Brief encounters with an exotic but decadent other: the image and perception of Portugal (and the Portuguese) in early victorian women’s poetry

Abstract

In this paper we intend to explore some poetic representations of Portugal and the Portuguese in early nineteenth-century English women’s poetry and to analyse the relationship between the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ in terms of the attraction/repulsion in relation to what is foreign. We will conclude that in this ‘encounter’ early Victorian women poets re-imagine and reconfigure Portugal by using different literary strategies. Felicia Hemans rewrites the Portuguese tragedy of Inês de Castro as a tableau of post-mortem coronation by enhancing the figure’s mythical and aesthetic dimensions. Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna places her poetic romance in the mediatic context of the Peninsular Wars in order to suggest Portugal as the feminine inferior Other. The Brontë sisters use geographical and topographic elements derived from Portugal to conceive the imaginary characters and plots present in their fictional poems and juvenilia. And Elizabeth Barrett Browning appropriates and reworks Portuguese literary traditions and conventions in order to voice her poetics of melancholy.