Victorian poetry and patriotismWars. Indeed, "Casabianca" (1826), whose first few words are quoted
above, commemorates the 1798 Battle of the Nile. On Hemans's deathbed
in 1835, two years before Victoria's accession to the throne, Hemans
expressed regret that she had failed to compose "some more noble and
complete work... which might permanently take its place as the work of
a British poetess." 11 Her sorrow was understandable. Taken as a whole,
Hemans's poetry failed to propose any "complete" account of patriotism
itself, much less attain the epic national status for which she clearly longed.
Yet in its very conflicts and instability, Hemans's work resonated
throughout the century. Perceived threats to one's country; symbolic or
actual separation from that country: these have often been the catalysts for
powerful strains of patriotic poetry. They also mark the unraveling points
of a patriotic tradition torn between celebration of England, Ireland,
Scotland, Great Britain, and the imagined "Greater Britain" of empire, as
well as between radically different understandings of the British "people."
Hemans's immensely popular poetry was instrumental in the linking of
such concerns to specific formulations of home, homesickness, and exile; to
meditations on the national and/or spiritual - as opposed to strategic -
value of wartime sacrifice and suffering; and to claims for nationhood as a
unifying means of engaging the symbolic and literal relations between land,
gender, and class.
"Females are forbidden to interfere in politics," the young Felicia
Dorothea Browne acknowledged in an 1808 letter 12 ; and from the moment
her first book, Poems, appeared that same year, she sought to formulate a
feminine patriotic poetry that would be, as much as possible, rooted in the
domestic sphere. No single text more powerfully illustrates the under-
pinnings of such domestic patriotism than G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology
of Spirit (1807). Here Hemans's German contemporary reads the Greek
tragedy Antigone as dramatizing the true relations between the domestic
and the public spheres. When Sophocles's heroine Antigone defies her
king's law in the attempt to give her brother's body decent burial, Hegel
argues, she undertakes more than a "simple movement of individualized
pathos." 13 She asserts a power that governs both divine law and the
community's "autonomous individuation into families": the power of
femininity. If the masculine state is to survive, Hegel emphasizes, then it
must suspend such divine familial law. For the state "engenders itself
through what it oppresses and through what is at the same time essential to
it": in other words, the divine law of femininity. Since the state thus
"retains its existence only through the disruption of familial happiness and
through the dissolution of self-awareness within the general," it must claim
living soldiers as its own; and it must also create "in femininity altogether
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