Conclusion: The Exile and the Empty Home

Summary

Over the course of this book, I have examined the recurrent concern with the notion of ‘home’ as it is explored in EBB's poetry, both in terms of poetics and subject matter. As I argued in Chapter 1, EBB's own search for a home in relation to literary traditions and inherited models of the poet led her to develop what was often a highly innovative and experimental poetics through which she increasingly dedicated herself to the interrogation of contemporary social and political concerns. In subsequent chapters, I have then explored the concept of the search for a home as it is undertaken by the speakers and protagonists in a wide range of EBB's works. This home is defined in multiple ways – as a spiritual home, an emotional home or a political home – but repeatedly both the home itself and the (often illusory) state of security associated with it are unavailable or unattainable. Indeed, time and again EBB's speakers and protagonists are left in a state of exile – from God and religious certainty, from love and a meaningful relationship, or from supportive political structures and an inclusive, liberal nation state. As I suggested in Chapter 5, it is only in the long, discursive novel-poem, Aurora Leigh, that the search for a creative and supportive home is rewarded when Aurora eventually achieves a position in Italy which brings together a relationship based on equality and mutual respect, professional esteem, religious security, and the potential for social change through the combination of art and politics.

And yet the notion of the stable and secure home which Aurora Leigh finally promotes is only a temporary phenomenon in EBB's body of poetry. For in the majority of the poems which EBB composed after Aurora Leigh (she was to live for another five years until 1861), the focus on instability, fragmentation and lack of security which characterized her work of the 1820s to the 1840s becomes predominant once more. In Poems Before Congress (1860), for example, a volume named after an international conference on the Italian Question which never took place, EBB continues the interrogation of the politics of unification she had started with Casa Guidi Windows, but in a series of much shorter poems which at times take radically different stances in order to articulate EBB's changing opinions on the Risorgimento.