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“Art's a Service”: Social Wound, Sexual Politics, and Aurora Leigh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Deirdre David
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Extract

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh has become a key text for feminist critics concerned with nineteenth-century women writers. For some, Aurora Leigh is a revolutionary poem, a passionate indictment of patriarchy that speaks the resentment of the Victorian woman poet through a language of eroticized female imagery. For others, the poem is less explosive, and Barrett Browning's liberal feminism is seen as compromised by Aurora Leigh's eventual dedication to a life governed by traditionally male directives. In my view, however, Aurora Leigh is neither revolutionary nor compromised: rather, it is a coherent expression of Barrett Browning's conservative sexual politics, and I shall argue that female imagery is employed to show that the “art” of the woman poet performs a “service” for a patriarchal vision of the apocalypse. In Aurora Leigh woman's art is made the servitor of male ideal.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 13 , Spring 1985 , pp. 113 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

NOTES

1. Kaplan, Cora, Introduction to Au-rora Leigh With Other Poems (London: The Women's Press, 1978), p. 11. The Women's Press, 1978), p. 11. The first important feminist analysis of Aurora Leigh is to be found in Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Double-day, 1976).Google Scholar

2. Kaplan, p. 35.Google Scholar

3. Barrett, ElizabethBrowning's Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy 1849–1861, with recollections by Mrs. Ogilvy, ed. Heydon, Peter N. and Kelley, Philip (New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co. and the Browning Institute, 1973), p. 32.Google Scholar

4. The Letters of Elizabeth BarrettBrowning, 2 vols., ed. with biographical additions by Kenyon, Frederic G. (London:The Macmillan Company, 1897), 1, 196–97. (Hereinafter abbreviated inthe text as L.EBB).Google Scholar

5. The Letters of Elizabeth BarrettBrowning to Mary Russell Mitford 1836–1854, 3 vols., ed. Raymondand, Meredith B. and Sullivan, Mary Rose (Winfield,Kansas: Wedgestone Press,Armstrong Browning Library ofBaylor University, The Browning Institute,and Wellesley College Library,1983), 3, 81. (Hereinafter abbreviatedin the text as L.EBB/M).Google Scholar

6. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–1846, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Bros.,1899), 1, 116, 373, 357. (Hereinafterabbreviated in the text as L.RB/EBB).Google Scholar

7. Leigh, Aurora, in The Complete Works of Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Porter, Charlotte and Clarke, Helen A., 6 vols. (New York: George D.Sproul, 1901), 1.826–32. (All referencesin the text to the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning are to thisedition: citations are by volume andpage number, except in the case of AuroraLeigh where citations are by book and line number[s]).Google Scholar

8. Westminster Review, 68 (1857),399–415; Blackwood's Magazine, 81(1857), 23–41; The Spectator, 29 (1856),1239–40. The following reviews of Aurora Leigh are also of particular interest: Saturday Review, 2 (1856), 776–78;Dublin University Magazine, 49 (1857),460–70; National Quarterly Review, 5(1862), 134–48.Google Scholar

9. In her sensitive reading of Marian Erie's relationship to mothers and themeaning of Marian's own motherhood,Sandra Gilbert makes the pointthat Marian bears a likeness “not onlyto the fallen woman Mary Magdalenbut also the blessed Virgin Mary,whose immaculate conception was the sign of a divine annunciation.” “FromPatria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Risorgimento,” PMLA, 99(1984), 194–211.Google Scholar

10. Donaldson, Sandra, Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, and Steinmetz, Virginia V. offer closely related interpretationsof the imagery of motherhoodand suckling in Aurora Leigh. Donaldsonlinks Barrett Browning's ownmotherhood and a more powerfulpoetry than that she had produced inher childless days: by the time of Aurora Leigh she uses the “metaphor of breastsboldly as a symbol of activity and vitality.” “Motherhood's Advent in Power:Elizabeth Barrett Browning's PoemsAbout Motherhood,” Victorian Poetry, 18 (1980), 51–60. Focusing upon Aurora'sambivalent attitude towards hermother's portrait, Gelpi argues thatAurora finally trusts her own womanhoodby the end of the poem. “AuroraLeigh: The Vocation of the WomanPoet,” Victorian Poetry, 19 (1981), 35–48. Steinmetz's reading discusses thematernal images less positively andmore psychoanalytically, and sees themas “negative symbols reenforcing thetheme of deprivation and representingthe poet's need to bring obsessive infantiledesires into light where they couldserve rather than dominate her.” “Imagesof ‘Mother-Want’ in ElizabethBarrett Browning's Aurora Leigh,” Victorian Poetry, 21 (1983), 351–67.Google Scholar

11. Gilbert, Sandra and Gubarsee, Susan these forms/faces in the portrait as”melodramatic, gothic, the moral extremesof angel and monster characteristicof male-defined masks andcostumes.” The Madwoman in the Attic:The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (NewHaven: Yale University Press), p. 19.Google ScholarDolores Rosenblum argues that whenAurora sees Marian's face in Paris, shere-sees the iconized female face ofnineteenth-century poetry, and isthereby liberated to a full expression ofher art. “Face to Face: Elizabeth BarrettBrowning's Aurora Leigh andNineteenth-Century Poetry,” Victorian Studies, 26 (1983), 321–38. Nina Auerbach splendidly dissects the contradictory “faces” of Victorian woman in Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

12. The Madwoman in the Attic, pp.579–80.Google Scholar

13. Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browningto Richard Hengist Home, with Prefaceand Memoir by Henry, RichardStoddard (New York: Worthington Co., 1889), p. 263.Google Scholar

14. See Rosenberg's, John D. The Fall of Camelot: A Study of Tennyson's “The Idylls of the King” (Cambridge,Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973) for a reading of the poem as apocalyptic vision and forexamination of the Idylls' contributionto the Victorian literary concern withclearing the wasteland.Google Scholar

15. Carlyle, Thomas, Past and Present, ed. Altick, Richard D. (Boston:Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), p.197.Google Scholar