Feminist Criticism and Social Change (RLE Feminist Theory) by Rosenfelt Deborah;Newton Judith;

Author:Rosenfelt, Deborah;Newton, Judith;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

SEVEN

Aurora Leigh

CORA KAPLAN

Never flinch,

But still, unscrupulously epic, catch

Upon the burning lava of a song

The full-veined, heaving, double breasted Age:1

With this ‘woman's figure’ the doubled female voice of Aurora Leigh, its woman-poet-author and woman-poet-heroine, defines the poet's task. The age is Victoria's, but Elizabeth Barrett Browning calls back a looser Elizabethan speech to extend her image from matriarch to nursing mother, ‘the paps from which we all have sucked’. Milk and lava pour from the poem in twin streams; Aurora Leigh (1857) produces the fullest and most violent exposition of the ‘woman question’ in mid-Victorian literature. In her discussion about self-determination Barrett Browning remembers and revises the work of other great women writers from Mme de Staёl to George Sand and integrates the debate on gender relations, into which most eminent Victorians were drawn in the 1840s and 1850s, with other political and cultural issues of those years. Aurora Leigh is a collage of Romantic and Victorian texts reworked from a woman's perspective. Gender difference, class warfare, the relation of art to politics: these three subjects as they were argued by the English and continental intelligentsia are all engaged as intersecting issues in the poem. The longest poem of the decade, it is, to use another ‘woman's figure’, a vast quilt, made up of other garments, the pattern dazzling because, not in spite, of its irregularities.

Although Virginia Woolf was to write that ‘fate has not been kind to Mrs Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her, nobody troubles to put her in her place’,2 Elizabeth Barrett Browning's place among eminent Victorians was so well assured in her lifetime that she was a prominent candidate for poet laureate when Wordsworth died at mid-century. Her place is empty today, the chairs having been moved up to hide her absence from that otherwise meticulously reconstructed feast Victorian studies have served up to us in the past twenty years, but her excision from the canon of great Victorian poets began relatively recently with the twentieth-century revision of literary taste. (Women writers like Woolf, however, never cut her out of their list)

Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning's ‘art-novel’ or ‘novel-poem’, was widely noticed and enjoyed an immediate and continuing popularity for at least a generation following its publication in 1857. It ran through thirteen editions in England by 1873 and was still read and republished up until the turn of the century. Conceived as early as 1845, just at the point of her meeting with Robert Browning, she saw it ambitiously if somewhat vaguely as a

sort of novel-poem … running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing rooms and the like ‘where angels fear to tread’; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age and speaking the truth of it out plainly. That is my intention.3

The intention lay fallow during the intense and artistically productive years of her early married life, but in 1853 she started to write it in great bursts and towards the end,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.