Classics Corner: Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning;
Beautiful Narrative Poem About A Woman Finding Her Place In the World
By Julie Sara Porter,
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: If there is one thing that many people know about Elizabeth
Barrett-Browning it is the poem “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…” If
there is another thing that many people know about Barrett Browning it is that
she had a long happy marriage to fellow poet, Robert Browning. While that is
true that she and Browning were very happy together and encouraged each other
in their poetic careers.
(Reportedly, the only public argument the two ever had
was over Spiritualism. She was an ardent believer and he was a skeptic.) “How do I love thee?” is only one of several
love poems and sonnets she had published over the years, many of them collected
in her work, Sonnets from the Portuguese. But what many modern people are
unaware is that Elizabeth Barrett Browning also wrote a 9-Book narrative poem
which was probably one of the definitive poetic works about feminism: Aurora
Leigh. This poem is about a woman who forgoes marriage for a literary career
and searches for her place in the world.
Like many poems of the Victorian era, Barrett Browning’s
work drips with allusion, metaphor, and rich language to make her point. Her
protagonist, Aurora Leigh is the daughter of a Tuscan mother and an English
father. After her mother’s death at age four, her father raises her to
appreciate learning and reading. He gives her books and teaches her various
languages like Latin and Greek. She develops into a very intelligent and
creative young woman with an imaginative spirit and aspirations to become a
writer.
As a child, she looks at her deceased mother’s portrait and
imagines her in the form of whatever she reads: “Ghost, fiend, and angel,
fairy, witch, and sprite,/A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,/A loving Psyche who loses sight of
Love/A still Medusa with mild milky brows.” These images effectively described
the various forms that women are often portrayed in literature: angels, or
monsters, witches, or helpers. Aurora Leigh visualizes her mother in these
forms that are dictated by male writers and strives to become someone who could
live beyond those character archetypes and create her own story: She longs to
be as good a writer as many of the male writers she reads.
When Aurora is 13, her father dies and she lives with her
aunt and cousin, Romney. Her aunt tries to rear in the fashion of a proper
Victorian lady which Aurora would have none of. Instead she retreats into her
books, her writing, and her love of nature. When she discovers her father’s old
library, Aurora finds an intellectual release and a devotion for books that
outweighs any societal or spiritual pressures her aunt puts on her:
“I sat on in my
chamber green, And lived my life, and thought my thoughts and prayed/My prayers
without the vicar; read my books/Without considering whether they were fit to
do me good/……So much help By so much reading/It is rather when We gloriously
forget ourselves and plunge/ Soul-forward, headlong into a book’s profound,/Impassioned
for its beauty and salt of truth/’It is then we get the right good from a
book.”
Aurora finds truth in books that she cannot find in the role that her
aunt gives her, so she sets to find her own truth through reading and writing.
That search for truth and her literary aspirations coincide
with Romney’s own journey to find his place. He takes up social work and
strives to help the poor. He thinks that he has the perfect helpmate in Aurora,
so he proposes to her. However unlike many literary heroines in her day, Aurora
turns him down. In one of the best passages in the poem, Aurora crowns herself
in a garland of laurels as if accepting a call from a Higher Power to devote
herself to her art. After Romney insists that women are to be the helpmate of men
and ridicules her literary aspirations, Aurora turns him down by telling him
that he loves not a woman, but a cause and that he is already married to his
social theory. She sarcastically tells him that she is unworthy of his
ambitions.
Aurora tells Romney that everybody, man or woman has a duty
to themselves before they can accept love: “(Romney) forget too much that every
creature, male or female/Stands single act and thought/And also in birth and
death……I too have my vocation, work to do, The heavens and earth have set me
since I changed/My father’s face for theirs, and thought your world /Were twice
as wretched as you represent/Most serious work, and necessary work as any of
the economists…..I Who love my art, would never wish it lower/To suit my stature
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 past question.”
Aurora realizes that she
wants what many men have in her day, the freedom to pursue her poetry to the
fullest and explore her creativity. She even challenges the ideal that women
are expected to be nothing more than wives and that she wants the freedom to be
a poet first. Like Virginia Woolf would later say, Aurora Leigh wants a “room
of her own and her own income.”
The characters in Barrett-Browning’s poem are three
dimensional and brilliantly realized. Romney is clearly sincere in his devotion
to help the poor, but he is somewhat cold in his relationships with women
seeing them as helpers but not people in their own right. Some may see Aurora
as single-minded even self-centered in her pursuit of poetry but she is also a
very passionate intelligent individual who pursues her interests to their
fullest. (She starts out writing small pieces that get accepted by literary
journals but are not personally fulfilling. She also takes tours of countries
like France to study nature and the people to give her inspiration.) Nowhere is
the character development strongest than in the relationship between Aurora and
Marian Erle, a working class girl who becomes Romney’s fiancée.
Marian is just as well-written as Aurora and Romney, making
a great third protagonist (even eclipsing Romney for deutragonist since she is
in more verses with Aurora, than Romney is). While it would be tempting to make
the other woman in Romney’s life a callous conniving bitch, Marian is actually
a sweet fragile young lady who probably lacks Aurora’s independence but is her
own person in surviving hardships. She is forced into prostitution at a young
age and runs away to a charity house where Romney works. She at first wants to
marry Romney realizing that he “loves everyone” but that Marian vows to be a
loyal wife. However, an encounter with a vain opportunistic noblewoman who
wants Romney for herself sends Marian to abandon Romney and run away only to
reappear in Aurora’s life in France with a child in tow.
At first Aurora engages in some victim blaming by implying
that Marian was seduced, but Marian counters with “Do wolves seduce a wandering
fawn in France/Do eagles who have pinched a lamb with claws Seduce it into a
carrion/So with me, I was not ever, as you say seduced but simply murdered.”
Instead Marian had followed a false promise of a job as a lady’s maid, had been
abandoned to a brothel, raped, and left pregnant. What begins as a feminist
narrative poem about one woman forgoing love to become a poet turns into a
feminist narrative poem about the friendship and sisterhood between two women
as Aurora Leigh invites Marian Earle and her son to live with her in Italy. It’s
no coincidence that after Aurora takes in Marian and her son, that she finds
her book of poems has achieved literary success. It is as though while her solo
pursuit of her art was fine and helped her creativity, it was when she opened
her heart to accept Marian into her life that she could truly become an artist.
Barrett-Browning hints that love and friendship as well as private studies are
what make an artist.
Art also has its place in the people that surround the
artist. Aurora becomes aware of this when she reunites with Romney who finally
reads her book of poetry and it speaks to him more than any words ever could.
He finally recognizes the true artist in Aurora. “The poet looks beyond the
book he has made,/Or else he had not made it. If a man could make a man, he’d
henceforth be a god /…..And this special book, I did not make it to make light
of it/It stands above my knowledge draws me up; ‘T is high to me. It may be
that the book is not so high, but I so low instead.”
Romney recognizes Aurora’s talent and that he
was wrong in belittling it in the past. Perhaps he realizes that Aurora did
need to spend that time alone to explore her endeavors.
Romney realizes that while he talked a good game about
helping the poor, Aurora had a much higher spirit than he ever did. She has
become a well-known poet and has accepted friendship by caring for Marian and
her son, treating them like family. While Romney is in despair that his charity
home burned to the ground after false allegations spread that the home was a
prison. Romney ended up destitute and blind. Aurora recognizes her love for
Romney and agrees to marry him.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s Aurora Leigh recognizes a
woman’s artistic aspirations that help lead her to be a fulfilled person who
accepts friendship, love, and is able to find her own identity. It moves
Barrett-Browning far beyond “How do I love thee?”
