Wounded Utterance: Trauma and Italy’s Second War of Independence in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems Before Congress and Last Poems

Chapter 4 traces the traumatic impact of the 1859 Second Italian War of Independence in Elizabeth Barrett Browning ’s Poems Before Congress (1860) and Last Poems (1862). Despite voicing enthusiastic support for unification, Barrett Browning’s poems also recognise the Risorgimento’s failures and costs. ‘Napoleon III. in Italy’, ‘Mother and Poet’, ‘Died . . .’, ‘The Forced Recruit’ and ‘A Tale of Villafranca Told in Tuscany’ explore the uses and limits of lyric utterance, using familial and intergenerational motifs to demonstrate how a performative poetic voice that ushers Italy into being conflicts with the historical trauma that precludes speech and severs the correspondence between words and deeds. EBB attempts a kind of wounded utterance, exploring a poetics of recognition that acknowledges the deep roots of political trauma embedded in the nation-making process while accepting and respecting the wartime suffering and grief that are beyond the powers of poetic convention and speech.

Spying in the British Post Office: Letter-Opening, Italy and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

This chapter discusses Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White (1859–60) in relation to the 1844 Post Office Espionage Scandal, which revealed British government spying against Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini. Representations of the Post Office Scandal in Parliament and print predict the revision of the Gothic into sensation fiction, helping to create the imaginative space through which the sensation genre could begin to interrogate Gothic national stereotypes and relocate the Gothic plot within modern Britain’s private homes and institutions. The letter-opening scandal and The Woman in White share a central place in a mid-Victorian moment of evolution in the mutually constitutive relationship between Italian and British national identities, generating and reflecting a crisis in Britishness focused on the secret tyrannies concealed beneath the surface of Victorian liberalism that emerged from the collision of British and Italian politics and print culture.

Introduction: Italian Unity and International Alliances

Although many historical narratives of the Risorgimento and early Italian constitutional monarchy view Italy as a nation-state unable to consolidate itself against political division and regional diversity, Italian political culture’s cultivation of a sense of internal fragmentation and powerlessness also constituted part of the Risorgimento’s ideological content and Italy’s national identity. Risorgimento culture’s oppositionalism also infiltrated British reaction to Italian politics. Theodosia Garrow Trollope’s eyewitness Athenaeum correspondence, collected as Social Aspects of the Italian Revolution (1861), develops politicised familial metaphors for unification and international alliance that empower and transform Italy through political solidarity. By contrast, texts by D. G. Rossetti, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Henrietta Jenkin and Arthur Hugh Clough propose more sceptical familial and romantic metaphors for Risorgimento Italy, revealing disillusioned and hesitant attitudes toward Italy in relation to its neighbouring powers, including France, Austria and Great Britain.

Romantic Italy and Restoration Politics: Romantic Poetry, Lady Morgan’s Italy and Mary Shelley’s Valperga

Chapter 1 analyses Romantic-era responses to the Congress of Vienna and 1820-1 Italian uprisings, with attention to Lady Morgan’s travelogue Italy (1821) and Mary Shelley’s historical novel Valperga (1823). Although the tropes of decay and rebirth that pervade British Romantic poetry about Italy by William Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans, Lord Byron and P. B. Shelley tend to elide contemporary Italy in favour of a distant, idealised past and imminent but imagined future, Morgan and Shelley historicise Italy to demonstrate that outside influence and occupation shaped the peninsula, while Italy mediated the major European powers’ views of themselves and each other. Morgan and Shelley place Italy, a cluster of minor states, within a broad, European context of cultural appropriation, imperialist territorial expansion and failed diplomacy, to interrogate the discourse of Italian decay and offer, instead, Italy as a potential site of concrete resistance to the post-Napoleonic status quo.

Conclusion

The Conclusion focuses on the delicate balance between investment in Italy and disenchantment with the Risorgimento’s outcome in the period following official Italian unification in 1861. Late nineteenth-century writers like Henry James and Vernon Lee step back from Risorgimento politics to depoliticise Italy, returning it to the aesthetic domain; yet, an unsettling quality of resurgence, or risorgimento, lingers in the skeletal Juliana Bordereau of James’s ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888) and the revived corpse Medea da Carpi of Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’ (1887/1890). George Meredith’s post-unification Vittoria (1866), in particular, points to the conflicts that the creation of an Italian nation-state failed to resolve; these contests, the Risorgimento’s cultural remains, reveal the centrality of loss, dissent and struggle to the Risorgimento’s legacy. However, Italian politics also played an invigorating, energising role for nineteenth-century British literature and culture, enlivening political discourse, cultural production and literary experimentation through its oppositionalist character.

Italian Exiles from Young Italy to 1848: Risorgimento Refugees in Giovanni Ruffini’s Lorenzo Benoni and Doctor Antonio

This chapter explores the re-imagining of the Italian refugee during the early Risorgimento. Victorian works by Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Barrett Browning register a new discomfort with Italian place that corresponds to the displacement of thousands of Italians from their home countries as conflict intensified in the middle of the nineteenth century. The chapter focuses on two English-language novels by Italian refugee Giovanni Ruffini, a former Young Italy member who fictionalises his own involvement in the movement in 1830s Piedmont and flight into exile in Lorenzo Benoni (1853) and depicts a returned Sicilian exile’s participation in the 1848 revolutions in Doctor Antonio (1855), to argue that Ruffini makes exile a constitutive feature of Italian political identity and re-writes the Italian landscape by mapping out the tracks of the dispossessed patriots who were expelled from their homes and communities during this period.