[In the following essay, Case probes Aurora Leigh's conflicting role as the heroine-narrator of both a conventional love story and a Künstlerroman.]

With Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning set out to write what she called a “novel-poem” about the growth of a woman artist. As several critics have pointed out, Barrett Browning used her crossbreeding of novel and verse to break out of the gendered restrictions imposed on her by a male poetic tradition.¹ The novel, with its long tradition of female authors and protagonists, provided a less anxious precedent for a poetic narrative centered on a woman than the unrelentingly masculine tradition of epic poetry. But viewing the novel form as a largely unproblematic release from more strictly gendered poetic genres obscures the more problematic aspects of novelistic convention and its impact on Aurora Leigh. In particular, in producing a story narrated by its artist-heroine, Barrett Browning had to work within and against the conventions of feminine narration.

If Barrett Browning broke up the conventions of epic poetry with her novel in verse, she also transgressed the conventions of the novel, and by more than her employment of poetic meter and flights of poetic language. Indeed, the sense among both Barrett Browning's contemporaries and modern critics that Aurora Leigh is “unwieldy” and “shapeless” as a novel² suggests that Barrett Browning was taking on novelistic conventions concerning plot structure and control of narrative that she was unable to fulfill according to a novel-reader's expectations. Most disruptive of such expectations are her first-person narrator Aurora's confusing switches between retrospective and present-tense narration. C. Castan, for example, in the most extensive discussion to date of the work's narration, concludes that the “complaints” of some nineteenth-century critics about the novel's narration are “understandable,” since “Mrs. Browning did not have the narrative skill to solve the problem that she set herself in writing Aurora Leigh.”³ But I will argue that Aurora Leigh's violations of novelistic genre, too, are a response to restrictions that generic conventions imposed on the expression of female artistic self-determination. The narrative confusions result from the coexistence of two seemingly incompatible plots: a female Künstlerroman and a feminine love story, for both of which Aurora serves as heroine-narrator. In the former, she confidently traces her intellectual and moral development as an artist in a retrospective mode; in the latter, she reveals to the reader, through the twists and turns of her more immanent and less self-aware narration, the self-delusions and misunderstandings that the plot will clear away to make possible her reunion with Romney.

Each narrative mode is suited to its particular plot. A first-person Künstlerroman, for example, ideally exemplifies the very artistic mastery whose acquisition it recounts.⁴ A conventional love story of the period, by contrast, typically offers us either a “perfect” heroine whose happiness is withheld through accidents or the machinations of others, or an “imperfect” heroine who overcomes her faults (usually pride and self-will) through a series of mortifications, and thereby becomes worthy to marry the hero. Both patterns (and Aurora Leigh participates in both) derive much of their pleasure from our participation in the heroine's naively unsuspecting state of mind at any given point in the story. They are hence well-suited to narrative forms that separate teleological narrative ordering from the protagonist's consciousness, whether omniscient third-person narration or forms of feminine narration such as letters or diaries. Like the feminine narrator, the conventional love-heroine, whether she narrates or not, is closed out of conscious participation in the hermeneutic and proairetic codes that structure the novel, while remaining subject to them.⁵ It is in this sense that Aurora, particularly in the later books, can be termed unreliable as a narrator.

The conflict between Aurora's dual literary roles itself represents a deeper tension within the text: that between the impulse to rebel against the restrictions of the traditional role of Victorian womanhood—an impulse that in the early books places a defiant Aurora squarely in the position of the traditionally male artist-hero—and the desire to co-opt the ideological power of that role, to form her “perfect artist” on the foundation of a culturally recognizable “perfect woman.” As many feminist critics have argued, Barrett Browning's novel-poem enacts a triumphant reconciliation of woman and artist, which necessarily rejects many aspects of the conventional Victorian dichotomy between femininity and artistic power.⁶ But its blissful denouement does not resolve all of the tensions between love-heroine and artist-heroine that it lays to rest. I would suggest that Barrett Browning's juggling of narrative modes does not so much reconcile these conflicting roles and impulses as allow them an uneasy coexistence.

Aurora Leigh presents itself in the first few lines as a retrospective first-person narrative, written by the narrator as part of an effort to make sense or order out of her own life:

I who have written much in prose and verse
For others' uses, will now write for mine,—
Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.(7)

In its declaration of a plan to write a “story” of one's life, this opening is analogous to that of David Copperfield, the other prominent first-person Künstlerroman of the Victorian period. Both promise not just an account of the events of a life, but a work of art of a recognizable form: David will produce a story that demands a “hero,” while Aurora will produce something analogous to a “portrait.” Both, too, posit a potential “other” central to this production, who may or may not be identical with the self who narrates: David suggests that “the hero of [his] own life” may prove to be someone other than himself, while Aurora ambiguously compares or associates her “better self” with a “friend” who has “ceased to love” her. Finally, the two are parallel in the ambiguity they suggest about whether the self-understanding that will provide coherence to the story—the “hero of my own life” whom David Copperfield expects his tale to identify; the “self” that Aurora writes to “hold together”—is the foundation for the narrative or only a hoped-for result of its composition (“these pages must show”).⁸

But the ambiguities of Aurora Leigh's opening are deeper and more troubling than those of David Copperfield's, for they threaten more profoundly our sense of what the “story” Aurora means to write will be about. Aurora's immediate self-identification as a successful writer—the first I of the novel-poem is one who has “written much in prose and verse”—asks that we be conscious of the work's status as a highly crafted literary autobiography; in other words, that we read with a certain faith in the narrator-poet's literary control. Doing so, we are presented with a complex metaphor for a self-consciously created and yet internally divided self. While narrative self-portraiture promises to reconcile past with present—to “hold together” what the poet “was and is,” and thereby create a unified self—the metaphor as a whole still leaves open the problem of how to reconcile the deeper self-alienation implied in the narrator's comparison of her “better self” to a “friend” who has “ceased to love” her.

At the same time, the oddness of the comparison, and particularly the fact that the “friend” is male, invites a counterreading: that behind the advertised story of artistic self-creation lies a tale of thwarted or denied romantic love. And this in turn undermines our faith in the poet-narrator's artistic control, her understanding of the shape or meaning of her story. It asks us to read her, not as a poet shaping her life into a work of art, but as a woman who does not know her own mind. The point is not that we must or do decide to read the work one way or the other. It is rather that the ambiguities inherent in the work's opening already reflect the tensions of dual narrative possibilities.

And in fact the narration of Aurora Leigh does not remain, like that of David Copperfield, consistently retrospective. Aurora writes herself into the present early in book 5. From there the narrative proceeds at times with a diary-like immediacy, as in her comment,

It always makes me sad to go abroad,
And now I'm sadder that I went to-night,
Among the lights and talkers at Lord Howe's.

(5.580)

and at times from a perspective somewhere in the future, the exact location of which is often difficult to determine.⁹ The vantage point from which Aurora delivers the account of her early life and development as an artist, then, is not, as the conventions of pseudo-autobiographical novels like David Copperfield would lead us to expect, somewhere at or beyond the satisfactory conclusion of her adventures.

At least one contemporary reviewer was considerably annoyed by these narratological mixed signals:

It is difficult to conjecture at what epoch of the story the book purports to have been written. It does not seem to have been written in the form of a journal, while the events were taking place; nor yet after the story was completed. It opens, indeed, as if this latter were the case … and the reader supposes that she had it all in her mind at that moment. When she says, therefore, in regard to Romney Leigh, “I attest / The conscious skies and all their daily suns, / I think I loved him not … nor then, nor since … / Nor ever,” the reader believes it.

In the third book we find her sitting, a maiden lady and an authoress, reading letters and commenting upon them … and the reader thinks that that is where the story must have left her; and though it looks very much as if she were in love with her cousin, yet he must be mistaken about it. Notwithstanding all this, she says in the last book: “I love you, loved you … loved you first and last, / And love you on forever. Now I know / I loved you always, Romney.” This contradiction confuses the reader, and he feels almost as if he were trifled with.¹⁰

The problem for this reviewer is not just that Aurora is unreliable as a narrator: the narrators of epistolary or journal-style novels, for example, often jump to conclusions about the state of their own feelings that later events call into question, and even the most authoritative retrospective narrators sometimes engage in what looks like emotional self-deception, as in David Copperfield's assertions of his abiding love and tenderness for Dora. But the one thing retrospective narrators can always be expected to know is the way events or feelings are tending—however little they may want to tell us about them. They are expected to have the interpretive advantage of hindsight, and to use that knowledge to guide the reader's responses and expectations. When Copperfield says that he sometimes wishes Emily had drowned when they were both children, for example, we may not know exactly why, but we know enough to be on our guard about Emily. By the same token, this reviewer complains, when the narrator of Aurora Leigh assures us that she did not and never would love Romney, the reader ought to be able to feel reasonably assured that whatever this book may prove to be about, it will not be the love story of Aurora and Romney Leigh. But of course, this is precisely what the novel, by the end, turns out to be.

It is easy to dismiss such a response as naive: there are a number of hints in the first few books of the poem that Aurora's feelings for Romney run deeper than she claims. But the reviewer has hit upon a real difficulty: at the point in the narrative where it occurs, Aurora's implicit claim of retrospective reliability asks that we take her renunciation of Romney at face value—a task that is made easier by her comparatively unerotic presentation of him. But if we do so, like the reviewer, we find our assumptions and narrative expectations rudely disrupted when the narrative perspective changes and the romantic plot assumes greater prominence later on. On the other hand, if we have been made suspicious by the hints of romantic self-deception in this section, or (more likely) if we already know how the novel will end, the disturbing dissonance between the claim of narrative authority and our sense of the actual direction of the narrative remains. As in the opening lines, we seem left with a choice between denying the romantic plot (only to find that we have been deceived) and denying the artistic/narrative mastery that validates the Künstlerroman.

The reviewer initially suggests authorial “carelessness” as the reason for his confusion—again, attributing the problem to Barrett Browning's imperfect command of novelistic conventions—but his complaint at the end of the paragraph that “the reader” feels “almost … trifled with” hints at his suspicion of an intent to deceive, a hint abandoned in the absence of any sense of what purpose such a deception might serve.¹¹ But I would argue that there is a purpose to the deception—or to what is, at least, a temporary confusion—Aurora's narration creates, and it has to do, again, with the two kinds of stories that Aurora Leigh is telling: it is no coincidence that the central confusion created by Aurora Leigh's narrative oddities concerns that essential element in any novel about a young woman—her romantic entanglements and matrimonial fate.

In a male Künstlerroman like David Copperfield, love and artistic achievement can be made to coincide relatively easily: the male artist's lady-love can always be subordinated to or integrated into his artistic life as assistant or as inspirational muse—as Dora supplying David with pens, or as Agnes, pointing him upwards to ever-greater moral heights in life and art. The social and literary conventions by which the beloved woman finds her ultimate purpose in the man she loves—and therefore in his concerns—make for an easy integration of romantic love and male self-fulfillment. But when the sexes of artist and beloved are reversed, the conventions of the marriage-plot work against the artist's needs. For the woman to lose herself in love, to subordinate her interests and aspirations to those of her lover, necessarily means foregoing the self-exploration and intellectual independence that are needed to develop as an artist. For the author simply to reverse genders, to create a submissive and self-sacrificing male lover prepared to devote himself to his wife's career, generates problems of its own, running as it does against literary codes of acceptable and attractive masculinity.¹²

This conflict between romance and vocation, indeed, is the subject of Aurora's and Romney's great argument in book 2. Romney asks his cousin to abandon poetry to help him in his social projects with her love and “fellowship / Through bitter duties” (2.354-55), explaining that, as a woman, she is “weak for art” but “strong / For life and duty” (2.372-75). Aurora, in her defiant reply, contrasts herself with the kind of woman likely to respond to such a plea to “Love and work with me”:

                                        Women of a softer mood,
Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life,
Will sometimes hear only the first word, love,
And catch up with it any sort of work,
Indifferent, so that dear love go with it.

(2.443-47)

Such women may make “heaven's saints” (2.450)—not to mention good heroines for male novels—but their way is at odds with Aurora's own developmental agenda as a would-be artist: as she insists to Romney,

                                        me your work
Is not the best for,—nor your love the best,
Nor able to commend the kind of work
For love's sake merely. Ah, you force me, sir,
To be over-bold in speaking of myself:
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, though your world
Were twice as wretched as you represent
Most serious work, most necessary work.

(2.450-59)

We can see then, why it was important for Aurora to reject Romney at the time of his proposal—he demands her vocation with her love, and she is only—perhaps—prepared to give him the latter. But why should it be important to convince the reader, with all the authority of a retrospective narrator, that she “loved him not,—nor then, nor since, / Nor ever”? (2.713-14).

Narrators, of course, do more than tell the reader where things are heading; they also have to suggest what they will mean, and the two functions are closely intertwined. The stopping point of a novel becomes its center of value as well, the telos of a character's adventures—a convergence neatly signaled by the dual meaning of the term end. The point of view at which a hero or heroine arrives will tend, by its mere position, to represent the truth, in relation to which earlier deviations can be seen as error. Part of what a retrospective first-person narrator does, then, in establishing a relationship between events narrated and the end of the novel, is to signal a state of error—as David Copperfield does, for example, through his parodic account of his infatuation with Dora.

This pattern of making the end point a center of value from which all previous positions are seen as error is readily apparent at the end of Aurora Leigh. After many misunderstandings, both trivial and profound, Aurora and Romney are united, and the meaning of their lives is seen retroactively to lie in the struggle to bring art, love, and social improvement into relation with each other—a struggle that achieves symbolic success in their marriage. This truth established, both lovers rush to attribute all previous deviations from it to grievous error. Even before the clearing away of imagined obstacles on both sides has made it possible for Aurora and Romney to declare their love, Aurora suggests that, while she was “right upon the whole” (8.536) about the social value of art, she may have been wrong to reject him quite so vehemently (8.496-99).

By the time their love has been declared, Aurora's recantation of her birthday speech is virtually complete. She was “wrong in most,” she confesses: wrong to see his love for her as selfish or limited, to question his “power to judge / For me, Aurora” (9.630-31), and to insist on using her own gifts “according to my pleasure and my choice” (9.633). In the course of this repudiation, Aurora ultimately turns her back on all the most forcefully stated claims of that original speech: she wishes now that she had been “a woman like the rest / A simple woman who believes in love” (9.660-61) and castigates herself for having taken offense that Romney

                                        sought a wife
To use … to use! O Romney, O my love,
I am changed since then, changed wholly,—for indeed
If now you'd stoop so low to take my love
And use it roughly, without stint or spare,
As men use common things with more behind
(And in this, ever would be more behind)
To any mean and ordinary end,—
The joy would set me like a star, in heaven,
So high up, I would shine because of height
And not of virtue.

(9.671-81)

Such a full repudiation of the position taken in her youth may be necessary given the symbolic weight Aurora and Romney carry in the poem. As mere individuals, they might reasonably be seen as having only now changed and matured to the point where it was possible for them to love each other, but as representatives of the artist and the social idealist, their love needs to be seen as inevitable, foreordained. Aurora must have “always loved” Romney, because art must always need the connection to human strivings that he represents. That this should apparently entail embracing a position of feminine subservience to her husband's aims can be better understood in the light of Deirdre David's work on Barrett Browning's beliefs about the social role of the woman artist, beliefs David tellingly argues are more conservative than feminist critics have been willing to acknowledge.¹³

The thoroughness of Aurora's repudiation here of her earlier choice to reject Romney in favor of her artistic vocation should also begin to make clear how Aurora Leigh's peculiar narrative form came about. It is difficult to imagine how the Aurora of the conclusion could have narrated the scene in the garden with anything like the emphasis and conviction it deserved. It would have to emerge as the foolish and arrogant mistake she now believes it to be—to be represented, at best, with the gentle, distancing irony David Copperfield employs toward his own early errors. But in fact, Aurora's early conviction that art matters more than Romney is crucial to her development—not simply as an erroneous and misguided position the discovery of which will later make her repose more gladly in the truth; it is also the precondition of her development as an artist, and hence what makes possible the later position from which she can repudiate it. However mistaken Aurora may be about the state of her own unconscious feelings for Romney, she seems essentially right in her assessment of her own vocational needs: the poem itself is proof of that. She is right, too, in seeing marriage to Romney as likely to compromise seriously her artistic aspirations: while Aurora later casts herself as having unfairly distorted Romney's good intentions (as indeed she later often does), his own words here condemn him as arrogantly dismissive of Aurora's artistic efforts or prospects, and contemptuous of any suggestions that she may have plans of her own for easing the world's miseries. He does not even glance at the book of her poetry he finds, convinced that, even if it is better than the average woman's work, it can still have little to offer:

The chances are that, being a woman, young
And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes,
You write as well … and ill … upon the whole,
As other women. If as well, what then?
If even a little better, … still, what then?

(2.144-48)

Romney here represents the whole weight of male social authority, discouraging women from writing by assuring them that anything they do will inevitably be second-rate. It is a position he takes up quite self-consciously, as he ventriloquizes for Aurora the kind of critical response she can expect for her work:

                                        “Oh excellent,
What grace, what facile turns, what fluent sweeps,
What delicate discernment … almost thought!
The book does honour to the sex, we hold.
Among our female authors we make room
For this fair writer, and congratulate
The country that produces in these times
Such women, competent to … spell.”

(2.236-43)

It is hence as symbolically necessary for Aurora to reject Romney the male critic at the outset, and prove herself independently as an artist, as it is at the end of the novel for her to realize she has “always” loved Romney the social idealist. Furthermore, to prevent the scene from being undercut by the undeniable foolishness of Aurora's position—she has been caught in the act of crowning herself with ivy and imagining herself as a great poet before she has fairly begun to create, and she defends her fledgling genius to Romney with all the high seriousness of someone who fully intends to become a great artist—it is important that the scene be narrated with all the authority of a now-accomplished artist, a later self who sees this moment, foolishness and all, as a crucially right choice in her own development.

Thus while the view from the conclusion would see Aurora's error as lying in her rejection of Romney—reunion with him being the telos of the novel as a whole—when the scene is narrated from a perspective that recognizes as an end the fulfillment of artistic talent, the configuration of error and truth is crucially different. The error now lies primarily in Aurora's foolish optimism about her own art. Writing “false poems” that she believes to be “true,” (1.1023) and accomplishing “mere lifeless imitations of live verse” (1.974), she sees the struggle of the artist as an easier one than her later self knows it to be, and crowns herself too soon. But even this foolishness is in some sense necessary for her later success: the bad verse is a useful apprenticeship, and without her artistic overconfidence she might never have braved the critical odds against the woman artist. Aurora's self-caricature in her account of her early artistic efforts is, significantly, as close to that of David Copperfield as anything in Aurora Leigh—it is the laughter of a narrator who sees in his or her earlier foolishness one's own best qualities: David's loving trustfulness, Aurora's artistic seriousness and aspiring soul.

What begins to emerge from Aurora Leigh, then, are two different kinds of story, which have in turn two different kinds of narration. The first, which corresponds roughly with the first four books of the poem, is the Künstlerroman. It is told as a fully conceived, retrospective narrative: as the reviewer says, “she had it all in her mind at that moment.” The form and subject here complement each other, the reader's sense of the narrator's conceptual control of her story, her authority over it, contributing as much to a belief in the tale's telos—successful authorship—as the events of the story itself. If we are aware of a potential counternarrative in her relations with Romney, it remains a dormant or subordinate one, precisely because of the narrator's conviction that it is tangential to the most important trajectory of her life: her development as an artist.

In book 5, the novel shifts both its subject matter and its mode of narration. At the opening of this book, Aurora makes her most forceful and coherent statement of what art in her age can and should be. She chides fellow poets for preferring a romanticized distant past to the heroism and beauty of the everyday present, speaking as someone confident both of her abilities and of her right to judge her fellow artists. Unsurprisingly, this section of the poem is frequently cited as Barrett Browning's own poetic manifesto. Thus, while Aurora expresses frustration with the shortcomings of her own artistic efforts, complaining that “what I do falls short of what I see” (5.345), it is clear that this is the frustration of the accomplished artist who cannot be satisfied with anything less than unattainable perfection. Indeed, even these frustrations, as they force Aurora to “set myself to art” (5.350), eventually issue forth in a work that Aurora implies is the long-awaited masterpiece: “Behold, at last, a book” (5.352).

But if Aurora's position as an artist is now as self-assured as it can be without casting doubt on her perfectionism, her emotional state is much more unclear. And as Aurora makes explicit in her discussion of her fellow poets Graham, Belmore, and Gage, the reasons for this have to do with the conflicts between her gender and her role as artist. While Aurora insists that she “never envied” these male poets for their “native gifts” or “popular applause” (5.505-17), she confesses to envying them for the adoring women who provide emotional support for their work and fill out the void in their personal lives: Belmore has a girl who, hearing him praised, “Smiles unaware as if a guardian saint / Smiled in her”; Gage's mother murmurs wonderingly, “Well done,” at each “prodigal review” of his new work, as unthinkingly proud of his poetry now as she was of his “childish spelling-book” years before, while Graham has “a wife who loves [him] so, / She half forgets, at moments, to be proud / Of being Graham's wife” (5.524-37).

Aurora herself suggests that the emotional lack she feels is that of orphanhood, but it is hard to see how either Aurora's silencing mother—whose only remembered words are “Hush—here's too much noise” (1.17)—or her melancholic, intellectual father could provide the kind of self-effacing, unconditional adoration these male poets receive from mother, lover, or wife.¹⁴ The passage points rather to Aurora's frustration at the gap her gender creates between artistic and emotional self-fulfillment—between the happy ending of a Künstlerroman and that of a love story.¹⁵ Indeed, in case we miss the connection, Aurora immediately shifts to a forcedly casual mention of the fact that she has “not seen Romney Leigh / Full eighteen months … add six, you get two years” (5.572-73). The passage thus makes an appropriate transition from one tale to the other—from the quest for artistic achievement and recognition to that for emotional fulfillment. The quest will lead her (unwittingly) first to Marian Erle, who with her “dog-like” (4.281) devotion seems a potential stand-in for the adoring women Aurora feels the lack of, and finally to Romney Leigh.

The discussion at the opening of book 5 not only marks the transition in subject matter from Künstlerroman to love story, it also, significantly, marks the switch to a different mode of narration. The peculiar account of time in the passage quoted above—with the poet apparently noting with ellipses a lapse of six months during which the manuscript had been abandoned literally midline—suggests a more immediate relation between the narrator and her tale. Immediately afterward, Aurora refers to “tonight['s]” events, and from here until the end of the novel, her narration approximates most closely to that of a journal, written, as she says at the end, “day by day” (9.725), sometimes in the immediacy of strong emotion—as when, after discovering Marian in Paris, she has to break off writing because her “hand's a-tremble” (6.416)—and sometimes with a degree of calm retrospection. Just as the retrospective narrative of the preceding portion of the novel-poem exemplifies the artistic control the acquisition of which it recounts, so here Aurora's more fragmented narrative reflects a certain lack of control and an absence of conscious purpose appropriate to her problematic relationship to the love plot.

Of course, the division between narrative modes is not absolute. As I have mentioned, there are buried strains in the early account of Aurora's dealings with Romney. The tensions between romantic involvement and artistic control show themselves in other ways with the introduction of Marian Erle and Lady Waldemar in books 3 and 4. From the beginning of book 3, in which the narrator lapses briefly into present tense to hint at her unhappiness—claiming that she has grown “cross” and “pettish” (3.35-36) for reasons she does not elaborate—Aurora's artistic self-confidence and determination begin to run parallel with an emotional dissatisfaction and even a certain self-distrust, as when she chides herself for failing to warn Romney and Marian about Lady Waldemar. This loss of control takes its most interesting artistic toll in the form of some curiously misused metaphors in book 4. In the first, Aurora attempts to account for her feeling of awkwardness with Romney by comparing the two of them to two clocks:

Perhaps we had lived too closely, to diverge
So absolutely: leave two clocks, they say,
Wound up to different hours, upon one shelf,
And slowly, through the interior wheels of each,
The blind mechanic motion sets itself
A-throb to feel out for the mutual time.

(4.420-25)

But, she goes on, “It was not so with us, indeed: while he / Struck midnight, I kept striking six at dawn” (4.426-27). The point of the metaphor seems to be to demonstrate its inapplicability to herself and Romney, as if its very inappropriateness would account for her discomfort.

Later, Aurora attempts to comfort Romney after Marian's disappearance by assuring him that Marian,

                                        “however lured from place,
Deceived in way, keeps pure in aim and heart
As snow that's drifted from the garden bank
To the open road.”

(4.1068-71)

Romney is quick to point out the flaw in her comparison:

“The figure's happy. Well—a dozen carts
And trampers will secure you presently
A fine white snow-drift. Leave it there, your snow:
Twill pass for soot ere sunset.”

(4.1072-75)

In both instances, Aurora introduces a comparison that seems curiously at odds with her intention, as each points to an end—in the first, reunion with Romney, in the second, defilement for Marian—that is the direct opposite of the situation it is intended to illuminate. Interestingly, the “mistake” in each metaphor lies not in Aurora's initial comparison but in the ending she assigns to its implicit “plot”: the clocks that should align themselves remain discrepant; the snow remains pure in a place where in fact it would be defiled. What is most significant about these mistaken metaphors is not simply the unconscious desires they presumably reveal (desires that the novel goes on to fulfill), but the fact that such desires should reveal themselves precisely in a lapse of artistic control—of the poet's power to make metaphors. The metaphors hence provide brief hints of a narrator not fully conscious of her own ends.

It is no coincidence that some of the most distinctive disturbances of Aurora's retrospective authority should be associated with Marian Erle and Lady Waldemar. Like Helen Burns and Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, the two figures represent Barrett Browning's engagement not only with the angel/whore dichotomy of Victorian culture, but with the artless/artful split that is its narratological equivalent. Initially the two figures appear to work to consolidate Aurora's status as master-narrator on a masculine model: Aurora appropriates and retells the artless Marian's story, highlighting its moral significance, broader social implications, and redemptive trajectory of plot in ways Marian is presumed to be unable to formulate for herself. Meanwhile, she frames the artful Lady Waldemar's speeches in terms that invite suspicious reading, calling attention to their duplicity and hidden “plots.” But unlike Helen and Bertha, Marian and Lady Waldemar both come to resist (with different degrees of success) their status as the feminine props of Aurora's narrative mastery, as both eventually offer narratives that explicitly contradict Aurora's readings of their characters, the meaning of their actions, and the appropriate endings of their plots. These resistant narratives not only disrupt Aurora's sense of narrative control (it is after one such episode, Marion's account of her rape, that Aurora confesses her “hand's a-tremble” as she writes), they also materially affect the end of Aurora's story: Marian's new self-understanding releases Romney from the obligation to marry her, while Lady Waldemar's embittered reflections help to reveal to Aurora the denied love between herself and Romney.

Aurora's eroded control over the ends of her narrative becomes more pronounced once the retrospective portion of the narrative stops. The relationship of events to the novel's ending—in other words, Aurora's continuing state of error—can no longer be signaled authoritatively by Aurora herself, as she now writes from a position of immersion in events rather than of confident hindsight. Instead, Aurora as narrator is continually revealed as unreliable, in error, both through her conspicuous repressions and denials regarding her feelings for Romney, and through the reversals in her dealings with Marian, in which she must confess to her own hasty misjudgments.

The best example of the former is Aurora's prolonged attempt to come to terms with Romney's (supposed) new engagement to Lady Waldemar, news of which she has picked up at Lord Howe's evening party. This section is apparently written immediately after her return—the party is referred to as having occurred “tonight”—and it shows Aurora in the very process of assessing and resolving her feelings by writing about them. Her reflections continually change direction, as she recognizes the significance of what she has already written and then pauses to redirect her thoughts. She opens, for example, with an effort to attribute her unhappiness after the event to a general discomfort with such occasions—“It always makes me sad to go abroad” (5.579)—but by the end of her poetic reproduction of the evening's conversation it has become clear to her that the real source of discomfort is Lady Waldemar:

                                                  The charming woman there—
This reckoning up and writing down her talk
Affects me singularly.

(5.1041-43)

Aurora goes on to attribute this to what she sees as Lady Waldemar's genius for indirect social torture, but eventually pauses again to reflect:

And after all now … why should I be pained
That Romney Leigh, my cousin, should espouse
This Lady Waldemar?

(5.1054-56)

From here she launches into an elaborate series of reflections on marriage, men, and Romney in particular, in an attempt to confront this “pain” and resign herself to the marriage. In the course of these, she examines and rejects every possible ground for objecting to Romney's marriage except the one that naturally presents itself to a reader—personal jealousy. That her attempt at resignation has ultimately failed is made clear by the broken, halting tone of her conclusion—

And then at worst,—if Romney loves her not,—
At worst—if he's incapable of love,
Which may be—then indeed, for such a man
Incapable of love, she's good enough;
For she, at worst too, is a woman still
And loves him … as the sort of woman can.

(5.1120-25)

—and by her sense of physical irritation and discomfort at the close: “My loose long hair began to burn and creep, / Alive to the very ends, about my knees” (5.1126-27).

The repression and confusion that this passage reflects, the alternating suggestion and denial of romantic interest in the man being discussed, make the narration here closest to that of the heroines of epistolary novels. As innocent girls, such narrators are expected to be unable to hide or repress their tender feelings; as well-bred young women, however, they are not supposed to acknowledge, or even be fully conscious of, romantic feelings that are not (yet) reciprocated or approved. To the extent that, like Clarissa, they are being presented as morally serious and intelligent, such heroines often go through the kind of elaborate self-questioning and efforts at resignation that we see here, but as in Aurora's case, these reflections are often at least as significant for what is not recognized or acknowledged as for what is—for what they witness to, rather than what they consciously intend to convey. Aurora has become a feminine narrator.

Such a narrator, as we have seen, necessarily has a fundamentally different relationship, to her story and to a reader, from the authoritative retrospective narrator to which we were initially introduced. In essence, we are asked to read against her more than with her. Instead of trusting the narrator to signal the shape her own life is to take, we focus on the gap between narrator and implied author, and trust the author to make the narrator betray herself, to signal the novel's telos between the lines of her own ignorance. And with the loss of the power of narrative ordering, Aurora also comes to seem less the plotter of her own fate and more its passive object; it is no coincidence that the end of the novel sees such a concentration of accidental misunderstandings, missed meetings, and other twists of fate. Inevitably, the novel's satisfactory resolution comes to seem more the doing of the author acting as deus ex machina than of the narrator.

Herein lies one of the most recalcitrant discomforts of Aurora Leigh. Even after its sources and purposes have been traced, the contradiction between Aurora's initial “I loved him not, nor then, nor since, nor ever” and her later “I loved you always” remains as unsettling to modern feminist readers as it was to that early reviewer, for it points to a deeper contradiction between Aurora's self-confident, bitingly insightful argument for her right to vocational self-determination and her abject retroactive repudiation of that right after her reunion with Romney.¹⁶ Barrett Browning puts this repudiation in a context that ensures that it is materially irrelevant to Aurora's fate, since it is matched (after she has made it) by Romney's own implicit disavowal of the right he earlier claimed to “use” Aurora for his own ends. Indeed, it is now he, moved by the power of her poetry, who will provide the kind of full-time emotional support for her work he once asked her to provide for his: “[W]ork for two,” he tells her, “As I … for two, shall love!” (9.911-12). I do not wish to underestimate the power and importance of this final vision of a nonhierarchical union between a man and a woman. But this balance is not Aurora's compromise. While Barrett Browning's plot balances, against Aurora's unconditional self-abasement to Romney, Romney's own change of heart, her artist-narrator cannot reaffirm, in the face of romantic fulfillment, her right to have held out for that balance—calling instead for women to “believe in love” as a power to overcome the romantic/vocational contradictions she has experienced. The shift from the story of Aurora's artistic achievement to that of her romantic fulfillment is accompanied by a shift to a feminized narrative mode that distances Aurora from the shaping of her own fate. Yet, significantly, the same narrative shift is what allows her earlier affirmation to remain within the novel-poem in all its original force, in the form of Aurora's initial retrospective narrative.

Nancy Miller suggests that “implausibilities” of plot in many women's novels represent efforts to express an “ambitious wish,” a “fantasy of power” whose expression is impossible within the patriarchal conventions of the novel, because those conventions permit to female heroines only plots based on erotic wish-fulfillment. “The inscription of this power,” she writes, “is not always easy to decipher,” because it is necessarily covert. “When these modalities of difference are perceived, they are generally called implausibilities. They are not perceived, or are misperceived, because the scripting of this fantasy does not bring the aesthetic ‘forepleasure’ Freud says fantasy scenarios inevitably bring: pleasure bound to recognition and identification, the ‘agreement’ Genette assigns to plausible narrative.”¹⁷ Miller's argument about the conventions that govern “plausible” plots could be extended to cover those that govern “consistent” narration, for, as we have seen, the narrative improprieties of Aurora Leigh served to fold into the work its plot of female ambition. Barrett Browning would not, given the conventions she had taken on in writing a novel-poem, throw away altogether the idea of marriage as the required telos of a young woman's story—nor even fully subordinate it to a “higher” aim of artistic achievement. Nor, apparently, could she allow her heroine-narrator the same kind of self-conscious control over the shaping of her romantic experience into narrative as she did over her development as an artist. But the mixed narration of Aurora Leigh did allow her to create a kind of double teleology for the novel, in which the struggle toward artistic independence and success, the plot of poetic “ambition,” could be kept relatively isolated from the undermining influence of the traditional love-story, with its emphasis on female passivity and lack of emotional or sexual self-knowledge, its insistence on loving self-abnegation as the proper “end” of female existence.

Aurora Leigh seems, on the whole, less uniformly successful than Jane Eyre in its challenge to the convention of feminine narration. But it is also more ambitious: Barrett Browning seeks—and apparently achieves—an explicitly public and preacherly authority for her artist-heroine, and at the same time engages more self-consciously and complexly with the counter-figures of the plotting woman and the artless victim, granting them, at least provisionally, the power to speak for themselves.

Notes

1. Mermin, Origins of a New Poetry, ch. 7; Friedman, “Gender and Genre Anxiety”; Stone, “Genre Subversion and Gender Inversion.” See also Cooper, Woman and Artist, ch. 6.

2. Radley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 125.

3. Castan, “Structural Problems,” 77. Castan's argument transfers to the female author the presumed incapacity for narrative ordering conventionally attributed to feminine narrators.

4. This is particularly true, of course, of a poet's Künstlerroman written in verse. According to Mermin, “the poetry … proves … by its energy, zest, and exuberance, the heroine's vocation” (Origins of a New Poetry, 215).

5. See Barthes, S/Z, 17-18.

6. See especially Cooper, Woman and Artist, and Zonana, “The Embodied Muse.”

7. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 1: 2-8. (Subsequently referenced parenthetically in the text.)

8. Dickens, David Copperfield, 1.

9. This is particularly the case in the last two books. As Castan establishes, although books 8 and 9 seem to provide an unbroken retrospective record of a single conversation between Aurora and Romney, Aurora makes various present-tense statements early in her narration of it that suggest she does yet not know what will emerge from the conversation later (“Structural Problems,” 76-77).

10. Review of Aurora Leigh, North American Review 85 (1857): 415-41.

11. There is also a veiled suggestion of sexual impropriety: the unsuspecting male reader is led astray and then “trifled with” by a woman whose ends are obscure.

12. Here, as in so many ways, Victorian life was more flexible than its art. Both Barrett Browning and George Eliot, at least, seem to have been able to maintain relationships with men who were substantial figures in their own right without either sacrificing their own commitment to their art or impugning their companions' masculinity.

13. David, “Woman's Art as Servant of Patriarchy,” 143-58.

14. Leighton sees this passage as reflecting Aurora's obsession with her absent father, but notes that the invocation “ring[s] false” (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 130-31).

15. Cooper argues that the passage demonstrates to Aurora “her inability to give and take as the male poets … can from their mistresses or wives,” and hence “the fact that love is essential for art” (Woman and Artist, 169-70). But again, these do not seem like relationships of “give and take” so much as examples of women's selfless adoration.

16. Cooper, acknowledging the discomfort critics such as Kaplan, Gilbert and Gubar, and Showalter have felt with this apparent capitulation, argues that it represents “a logical stage in her maturation,” which Aurora eventually “reject[s]” as a “delusion” (Woman and Artist, 183-84). But this rejection is never indicated in the poem.

17. Nancy K. Miller, “Emphasis Added,” 41-42.

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974.

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. Ed. Cora Kaplan. London: Women's Press, 1978.

Castan, C. “Structural Problems and the Poetry of Aurora Leigh.” Browning Society Notes 7 (1977): 73-81.

Cooper, Helen. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Woman and Artist. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989.

Friedman, Susan. “Gender and Genre Anxiety: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H. D. as Epic Poets.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5 (1986): 203-28.

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980.

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979.

Leighton, Angela. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1986.

Mermin, Dorothy. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989.

Miller, Nancy K. “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction.” PMLA 96 (1981): 36-48.

Radley, Virginia. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. New York: Twayne, 1972, 125.

Stone, Marjorie. “Genre Subversion and Gender Inversion: The Princess and Aurora Leigh.” Victorian Poetry 25 (1987): 101-27.