Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Aurora Leigh (1856)
OVERVIEW:
This novel in blank verse tells the life story of a fictional
woman poet. Born in Italy of an Italian mother and an English
father, Aurora, whose name means "the dawn," is an orphan
by the age of thirteen. She goes to England to be cared for and
educated by her father's sister. This aunt is a narrow, convention-bound
woman who imposes on Aurora an education intended to prepare her
to be an ordinary middle-class wife. The girl studies religion,
languages, a little math and science, and some music and art.
Feeling like a caged bird, Aurora keeps her inner life while outwardly
conforming to this training to be a humble wife, a "cushion."
She decides to become a poet. Her aunt's cousin, Romney Leigh,
proposes marriage to her. He is dedicated to social service and
wishes Aurora to help him in his political career, but she rejects
him in favor of her own vocation as a poet. Romney then decides
to marry a lower-class woman, Marian Earle, but she is discouraged
from the marriage by an aristocratic lady, a rival for Romney's
love. Sent away to France, Marian is trapped and raped, as a result
she becomes pregnant. She and her child are later rescued by Aurora.
The three set up a home together in Italy, where Romney later
appears. He had been blinded by an accident and has become somewhat
softened by experience. Meanwhile, Aurora has learned the value
of love from living with Marian and her child. She marries Romney
in a new spirit of modest self-effacement. While not giving up
poetry, she will write in service to the ideas of her husband.
Thus Barrett Browning closes with a compromise between the artist's
drive for self-expression and the Victorian wife's role of submissive
service.
DETAIL:
Prostitution is the social evil the poem cares most to cure, and
Aurora asserts that if art teaches men to reverence the body they
will cease to "Make offal of their daughters for its use"
(7:866).
The Mother Age -- taken from Tennyson's "Locksley Hall"
(5: 214-20)
Mariam's experience in the brothel drives her temporarily mad.
Her clarion blast will "blow all class-walls level as Jericho's"
(9:932)
Renewal in individual hearts will create "new dynasties or
the race of men; / Developed whence, shall grow spontaneously
/ New churches, new economies, new laws / Admitting freedom, new
societies" (9: 945-48)
Poem ends with a vision of the New Jerusalem "Beyond the
circle of the conscious hills" (9: 954)
Barrett Browning herself inclined to allegorizing the story--explained
to a friend who protested on Romney's behalf that "He had
to be blinded, observe, to be made to see; just as Marian had
to be dragged through the utmost debasement of circumstances to
arrive at the sentiment of personal dignity. I am sorry, but indeed
it seemed necessary."
Lady Waldemar--refers to prostitutes as women "we could not
name / Because we're decent" (3:551-52). Mariam knows she
cannot speak plainly about being drugged and raped: "We must
scrupulously hint / With half-words, delicate reserves, the thing
/ Which no one scrupled we should feel in full" (6:1222-24)
Browning's poem has often been praised for its exposition of a
paradoxical theory of success and failure, but it has other qualities
as well. Its slow-paced, enervated blank verse, its setting of
a quiet evening in autumn, its comparative lack of the movement
and noise that we expect in Browning's energetic verse create
a unity of impression that is unobtrusive yet effective.
Begin the Begin