By Millie Roberts
“Washing Day” by Anna Letitia Barbauld is an elusive text. Written in 1797, the poem has been a site of debate amongst scholars for decades (Kraft 25). Beginning with an epigraph from Shakespeare, the poem describes the routine, yet “dreaded” (Barbauld, line 8) day of washing accomplished by a household of women. The first few lines invoke a “domestic muse” (line 3) and the poem continues to employ a mock-epic tone until the final stanzas, when it turns to the speaker’s own recollection of washing day as a child. The poem famously ends with a stanza that transforms the soap bubbles, with which her1 child-self plays, into a Montgolfier balloon—the first operational hot air balloon invented in 1783, which Barbauld witnessed herself while it was on display in London one year later (Kraft 28). Critics disagree on a number of fronts: whether Barbauld is elevating or trivializing domesticity, what purpose the reference to the Montgolfier balloon serves, and what interventions Barbauld makes in her use of the mock-epic form, to name a few.
Despite the numerous critical contentions regarding the poem, little scholarly analysis has focused extensively on the temporal switch that occurs in the poem’s final stanzas. In “Washing Day,” temporality and memory liberate the speaker from oppressive patriarchal constructions of time, literary history, and labour, ultimately revealing how male-dominated institutions suppress women’s consciousness and imaginative capacities. With allusions to masculine literary tradition and male cultural figures, adopting the mock-epic tradition at the beginning of the text operates with masculine connotations, giving the speaker a presumably masculine voice despite the form’s content being rooted in the feminine sphere. The mock-epic style dissipates when the speaker’s personal memory enters the poem, which is simultaneous with the introduction to the speaker’s self-reflexivity. Memory forms the speaker’s subjectivity and consciousness: a move especially rooted in women’s sociolinguistic practices that subverts male-dominated conceptions of history and culture. In “Washing Day,” this manifests itself in the dramatic interruption of the mock-epic narrative with a feminine speaker’s stylized memory. Her memory alters the temporality of the poem, transitioning into the past to describe a time in which the speaker was too young to be restrained by the physical demands of participating in washing day. Free from domestic labour, the child-speaker exercises consciousness in the form of imagination, transforming soap bubbles from the washing into a Montgolfier balloon. Barbauld thus equates the intellectual and creative capacity of the child-speaker to the world of men and science: a demographic additionally estranged from domestic labour. Barbauld’s manipulation of past, present, and future temporalities is demonstrative of a wider proto-feminist movement amongst women writers in the Romantic era. In “Washing Day,” it allows the speaker to form her subjectivity through memory and liberate herself from the restraints barring her creative consciousness, an alienation caused by the patriarchal oppressiveness of domestic labour.
One of the earliest critical readings of “Washing Day” was written by Ann Messenger in her 1986 book, His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature, in which she explores its mock-heroic form and its implications for readings of gender. Messenger asserts that the lofty, epic Miltonic language of the poem “dignif[ies] the drudgery” of domestic tasks accomplished by women and in doing so, decenters the realm of male activity (189). The equation of the Montgolfier balloon—emblematic of masculine scientific progress—and the soapy bubbles emitted from washing reduces “men’s exploits” to that of “child’s play” (192). Since Messenger’s analysis, scholars have engaged with her arguments to varying extents. For Sharon Smith, the poem does not elevate women’s work or comment on gender but instead focuses on something else altogether: the mock-epic as a satirical object (564). Smith argues that Barbauld invests in an “ethic of satire,” using the mock-epic form not to create a degrading differentiation between the high satirist and the low satirical object, but to draw a mutual connection between the two (552). In satirizing satire, Barbauld ultimately reveals how the poet shapes the satirical object, thus rendering the “truth” of its criticism unstable.
While both Messenger and Smith’s readings provide insight into Barbauld’s poem, neither make a specific claim regarding the shift in form near the end of the poem. Transitioning from third-person, mock-epic style, the poem transforms into a first-person narrative, as the speaker recounts her own memories of washing day as a child. Hayley Bordo asserts that Barbauld performs the epic genre by interrupting male literary figures with her own female voice to reveal the genre’s artificiality (188). Just as washing day interrupts the daily organization of patriarchal domesticity, “Washing Day” interrupts the organization of patriarchal poetic convention (192). Placing Bordo’s reading in conversation with Smith, one could argue that “Washing Day” primarily invests itself in denaturalizing men’s literary ascendence, by imposing a feminine domestic voice onto a masculine mock-epic tradition, which reveals the cruelty of the form itself with an “ethic of satire.” What was once a degrading, masculine mode of writing becomes feminine, and—according to Messenger—even proto-feminist.
What is missing from each of these readings of “Washing Day” is the role of memory, despite the fact that the narrative focalization on the speaker’s childhood is integral to the text’s formal transition. In the first two-thirds of the poem, the speaker remains undefined; while the poem adheres to a mock-epic form, there is no self-reflexivity or indication of individual perspective, evident in the lack of pronouns “I” or “me” in this section. Without being clearly positioned, the speaker is almost omniscient; an all-knowing, objective commentator on the drudgery of washing day. The generic shift in the poem is marked with the line “I well remember, when a child, the awe / This day struck into me” (Barbauld, lines 57-58), signaling the first instance of the speaker’s self-reflexive “I” and the onset of subjective memory in the text. Rather than a lofty speaker writing a satire from afar, the speaker now grounds herself in her own experience of washing day from childhood. There is still a distance, however, observed in the text—not from washing day itself, but from the emotions felt by the speaker as a child. The “awe” that the speaker experiences when thinking of washing day occurs only in an act of remembering the past, reserving the subjective feeling for the speaker’s child-self rather than being felt at the speaker’s present moment. It is in remembering the past that the speaker finds her self-reflexivity, establishing memory as an instrument of forming autonomous subjectivity. This is reinforced by the speaker’s especially agential tone when evoking her memories, exhibited in moments such as “I sit me down” (line 77) or “I went and sheltered me” (lines 65-66). In these lines, “I” is active upon “me,” a move that is doubly subjective in contrast to the beginning of the text and provides the speaker with agency over herself. By evoking memory and transporting the poem’s narrative to the past, the speaker enacts her subjective power to the text.
Memory, as a method of recollecting past events, is a particularly gendered custom, in that women’s subjective experience works in opposition to male-dominated realms of history. Radstone and Hodgkin describe how memory is integral to subjectivity, stating that “memory is indissociably linked… with the complex story of the emergence on to the historical stage of a bounded, coherent self who comes to be understood as the ‘container’ or possessor of memory” (3). Memories form the self, and one’s understanding of the self. History, being a regime produced by systems of power, has a contested relationship to memory. On the one hand, systems of knowledge and power easily produce collective memory, thus bolstering the regime of history, but on the other, personal memory subverts official narratives of the past (11). With this understanding, subjectivity—in the form of memory—is a liberatory practice against regimes of power. Julia Kristeva argues that female subjectivity, based on “intuition,” problematizes the masculine, linear “time of history” that undergirds Western civilization (17). Women’s subjectivity, personal experience, and “intuition” constitute a gendered form of memory, something inherently antithetical to patriarchal systems of power. In fact, recent sociolinguistic studies have shown that women recount stories in a more personalized, subjective manner than men do, inserting their own perspectives and dialogue into narrative memory at a greater rate (Leydesdorff et al. 3). The use of memory in “Washing Day” is therefore inherently feminine and a liberatory practice. The speaker, caught in a masculine literary tradition of mock-epic, performs a male voice, as Bordo would argue, until released by memory into a particularly feminine subjective voice—an act that works against patriarchal knowledge systems and male convention.
Entering into memory also liberates the speaker from labour, a move which allows them to enjoy a degree of introspection she would otherwise lack. Transitioning from a present tense description of the work required by women on washing day, the speaker’s memory of her child-self has not yet participated in the practice; she “scare knew why” (line 59) the maids did not coddle them on this day compared to others, indicating her lack of first-hand intimacy with “the dreaded Washing-Day” (line 7) that the present-day speaker reveals before the shift. Anyone who has participated in washing day would know and respect the fact that there is little time available to offer “the soft caress” (line 60) or “usual indulgencies [of] jelly or creams” (line 61) and “buttered toast” (line 63) that the child-speaker seeks. Lines 75-78 highlight the contrast between the child-speaker and the working women; immediately after confronting the relentless labour of the women in her household—“All hands employed to wash, to rinse, to wring / Or fold, and starch, and clap, and iron, and plait”—the speaker’s child-self goes to “sit” and “ponder much / Why washings were.” The child-speaker’s inertia juxtaposes the repetitive action of the women’s physical labour, which incessantly and rhythmically moves forward while the child stays put, structurally ending the clause. Free from partaking in washing day, the child-speaker has the imaginative ability to engage in personal contemplation, a configuration of subjectivity that the working women and present-day speaker do not have access to.
According to Kraft, imagination is a key element to “Washing Day,” especially in the contexts of the literary Romantic era’s preoccupation with the topic. Kraft argues that the presence of the Montgolfier balloon at the end of the text affirms the capacity of the mundane to incite creative imagination (37). The final section of the poem, on which Kraft builds her analysis, reads: “Sometimes through hollow hole / Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft / The floating bubbles; little dreaming then / To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball / Ride buoyant through the clouds, so near approach / The sports of children and the toils of men” (Barbauld, lines 78-83). The child-speaker blows bubbles from the washing soap which lyrically transform into the Montgolfier balloon, a feat of imagination emerging from something commonplace. In consideration of Barbuald’s interest in science, Kraft believes the presence of the Montgolfier balloon in the poem is viewed positively. She refutes Messenger’s argument of a feminine elevation/masculine devaluation taking place in the text, positing instead that the mock-heroic conventions of the poem work to trivialize both men’s and women’s work, and that the only transcendental object is imagination itself (Kraft 33). For Kraft, creativity arises not in spite of domestic monotony, but as a result of it (37).
Yet, Kraft’s analysis is complicated by the fact that it is not the working women whose imagination creates a Montgolfier balloon out of soap bubbles, but the speaker, specifically in the contexts of her childhood. Furthermore, the very invention of the balloon in the first instance was certainly not accomplished by those engaged in mundane domestic labour, but by two middle-class men who had the time and resources to imagine its possibility. It would seem that creativity does not arise from monotony, as Kraft claims, but rather an absence of labour. Notably, “all [the] hands employed” to participate in washing day did not include the husband nor the children of the house, equating the two in their detachment from and disgruntlement at the labour which is specifically reserved for women. Both are aggrieved at the interruption of washing day from their usual routine, which includes being served “indulgencies” by the women. The husband “vainly feeds his hopes / with… / tart or pudding” but “pudding he nor tart / That day shall eat” (Barbauld, lines 49-52), thus making him an “unlucky guest” (line 55) in his own home. This parallels the previously described grievances chronicled by the child-speaker at their lack of “usual indulgencies.” By virtue of being a man and a child, respectively, neither are required to help with the domestic labour during washing day, and are equally alienated from it. Just as the child-speaker has imaginative luxury in this distance from labour, one can assume the husband does, as well. Men and children’s capacity for imagination is reinforced by the poem’s approximation of the balloon as approaching “the sports of children and the toils of men” in the sky, signifying the creative ambition of all three; the Montgolfier balloon equates child’s play and men’s scientific achievement as products of imagination.
Considering that both the child-speaker and the husband are free from washing day, and the “sports of children and the toils of men” denote creativity, clearly the toils of women are excluded in this estimation due to their inhibited imaginative potential. The child-speaker exemplifies this in her annoyance that on washing day, she cannot obtain a “thrilling tale / Of ghost, or witch, or murder” (lines 64-65) from the maids. Encumbered by their work, the maids do not have the imaginative space to create a story to entertain the child-speaker. Their labour bars working women from the faculty of forming ideas and limits their ability in identity-making and subject formation—two developments of consciousness and feminine subjectivity necessary for opposing patriarchal institutions of power. The speaker evades this oppressive gendered labour by means of entering memory, employing her imagination and subjectivity to do so.
In addition to being a symbol of imaginative capacity, the insertion of the Montgolfier balloon further distorts the poem’s chronology of time by symbolizing futurity. In the speaker’s past, her child-self was “little dreaming then” (line 80) to see a Montgolfier balloon in the sky, indicating that at the time of the speaker’s memory, the balloon had not been invented yet. In doing so, the speaker imposes a future object onto her own memory of the past, and imagines the presence of futurity only in the contexts of her childhood. The present recounting of washing day featured in the first section of the poem limits its creative allusions to that of previous literary, historical, or cultural figures, such as Shakespeare, Guatimozín (line 29), and Erebus (line 37). Working within the mock-epic form, this concentration on figures of the past is fitting, but it is also an example of temporal manipulation that occurs within the poem. In the present tense, there are references to the past, and in the past tense, there are references to the future.
David Sigler views the poem’s temporal inconsistency as an example of what he calls “fracture feminism.” Similar to Kristeva, Sigler regards the construction of chronological time itself as patriarchal, but grounds his critique specifically in the contexts of the eighteenth century and literary Romanticism. According to Sigler, the Romantic era was a period in which many women writers were engaging with the concept of time itself, as the eighteenth century saw the standardization of clock time at the hands of male-dominated institutions, such as industrialism, politics, and militarism. The uniformity of time became a mechanism of social control, over which men had almost exclusive ascendancy. Women were systemically excluded from this ideological diffusion, barred from entering the hegemonic power structures that instituted clock time and were therefore alienated from the so-called objectivity of clock time itself (8). Women were unable to live in the temporal present, and thus had to situate themselves elsewhere. Elsewhere, for women writers, was “the gap between objective and subjective chronologies” (18)—a fracture in time itself made visible in their writings and through which they could critique the socially constructed linearity of time which oppressed them.
Sigler cites “Washing Day” as an exemplification of fracture feminism, especially in the contexts of the Montgolfier balloon. The balloon inscribes a future that is “already present” (4) in a scene set in the past; an atemporality established by Barbauld’s writing that defies linear time. Furthermore, Sigler delineates how
The work of the laundry is oppressive not only because it is physically hard and impossible to balance with the “hospitable rites” expected by men, but also on account of the repetitiveness, inevitability, and ceaselessness of the task… That is, washing becomes oppressive when it becomes a “day,” regularized and made to seem natural by the calendar. (Sigler 165)
He then goes on to close read “Which week, smooth sliding after week, brings on / Too soon” (Barbauld, lines 10-11) as demonstrative of how linear clock time (“smooth sliding”) is incongruous with women’s experience of time—the “smooth sliding” of chronological time coming “too soon” for the women domestic labourers. Washing day itself is therefore an instrument of patriarchal clock time under which women were oppressed (Sigler 165). Putting Sigler’s analysis in the context of the generic shift near the end of the poem, the speaker’s use of memory evidently interrupts patriarchal linearity. Entering a past when she was free from feminine domestic labour, the speaker frees herself from the bounded temporality of the present washing day, thus capable of forming her subjectivity and exercising imagination. Barbauld’s reference to the Montgolfier balloon is therefore both a commentary on the creative limitations of women’s domestic labour and a manipulation of temporality that subverts male linear time.
Subjectivity and imagination, then, occur in the absence of women’s domestic labour. The speaker’s subjective “I” enters the text only when removed from the present-day labour of washing day and with the evocation of the past, to a time when the speaker’s child-self had not yet encountered the plights of washing day firsthand. Instead, the child-speaker is free to reflect on her circumstances in a state of childlike wonder, which makes the scene ideal to imbue with objects of the creative future, such as the Montgolfier balloon. Reading Barbauld’s “Washing Day” through the lens of domestic labour, time, and imagination reveals the patriarchal organization of each construct. Understanding women’s labour as oppressive due to its obstruction of consciousness formation and creative imagination provides a new perspective to debates surrounding the poem. While Messenger’s argument in support of the poem’s elevation of women’s domesticity does not hold true, the text still brings to light the differences in men’s and women’s spheres of life. “Washing Day” expresses a woman’s excavation of her own subjective consciousness through form, supplanting patriarchal constructions of societal control with feminine subjectivity. Building upon Sigler’s theorization of “fracture feminism” and manipulation of time, understanding memory itself as a tool, which destabilizes patriarchal regimes of knowledge production and forms women’s subjectivities, can aid in further analysis of British women writers of the Romantic era. As women increasingly entered literary spheres during the eighteenth century, they faced the endeavor of self-expression, left to question: how could a woman write of their own subjectivity when the word of men was the only language they were taught?
Works Cited
Barbauld, Anna Letitia. “Washing Day.” The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Poetry, Broadview Press, 2016, pp. 40–41.
Bordo, Haley. “Reinvoking the ‘Domestic Muse’: Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the Performance of Genre.” European Romantic Review, vol. 11, no. 2, Mar. 2000, pp. 186–196, https://doi.org/10.1080/10509580008570108.
Kraft, Elizabeth. “Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘Washing-Day’ and the Montgolfier Balloon.” Literature & History, vol. 4, no. 2, Sept. 1995, pp. 25–41, https://doi.org/10.1177/030619739500400202.
Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time.” Signs, vol. 7, no. 1, 1981, pp. 13–35, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173503.
Leydesdorff, Selma, et al. Gender and Memory. Oxford University Press, 1996.
Messenger, Ann. His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature. University Press of Kentucky, 1986.
Radstone, Susannah, and Katharine Hodgkin, editors. Regimes of Memory. Routledge, 2003.
Sigler, David. Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism. State University of New York Press, 2022. Smith, Sharon. “”I Cannot Harm Thee Now”: The Ethic of Satire in Anna Barbauld’s Mock-Heroic Poetry.” European Romantic Review, vol. 26, no. 5, 3 Sept. 2015, pp. 551–573, https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2015.1070348.