Anna Laetitia Barbauld Washing Day 1797 Washing Day

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ՙWashing Day’ (1797)

ՙ Washing Day’ 1 . . . . and their voice, Visits the parlour, an unwonted guest. Turning again towards childish treble, pipes The silent breakfast-meal is soon dispatch'd And whistles in its sound. – Uninterrupted, save by anxious looks Cast at the lowering sky, if sky should lower. The Muses are turned gossips; they have lost From that last evil, oh preserve us, heavens! The buskin'd step, and clear high-sounding For should the skies pour down, adieu to all phrase, of quiet; then expect to hear Language of gods. Come, then, domestic Muse, Remains Of sad disasters–dirt and gravel stains In slip-shod measure loosely prattling on to efface, and loaded lines at once Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream, Hard Snapped short–and linen-horse by dog thrown Or drowning flies, or shoe lost in the mire down, By little whimpering boy, with rueful face; And all the petty miseries of life. Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded Washing. Saints have been calm while stretched upon the Day. rack, –Ye who beneath the yoke of wedlock bend, And Guatimozin smil'd on burning coals; With bowed soul, full well ye ken the day never yet did housewife notable Which week, smooth sliding after week, brings But Greet with a smile a rainy washing-day. on Too soon; for to that day nor peace belongs Nor comfort; ere the first grey streak of dawn, The red-arm'd washers come and chase repose. Nor pleasant smile, nor quaint device of mirth, E'er visited that day: the very cat, From the wet kitchen scared, and reeking hearth,

Notes • Epigraph from Shakespeare’s As You Like It (All the world’s a stage…); original: …. and his big manly voice, / Turning again toward childish treble, pipes / And whistles in his sound. • Invocation, cf. Milton: Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe. With the loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, Sing Heav'nly Muse… … What in me is dark Illumin, what is low raise and support; That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men. • Epic and the domestic • Shakespeare’s and Milton’s blank verse • Mock epic tradition (Augustan), but then who is the object of the satire, from what position does the narrator satirise, what values criticised or affirmed? • Allusion to Guatimozin (as opposed to washer women) • Mock epic word is feminine and domestic, as in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock • We forego the "high-sounding phrase” and discuss very lowly affairs of lowly domestics, but we keep watching the sky

ՙWashing Day’ 2 –But grant the welkin fair, require not thou Who call'st thyself perchance the master there, Or study swept, or nicely dusted coat, Or usual 'tendance; ask not, indiscreet, Thy stockings mended, tho' the yawning rents Gape wide as Erebus, nor hope to find Some snug recess impervious: should'st thou try The 'customed garden walks, thine eye shall rue The budding fragrance of thy tender shrubs, Myrtle or rose, all crushed beneath the weight Of coarse check'd apron, with impatient hand Twitch'd off when showers impend: or crossing lines Shall mar thy musings, as the wet cold sheet Flaps in thy face abrupt. Woe to the friend Whose evil stars have urged him forth to claim On such a day the hospitable rites; Looks, blank at best, and stinted courtesy, Shall he receive. Vainly he feeds his hopes With dinner of roast chicken, savoury pie, Or tart or pudding: –pudding he nor tart That day shall eat; nor, tho' the husband try, Mending what can't be help'd, to kindle mirth From cheer deficient, shall his consort's brow Clear up propitious; the unlucky guest In silence dines, and early slinks away.

Notes • Mock epic simile (like Erebus) • Master is not the master • Feminine hospitality out of service, men try vainly to supply

ՙWashing Day 3 I well remember, when a child, the awe This day struck into me; for then the maids, I scarce knew why, looked cross, and drove me from them; Nor soft caress could I obtain, nor hope Usual indulgencies; jelly or creams, Relique of costly suppers, and set by For me their petted one; or butter'd toast, When butter was forbid; or thrilling tale Of ghost, or witch, or murder–so I went And shelter'd me beside the parlour fire: There my dear grandmother, eldest of forms, Tended the little ones, and watched from harm, Anxiously fond, tho' oft her spectacles With elfin cunning hid, and oft the pins Drawn from her ravell'd stocking, might have sour'd One less indulgent. – At intervals my mother's voice was heard, Urging dispatch; briskly the work went on, All hands employed to wash, to rinse, to wring, To fold, and starch, and clap, and iron, and plait. Then would I sit me down, and ponder much Why washings were. Sometimes thro' hollow bowl Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft The floating bubbles, little dreaming then To see, Mongolfier, thy silken ball Ride buoyant through the clouds–so near approach The sports of children and the toils of men. Earth, air, and sky, and ocean, hath its bubbles, And verse is one of them–this most of all.

Notes • Stops being about the washing day and stops being a mock epic • Shift in perspective reveals the importance of having a fixed viewpoint for satire, which is not attainable here • Establishes a continuity between the humble domestic world of grandmother, childish pondering, bubbles, hot air balloons and poetry • Maybe a criticism of frenzied female work that leaves no room for creative idleness BANQUO. The earth hath bubbles, as the water has And these are of them. Whither are they vanished? MACBETH. Into the air; and what seem'd corporal melted As breath into wind. Would they had stayed! (I. iii. 79 -82)

Balloon mania The first manned hydrogen balloons and hot-air balloons, called Charlières and Montgolfières after their creators Jacques Charles and the Montgolfier brothers, were launched successfully in France in the summer and autumn of 1783. From their first flights, balloons took on a political significance beyond their origins in the Enlightenment ambition to discover the secret of flight. The earliest launches were attended by the royal family of France, foreign dignitaries including Benjamin Franklin, and leading noblemen and scientists, who petitioned for the honor of riding in the balloon at great personal risk. Nor was the interest in balloons limited to the élite: Barbauld was intrigued by the invention in its earliest form, and she attended a ballooning exhibit at the Panthéon in Paris in January 1784. But with the advent of the French Revolution, the nobility and valor connoted by ballooning in the 1780 s transformed, for the English at least, into a republican military threat; in the words of William Cowper, the technology of the balloon, once militarized, threatened “the annihilation of all authority. ” 1 Romantic-era climatologists were invested in mapping the currents of sea and air, as military strategists plotted the circulation of their forces by these same pathways. French aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American physician John Jeffries had crossed the English channel by hot-air balloon in 1785, in 1794 the French army adopted the balloon for a specifically military purpose, surveilling the movements of the Austrian army

Notes • The washing women work with similar materials (textiles and ropes) as the balloonist • Romantic verse as a bubble and a balloon: tied to the domestic and the mundane but also hovering above it • Makes distinctions between high and low activities more difficult to sustain • politics, science and mundane labour feminised and united • Last line both self limiting and self-affirming

Recommended Literature • Rosenbaum, Susan. ՙ"A Thing Unknown, without a Name": Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the Illegible Signature Studies in Romanticism’, 40. 3 (2001): 369 -399. • Bordo, Haley. ՙReinvoking the “domestic muse”: Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the performance of genre. ’ European Romantic Review, 11. 2 (2000): 186 -196. • Hegele, Arden. ՙRomantic Balloons: Toward a Formalist Technology of Poetics. ’ Partial Answers, 15. 2 (2017): 201 -216. • Smith, Sharon. ՙ“I Cannot Harm Thee Now”: The Ethic of Satire in Anna Barbauld's Mock-Heroic Poetry. ’ European Romantic Review, 26. 5 (2015): 551 -573. • Markidou, Vassiliki. ՙBubble[s]' and Female Verse: A Reading of Anna Laetitia Barbauld's 'Washing Day. ’ Critical Survey, 19. 2 (2007): 19 -33. • Williamson, Karina. ՙThe Tenth Muse: Women Writers and the Poetry of Common Life. ’ Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth. Ed. Thomas Woodman. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. 185 -199. • Kareem, Sarah Tindal. ՙEnlightenment Bubbles, Romantic Worlds. ’ The Eighteenth Century, 56. 1 (2015): 85 -104.