In today’s technologically riddled world, giving birth is as easy as arriving at the hospital. At which, a medical team works harmoniously together to deliver the growing life from the mother. However, life in the Victorian era was anything but simple. Mary Robinson, for example, is a testament to the struggles of giving birth in the perspective of the working class. As a result of living in the lower half of society, many working class women, including Robinson, would lack nutritional intake. This in turn, could cause contracted hips, increasing the difficulty of giving birth. The working class not only suffered from malnourishment, but as well from fatalities during birth due to their small stature. Women in the working class were significantly smaller than those of “good”, more well off families. “Women noted at 5’1 and shorter would suffer twice the fetal mortality rate of giving birth of those above 5’4; along with running the risk of dying during birth the percentage of babies born premature greatly increased”(Wohl).
With Robinson’s travels to help fend off collectors of her most recent husbands gambling and Perdita’s debt, she was plagued with a miscarriage. The lacks of better care lead her to be the recipient of a partially paralyzed leg (upenn.edu). This misfortune would only get worse as the paralysis spread and she would go on to suffer acute painful rheumatism for the rest of her life. These varying actions and hardships in her life can really be felt by the heavy words that are used throughout the poem “ODE to BEAUTY”. Although written in a romanticist style the poem is reminiscent of her life.
“No more it scatters perfumes round,
No more it rears its gentle head,
Or brightly paints the mossy ground:
For ah! The beauteous bud, too soon,
Scorch’d by the burning eye of day;
Shrinks from the sultry glare of noon,
Drops its enamell’d brow, and blushing, dies away.”(Robinson)
With her life filled with hardships, it appears that she is the flower she speaks of. She is tired of carrying the heavy weight of being with these men, who are continuously finding a means to complicate her life. And in her final struggles to fight and keep her lover from having to feel the continent she is in and then to have the misfortune of this miscarriage. Her life, once glamorous, is now this shamble and shell that is shrinking; giving way to her paralyzed leg and continuous pain as if she is now ready to pass away.
Bibliography
Google.com/images
Wohl, Anthony. Women and Victorian Public Health: Difficulties in Childbirth. www.victorianweb.org. Accessed Sept. 11, 2012, last updated: June. 29, 2002
Wojtczak, Helena. Pregnancy and Childbirth. www.victorianweb.org.
Accessed Sept 11, 2012, last updated: 2000
