequent re-iteration of this very thing, fact and interpretation, role-model and imitator.8 The length and colour of Teresa's hair - "dark" upon mourning (and befitting the ambience of lament and mystery the poem is set in from the start) but "bright" in the poetess' perception - present an opportune occasion for perusing the contingencies of "objective" reality as a much pursued aim of 19th-century English empirical thinking. Barrett's subversive models of presentation, analysis and narration (with constant revisionist returns back in time - in translation and in authentic composition) constitute her coming to terms with the impossibility of existing conscientiously divorced from historical mediation. Analyzed and analyzer, object and subject, original and copy could not be accurately distinguished or isolated. Echoes are to be heard and divined from all over her poetry, and echoes from "the heart of man", echoes "like Dodon&an brass", reach us in the finale of the poem The Death-Bed of Teresa Del Riego.
WORKS CITED:
Barnes, 2012: Barnes, Julian. Flaubert's Parrot. London: Vintage Books 2012 (1984). Barrett Browning, 1897: Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Vol. 1. New York - London: Macmillan, 1897.
Barrett Browning, 2010, 1: Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. vol. 4. Edited by Marjorie Stone and Beverley Taylor. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010.
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Gadamer, 2004: Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London & New York: Continuum, 2004.
Gray, 2010: Gray, F. Elizabeth. Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women's Poetry. Routledge, 2010.
Heidegger, 1962: Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
7 Jj Overall, the philosophical density and intertextual variety of Elizabeth Barrett's many poems of mourning abate Angela Leighton's slightly condescending verdict regarding the crippling effect of grief (as she indeed means "the grieving sonnets of 1844") which "for Elizabeth Barrett, is the blank side of writing, which shames and contradicts the high revelations of poetry" (Leighton, 1986: 89).
8 This tendency appears to agree with what Tricia Lootens phrases as "the instabilities and subversive potential of her early conceptions of feminine sainthood" exemplified, later, in poetical works such as Sonnets from the Portuguese and the Casa Guidi Windows collection (Lootens, 1996: 127).
Robinson. London: SCM Press, 1962.
Iser, 1972: Iser, Wolfgang. "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach". New Literary History 3. 2 On Interpretation: I (Winter, 1972): 279-299.
Leighton, 1986: Leighton, Angela. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Lootens, 1996: Lootens, Tricia. Lost Saints. Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Márquez, 2012: Маркес. Габриел Гарсия. За любовта и други демони. Прев. Елена Дичева. София: „Лъчезар Минчев", 2012.
Ofek, 2009: Ofek, Galia. Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture. Surrey -Burlington: Ashgate, 2009.
Van Remoortel, 2011: Van Remoortel, Marianne. Lives of the Sonnet, 1787-1895. Ashgate, 2011.
Wallace, 2015: Wallace, Jennifer. 'Greek under the Trees': Classical Reception and Gender. Eds. Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace. The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. Vol. 4: 1790 - 1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 243-278. Williams, 1997: Williams, Jeni. Interpreting Nightingales. Gender, Class and Histories. Sheffield Academic Press, 1997.
Biographical note
Yana Rowland PhD is a full-time associate professor at the English Department of Plovdiv University. Her interests and research contributions range between Victorian poetry, hermeneutics and existential ethics. She is in charge of the core modules in Victorian Literature, Modernism -Post-Modernism and Literary Anthropology. She has authored two scholarly studies: The Treatment of the Themes of Mortality in the poetry of the Bronte Sisters (Plovdiv University Press, 2006) and Movable Thresholds: On Victorian Poetry and Beyond in Nineteen Glimpses (Plovdiv University Press, 2014). Email: yanarowland@ gmail.com
