TRICIA LOOTENSits internal enemy." Yet it dare not fully disregard feminine law. It must, for
example, return the bodies of dead soldiers to their families - and hence to
that divine eternal "element" in which the historical state ultimately moves.
In Hemans's writing as in Hegel's, women both mourn and accept the
waging of war: the technically useless but symbolically essential pouring-
out of women's metaphoric heart's blood thus becomes a precise counter-
part (and at points a subversive counter) to the spilling of soldiers' lifeblood
on the battlefield. Soldiers die in military exile, redeemed by the "The Spells
of Home" (1828; FH V, 295-96); women themselves live and die in
spiritual exile within "The Homes of England" (1828; FHV, 228-29).
Cease your proud "swelling / Into rich floods of joy," pleads the
presumably feminine speaker of Hemans's "Triumphant Music" (1830; FH
VI, 134). Songs of triumph should sound for the national, military figures
of a "young chieftain dying" under a "freed country's banner"; "a martyr,
leading / Unto victorious death serenely on" (VI, 135); or a "patriot by his
rescued altars bleeding" - not for "one whose heart is beating / Against
life's narrow bound, in conflict vain!" (VI, 135). With "no crown of victory
to inherit," the speaker's spirit protests, it is "but pain, / To mount so high,
yet find on high no dwelling":
For power, for joy, high hope, and rapturous greeting,
Thou wak'st lone thirst - be hush'd, exulting strain!
Be hush'd, or breathe of grief! - of exile yearnings
Under the willows of the stranger-shore. (VI, 135)Thus, "with her domestic affection devoted to healing others," Hemans's
ideal female patriot must, in Susan J. Wolfson's words, "accept her own
depletion." 14 Here, as elsewhere - as Anne K. Mellor observes - Hemans's
poetry "exhausts the very ideology it espouses." 15
Such a paradigm was always unstable, however. Some of Hemans's
poems glorify female figures who defy the masculine authority of the state
or kill and die for the united honor of nation and family, for example. In
Jerome J. McGann's words, even apparently conventional patriotic favor-
ites such as Hemans's "The Homes of England" "understand that they are
haunted by death and ^substantialities." 16 This is certainly true of
"Casabianca," where divine and mortal laws fuse to detonate both a
battleship and a family. Here Hemans stages the moment when "A creature
of heroic blood," young Casabianca, destroys his family's future as he saves
its honor. He will not leave his post until released by the man who is both
his admiral and his father; and that man lies dead beneath the burning
deck. Read literally, this is a horrifying scene, not only because the child's
last moments are so agonizing but also because his death seems so useless.
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