TRICIA LOOTENSwhich de Stael's myth of the doomed poetic heir to Sappho haunted
aspiring women poets for the remainder of the century. What remains to be
fully explored is how thoroughly Corinne and her successors are shaped by
fantasies of female patriotic authority.
"Daughter of th' Italian heaven!" begins Hemans's famous poem
"Corinne at the Capitol" (1830; FH VI, 87). The apostrophe is ironic: for
though Corinne may "be" Italy, she is also the biological daughter of a less
than celestial English aristocrat. Indeed, in cutting short its own dazzling
account of Corinne's poetic and patriotic triumph, Hemans's poem merely
anticipates the moment at which de Stael dramatizes Corinne's secret, fatal
national vulnerability. Transfixed by the bleak gaze of a Scotsman, de
Stael's Corinne interrupts herself, transforming a joyous improvization on
the glories of Italy into a meditation on death and mourning. The shift is
symbolic: for Corinne, this man's consistent Britishness will prove as
deadly as his wavering adoration. When de Stael's betrayed poet sings her
last song, toward the novel's close, it will be a farewell to "lovely" Italy,
"the liberal nation that does not banish women from its temple." 21
In Corinne whereas Italy is the land of feminine genius, Britain is that of
domesticity. And thus when Hemans interrupts Corinne's "burning words
of song" (VI, 89) to lecture what Nanora Sweet terms Italy's "woman
laureate" 22 on the superiority of the "humblest hearth," her strictures
against joyful public confidence may well reveal their author's own
patriotic project. "Felicia Hemans, or England": the imagined title, which
allows no triumphant music, requires only the crown of household love.
Can a British woman write patriotic songs of triumph? She can, Corinne
teaches, if she writes of Italy. While Hemans's "Corinne" sought to
domesticate and thus anglicize feminine patriotic poetry, works by other
British women poets wholeheartedly embraced the early-nineteenth-
century "Romance of Italy." As a feminized and alluring, if often ultimately
inaccessible, Western European cultural homeland, "Italy" could shift from
what Sandra M. Gilbert calls a potential "political state to a female state of
mind" 23 ; as a political state, it could provide inspiration for reimagining
England and Englishness. 24
None of these possibilities was lost on Elizabeth Barrett Browning. From
"The Battle of Marathon" (1820), the poem that she published at fourteen,
to her final preface for Poems before Congress (1861), which insisted that
"if patriotism be a virtue indeed, it cannot mean an exclusive devotion to
our country's interests" (EBB III, 215), Barrett Browning wrote as a
Christian female patriotic poet. After her marriage to Robert Browning in
1846, England's "Queen of Song" lived in ambivalent, partially self-
imposed, exile in Italy; and as Barrett Browning's later poetry gained in
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