Good essays anchor themselves to a succinct and provocative idea. This anchoring ensures that the essay has a real spine or back bone and does not wander off into woolly minded obscurity. It also ensures that the examiner is interested and impressed by the vigour of your thinking and ( hopefully) your originality.
So let’s look at this poem by Elizabeth Barrett Brownng and try to read it according to the anchoring technique!
‘But where do you go?’ said the lady, while both sat under the yew
And her eyes were alive in their depth, as teh kraken beneath the sea blue..’
This is a gift!
The poem has begun with a question which provocatively demands a reply. The context of the poem with its arboured speaker is also crucial to its impact and meaning. Let’s think about space and mobility.
For ..’But where do you go?‘ is as much to do with gender relationships and intimacy..AND the irony of MOBILITY in Victorian and PRE-Victorian society.
Think of Jane Austen’s poor Emma cloistered in her ( seemingly) everlasting shrubbery when she believes her friend Harriet is betrothed to Knightley and she will be left forever in the company of her unequals. By contrast , Frank Churchill of course is always leaving the neighbourhood for London, even just for a haircut!
Here the ‘wife’..AND look how ‘VEILED’ she is behind her role as anonymous ‘wife’ to Lord Walter..speaks out and questions her flirtatious ‘friend’ about his existential condition, his literal and metaphorical whereabouts! Rember too that it would be very common for Victorian gentlemen to ‘amuse’ themselves in town whilst their virtuous wives remained at home waiting for their retrun and often the ‘return’ of something far most nasty in shape of sexually transmitted disease.
The ‘yew tree’ is also of significance. yew trees were extensively planted in Europe and associated with grave yards. This question about behaviour in terms of ‘mobility’ originates from a place of death. Only in a place ‘unbounded’ by the domestic restrictions of the Victorian Hearth and Home, can a woman speak, and the of course she is curtained off by her social role. She is figuratively behind the curtain of her husband’s role and status.
So the ostensibly casual, cloistered even romantically intimate setting is being used by Browning to intiate a debate about female subjugation and voicedness.
The demonising of the speaker in the second line( ‘kraken’ )is fascinating as there is an inherent ambiguity in the exact ‘source’ of the ideas. Who is the focaliser here? Is it the male companion’s viewpoint who is demonsing the female as she speaks and therefore becomes threatening as well as sexually predatory. Or is thsi the poet colluding with the conventions of Victorian gender relationships highlighting the rapidity by whcih female agency is demonised? And is this apparent collusion actually an act of ironic subversion?
I rather think the latter.
And notice how a few lines later the issue of mobility is further explored when the ‘gallop’ of Lord Walter’s horse is mentioned. Men roam, women stay at home and are NOT expected to question this occurence.
It is also notieceable that the powerful speech of the woman originates from a secluded and even static place. Ironically though we realise that the speaker is psychologically and intellectually very ‘mobile’ and canny..unlike the male friend who retreats into defensive condemnation and perjorative double standards. His mobility is only geographical ;emotionally he is consumed by immobility,;statsis ;’thanatos’ unlike the speaker whose energy is palpably kinetic and embraces ‘eros’…