Current Search: University of West Florida (x) » Barcomb, Kyndall Jenee (x)
-
-
Title
-
Unlocking "The womb of chaos": freedom and agency in Anna Letitia Barbauld's "A summer evening's meditation".
-
Author
-
Barcomb, Kyndall Jenee
-
Abstract/Description
-
Anna Letitia's "A Summer Evening's Meditation" exhibits a feminine poetics of space that portrays not only the poetic speaker but also the universe itself as distinctly feminine and feminist. This poetics genders the cosmos and permits the poetic speaker to express her longing to explore the universe just as it allows Barbauld to engage in the scientific discourse of astronomy. The speaker herself fulfills her longing as she exercises agency to explore and recreate space in terms of what...
Show moreAnna Letitia's "A Summer Evening's Meditation" exhibits a feminine poetics of space that portrays not only the poetic speaker but also the universe itself as distinctly feminine and feminist. This poetics genders the cosmos and permits the poetic speaker to express her longing to explore the universe just as it allows Barbauld to engage in the scientific discourse of astronomy. The speaker herself fulfills her longing as she exercises agency to explore and recreate space in terms of what Elizabeth Grosz identifies as a "freedom from" constraint or oppression and a "freedom to" respond with action (140). The poem's embracing "freedom to" is a radical move that eliminates the woman's need to attain freedom from an oppressor and instead urges her to perform her freedom through agentic action. Agency, in this sense, produces an embodied female subject and empowered female voice able to contribute to ways of knowing and being. As such, the action of "Meditation" functions metaphorically as a critique of eighteenth-century British culture that reinforced male control over scientific discovery, knowledge production, and agency. Reading Barbauld's "Meditation" through Groszean feminist theory re-envisions the poem as an argument for female freedom in its fullest, freest sense.
Show less
-
Identifier
-
1128868965, WFE0000647
-
Format
-
Document (PDF)
