‘Over my boundless waste of soul’: echoes of the natural world, or A feminine naturphilosophie, in the poetry of Emily Brontë and Mathilde Blind

Abstract

Victorian women poets were confronted with the need to reassess the Romantic concepts on Man and Nature and to ‘re-present’ the natural world as also a feminine realm or domain. Poets such as Emily Brontë and Mathilde Blind – themselves professing a sort of nature religion – have not only questioned the notion of Creation as a male myth but also challenged the prevailing anthropocentric view of life on Earth. Brontë and Blind have not only generally reconsidered the place of feminine consciousness in the ecological web but also responded to their bioregional sensibilities, namely by expressing a strong sense of place/space. In their respective and diverse attempts to ‘translate’ Nature into Language, the two women poets seem both to cooperate with the natural realm by ‘writing with’ it and to diverge from it, thus subverting the traditional conceptions. They see themselves as fundamentally divided between creative imagination and natural reality, dramatically confronting Nature and Text. These poets’ lines abound with vivid, deliberately placed depictions of the environment: weather, landscape and the seasons, communicating an excess of vital stimulation. But besides exalting community with a living, breathing Nature, Brontë and Blind expound an existential philosophy that, in spite of its implicit pantheism, is concerned with the ultimate destination of the human soul. In their often sudden and fleeting visionary flights, they see themselves as self-taught philosophers or prophets, imbued with Shelleyan ardour, whose audacity signals their refusal to subscribe to a particular religious or political system. Both Brontë and Blind denounce human competition and violence and both seek ways of coming to terms with human redemption through love and the imagination. By analysing the constraints that are general to humanity, their respective poems assume a sort of universal relevance and appeal.