THE PAPS WE ALL HAVE SUCKED

                                                                                Never flinch,
But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
Upon the burning lava of a song,
This full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age
That, when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say
‘Behold,—behold the paps we all have sucked!
This bosom seems to beat still, or at least
It sets ours beating: this is living art
Which thus presents and thus records true life.’

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning¹

This much-quoted passage exhorting poets to write of the present works by a splendid concatenation of mixed metaphors: an overflowing milky breast that is simultaneously an erupting volcano, a stream of molten metal, an antique statue and a sacred text. Poetry thus becomes both representation (the immortal statue) and the thing represented (the living maternal body from which the essence of life streams warmly into readers' minds). Elizabeth Barrett Browning's—or her heroine Aurora's—richly tangled imagery brings together the Romantic concept of poetry as spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings with her own symbolism of divine volcanic energies, adumbrated in an earlier allusion to the ‘lava-lymph / That trickles from successive galaxies / Still drop by drop adown the finger of God’.² The notion of poetry taking the ‘impress’ of its age like hot metal running into a mould, thus creating an artifact admired by men of distant generations, evidently alludes to the classic Horatian boast ‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius’ (‘More durable than bronze … is the monument I have made’) and to Shakespeare's ‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme’.³ But there is more: by ‘present[ing] and record[in]g true life’ the poet also transmits that life, in that her (or his) ‘living art’ sets future bosoms beating as readers imbibe poetry's divine nourishment—or in less figurative terms, as the poet's vision communicates itself to future readers.

Aurora's aesthetic, sketched here and elaborated elsewhere in the poem, is founded on a Shelleyan notion of poetic imagination as transcendent universal vision. But with a feminist twist; for as Marjorie Stone has well said, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning not only steals fragments from the classical and Christian [and, I would add, Romantic] fathers who establish her authority. She also submits them to a gynocentric metamorphosis, anticipating the textual practice of modern women poets.’⁴ If that lyrical manifesto for poetry as the essence of ‘true life’ invokes P. B. Shelley's statement in A Defence of Poetry (1821) that ‘Poetry is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth’,⁵ its central metaphor of breast-feeding enacts, whether consciously or not, a boldly feminist pun on Shelley's word ‘express’ whose Latin root means ‘to press out’ and whose usages include the medical meaning ‘to squeeze out excess milk from a breast’.

Gynocentric metaphors are familiar enough terrain for modern readers of Victorian women poets, but Aurora's feminist claim for her art boldly goes where few or no women have gone before: by equating the divine energy of the poet's word with ‘the paps we all have sucked’ she rewrites the New Testament. For the phrase alludes to an exchange between Christ and one of his female listeners:

And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him: Blessed is the womb that bare thee and the paps which thou hast sucked.

But he said, Yea rather, blessed are those that hear the word of God and keep it.⁶

The woman who ‘lifted up her voice’ out of turn to praise the mother who bore and nurtured Jesus got told that her business was to listen to the word of God and keep it—in other words, to keep her mouth shut. Aurora's metaphors ingeniously transform Jesus' snub to the female speaker and the maternal body: as Christ was the word made flesh, poetry is woman's flesh made word. She thus invests the epic which is viewed with awe and touched with reverent hand by posterity, at once with Christ's divinity and with a universal maternal body whose ‘paps we all have sucked’. At the same time, Christ's repudiation of his family—‘My mother and my brethren are they who hear the word of God’⁷ matches Aurora's present alienation from her only surviving family, consisting of her cousin Romney Leigh whose offer of woman's traditional destiny of marriage she has rejected in order to follow her own vocation to the word. She also, aptly enough, inverts the traditional gendering of divinity and its humble audience. The listener snubbed for loudly and embarrassingly praising the maternal body is transformed by virtue of the (then unquestioned) grammatical convention that ‘men’ = ‘humanity’, into the spectacle of the males of the next Age humbly reverencing the image of a divine mother—just as Romney will come by the end of the poem to reverence Aurora's own art.

A similar re-gendering of a sacred patriarchal text into a metaphoric female body occurs in a later passage—by contrast, little commented on except by Marjorie Stone—about the Homeric epics, those founding texts of Western poetry. In order to finance her journey to her motherland Italy, the hard-up Aurora decides to sell off all—or nearly all—of the classical library she has inherited from her father, including F. A. Wolf's edition of Homer. Elizabeth Barrett Browning herself possessed a copy of this luxury edition, presented by her mentor Hugh Boyd (‘Twelve books—and the most splendid paper & type … the most magnificent Greek book I have ever looked upon’).⁸ But Aurora parts from its beauties without regret, wishing to keep another book whose sentimental value is greater.

The kissing Judas, Wolf, shall go instead
Who builds us such a royal book as this
To honour a chief poet, folio-built,
And writes above, ‘The house of Nobody!’
Who floats in cream, as rich as any sucked
From Juno's breasts, the broad Homeric lines
And while with their spondaic prodigious mouths
They lap the lucent margins as babe-gods
Proclaims them bastards. Wolf's an atheist,
And if the Iliad fell out, as he says,
By mere fortuitous concourse of old songs,
Conclude as much too for the universe.(9)

Marjorie Stone rightly points out this triumphant celebration of the female creative principle which ‘embodies Homer's creativity as the cream from Juno's breasts and the fruit of her womb … with emancipatory, emphatically female energy’.¹⁰ As in the manifesto for the ‘unscrupulous epic’ quoted earlier, this feminist energy manifests itself in a wonderfully inventive mixed metaphor. The image of the ‘spondaic mouths’ of line-endings lapping the white margins around them turns both on the familiar synecdoche whereby ‘mouth’ equals ‘the poet's words’ (as in the familiar phrase ‘the poet's tongue’),¹¹ and on a technical pun: in dactylic hexameters, the metre of the Homeric epics, the last foot of the line is always a spondee. The Iliad's lines thus ‘lap’ their margins in a double sense: they are Homer's divine children, his ‘babe-gods’ lapping the luxurious white space at their edges like milk, yet they themselves are that milk, ‘Juno's cream’ (to which, according to the notes, Greek mythology attributed the origin of the Milky Way¹²) whose polysemic fluencies ripple at the margins enclosing them. These rich ambiguities bring to mind Freud's observation in the lecture ‘On Femininity’ that it is impossible to define suckling as either active or passive for ‘the act of lactation may equally be described as the mother suckling the baby and being sucked by it’¹³—an apt enough image of reading as Elizabeth Barrett Browning conceives it. The poet's words exist to be read, and are in that sense passive, yet their energy and pleasure actively inspire the readers' nourished and delighted response.

So far, splendid. But before feminists get too excited by these Victorian anticipations of Helene Cixous invoking the mother's milk flowing through the female text and women writing themselves in white ink,¹⁴ we should also notice how firmly both Aurora and her creator are committed to precisely that notion of the poet as sole originating authority which Cixous and other deconstructionists have attacked as bourgeois-patriarchal. Marjorie Stone argues that Aurora ‘defends his [Homer's] works against the same charge of illegitimacy that subsequently afflicts Marian’,¹⁵ but this is not convincing since the abusive term ‘bastards’ is not Wolf's but Aurora's own. What Friedrich Augustus Wolf's Prolegomena to Homer (1795) argued was the multiple authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey, on the ground that these poems must be older than the invention of writing, which he thought was unknown in Greece before the sixth century b.c. Both the archaic language of these epics and the fact that the world which they describe is pre-literate suggested an oral origin, yet the poems themselves were far too long to have been composed orally. (The feats of memory and composition of which the bards of oral poetic cultures are capable were then unknown to European scholars.) Both epics therefore must, he argued, have originated as a congeries of ancient lays about the heroes of the Trojan War and have been edited into their final narrative shapes by the committee which wrote them down at the command of the Athenian dictator Peisistratos around 500 b.c.¹⁶ Aurora the Romantic will have none of this. Invoking the theological argument from design, she argues that Homer's authority is analogous to that of God, First Cause of the universe. Since Wolf's denial of a single origin to that greatest of poems the Iliad necessarily implies denying authorial purpose, he also in effect denies the existence of a purpose or design to the universe; and even by implication throws a similar doubt on God's word in the Gospels whose varying sources had been revealed in the nineteenth century by the commentators of ‘higher criticism’. This assumption that if the Homeric epics don't have a single father they must be ‘bastards’ implies in very traditionally patriarchal terms that true poetry is begotten by the autonomous mind upon the maternal body of language. Those splendidly female energies of Aurora's maternal metaphors are thus paradoxically inspired by her anxiety to defend Homer against charges of multiple anonymity that would make his children illegitimate. The notion underpinning her ‘female’ defence of Homer turns out to be what Toril Moi calls ‘the seamlessly unified self … which is commonly called “Man”’. Moi's Cixousian critique of the concept of the author-father exactly fits Aurora's ideal of singular paternal authority:

Gloriously autonomous, it banishes from itself all conflict, contradiction and ambiguity … the self is the sole author of history and of the literary text: the humanist creator is potent, phallic and male—God in relation to the world, the author in relation to the text. History or the text become nothing but the ‘expression’ of this unique individual … the text is reduced to a passive, ‘feminine’ reflection of an unproblematically ‘given’ ‘masculine’ world or self.¹⁷

Does this mean that the feminist textual energies of ‘Juno's cream’ boil down, so to speak, to an essence of masculinity or fluid ejaculation of phallic authority? Not quite. The point is not that the ‘real’ truth of Aurora Leigh is the patriarchal aesthetic underlying its feminist politics but, precisely, the contradiction of the textual and sexual energies that it puts into play.

DIVINE VISION AND ‘WOMAN'S ILL’

Despite Aurora's celebrations of the nurturing maternal breast, it should not be assumed that metaphors of the female body in Aurora Leigh are invariably positive. In a powerful early passage that anticipates Sylvia Plath's wry self-mocking poem ‘Stillborn’,¹⁸ Aurora dismisses her early work, well received though it is, as an intellectual failure. For this she blames her own femininity:

I ripped my verses up
And found no blood upon the rapier's point.
The heart within was just an embryo's heart
That never yet had beat, that it should die,
Just gasps of make-believe galvanic life,
Mere tones, inorganised to any tune.(19)

‘I ripped my verses up’ appears to carry the double meanings ‘I destroyed my verses’ and ‘I read my verses with cold self-awareness’: the body of her poetry is thus disembowelled by a piercing stroke from a phallic sword whose penetration represents her own bitter knowledge of their worthlessness. But this is not really murder or suicide, because her slaughtered embryos, unlike Homer's babe-gods, were never alive. As Plath was later to put it, ‘these poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis … they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction / And they stupidly stare, and do not speak of her.’²⁰ The artificial electric charge jerking the abortive corpses is a poor imitation of the real poetic fire that, as Aurora wrote earlier of the poetry that fired her adolescent self, ‘says the word so that it burns you through / With a special revelation, shakes the heart / Of all the men and women in the world / As if one came back from the dead and spoke.’²¹ Because Aurora cannot ‘say the word’, the suppressed fire of inspiration can only torture her:

And yet I felt it in me where it burnt,
Like those hot fire-seeds of creation held
In Jove's clenched palm before the worlds were sown,—
But I, I was not Juno even! my hand
Was shut in weak convulsion, woman's ill,
And when I yearned to loose a finger—lo,
The nerve revolted. 'Tis the same even now:
This hand may never, haply, open large
Before the spark is quenched, or the palm charred
To prove the power not else but by the pain.(22)

At play in this remarkably powerful passage of feminine masochism are echoes of many other texts both ancient and modern. Aurora's image of God as a sower goes back to Plato's Timaeus in which God the Demiurge plants souls on the planets. It is also a creative re-reading of Robert Browning's strongly Platonic ‘Essay on Shelley’ (1852), which defines the ‘subjective’ poet as one who invokes

the supreme Intelligence which beholds all things in their absolute truth,—an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's own soul. Not what man sees, but what God sees—the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand—it is towards these that he struggles.²³

Browning's image itself rewrites Shelley's Defence of Poetry in which poetic inspiration is imagined as a fading coal flaming up when the wind of inspiration passes through the mind of the poet who ‘not only beholds the present as it is’ but ‘beholds the future in the present’, and whose ‘thoughts are the germs of the flowers and fruit of latest time.’²⁴ Aurora, who envisages poetry as a Shelleyan-Platonic transcendent vision of reality, aspires with ultimate success to be such a prophet-poet, her voice proclaiming the New Jerusalem envisaged by Romney at the end of the poem. For Shelley, poetry was ‘the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth’;²⁵ for Aurora, poets are ‘the only truth-tellers now left to God, / The only speakers of essential truth … the only teachers who instruct mankind / From just a shadow on a charnel-wall / To find man's veritable stature out.’²⁶ Recent editors of Aurora Leigh refer that shadow on the wall to Ruskin and to the American artist William Page,²⁷ but given its contiguity with God's ‘essential truth’, it also surely echoes Plato's image of the material world as shadows thrown on the wall of a cave. Aurora's own defence of her poetic vocation against Romney's pressure to drop such aesthetic self-indulgence and become his helpmeet invokes Shelley's argument that the poet's capacity for imaginative insight makes him essential as a humaniser of a the modern industrial world—but with a twist. Sharing Shelley's idealism but not his radical politics, she concedes the need to redress social evils but insists that without the poet's vision to ‘keep up open roads / Betwixt the seen and unseen’,²⁸ reformers will never lead the swinish multitude: ‘It takes a soul / To move a body: it takes a high-souled man / To move the masses, even to a cleaner stye’. (A chastened Romney will later repeat these repulsive lines to Aurora, admitting that she was right and he wrong.²⁹) An older, wiser Aurora meditates, in precisely those generalising, abstract terms which the young Romney had considered impossible for ‘mere women, personal and passionate’,³⁰ that the poet's gift is to fix ‘The type with mortal vision, to pierce through / With eyes immortal, to the antetype / Some call the ideal—better called the real’, thus inspiring men to treat the particular body and the material world with proper reverence. Following Shelley's subtle and lovely saying that ‘poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’,³¹ Aurora argues that only the poet perceiving ‘the spiritual significance burn through / The hieroglyphic of material shows’³² understands the sacredness of everyday particulars. Alluding to Moses' vision of God in the burning bush, she tells us that ‘Earth's crammed with heaven / And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, / The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries.’³³

When Elizabeth Barrett Browning makes Aurora represent her frustrated genius as fiery seeds burning the hand that encloses them, she is therefore echoing not just her husband and fellow-poet Robert but their poetic forefathers Shelley, Plato and Christ, for the image also subliminally invokes the Parable of the Sower in which ‘the seed is the word of God’ scattered among mankind.³⁴ Since all these images are implicitly patriarchal in that they represent a masculine spirit-seed impregnating or wounding a feminine material body, it is not surprising that a woman poet should use them to represent feminine impotence, ‘woman's ill’, that prevents her from emulating the Creator. Yet Aurora's admission of failure is paradoxically more powerful, at least to me, than any of her triumphant invocations of poetry as visionary transcendence—not least because unlike her patriarchal sources she here invokes a suffering human body. The phrase ‘woman's ill’ certainly suggests a subtle variation on the curse of Eve, ‘in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children’,³⁵ in that the ‘weak convulsion’ of her mental labour brings forth only dead embryos. But it alludes also, and far more strongly, to the writer's self-torturing inability to release her own potential. Both image and argument refer to and rewrite the words of her female contemporary Charlotte Brontë, whose novel Shirley (1849) memorably invokes the metaphor of a hand clenched over its own hurt to represent the frustration women experience because they are unable to speak their feelings. Brontë invokes this image during a bitter meditation prompted by the heroine's misery when her potential lover withdraws without warning from what had seemed like an innocently blossoming friendship. Directly addressing a reader assumed to be female, Brontë muses on the double standard whereby a jilted man can ‘speak and urge explanation’ but ‘a lover feminine can say nothing: if she did the result would be shame and anguish’, for her nature would revolt against such open humiliation. She tells her women readers that they must grin and bear it:

Take the matter as you find it: ask no questions: utter no remonstrances: it is your best wisdom. You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don't shriek because the nerves are martyrized: do not doubt that your mental stomach—if you have such a thing—is strong as an ostrich's; the stone will digest. You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers over the gift, let it sting through your palm. Never mind: in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.³⁶

The sermon to female readers parodies the words of Christ in Luke 11, the same chapter as that invoked by Aurora's feminist manifesto quoted at the outset of this essay:

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? … Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? … How much more shall your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?³⁷

Shirley's advice amounts to a savage mockery of Christ's promises. ‘Ask and it shall be given you’—but if you are a woman you cannot ask and are given nothing. A father will not give his son a stone instead of bread, or a scorpion instead of an egg, but a daughter who gets just that can only accept the disappointment politely, expecting no help from her Heavenly Father. Her best wisdom lies in a proudly pagan stoicism that learns to ‘endure without a sob’.

Of course Brontë is having it both ways here, commanding stoical silence with a cry of rage as loudly impassioned as the heroine of a comic opera warning a lover on a high G note not to make a sound lest papa overhear him. This furious sermon is one of the most living things in Charlotte Brontë's dullest novel. Its effect is as disruptive as that ‘awkward break’ in Jane Eyre where the contrast between ‘Grace Poole's laugh’ and Jane's own frustration at her limited horizons (‘Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot’)³⁸ famously aroused Virginia Woolf to criticise Charlotte Brontë for letting her own anger intrude inappropriately: ‘She left her story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance’.³⁹ But as Mary Jacobus has shown, the ‘awkward break’ says more than Woolf wants to admit: ‘Editing into her writing the outburst edited out of Charlotte Brontë's, Virginia Woolf creates a point of instability which unsettles her own urbane and polished decorum.’⁴⁰

At the centre of Brontë's and Aurora's self-analysis is the tormenting image of ‘woman's ill’: frustrated speech figured as a hand clenched over its own pain. Aurora Leigh transforms the sarcastic adjuration ‘Close your fingers on the gift, let it sting through your palm’, where ‘gift’ ironically means its exact opposite, into a different story of the creative gift torturing its silent owner whose involuntary ‘weak convulsion’ traps the word that should ‘burn you through / With a special revelation’⁴¹ inside her ‘charred palm’, the power persisting only as pain. Like the older writer, Aurora has it both ways, invoking both the transcendent grandeur of her poetic masters and Charlotte Brontë's rebellious female rage. One way and another, the pure milk of Christian orthodoxy has grown memorably curdled.

Notes

1. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh [1857], ed. Margaret Reynolds (New York, Norton, 1996), Book V, 213-22, p. 150.

2. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book V, 3-5, p. 142.

3. Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Odes III, 30, tr. James Michie, The Odes of Horace (New York, Washington Square Press, 1973); William Shakespeare, Sonnet 55, Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London, Thomson, The Arden Shakespeare, 1997), p. 221.

4. Marjorie Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1995), pp. 153-4.

5. P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry [1821], Duncan Wu (ed.), Romanticism: An Anthology, 2nd edn (Oxford, Blackwell, 1998), p. 947.

6. Luke 11:27-8.

7. Luke 8:21.

8. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's diary, cited by Reynolds, in Aurora Leigh, p. 180n.

9. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book V, 1246-57, p. 180.

10. Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, p. 157.

11. W. H. Auden and John Garrett, The Poet's Tongue: An Anthology (London, G. Bell, 1935).

12. Reynolds, in Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, p. 180n.

13. Freud, ‘On Femininity’, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, tr. James Strachey (Harmondsworth, Penguin, [1964] 1973), p. 148.

14. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, tr. Carolyn Burke, in E. Marks and I. de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms (London, Harvester, 1982), pp. 245-64.

15. Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, p. 157.

16. See D. B. Monro, ‘Homer’, Enyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1911), vol. 12, pp. 633-4.

17. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London, Methuen, 1985), p. 8.

18. Sylvia Plath, ‘Stillborn’, in Ted Hughes (ed.) Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems (London, Faber, 1981), p. 142.

19. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book III, 244-9, p. 80.

20. Plath, ‘Stillborn’, Collected Poems, p. 142.

21. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book I, 905-8, p. 31.

22. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book III, 250-60, p. 80.

23. Robert Browning, ‘Essay on Shelley’ [1852], in James F. Loucks (ed.), Robert Browning's Poetry (New York, Norton, 1979), p. 447.

24. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, p. 946.

25. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, p. 947.

26. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book I, 859-60, 864-7, p. 30.

27. Margaret Reynolds, in Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, p. 52n; John Robert Glorney Bolton and Julia Bolton Holloway (eds), Aurora Leigh (London, Penguin, 1995), p. 472n.

28. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book II, 168-9, 173, p. 52.

29. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book II, 179-81, p. 52; Book VIII, 430-2, p. 266.

30. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book II, 221, p. 45.

31. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, p. 949.

32. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book VII, 780-3, p. 237; 861-2, p. 239.

33. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book VII, 821-4, p. 238. See Exodus 3: 2-5.

34. Luke 8:4-15.

35. Genesis 3:16.

36. Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, ed. H. Rosengarten and M. Smith (Oxford, Oxford University Press, [1849] 1979), p. 103.

37. Luke 11:10-12.

38. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London, Penguin Classics, [1848] 1985), p. 71.

39. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (London, Penguin, [1929] 1977), pp. 70, 73.

40. Mary Jacobus, ‘The Difference of View’, Women Writing and Writing About Women (London, Croom Helm, 1979, p. 17. See also Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Mad Woman in the Attic (New Haven, Yale, 1979).

41. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book I, 905-6, p. 31.