Empires, flowers

In Barbauld’s “To a Lady, with some painted flowers” she again refers to a woman’s “empire” as she does in “The Rights of Women”---this time at the end of the poem. Still, while it is a “native empire o’er the breast” in “The Rights of Women,” in “To a Lady” the right “to please” is “Your best, your sweetest empire”—which implies that it is not necessarily the only empire. This is odd, of course, because a few lines before it says that the flowers “Were born for pleasure and delight alone.” The comparison of the woman to the flowers thus remains incomplete to a certain degree---while the flowers only have one empire, according to this speaker, the others that belong to the lady are unmentioned. The image of the speaker of the poem handing a lady flowers mirrors the poet’s presentation of the poem, and on the surface—since the poem is not outwardly critical as Jen mentioned—the poem also becomes a version of the painted flowers. Thus that the poem is all about presentation is important—one could present this poem to someone saying it was in support of or critical of the empire of woman being to please. The final suggestion that this is not the only empire can hint at a more critical reading, but can also easily be ignored.

Barbauld seems to take on a different method than Mary Wollstonecraft overall, as it kind of embraces the flowery-ness, sarcastically or not. It may seem at first a more subtle method. Wollstonecraft makes it clear in her vindication that she is not using what she calls flowery langauge—that which, perhaps, one would associate with women. She appears to do this in an attempt to gain more credibility. Of course, this in a sense separates her from the women that she is trying to argue for. And it is probably safe to assume that she did spend a lot of time crafting this kind of practiced carelessness that results from making such a statement. In this sense, Wollstonecraft isn’t necessarily more straightforward than Barbauld, who is able to use the flowerly language and flowery imagery to acknowledge the same deficit in the rights of woman. And in a sense one could say that Barbauld succeeds in doing more than just pleasing with her poem, if we read it as critical. In this sense she is able to use the flower imagery to her advantage, rather than distancing herself from it as Wollstonecraft does.

Another thing: It was interesting after reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication to look back at Barbauld’s “The Rights of Women”---what stood out to me at first was all of the military/war imagery that Barbauld uses in her poem, specifically in the third stanza. Wollstonecraft compares women to soldiers in her chapter, but in a different way---she calls them out as being uneducated just as women are and therefore showing some of the same faults that are generally assigned to women. The idea stood out when I was reading because it’s just such an interesting and I imagine shocking for anyone reading it at the time---as soldiers are generally considered as the embodiment of masculinity. In comparing them to women she of course makes a grand claim and that her ability to back up with reason makes pretty powerful. In contrast, of course, Barbauld compares women fighting to soldiers rather than the other way around. Still, overlayed with the idea that soldiers perhaps are similar to women, the poem presents a similar idea/situation.