With her “unscrupulously epic” “novel-poem” “Aurora Leigh,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning presents readers with “the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered.” Published in 1864, Barrett Browning used Aurora Leigh, an alleged fictional character (which resembles herself), to “find woman’s place in the central tradition of poetry . . . in the context of Victorian ideas about genre,” (Dillon 509). Issues such as women’s role in society, in the household, in the labor area, and as a poet or a woman, are addressed in “Aurora Leigh.” By closely examining excerpts from books I, II, and V, out of the nine-book poem, the social thoughts of Barrett Browning will be presented: first, poetry should not only be a man’s literary duty; and second, women are capable of doing more than just simple housework and housewife duties. As a partially autobiographical poem, she is able to fully express her thoughts without being too controversial during the Victorian period.
Born in 1806, Elizabeth Barrett Browning became “England’s most famous woman poet,” and was admired for her “moral and emotional ardor and her energetic engagement with the issues of her day,” (Norton Anthology 1173); issues of the day, including her poetic abilities—which, as a woman, were not well accepted. But being brought up by her father in a highly academic environment (she was tutored along with her younger brother, Bro), nothing less could be expected than a highly intellectual and non-traditional young woman. According to the Norton Anthology of English Literature, “Aurora Leigh” has attracted so many readers because it is “the first work in English by a woman in which the heroine herself is the author,” (Norton Anthology 1174).
To understand Aurora, the main character in “Aurora Leigh,” one must understand the author. Dorothy Mermin says in her book “Elizabeth Barrett Browning Through 1844: Becoming a Woman Poet,”
When Elizabeth Barrett set out to become a great poet in the tradition running from Homer to Wordsworth, she found herself facing difficulties that sprang not just from cultural and social constraints on female experience, behavior, and expression, but more generally from an essential lack of congruence between the imaginative worlds created by male poets and the shapes of her own experience.
According to Mermin, is was not easy for Barrett Browning to see herself as a poet; but it was conceivable to see herself as a daughter-poet or as a woman-poet. Poetry was not meant for women in the Victorian period—or, rather, to be more exact, poetry about social, political, or current issues was not meant for women in the Victorian period. Women were supposed to write about nature, children, God, love, their husbands, their houses, their simple lives… Poetry about anything with deep meaning was a man’s duty. But, being brought up as a boy (since she was tutored and intellectually stimulated while growing up), Barrett Browning had to “struggle both to escape the patterns that had constricted her poetic development and to make a source of power, not weakness, for her poetry out of her experience of constriction, exclusion, renunciation, and rebellion. This experience in its broadest outlines significantly resembles that of male Victorian poets,” (Mermin 714). As a woman, this struggle was even harder for her; she had to struggle harder than male poets did to come to terms with the still-alive traditions of Romanticism, according to Mermin.
In book II, lines 110 – 115, Romney (Aurora’s cousin) tells Aurora that if she has headaches, she should cure them with balsams, to which Aurora replies, “I perceive. / The headache is too noble for my sex. / You think the heartache would sound decenter, / Since that’s the woman’s special, proper ache, / And altogether tolerable, except, / To a woman.”
Later on (lines 353 – 361), Romney tells Aurora that all he asks for from a woman is love, for life in fellowship, and for wifehood. Aurora then says, “am I proved too weak / To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear / Such leaners on my shoulder? poor to think, / Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought? / Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can, / Yet competent to love, like him?”
It is clear with the two previous examples that Aurora Leigh is not willing to become what a husband would want her to become. She questions men’s thoughts, such as headaches being too much for her sex, yet her sex must be able to carry the burden of love, life in fellowship, and wifehood. Romney makes this clear, when he says in lines 372 – 375, “If your sex is weak for art / . . . it is strong / For life and duty.”
In her struggle, Barrett Browning fuses both what she was expected to write about and what she wanted to write about: she writes about nature, but male poets had made nature female for its maternal characteristics. Trying to continue with what male poets had set as the standard, she wrote about nature, but literary analysts claim that in writing about nature she writes about her mother:
Insofar as she conceived of nature as female and maternal, her conflicting feelings about her own mother and about being a woman meant that nature as a poetic subject both compelled and excluded her. (Mermin, 714)
And so, she continued to write about nature, with deeper thoughts and messages hidden in her words. For example, she wrote about “a steady indignation against Nature who made me a woman,” (qtd. in Mermin 715); Freudian theory, says Mermin, allows us to read “Nature” as “mother.” Yet, by following the basic structure males have created, according to Mermin, she struggled to maintain the status quo: the weak maternal earth, the powerful male heaven. She wrote about what other women writers were writing about—ballad romances, mortuary verses, statements of resignation to God’s will, and the like. She had no problem with female poets who wished to be nothing more than female poets, and praised “woman writers for what she regards are feminine virtues—suffering, tears, love, preferring friendship to fame,” (Mermin 715).
But after years of writing about nature, not only Barrett Browning but also male poets started feeling discomfort with Romantic nature poetry, according to Mermin. “Aurora Leigh” presents an assessment of female poet’s link to maternal nature, paternal culture, and Victorian society, says Mermin, and Aurora finds her true subject in both her struggle to grow up and her struggle to become a poet.
On the one hand, Aurora Leigh was a poet at heart—and a good one, Barrett Browning tells us. But on the other hand, Aurora was a woman, and she had to behave as such. With a strict aunt taking care of her, Aurora became a perfect little Victorian woman:
I learnt the collects and the catechism,
The creeds, from Athanasius back to Nice,
The Articles, the Tracts against the times
(By no means Buonaventure’s “Prick of Love”),
And various popular synopses of
Inhuman doctrines never taught by John,
Because she [her aunt] liked instructed piety.
I learnt my complement of classic French
(Kept pure of Balzac and neologism)
And German also, since she liked a range
Of liberal education—tongues, not books.
I learnt a little algebra, a little
Of the mathematics, —brushed with extreme flounce
The circle of the sciences, because
She misliked [sic] women who are frivolous.
I learnt the royal genealogies
Of Oviedo, the internal laws
Of the Burmese empire, —by how many feet
Mount Chimborazo outsoars Teneriffe,
What navigable river joins itself
To Lara, and what census of the year five
Was taken at Klagenfurt, —because she liked
A general insight into useful facts.
I leant much music, —such as would have been
As quite impossible in Johnson’s day
As still might be wished—fine sleights of hand
And unimagined fingering, shuffling off
The hearer’s soul through hurricanes of notes
To a noisy Tophet; and I drew . . . costumes
From French engravings, nereids neatly draped
(With smirks of simmering godship): I washed in
Landscapes from nature (rather say, washed out).
I danced the polka and Cellarius,
Because she liked accomplishments in girls.
I read a score of books on womanhood
To prove, if women do not think at all,
They may teach thinking (to a maiden aunt
Or else the author), —books that boldly assert
Their right of comprehending the husband’s talk
When not too deep, and even of answering
With pretty “may it please you,” or “so it is,” —
. . .
I learnt cross-stitch, because she did not like
To see me wear the night with empty hands
A-doing nothing.
In the above excerpt from book I (lines 392 – 449), Barrett Browning presents what the perfect woman was during the Victorian period—and Aurora managed to be one. A woman’s hands should be used to play a piano, dance, sketch, or stitch, but not to write poetry.
Several literary critics have found much interest in the task of embroidering; in fact, Anne D. Wallace writes, in “‘Nor in Fading Silks Compose’: Sewing, Walking, and Poetic Labor in Aurora Leigh,” that there is a clear distinction between “gendered ‘labor’ and ‘writing’ as masculine,” and Barrett Browning’s poem must now “re-define the relations among women, work and writing, selecting for its celebration a material labor commonly practiced by women,” (Wallace 225). Wallace continues to say that this labor, in the case of “Aurora Leigh,” “is sewing, a kind of work done by almost all women, of all classes, both as unpaid domestic labor and as paid public employment,” (Wallace 225).
In the poem, Aurora was brought to live with her aunt, who “has lived / A sort of cage-bird life,” (lines 304 – 305), and Aurora was “alas, / A wild bird scarcely fledged,” (lines 309 – 310) brought to her aunt’s cage. This hints that Aurora is not meant for housewife work. Yet, she has to deal with it, and after Aurora has stated all that she has learnt, she says,
…By the way
The works of women are symbolical,
We sew, we prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you’re weary—or a stool
To stumble over and vex you . . . “curse that stool!”
Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean
And sleep, and dream of something we are not
But would be for your sake.
Aurora sews; she sews because that is what she has to do as a woman. Barrett Browning has set up a clear opposition, says Wallace, between the female sewing labor, and the male writing labor. But, more than simply set up this opposition, Barrett Browning portrays the female labor as “lesser” than the male labor, according to Wallace. However, in “Aurora Leigh,” sewing is not only a leisurely, domestic art, says Wallace, but a productive labor for women.
Concluding book II (lines 494 – 497), Aurora says, “I may love my art. / You’ll grant that even a woman may love art, / Seeing that to waste true love on anything / Is womanly.” Her art, in this case wrongly assumed to be embroidery, is known to be poetry—that is the art she loves. But, being female, her love is assumed wasted.
At the end of “Aurora Leigh,” Barrett Browning’s feminist poem, she offers a “striking image of a woman artist who is simultaneously poet and muse,” says Joyce Zonana in her book “The Embodied Muse: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Feminist Poetics.” Presenting Aurora as the poem’s narrator and heroine, Barrett Browning has given Aurora “heavenly knowledge, even as she stands on ‘promontory earth,’” (Zonana 241).
Zonana says that “it is not so much ‘unfeminine’ to be a poet as it is ‘unmasculine’; in choosing to be a poet, Aurora does not so much challenge her century’s gender rules as confirm them,” (Zonana 249). As a female poet, Barrett Browning challenges the patriarchal idea of the muse as “the passive female object of the active male poet’s quest,” and goes even deeper, saying that “the muse must be external and Other to the poet, the ‘object’ of a quest,” (Zonana 242). But, Aurora speaks her very truth, according to Zonana, and thus makes herself her own muse. This has brought much deliberation, for some literary critics believe that by making herself her own muse, Aurora (and Barrett Browning, as well) is in “denial of her subjectivity, a negation of her quest to be a poet rather than the object or inspirer of male poetry,” (Zonana 243).
Barrett Browning has objectified females, just like male poets do, by making her muse a female. The point is countered, however, by the fact that she is her own muse, and claims “the muse as a powerful image of divinity, creativity, and sexuality . . . What enables her to function as a muse is her full subjectivity, her radical embodiment, and her complete acceptance of herself as a woman and artist,” (Zonana 243).
In fact, in book II (lines 3 – 5), Aurora says that she stands “Woman and artist,—either incomplete, / Both credulous of completion.”
Zonana perfectly describes Aurora, saying that she is not “a transcendent, disembodied, heavenly figure,” nor is she “a Victorian Angel in the House,” but instead, she is an “immanent, earthly woman,” (Zonana 244). This description of Aurora, however, sounds very similar to a description of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. For years now, literary critics and analysts have pondered the idea of “Aurora Leigh” being Barrett Browning’s “autobiographical epic,” as stated by Zonana. Steve Dillon, author of “Barrett Browning’s Poetic Vocation: Crying, Singing, Breathing,” states that “Barrett Browning’s poetic voice becomes much more recognizably her own in . . . Aurora Leigh.” Dillon goes on to say that “Aurora Leigh is a verse-novel that shows how Aurora develops her poetic voice over time,” much in the same way that Barrett Browning did.
Zonana says that Aurora Leigh has no need for a muse because “she is writing about what she knows,” and so “Aurora is her own authority, and she places herself at the beginning and the end of her epic,” (Zonana 244). Since Aurora is Barrett Browning’s creation, it is easy to assume that Barrett Browning needs no muse either because she, too, is writing about what she knows. Aurora, then, becomes Barrett Browning’s muse, “a woman who will, in Aurora’s terms, ‘be and do’ (V, 367). This goddess, unlike her precursors in the poetry of men, is made of earth and committed both to living upon it and transforming it,” (Zonana 259).
Having had no precursors in the field of poetry, Barrett Browning was left to live in a world that was not ready for her. Nevertheless, she managed to break the limits of accepted social procedures and become one of the most important Victorian poets—regardless of the fact that she was a woman. Barrett Browning, like Aurora Leigh, lives to be “The earliest of Auroras!” (book II, line 66), and claims that poetry “is living art, / Which thus presents and thus records true life.’” (book V, line 222).
Works Cited
A Celebration of Women. Ed. Mary Mark Ockerbloom. 1994. UPENN. 10 Nov. 2003 http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barrett/aurora/aurora.html
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. “Aurora Leigh.” Aurora Leigh. Ed. J. Miller, London, 1864. Rpt. in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 1180-1194.
Dillon, Steve. “Barrett Browning’s Poetic Vocation: Crying, Singing, Breathing.” 2002. Project Muse. West Virginia University. 10 Nov. 2003. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/victorian_poetry/v039/39.4dillon.html
Mermin, Dorothy. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning through 1844: Becoming a Woman Poet.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Vol. 26, No. 4, Nineteenth Century. 1986. JSTOR. Rice University. 10 Nov. 2003.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0039-3657%28198623%2926%3A4%3C713%3ABBTB1B%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M
The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Foreword. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 1173-1174.
Wallace, Anne D. “‘Nor in Fading Silks Compose’: Sewing, Walking, and Poetic Labor in Aurora Leigh.” 1997. Project Muse. The John Hopkins University Press. 10 Nov. 2003. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elh/v064/64.1wallace.html
Zonana, Joyce. “The Embodied Muse: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Feminist Poetics.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Vol. 8, No. 2. 1989. JSTOR. University of Tulsa. 10 Nov. 2003. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0732-7730%28198923%298%3A2%3C24%3ATEMEBB%3E2.0CO%3B2-L
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