SOURCE: Tucker, Herbert F. “Aurora Leigh: Epic Solutions to Novel Ends.” In Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, edited by Alison Booth, pp. 62-85. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.

[In the following essay, Tucker examines the “epicizing conventions” in Aurora Leigh, discussing principles of structure, narrative technique, and the dichotomy between the human and the divine.]

Like it or not—and readers have long done both—Aurora Leigh is a work of overwhelming fluency. It is the fitting masterpiece of a prolific poet and tireless correspondent who stands out as having lived, even more than other first-generation Victorians, with pen in hand. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's magnum opus floods the reader with a tide of writing that feels by turns irresistible and interminable, and that will settle for no level but its own. At once a veiled autobiography, a reluctant novel, and an aspiring epic, this 1856 work with the nondescript subtitle “A Poem” overflows the generic categories in which interpretation would contain it. Accordingly, the case this essay makes for reading the poem as an epic is advanced in a provisional and heuristic spirit. It was in such a spirit, after all, that Barrett Browning herself treated epic: like other nineteenth-century poets, she came to the genre as one that posed as many questions as it answered, including questions about how its antique conventions might inform an era self-consciously novel and normatively novelistic. A consideration of certain epicizing conventions in Aurora Leigh—its ring structure, the procession of its narrative point of view, its coordination of cosmos with psyche through images of fluid dissolution—can show how Barrett Browning found in these conventions a variety of means for loosening the realist novel's grip on Victorian narrative as a shaper of women's lives.¹

“Of writing many books there is no end.”² Barrett Browning derives this epigraphic motto in already perfect pentameter from the King James version of Ecclesiastes 12:12. But where the Preacher there draws to his end by lamenting the endless task of making books, Aurora Leigh dawns on her reader by celebrating the initiative power of writing them. Writing is Aurora's life: within the narrative, it provides her living as a professional poet whose vocation and career emplot her existence; at the level of narration, writing constitutes the dynamic medium whereby her voluble subjectivity melts away all impediments to its flow. As the poem makes plain and practically all recent criticism confirms, such impediments chiefly arise from the limits that patriarchy sets to expression in narrative, mythological, and metaphorical form. Aurora's preferred term for these limits is “conventions” (16/1.480), a term with both literary and social meanings; and it is where Aurora Leigh most conspicuously breaks with conventions of patriarchy that the poem reaches its most interesting literary and social conclusions, and most effectively articulates an alternatively epic, Victorian-feminist program for achieving the modern ends of writing.

I

Of writing many books there is no end, yet structurally Aurora Leigh is a book comprising many books, all of which do end. The nine-book format of the poem both alludes to the conventional divisions of epic—spotlighted at dead center in a visiting American's “epic, in twelve parts” (183/5.829)—and violates those divisions. For the variously divisible number twelve Barrett Browning substitutes the odd square nine, a triad trebled. Yet the division into threes that standard epic proportioning might make us expect seems to be deliberately frustrated.³ The tripartite breaks between books 3 and 4 and books 6 and 7 are scarcely breaks at all: mere pauses for breath within the melodramatic narrative of Marian Erle's turbulent life, they constitute the smoothest and most compelling interbook transitions of the entire work. This willful narrative enjambment suggests that a different principle of organization may be at work, one that Aurora's undisguised contempt for motives of calculation in any form would also independently tend to endorse—a principle arising less from computational equivalence than from geometrical symmetry. And indeed, for all its impetuosity of manner the poem's many books do fit firmly into a nested pattern of concentric rings, which not only upholds the long narrative but grounds it in a venerable epic tradition of compositional balance.

As this formal symmetry has not received critical notice, an overview of the narrative structure may help bring it into focus here. In books 1 and 2 Aurora tells how her Italian childhood and English education have bred in her such independence of spirit that she has rejected her rich cousin Romney Leigh twice, first as a husband and then as a patron. The corresponding books 8 and 9, set once again in Italy, describe the two principals' reconciliation as adults, through a process of mutual education that culminates in their engagement to marry at last and to collaborate in the work of social reform—but now along inspirationist lines more or less dictated by Aurora to a Romney whose physical blinding has purged his inward vision into harmony with hers. Within this outer structural ring, an inner ring comprising books 3-4 and 6-7 is devoted to the trials of Marian Erle, an abused working-class daughter and emigrée unwed mother of stainless virtue whom Aurora befriends and later protects. Concurrently with the unfolding of Marian's story, the action moves Aurora from the countryside into the center of the London publishing world, and then out again to the Continent, in flight from that cultural center and the unfulfilling career it has come to stand for. At the professional center of Aurora's life, and at the structural center of her poem, transpires the most experimental of her nine epic books, a sui-generis hybrid whose balanced halves epitomize the symmetrical principle governing the whole, even as they illustrate the modern poet's most novel concerns. The first half of book 5 is a theoretical meditation on the generic means and ends of contemporary writing, the second an intensely novelistic rendition of that drawing-room life into which Barrett Browning declared her ambition to dispatch the Victorian muse.⁴

The three-ring circus of Aurora Leigh is organized, then, not according to the arithmetical (and rather Romneyesque) proportions dear to analysts of written epic since Virgil, but according to an older principle of symmetrical ring composition that is arguably derived from Homeric examples. Barrett Browning's allegiance to Homer is a matter of early and constant record, up to and including Aurora's loyalist, orthographically scornful dismissal of F. A. Wolf as an “atheist” deconstructor of Homer's personal authority (197/5.1245-54: “The kissing Judas, Wolff” [sic]). That Barrett Browning adopted for this most fluently written of Victorian epics a principle suited to the oral conditions of bardic improvisation betokens the compositional fluency of her text, rather than its published writtenness. It is a large structural sign of her concentration on the spontaneity of the writing act, as it counteracts the predestinating force of a novelistic plot and counterbalances the weight of formal closure.

This improvisatory design leads Barrett Browning to a more radical departure from the master practices of Victorian narrative: I mean the peculiar mobility that Aurora's freely shifting verb tenses bestow on the temporal perspective she writes from. At the outset, after some lines of conventional salutation in the present tense, Aurora embarks on the history of her youth: “I write. My mother was a Florentine …” (2/1.29). The copresence of different tenses in this story-launching line forecasts the ease with which Aurora will move back and forth between narrated past and narratorial present. This shuttling movement persists across books 1 and 2, always in conformity with a well-established convention of first-person diegesis. Writers since Augustine have constructed the autobiographical subject's development along an asymptotic narrative line, which continuously approaches a hypothetically frozen moment of present consciousness. The “now” of the writing subject stands at the end of the autobiographical curve, being at once its temporal terminus, its point of retrospective vantage, and the locus that finally embodies its thematic and psychological conclusions.

Books 1 and 2 observe this autobiographical convention, as do the corresponding books 8 and 9. The first pair of books cover two decades, the last pair two hours; each pair is narrated (with a signal late exception to which I shall return) from a fixed point of clear retrospect. It is not at all clear, however, that this point is the same in both instances. For one of the anomalies of Barrett Browning's narrative practice in Aurora Leigh is the temporal procession of its point of view. The five middle books of the poem repeatedly set the narrative vantage point in forward motion, according to an irregular installment plan that may ultimately be as principled as it initially seems to be capricious. Establishing Aurora's autobiographical activity in a succession of distinctly realized present contexts, the poem destabilizes the fixed perspective of conventional first-person narrative and supplants autobiographical retrospect by diaristic intermittency. Narratizing its own composition, Aurora Leigh renders elastic the relation of the writing present to the written past, and thereby signifies the poet's unconventional freedom.⁵

This process begins with the opening pages of book 3, when after meditating on the need to gird her loins for the unexpected, Aurora takes her own advice and—from the surprised reader's standpoint—does a quite unexpected thing: “Leave the lamp, Susan, and go up to bed. / The room does very well; I have to write” (78/3.25-26). In dismissing her maidservant and introducing a specific context for the writing act, Aurora dismisses the supports of conventional autobiography, and supplants a hypostatized present by an actual, mobile one. From this new point—or along the new line that a moving point describes—she plunges into several pages of reflection on her current circumstances as an independent writer in London. When Aurora resumes her narrative (“I bear on my broken tale” [82/3.156]), she returns to where she has ended book 2, with her parting from Romney “seven years ago” (82/3.146; 77/2.1238). Meanwhile, though, her lengthy interlude of dramatized writing has introduced a narratorial present quite different from the one implied by books 1 and 2. The grammatical tense remains the same, but a shift has taken place in what a grammarian would call the aspect of the verb: the “now” from which Aurora has surveyed her youth in books 1 and 2 and the “now” of book 3, in which she shoos Susan off and tears into today's mail, cannot be identical.

The rest of book 3 and all of book 4 revert to a conventional narrative mode that brings the story several years closer to the narratorial present, rehearsing the utopian marriage engagement and catastrophically failed wedding of Romney and Marian, and concluding like book 2 with another apparently terminal parting between Romney and Aurora. But then, as by claustrophobic reaction against the threat of marriage-plot enclosure that Romney still very much represents, book 5 opens as book 3 has done: the narrative somersaults ahead of itself into a present saturated with writerly circumstance. For some twenty pages Aurora conducts a richly digressive discussion of the contemporary situation of the Victorian writer: night thoughts that are themselves fittingly situated in the context of her solitary return from an aggressively contemporary soirée of book talk “Among the lights and talkers at Lord Howe's” (175/5.581). Not only does the poem jump into the present, as at the start of book 3; it jumps, without quite announcing the fact, into a different present. For even within the generous margins of tolerance enjoyed during the age of Wuthering Heights and Lord Jim, it is incredible that Aurora should have written all of books 3-5 at a single sitting after a long evening out. If we apply to the scene of writing the same canons of verisimilitude that book 5 theoretically and practically invokes, we must assume that the night of Lord Howe's party is later than the night on which Susan was sent up to bed in book 3. Recognizing that the moment of Aurora's writerly fluency must itself be in flux, we encounter a flaw in the conventional narrative foundation that has seemed to ground the text thus far. This recognition is reinforced by the fluidity of Aurora's verb tenses later in book 5, as she slips back into the past to describe the composition of an accusing letter to her false friend Lady Waldemar (193/5.1126), concludes this description in the narrative present (194/5.1157), and then goes on into present-tense prolepsis with her plans to leave London for Italy (195/5.1190). The temporal ice once broken, the narrative in books 6 and 7 proceeds to migrate between approaching past and advancing present tenses as freely as Aurora's briefcase travels from London to Paris to Florence.⁶

This mobility of narrative aspect draws on several of the generic traditions in which Aurora Leigh participates. Within the tradition of the novel, the work plays the conventions of perfect omniscience against those of imperfect epistolary intermittency. Within the tradition of autobiography, it exploits similar alternatives: between the standard, postmortem mode of autobiographical finish and the serial mode of the diarist shaping forth a life in running installments. All of these fictional and autobiographical options were available to authors by the 1850s, although the more temporally stabilized option within each genre had become the Victorian norm. More deviantly transient forms of narrative, however, held a special place in traditions of women's writing. Barrett Browning was better versed in these traditions than any other major poet of her day, and it was her feminist strategy in Aurora Leigh to apply their conventions as leverage against the norm.⁷ Her signal originality lay where Victorian originality so often lay, in the arts of compromise: in juggling diegetic modes that alternately offered comprehensive and incremental ways of making narrative sense.

This most original narratological feature of Aurora Leigh may also be its most traditional, if we look past novel and autobiography to epic. For epic offered nineteenth-century writers a set of storytelling conventions that were arguably more flexible than those of popular prose forms like fiction, (auto)biography, and history. From Homeric rudiments, writers of epic from Virgil to Milton and Wordsworth had with increasing address developed means of playing against one another the different immediacies of present-tense narration and of invocation or apostrophe. Where epic paused from singing the story to sing about the song instead, and urged not the hero's concerns but the poet's, it made an opening that Barrett Browning was quick to occupy and distend for purposes of her own. One of the ways in which she feminized so famously masculine a genre was by exploiting internal differences between its narrative and narratorial, epic and poetic, registers. She found in epic models a traditional means to an untraditional, genuinely novel end, by crossing the linear plot of the Künstlerroman with desultory devices drawn from women's traditions of epistolary and diaristic narrative.

The result is an upbeat narrative that plays in two time signatures concurrently. Against the meter of a large, symmetrical structure of books, Aurora Leigh counterpoints the wayward rhythm of an improvisatory, spontaneously regenerated writing act. This narrative syncopation discloses a subversive motive with respect to the sexual politics of domestic fictional realism. For the structural shape of Barrett Browning's nine books underscores, on the whole, the drive toward a conventionally novelistic denouement in marriage. More often than not, individual books end with thoughts of Romney and his marital prospects, which tilt the whole plot in the direction of a generically foregone conclusion. But the counterpointed action of Aurora's fluent writing resists that plot and its determinations, by repeatedly foregrounding Aurora's freedom to write when and as she sees fit. This independence emerges nowhere more clearly than in a remarkable passage, near the end of the poem, that punctuates and deflates what would be the most conventional moment of a domestic romance, the leading man's declaration of that love which is marital possession:

But what he said.. I have written day by day,
With somewhat even writing. Did I think
That such a passionate rain would intercept
And dash this last page? What he said, indeed,
I fain would write it down here like the rest.

(343/9.725-29)

This metapoetic review fans out the hypostatized autobiographical present into a subtle spectrum of tenses discriminating among “what he said,” what “I have written” and what “I fain would write.” More precisely, the passage discriminates among successive and competing moods: what Aurora felt on the spot at Romney's words, what she thought two moments ago she would write about that remembered feeling, what she found herself feeling a moment later about that intended writing, and what she now has in mind to write next (or, just as telling, not to write). The flow of Aurora's tears has checked her narrative but lubricated her writing: the flow of ink goes on. Tears “dash” the “last page”—which is not really the last, there being another ten pages in store—that prolongation being part of Barrett Browning's point and—if we recall her punctuational fondness for the dash—part of the point of her pointing. She prints no dash, but instead her favorite equivalent, the mark of elliptical aposiopesis (“..”).⁸ Throughout Barrett Browning's poetry and correspondence this idiosyncratic mark indicates not a double stop but a half stop, a pause promising continuation. And the way Aurora weeps on, as well as in, this intensely scripted passage lets us envision two still-wet points of ink blurred into an accidental dash. Dashing the autobiographical page her pen dashes across, Aurora's “passionate rain” of tears makes the mobilization of her viewpoint a graphically textual event.

Substituting what she writes in the moving present for what Romney said in an emotional past, Aurora so conjugates narratorial present with narrated history as to wrest from her mate the conjugal authority bestowed on him by Victorian patriarchy. This maneuver is perfectly in keeping with the triumphal character of books 8 and 9. The long final dialogue there gets underway with Romney's adoring recitation of leading ideas from Aurora's latest publication, her own famous last words in print. The dialogue concludes as she reveals to his humiliated blindness, in tropes from the book of Revelation, the spiritual meaning of the brightening colors of the dawn, in what amounts to an anagogical gloss on her own name. Romney's last words, “he shall make all new” (350/9.949), no doubt inspire Aurora's ensuing appropriation of the imagery of Revelation 21. But even where the emphatically terminal words of Scripture are at issue, there is evidently no end of ways to have the last word. Romney intends a divinely sponsored institution of his own program for “New churches, new oeconomies, new laws” (350/9.947); Aurora cleaves instead to the autobiographer's program of self-reading, and earns that program a place on the agenda of Victorian epic. She herself becomes, in heralding its emergence, the dawning New Jerusalem, the city that may be of God and man but that is a woman. It is finally Aurora who “makes all new,” as she has done throughout the poem by renewing the lived past in the mobile now of her writing.

II

To envision a new heaven and new earth is to redraw the horizon where divine and human spheres meet. One of Barrett Browning's most obvious departures from the conventions of Victorian fiction is the zeal with which she undertakes the joint epic functions of cosmology and theodicy, expanding the secular and institutional horizons of the novel to embrace a forthrightly spiritual and ideological task of cultural redefinition.⁹ Much as the narrative innovations of Aurora Leigh keep opening the interval between past and present in order to extend the life of writing and to procrastinate its heroine's enclosure, so its epic mythology sets the action within a religious horizon that is both distinctly visionary and flexibly revisionary. Often, indeed, Barrett Browning's tropes of dissolution and absorption imagine this ultimate circumference as a space that is itself in flux. Such tropes erode the very concept of the fixed boundary, and accordingly problematize other dividing lines—of genre, of gender, of identity—within the world they encompass. Barrett Browning in one sense blurs the normative demarcations and hierarchies of traditional epic; in another sense, though, she keeps faith with the epic poet's obligation to harmonize ultimacy with immediacy, macrocosm with microcosm: to give imaginative currency to a fluid universe that sponsors and nourishes the fluency of her heroic narrative.

Aurora repeatedly situates herself within a natural world whose physical horizon is liquid, or better yet deliquescent. Newly removed from Italy to her aunt's country home in England, she salves her disappointment at the tame landscape there by finding a vista where outlines melt and run together. Out her chamber window she observes

                                                                                                                                                      the lawn,
Which, after sweeping broadly round the house,
Went trickling through the shrubberies in a stream
Of tender turf, and wore and lost itself
Among the acacias, over which, you saw
The irregular line of elms by the deep lane
Which stopt the grounds and dammed the overflow
Of arbutus and laurel.

(19/1.581-88)

This liquefied landscape ends in “A promontory without water” that yet can seem all water: “You could not catch it if the days were thick, / Or took it for a cloud” (20/1.603-4). Aurora later delights in Paris as a city that “swims in verdure, beautiful / As Venice on the waters” (201/6.89-90). And she sets the scene for her final interview with Romney by imagining Florence at dusk as a submarine city, “filled up” and “flooded” with “transparent shadows,” “As some drowned city in some enchanted sea” (281/8.36-38).

Of all such liquid panoramas, Aurora might say, as she says of the first, “I sat alone, and drew the blessing in / Of all that nature” (21/1.650-51). This and comparable images of absorption figure Aurora as nature's nursling daughter, feeding on the physical earth as on a maternal body that is female like her own: “The earth, / The body of our body, the green earth, / Indubitably human” (160/5.116-18). This nurturant nature answers to the “mother-want about the world” that Aurora has felt since her own mother's death (2/1.40), and that she particularly associates with the mammary forms of Italian mountain scenery.¹⁰ Anticipating her return to the matria, she asks if the hills there feel “The urgency and yearning of my soul, / As sleeping mothers feel the sucking babe / And smile” (198/5.1269-71). From the “multitudinous mountains,” “panting from their full deep hearts / Beneath the influent heavens,” Aurora expects “communion” (20/1.622-26). But as we have seen, she also knows how to find communion elsewhere—wherever, in town or country, she can revive the sense of fluency in which giving merges with receiving and boundaries dissolve:

I had relations in the Unseen, and drew
The elemental nutriment and heat
From nature, as earth feels the sun at nights,
Or as a babe sucks surely in the dark.

(15/1.473-76)

“The Unseen” is not the unimaginable, although as usual in Aurora Leigh the imagery in which it is apprehended involves sensory force instead of visual form. The unabashed regressiveness of such “unscrupulously epic” images (163/5.214) often asserts “relations” like those Aurora prizes here. Such relations, as against the familial relations privileged in domestic fiction, challenge realism's one-way notions about the linear production of effects from causes and the bearing of mythic origins on cultural ends.

What God does this poem evoke, and what is its God's gender? At the level of epic theodicy, Barrett Browning vacillates between the patriarchal Christianity that ruled her father's house and an alternative theology grounded in the feminine, the bodily, the unspoken but fluently felt. The poem abounds in daring figurations of the cosmic feminine, as when the originality of a fresh genesis and the reverend music of the spheres conjoin in “mother's breasts, / Which, round the new made creatures hanging there, / Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres” (157/5.16-18). But more daring than this alternative cosmology is the very fact of gender alternation within the poem's images for the divine. The mythopoeic undulation of Aurora Leigh between male and female conceptions of deity suits an epic cosmos whose angelic machinery is, like its inspiring muse, the impulse intuitively known. “We feel it quicken in the dark sometimes”; “those dumb motions of imperfect life / Are oracles of vital Deity” (27/1.820, 822-23). Barrett Browning keeps her poem inviolable by conventions—as Aurora keeps her written life—through opposing to patriarchy, not matriarchy, but what might be called matrentelechy: the indwelling force of an organically evolving order. Patriarchy mystifies original spirit by positing a distant and arbitrary archē that entails fixed cosmic and historical ends; matriarchy, properly speaking, only changes the gender of this structure without dismantling its hierarchy. Barrett Browning's matrentelechy proposes instead an oscillating continuum of being, “the body proving spirit” (300/8.624). In Aurora's cosmos as in her narrative, the point of origination is always processive, working out an end that is never manifest (“motions of imperfect life”), yet is perpetually present.

Aurora's “vital Deity” becomes most fully present in several striking passages that confuse the issue of theological gender, and finally dissolve it altogether.

                                                                                                    What, if even God
Were chiefly God by living out Himself
To an individualism of the Infinite,
Eterne, intense, profuse,—still throwing up
The golden spray of multitudinous worlds
In measure to the proclive weight and rush
Of his inner nature,—the spontaneous love
Still proof and outflow of spontaneous life?

(101/3.750-57)

There is no mistaking this cosmic ejaculator's masculinity, which may draw inspiration from a painting of Danae's visitation by Jove on which Aurora's friend Vincent Carrington has been working. But to think of the patriarchal Jove is to appreciate the comparatively feminine aspect of Barrett Browning's fecund creator God, who brings forth life from within and sustains it by a perpetual, anarchic “outflow”—no Logos, but rather a wordless issue without beginning or end. That “the Infinite” takes on “Himself” a masculine form seems nearly an afterthought, a belated and casually conventional manifestation of an essence anterior to gender difference. So primal a divinity is very close to the God that Marian Erle has come to know as a “grand blind Love,” a “skyey father and mother both in one” (106/3.898-99). It also anticipates the remarkable image that begins book 5:

Aurora Leigh, be humble. Shall I hope
To speak my poems in mysterious tune
With man and nature,—with the lava-lymph
That trickles from successive galaxies
Still drop by drop adown the finger of God,
In still new worlds?

(157/5.1-6)¹¹

From the division into male and female, “man and nature,” Aurora's cosmological imagination travels upstream along God's gender-neutral “finger” to a protoplasmic “lava-lymph.” This ethereal prima materia feels sexual without being gendered; like the sacramental “strain / Of sexual passion” and “great outgoings of ecstatic souls” in the lines that follow, the metaphysical riddle of creation is for Aurora a matter of sensually fluid dynamics. Strategically positioned at mid epic, the entire passage constitutes an invocation of the power to write.¹² By proposing a processive creation that holds gender in solution, Aurora both universalizes and primes what it makes more than the usual sense here to call the creative flow.

III

To put her writing “in mysterious tune” with a divine fluency is the aim of Aurora's poetics. To identify her self with her poetic creativity is the correlative aim of her story. The last obstacle to these aims is also their initial prerequisite: Aurora's achievement of autonomous personhood. Fashioning a distinct and resistant self is a task entailed on her, as books 1 and 2 amply show, by her presumptively dependent status as a woman in Victorian society. She must again and again affirm her independence, and must indeed harden it, if she is to have any to speak of—all the more if she is to survive as a writer in a publishing world where men set the terms. By the second half of the poem, however, Aurora finds these survival skills turning her fortified selfhood into a prison that is barely preferable to the constraining female roles she has labored to resist.

A way opens out of this self-induced enclosure through a return to the creative process that has informed Aurora's early education and that continues to sustain her maturity. Early training under her scholarly father's eye has inoculated her against the seductions of intellectual system: “He sent the schools to school” (7/1.194). But in the realm of Romantic poetry, where autodidacticism is the great commandment, Aurora experiences an independence without defensiveness. Left on her own, she drowns in poetic influence many times over, yet emerges a curiously fulfilled and resolute survivor. Immersion in the “influent odours” of her beloved poets at first causes her to write what she sees in hindsight as “lifeless imitations” and “counterfeiting epics” (29/1.887; 31/1.974, 990). Yet she also sees how influence and inspiration at their best are correlative: books profit readers most when “We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge / Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound / Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth” (23/1.706-8). This paradoxically glorious self-oblivion commingles reading with writing, and passion with action: “Being acted on and acting seem the same” (31/1.968). And the creative play of inundation with independence during Aurora's early poetic development provides a working model to which she can later turn for help in a mid-life crisis of insolvent selfhood.¹³

To be sure, an idealizing theory of impassioned reading lets Barrett Browning hide a multitude of sins: the frequent derivativeness of her Romantic rhetoric; the thorny question of Aurora's wholesale mediation of the narratives of Marian Erle (122/4.151-56); or the severe limitation of her social sympathies with life beyond the pale of bourgeois gentility.¹⁴ Still, such a theory constitutes a poetics fully consistent with the narrative innovations of Aurora Leigh, with its mythological epic framework, and with its heroine's development from defensive self-enclosure toward creative openness. While this general pattern of psychological development gives the plot a resolutely conventional Victorian profile, it is also freshly figured, and significantly qualified, in a specific pattern of images that recapitulate the poem's cosmic fluidities at the level of the individual subject. The recurrent metaphor of a jewel or crystal melting in a liquid medium—typically a pearl in wine—serves both to define Aurora's social and psychological options and to suspend the very questions of definition and choice.

The meltdown metaphor is first introduced when Lady Waldemar, the poem's great mistress of conventions, looks askance at Romney's faux pas in engaging to marry Marian, in whom “the lineal pearl / And pride of all your lofty race of Leighs / Is destined to solution” (99/3.681-83). Pearls occur in nature as means of organic defense; this makes them apt figures for the defensive secretion of “pride” that gives to this and kindred images in the poem a common denominator.¹⁵ The breakdown of pride during the second half of the poem forms a moral action that is eminently Victorian, but that becomes more interesting when regarded as a psychological project: the reconception of identity as a dynamically interactive process rather than a freestanding construction. Solution need not denote a destiny or conclusion, as Lady Waldemar would have it. More faithfully and technically observed, it involves the reaction of a solvent with a solute. From this scientifically derived model for chemical solutions—a process of mutual reagency—Barrett Browning derives a model for psychic solutions as well.

As the poem develops, this model gathers increasing force with successive permutations of the pearl/wine trope. It next comes back to Aurora in book 5, when the prospect of union between Romney and Lady Waldemar reminds her of men's and women's differing motives for marriage:

                                                            Where we yearn to lose ourselves
And melt like white pearls in another's wine,
He seeks to double himself by what he loves,
And make his drink more costly by our pearls.

(191/5.1078-81)

Aurora recurs to Lady Waldemar's earlier metaphor for marriage—prompted no doubt by the lady's spectacular décolletage at Lord Howe's party and rope of “pearls, drowned out of sight in milk” (176/5.620)—but she employs the metaphor with a difference. In moving from class politics to sexual politics, Aurora touches on a subject that always awakens her sense of justice. Accordingly, her image does better justice than Lady Waldemar's to both reagents in the process of solution, attending equally to either side in the economy of loss and gain. Stung by a rumor she hates to believe, Aurora sustains her usual wry tone; but the metaphor she remembers is now more wholly imagined and fair-mindedly explored.

Fair-mindedness is a theme that organizes the next book, where Aurora's discovery of Marian in France tests and transforms her conception of womanhood, and thus of her own identity. This transformation occurs during an extended recognition scene in which images of absorption and dissolution play an important rhetorical role. When Aurora beholds Marian “drowning in the transport” of the infantine sublime made manifest in her son, she describes the mother “drinking him as wine” (217/6.599, 605). The “wine” in this tiny, ambiguous simile may represent either baby or mother: Marian partakes of her son as of the wine of life, in virtually holy communion; at the same time, this new mother melting for her child (and presumably still nursing) reacts to his pearly perfection the way wine reacts with or “drinks” pearls in the earlier images of solution. The intercommunion of nursling and mother here figures in little the saving ambivalence of the meltdown imagery that runs at large through the poem. Aurora's vicariously maternal rapture over this scene prepares for the rapture of sisterhood a few pages later, by helping to break down the social defenses whereby she has stigmatized Marian's lapse, as an unwed mother, from the sexual double standard. Righteously indignant at first, then “angry that she melted me” (221/6.725), Aurora finally lets go her socially inculcated convictions for the sake of deeper bonds of sisterly feeling: “convicted, broken utterly, / With woman's passion” (223/6.778-79).

With this early climax the melting of conventional barriers between social classes, and between conceptions of feminine virtue and vice, enables Aurora in book 7 to move on with Marian and her child to Italy, and there to establish the ménage à trois that is Barrett Browning's most originally imagined challenge to existing social arrangements. This exiles' experiment in alternative living appeals strongly to modern readers, who may wish Aurora happy there forever. But Aurora's Victorian happiness is not ours, and the Italian ménage seems to her increasingly a condition of exile from the life she most desires. Without question the gravitational force of Victorian novelistic conventions does much to attract Aurora to the normative heterosexual marriage she will embrace in book 9. But we may also make out Barrett Browning's case for this patently novelistic ending in poetic terms that are more lyrically private, and more epically cosmic, than the scope of Victorian domestic fiction could admit.¹⁶ Setting up house with Marian and her child is Aurora's bravest action; but in the passional world of Aurora Leigh, action is only half the story. Our epic heroine has very early identified creative joy as a state where “Being acted on and acting seem the same,” a state requiring, and rewarding, the capacity for generous surrender. Aurora knows well how vulnerable this capacity is to exploitation in the social sphere, when it takes the form of a cultivated gentlewoman's “faculty in everything / Of abdicating power in it” (14/1.441-42). Aurora Leigh aspires beyond the social sphere, however, as it aspires beyond the “superficial realism” of social fiction.¹⁷ Its later books seek a rapprochement with the power of abdication itself; and its plot resolution lies less in Romney's last proposal of marriage than in the cosmically attuned, epically resonant spiritual discipline that readies Aurora to accept it.¹⁸

Aurora may hear Romney's voice only after she has learned to still her own. This is melodramatically evident—at times all but farcically so—in the tangle of misunderstanding from which the couple spend most of books 8 and 9 getting clear. But Aurora's capacity there for self-correction through dialogue is largely due to a more meditative process of speechless inquisition that precedes her words with Romney. Her readiness for love entails the preparatory exercise of relinquishing the very identity she has worked so hard to define, an exercise that further entails relaxing her grip on the vocation with which she has so nearly identified herself. Excluded at the villa from the intimacy she sponsors between Marian and her son but may not share, exiled from the childhood she vainly tries to revisit at her father's former house, Aurora embraces the condition of exile and loss by willingly suspending her connection not just with English but with language itself. She prays that God will “only listen to the run and beat / Of this poor, passionate, helpless blood—And then / I lay and spoke not. But He heard in heaven” (278/7.1270-72). At this zero point of abandon, Aurora discovers a body language that “beats” before poetic rhythm and “runs” past the currency of words. She attempts through wordless communion the artist's last, hardest task: to muse beyond the will and the forms that shape it.¹⁹

This creative discipline—which involves body and spirit alike, as Aurora consistently maintains the best poetry must do—provides the topic of the fine passage concluding book 7:

I did not write, nor read, nor even think,
But sate absorbed amid the quickening glooms,
Most like some passive broken lump of salt
Dropt in by chance to a bowl of oenomel,
To spoil the drink a little, and lose itself,
Dissolving slowly, slowly, until lost.

(279/7.1306-11)

Aurora's manic narrative having run down for once, she confronts a state that is not the depressive complement of mania but its opposite: an exhaustion that simultaneously drains the self and enlarges consciousness. The simile of dissolution bears conviction, and consummates earlier images in the poem, through the fullness of its attention to the mystical experience it figures: a paradoxically passive act of expansive attenuation and diffusive absorbency. The passive verbals “absorbed,” “broken,” and “Dropt” coexist with the active “spoil,” “lose,” and “dissolving”; the penultimate line—reluctant, slightly hypermetrical—retains in self-deprecation the characteristically tart assertiveness that Aurora here studies to soothe. The dissolving grain of selfhood is not quite lost, either temporally or chemically; instead it is changed, even as it changes the solvent it feeds. Quickening the absorbent “glooms,” in a mutual exchange that quickens her in turn, Aurora's reagent identity enters a creative process that repeats in a finer tone the cosmology of Barrett Browning's epic.

Book 7 thus effects the subtlest end among the “many books” of Aurora Leigh, a closure that does not solve Aurora's anxieties of loss but suspends them, within a medium of chastening attentiveness to the fluid borders of a self that yields and receives. This metaphorical suspension constitutes a kind of narrative suspense, an unresolved harmony that keeps “mysterious tune” with the sacramental cosmic processiveness Aurora has invoked in book 5.²⁰ It also places in epic perspective the novelistic realism that ostensibly superintends the final two books. There the declaration of love between Aurora and Romney brings narrative suspense to a storybook conclusion. But the epic work of the poem is not concluded until their mutual revelation and betrothal are ratified as apocalypse and hierogamy, from a vantage beyond the precincts of domestic fiction. The undertaking of Romney and Aurora to make a new home together, and to lay the basis for a reformed England that will “blow all class-walls level” (350/9.932), calls for consummation in a house not made with hands:

Along the tingling desert of the sky,
Beyond the circle of the conscious hills,
Were laid in jasper-stone as clear as glass
The first foundations of that new, near Day
Which should be builded out of heaven, to God.
He stood a moment with erected brows,
In silence, as a creature might, who gazed:
Stood calm, and fed his blind, majestic eyes
Upon the thought of perfect noon. And when
I saw his soul saw,—“Jasper first,” I said,
“And second, sapphire; third, chalcedony;
The rest in order,.. last, an amethyst.”

(351/9.953-64)

Like the Bible she invokes, Barrett Browning's Victorian epic stops at a limit that is a beginning as well as an end, alpha and omega at once (Revelation 21:6; see also 27/1.831). Aurora's Christian vista of daybreak corrects the dim view of the bookmaking Preacher she paraphrased at the start: it is not true that there is no new thing under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9). The passage also renovates the novel, by expanding the horizons of domestic fiction beyond merely human engagements, through the edification of the bridal New Jerusalem, to espouse a sacred civic trust.²¹

The consecrated elements of this final epic vision—the “jasper-stone as clear as glass” and the jeweled heavens of the last lines—come directly out of the book of Revelation (21:11, 18-19). Yet these supernatural images of crystal clarity also come naturally, for the reader, out of the saturated air that has bathed the landscape across the summer night (281/8.34-59), and out of the tropes of psychological fluidity that Barrett Browning has developed across the poem. These last images of crystalline Bildung are precipitated out of the poetic solution in which Aurora's selfhood has been dissolved, diffused, and suspended for a kind of re-creation to which the traditional bildungsroman gave little play. The transparent stones of revelation, like the many books or building blocks of the poem, are the gradual structures of Aurora's processive identity. With the sudden disclosure of a love long deferred, Aurora can regain her soul at last because she has already found out how to lose it. She has learned for herself what her words have taught the broken, needy Romney, and what her writing in Aurora Leigh sets forth to show the reader: how to greet loss itself in the spirit of mobility, flux, and transformation for which the poem has found a wealth of narrative, mythopoeic, and imagistic equivalents. The last act of Aurora Leigh validates a bourgeois marriage, and to that extent affirms the ends of the novel; but its revisionary last words crown an epic passionately given to the gender-solvent, genre-absorbing fluency of love.

Notes

1. Aurora Leigh passes epic muster with less fuss nowadays than most Victorian verse narratives, presumably because feminist criticism follows Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), p. 40, in taking for granted the cultural and political resonance of Barrett Browning's project. There are good discussions of genre questions in Susan Stanford Friedman, “Gender and Genre Anxiety: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H. D. as Epic Poets,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5 (1986): 203-28; Marjorie Stone, “Genre Subversion and Gender Inversion: The Princess and Aurora Leigh,” Victorian Poetry 25 (1987): 101-27; and especially Dorothy Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 183-84, 215-17.

2. Aurora Leigh: A Poem, ed. Gardner B. Taplin (Chicago: Academy, 1979), p. 1. Page number in this reprint of the author's last London edition will hereafter be cited parenthetically, followed by book and line numbers in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Complete Works, ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, 6 vols. (1900; rpt. New York: Riverdale, 1903).

3. Among other poems in nine books Barrett Browning would have known Young's Night Thoughts and Wordsworth's The Excursion, which structurally anticipates the “enjambed” effect I go on to discuss. Cf. also Blake's The Four Zoas and Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse.

4. See, e.g., The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845-1846, ed. Elvan Kintner, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), 1:31. Rod Edmond, Affairs of the Hearth: Victorian Poetry and Domestic Narrative (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 130-31, cites other pertinent passages from Barrett Browning's correspondence.

5. Lorna Martens, The Diary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), p. 4, distinguishes in similar terms between the autobiographical memoir and the diary as fictional forms. See also Shari Benstock, “Authorizing the Autobiographical,” in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 18, on the example of Virginia Woolf; and, for a general discussion of the diary as “serial autobiography,” Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), especially pp. 152-54.

6. This feature of the poem has received little scholarly attention beyond C. Castan's discussion of narrative unreliability and suspenseful sleight of hand in “Structural Problems and the Poetry of Aurora Leigh,” Browning Society Notes 7 (1977): 73-81. By book 5 “the story has caught up with the narrator and till the end of the poem they stay together” (p. 75); but Castan's allowance that “the first slab of narration” spans books 1-5 seems, in view of the book 3 episode discussed above, too generous by half.

7. The extensive table in Martens's bibliographical appendix, although it omits Aurora Leigh, shows how the vogue for epistolary and diaristic narrative boomed at either end of the nineteenth century but bottomed out at the middle: “the climate during periods of realism and naturalism was extremely unfavorable” to fictional forms, like Barrett Browning's, “in which character depiction took precedence over intrigue” (Diary Novel, pp. 100, 84). On the poet's use of writings by women see Deborah Byrd, “Combating an Alien Tyranny: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Evolution as a Feminist Poet,” Browning Institute Studies 15 (1987): 23-41. Deirdre David, on the contrary, presents Barrett Browning as a poet with “no sustaining sense of attachment to a female literary tradition”: see Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), p. 157; also pp. 104-5.

   Among women's writings Aurora Leigh owes most to Madame de Staël's Corinne ou l'Italie (1807; rpt. Paris: Gallimard, 1985). To Barrett Browning's well-documented borrowings from Staël's Künstlerroman in matters of narrative substance we may speculatively add a dimension of narrative technique that is pertinent to our argument. Corinne's uniquely improvisatory performances come most fully into their own through “un genre de charme non seulement naturel, mais involuntaire” (a sort of charm that was not merely natural but involuntary) (p. 55), when “elle s'abandonna dans ses vers à un mouvement non interrompu” (she yielded in her verses to an uninterrupted urge) (p. 352). But Corinne's fluency as an “improvisatrice” is bound up psychologically as well as etymologically with her “imprévoyance” (unforeseeing) (p. 407; translations mine): as she comes to behold her destiny—the fatal incompatibility of her genius with her love—she quits the rostrum for the study and lapses from vital improvisation into the little death of writing (pp. 519, 580). Barrett Browning, bent on resisting the fatalism from which Staël had wrung such feminine pathos, valorizes the writing act and does everything possible to bring the text flush with her heroine's life.

8. Editors of the poetry since Porter and Clarke have disregarded this idiosyncrasy, which a properly scholarly edition (whenever one appears) should respect.

9. This is to disagree with the apparently self-contradictory position, maintained in different books jointly authored by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, that Aurora Leigh fails to envision “truly cosmic goals” yet also somehow remains in thrall to a regressive “providential” vision (see The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination [New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1979], p. 582; No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1: The War of the Words [New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1988], p. 72).

10. See inter alia Delores Rosenblum, “Face to Face: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and Nineteenth-Century Poetry,” Victorian Studies 26 (1983): 321-38; Virginia V. Steinmetz, “Images of ‘Mother-Want’ in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh,” Victorian Poetry 21 (1983): 351-67; Friedman, “Gender and Genre Anxiety,” pp. 220-21. Sandra M. Gilbert, “From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Risorgimento,” PMLA 99 (1984): 194-211, draws out the political content of such associations.

11. As this is the sort of passage that both affronted and thrilled the poem's first readers, it is instructive to see how the late-Victorian commentators Porter and Clarke mediate through classical myth their evident sense that it gives “daring expression” to androgyny: “lava” and “lymph” are “both in a condition of unusual potency, the first from volcanic force, the second from the sort of inspired possession associated with the word ‘lymph’ in connection with Greek oracles. The Nymphs and Muses were goddesses of the fertilizing moisture of springs impregnated with exciting fumes” (Complete Works, 5:202).

12. Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, pp. 205-11. Compare Staël's Corinne, where the protagonists pray to the figure of the intercessory father—the literal father, the late Lord Nelvil—so regularly as to open, at least for a Dissenting reader like Barrett Browning, the question whether God's gender may not be somehow different. When Corinne does invoke the divine, at a turning point in her first improvisation, her images shimmer with a theological androgyny that seems to anticipate Aurora Leigh's: “Ici l'on se console des peines même du coeur, en admirant un dieu de bonté, en pénétrant le secret de son amour; les revers passagers de notre vie éphémère se perdent dans le sein fécond et majestueux de l'immortel univers” (Here one finds consolation for the very pangs of the heart, in wondering at a god of goodness, in penetrating the secret of divine love; the passing disappointments of our ephemeral life are lost in the fecund and majestic bosom of the immortal universe.) (p. 64; my translation).

13. Here I depart from Mermin, who applauds Aurora's “indissoluble identity” (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, p. 200), and side with Bina Freiwald: “while the text's transcendentalist metaphysics remains intact throughout, its collapsed center—an absent transcendentalist subject, an ‘unnatural’ feminine self—is inhabited by a fragmentary, paradoxical subjectivity whose reconstitution becomes the poem's aesthetic and ideological work” (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh: Transcendentalism and the Female Subject,” in Proceedings of the Tenth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. Anna Balakian and James J. Wilhelm [New York: Gardland, 1985], 2:419). On the transcendentalist fix of Aurora Leigh, see also David, Intellectual Women, p. 152. I find in Aurora's “ability to relinquish identity” more than “the unfortunate myth” of femininity to which David reduces it; still, David's implacable book remains our best antidote to the celebratory mode currently dominating Barrett Browning criticism.

14. David, Intellectual Women, pp. 98ff., argues that Barrett Browning's imaginative practices are quite coherent with her transcendentalist position; if so, then the Romantic ideology and political conservatism mentioned here are two sides of the same coin. The poet's exceptional Victorian fidelity to High Romantic transcendentalism is noted by Kathleen Blake, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Wordsworth: The Romantic Poet as Woman,” Victorian Poetry 24 (1986): 389; Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, p. 204.

15. On the problem of pride in Barrett Browning and Aurora Leigh, see respectively Alice Falk, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Her Prometheuses: Self-Will and a Woman Poet,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 7 (1988): 69-85; and Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, p. 576. See also 340/9.618-19: “a woman proud, / As I am, and I'm very vilely proud.”

16. See Friedman, “Gender and Genre Anxiety,” pp. 207-9.

17. Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, p. 217.

18. Two recent biographers speculate that anxieties over closure—general fear about coming to an end, specific indecision about just where to leave Aurora—lay behind the writer's block that Barrett Browning uniquely encountered on completing book 6: see Margaret Forster, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988), p. 309; Peter Dally, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Psychological Portrait (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 172. Barrett Browning resolved these anxieties, I would submit, by projecting them into the transitional narrative of book 7.

19. My argument here touches that of Christine Sutphin, “Revising Old Scripts: The Fusion of Independence and Intimacy in Aurora Leigh,” Browning Institute Studies 15 (1987): 43-54; and draws more generally on the ideas of Hélène Cixous on body language and Julia Kristeva on the “semiotic.” Anti-intuitionist caveats against the “semiotic” are issued by David, Intellectual Women, pp. 144-45, and by the Marxist-Feminist Literature Collective, “Women's Writing: Jane Eyre, Villette, Aurora Leigh,” in 1848: The Sociology of Literature, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: Univ. of Essex, 1978), p. 188.

20. See Steinmetz, “Images of ‘Mother-Want,’” pp. 362-66.

21. David, Intellectual Women, p. 133: “at the end of the ‘novel-poem’ figuring an epic quest and thereby defying governing rules of appropriate form, Aurora Leigh's poetry is properly directed by an ‘inward’ vision which will build a new city.” That this new city is the New Jerusalem affiliates Aurora Leigh with the Romantic epics of Blake and Wordsworth and with ideals of culture given wide Victorian currency by Coleridge and Carlyle: see Elinor Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770-1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975). For David, as for the Marxist-Feminist Literature Collective (“Women's Writing,” p. 201), the entire complex of ideas here embodied represents an essentially conservative response to the “marginalized” or “effeminate” status of letters, a circumstance under which Victorian intellectual women could attain a compromised prominence at best. Answers to the question whether Aurora Leigh is a feminist work or just an effeminate one depend altogether on how the practical consequences of literature are assessed, i.e., on what issues are or are not deemed political. See Moers, Literary Women, p. 14; Flavia Alaya, “The Ring, the Rescue, and the Risorgimento: Reunifying the Brownings' Italy,” Browning Institute Studies 6 (1978): 1-41; Helen Cooper, “Working into Light: Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” in Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Bloomington and London: Indiana Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 65-81; Gilbert, “Risorgimento.”