The Exploration of Female Identity in the Father-Daughter Dynamic in Caroline Bowles's Poetry

Abstract

The work and literary accomplishments of Caroline Bowles Southey established her significance as a poet in the Romantic tradition as well as contemporary culture. Similar to many other women writers, she worked within the established poetic genres against the conformity of the masculine norms of Romanticism. The father-daughter relationship is not new, yet in Caroline Bowles’s poetry it becomes a symbol of the patriarchal relation of women and men in society, a precursor to the questioning of woman’s role and place in culture. This paper aims to examine the father-daughter dynamic in Ellen Fitzarthur and Birth-Day. Bowles interrogates the ambivalence of self: the private and the public persona, which has to come to terms with the demands and pressures of patriarchal society. To achieve self-fulfillment a woman has to be free from the power of the father. Caroline Bowles’s poetry is such an attempt to strive towards the personal and poetic independence from the expectations of the patriarchal society.