Felicia Hemans

Reading Hemans biography really helped put into perspective an understanding of where her writings came from. I like the fact that she writes about the feelings women have after losing someone they love (and certainly not by death) but doing so in a very classful way because it is very easy to show that scorned, angry side that all women posess. I must say that of all the poems of hers that I read "The Wife of Asdrubal" is by far my favorite, primarily because it was the only one that I was fully able to comprehend (poetry isn't really a strong attribute of mine). I understand the pain and betrayal Asdrubal's wife felt when she saw her husband siding with the enemy and leaving her and her children to suffer a horrible death (pg. 407). When I first read the poem I thought that Asdrubal's wife took it to the extreme when she stabbed her children then proceeded to throw them into the approaching fire but once I thought about it for a while longer I realized that it was probably the best thing for her to do for her children so that they wouldn't suffer.

I found the companion reading fairly interesting because it allowed me the opportunity to see how a male felt about Hemans and her work. I loved the fact that women were praised in the very first couple of lines, "Women we fear, cannot do every thing... But what they can do, they do, for the most part, excellently" (pg. 415). That praise, however, was short lived because the rest of that page talked about nothing else but of what women were incapable of doing, at least in their minds at the time. Once you got past all the "vagina" bashing you really just read one writer praising the work of another.

It is clearly evident that Hemans was a bit bitter towards men during her life. Being abandoned by her husband and her father abandoning her mother really affected her and impacted her work, "The Wife of Asdrubal" is a prime example of that. On the other hand she did show the lighter in side of women like in "The Homes of England." I found her to be an extremely talented writer and possibly helped women, along with the other talented female writers of her time, revolutionalize the typical views of what a woman is capable of.