Anna Letitia Barbauld's ‘Washing-Day’ and the Montgolfier Balloon

Kraft, Elizabeth

doi:10.1177/030619739500400202

Cited by 7 publications

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“…17 Elizabeth Kraft has already laid emphasis on this reading bias, and noted that the poem does not postulate domesticity and creativity as 'exclusive alternatives' or 'irreconcilable dualities'. 18 In agreement with Kraft's argument, I read domesticity and imagination as being strongly interrelated in 'Washing Day'. Indeed, I believe that from line 58 to line 67 Barbauld focuses on the maids of the household, namely, the very same persons who conduct specific domestic duties, but also narrate fairy tales that evoke supernatural creatures as well as a preternatural atmosphere.…”

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confidence: 63%

“…[13][14][15][16][17][18] By presenting the Goddess of Dullness as the force that leads the male poet into darkness and death, Pope links female poetry to babble and destruction. Barbauld's mocking reference to Pope's attack on female verse is accompanied by a cryptic response at the end of the poem where it becomes manifest that the all-destructive force of Dullness extinguishes every kind of 'light' including fancy, wit, the arts, Truth and the sciences.…”

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confidence: 99%

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'Bubble[s]' and Female Verse: A Reading of Anna Laeticia Barbauld's 'Washing Day'

Markidou¹

2007

Critical Survey

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confidence: 99%

'Bubble[s]' and Female Verse: A Reading of Anna Laeticia Barbauld's 'Washing Day'

Markidou¹

2007

Critical Survey

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“…12 As Elizabeth Kraft notes, it is difficult, given this information, to ascertain the poem's date of composition: 'To help her brother in this enterprise, Barbauld could have allowed him to print a favourite poem over ten years old, or she could have composed a new poem'. 13 It is possible only to know that the poem was written after 1783, the year the Montgolfier balloon-which supplies the poem's final metaphor-was launched.…”

Section: And Let Each Rising Morn Behold With Carementioning

confidence: 99%

Satire and Domesticity in Late Eighteenth‐Century Women's Poetry: Minding the Gap

Johns‐Putra

2010

J Eighteenth Century Stud

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This paper deals with the gap between the domestic and the poetic, which arises when the former is construed as trivial and quotidian and the latter imagined as the domain of the sublime, serious, and singular-the defamiliarised, even. Specifically, it explores the challenge faced by women writers in poeticising the domestic, particularly as the domestic sphere became-towards the end of the eighteenth century-the site and topic of ideological debate. It is a critical commonplace that the end of the eighteenth century saw the cultivation of a set of ideals promoting domesticity for women. Even given recent debate about how far these ideals can be said to have exercised an ideological or hegemonic function, it is at least widely acknowledged that an alignment of femininity and domesticity occurred in an imagined 'private sphere' of the home. Indeed, MichaelMcKeon's expansive study of both the historical phenomenon and critical discussion has emphasized that the 'domestic ideology of separate spheres' occurs, towards the end of the eighteenth century, as a way of articulating as separate what had already been distinct.As McKeon puts it, it 'spatializes an incremental and long-term sexual division of labor-a separation out of men's and women's work-as the mutual exclusion of 'outside' and 'inside' labor in terms of a dichotomy between waged and unwaged labor.The distinction, if not the separation, was traditional'.1 It is a commonplace too that such a set of ideas was, in the hands of women, a means towards authority and responsibility,and not a simple blunt instrument of male oppression; indeed it could sometimes take on

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“…49 My reading-I will be discussing only on the poem's final 29 lines-suggests that Barbauld uses bubbles to reflect upon poetry's capacity to make "new Worlds of its own," in Addison's phrase, a capacity represented as consistent with scientific impulses to which Romantic poetry is often contrasted. 50 Barbauld's speaker recalls how washing-day deprived her as a girl of the "thrilling tale / Of ghost, or witch, or murder" because on washing-day the maids have no time to tell stories (l. [65][66]. As if in compensation for this lack, a fantastical literary mood infuses the lines that follow, which, in Terry Castle's evocative description, veer "off into pure fantasia."…”

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confidence: 99%

“…If, in listening to the maids' tales, the girl is, in Kraft's words, "transported by their tales to worlds that do not exist," so too does scientific thought involve this same transport to alternative worlds, as Newton goes back and forth, in his Queries to the third book of Opticks, between a world in which light is corpuscular and a world in which light is a wave. 62 Likewise, to "ponder much," as the speaker's younger self does, "Why washings were" is to imagine the possibility of a world in which it might be otherwise (l.78-79).…”

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Enlightenment Bubbles, Romantic Worlds

Kareem¹

2015

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While many critics have discussed the bubbles that make fleeting but memorable appearances in several well-known Romantic-era poems-most notably, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" (1796), Anna Letitia Barbauld's "Washing-Day" (1797), and George Gordon, Lord Byron's Don Juan (1818-1824)-discussions of these appearances tend to take the bubble's properties and associations for granted. 1 To do so is a mistake, because, from Isaac Newton's Opticks (1704) to the South Sea Bubble (1720), from fashionable paintings of cherubic children playing with soap-bubbles to satirical depictions of Gottfried Leibniz's vision of God likewise playing with worlds, the eighteenth century redefines what bubbles mean. To read the above poems in the light of these varied developments is to discover that analogies drawn therein between bubbles and poetry are not self-deprecating, as they are often read. 2 Rather, these poems harness the particular meanings that the bubble accrued in the eighteenth century in order to articulate a new idea of literature that defines the act of literary composition as a form of play that brings forth new worlds. Just as Elizabeth Kraft persuasively argues that readings of Barbauld's "Washing-Day" have been led astray by a "twentieth-century view of ballooning as mere recreation," 3 so I would argue that when recent critics ascribe meaning to soap-bubbles-whether good: "an ethereal, fairy-like imaginative setting," or bad: "financial ruin, impractical plans, silly chimeras"-they insufficiently register a pervasive eighteenth-century discourse that constitutes soap-bubbles as richer and more capacious vessels of meaning. 4 Late seventeenth-and eighteenth-century natural philosophy understood soap-bubbles' iridescent colors as the product of light's interplay with the

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Anna Letitia Barbauld's ‘Washing-Day’ and the Montgolfier Balloon

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

'Bubble[s]' and Female Verse: A Reading of Anna Laeticia Barbauld's 'Washing Day'

'Bubble[s]' and Female Verse: A Reading of Anna Laeticia Barbauld's 'Washing Day'

Satire and Domesticity in Late Eighteenth‐Century Women's Poetry: Minding the Gap

Enlightenment Bubbles, Romantic Worlds

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