Following her transformative marriage to Robert Browning in 1846, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote the following to her lifetime friend Mrs. Martin regarding her life before her marriage:

I was buried and that was the whole … a thoroughly morbid and desolate state it was which I look back now to with a sort of horror with which one would look back to one's graveclothes if one had been clothed in them by mistake during a trance.¹

Barrett Browning candidly and succinctly refers to her life before her marriage as a trance-like living death, one inclusive of illness, invalidism, and self-imposed isolation. Notwithstanding her adolescent respiratory illnesses and the putative riding accident that brought about her confinement to a “spinal crib” as a young adolescent, Barrett Browning's early life was constructed around an aura of “illness,” feebleness, and an “obsession with death.”² After her mother's death when Elizabeth was twenty-two, the Barrett family was so accustomed to Elizabeth's confinement in her room that no one expected her to assume her mother's duties even though Elizabeth was the eldest. Elizabeth surmised that her illness was so severe and longterm that “according to Plato” she “should have been put to death long ago as a chronic patient,” she “had been so long ill without dying.”³

Like the writing of many Victorians who seem mesmerized by death, illness, and “punishment,”⁴ death figures as a dominant trope of Barrett Browning's early writing. While critics note this obsession in her juvenilia, critical attention has not been paid to the way death and transformation work in relationship to art in Aurora Leigh. Since its resurrection by second-wave feminists in the latter part of this century, critics have scrutinized the epic poem largely in terms of its gender politics while ignoring the overt and multitudinous references to death. Tess Cosslett alone notes Aurora's “death-like withdrawal”⁵ in the early portion of the narrative. However, I find that Aurora Leigh⁶ is replete with death and disfigurement images that go far beyond the conventional Victorian fascination with death, grief, and eulogy. These images are intimately tied with Barrett Browning's attitude toward the role of the poet, in particular the woman poet. Aurora Leigh claims that women are “buried alive” by society and that the way women are resurrected and society is transformed is through the attainment of a poetic vision akin to the spiritual vision of the seer.

The image of female death—the death portrait of the mother—serves as the centerpiece of Book I. While Aurora demonstrates a Romantic, Transcendental disposition in claiming “relations with the Unseen,” she also reveals an obsession with her dead mother's portrait. She sits for “hours upon the floor” and gazes “half in terror, half in adoration” at a portrait that she intermingles with myth, dream, and literature, a portrait that reveals how women have been entombed by myth. Her dead mother's portrait conflates and encapsulates all the stereotypical images of women as presented in literature, culture, and art. Aurora interprets her mother as a “Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite” (I. 154) and a “dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate” (I. 155). These stereotypes of women and the description of a fixed female gaze that seems only to view horror and destruction contrast markedly with Aurora's burgeoning spiritual vision and her attempt to shatter iconic female images by becoming a thinking, contemplative young woman.

Both Aurora's aunt and Romney attempt to stifle, silence, and slay Aurora's developing insight, her “privilege of seeing” (I.578). Both would rather bind Aurora in myth. When her aunt sees Aurora's “soul agaze” in her eyes (I. 1031), she “stabs” Aurora “through and through” (I. 328) as a way to attempt to kill the awakening spirit and intellect within and as a method of confining Aurora to the circumscribed life expected of her, a life like the aunt's which according to Aurora was “not life at all … She had lived a sort of cage-bird life” (I. 304-05). The aunt even goes so far as to suggest that she would “make room” for Aurora in her “grave” (II. 594), again attempting to bury Aurora, to make her like other silenced women who are the living dead. During this time, Aurora attempts to “dodge the sharp sword against” her “life” (I. 691).

Aurora's aunt attempts to kill her spirit, yet Aurora finds a way to continue to develop her insight and intellect. Aurora covertly reads the classics while she gazes out of her window, viewing nature's limes and laurels. In this verdant nest, Aurora continues the education initiated by her father, an education that “wrapt his little daughter in his large doublet,” allowing her access to the great works of literature. Her encounter with poetry strengthens her spirit:

                              Thus, my soul,
At poetry's divine first finger-touch,
Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,
Convicted of the great eternities
Before two worlds.

(I. 850-54)

In addition, Aurora develops her spiritual sight through her early excursions into writing—an act that regenerates her.

Like his aunt, Romney, the social activist, has no spiritual insight, no poetic vision. He sees “death as death” and has no ability to see beyond the tangible. In addition, he labels Aurora as a “witch, scholar, poet, dreamer” (II. 86) and never takes seriously her claim that a woman can comprehend the mysterious and sublime transcendental realm. Romney finds no useful purpose in poetry, and he proclaims it ludicrous to assume that women are capable of seeing the intangible, because “we get no Christ from you,—and verily we shall not get a poet, in my mind” (II. 224-25). Romney denounces women's ability to see the grand scope of human suffering, stating that to Aurora “the human race means such a child or such a man, you saw one morning waiting in the cold” (II. 188-91). Romney feels that women cannot make cosmological generalizations about the public sphere as true poets should. As mindless “sublime” madonnas, women, according to Romney, look vacantly at the world unable to grasp or comprehend its complexities. In response to such a pervasive lack of spiritual insight among people, Aurora exclaims “We are sepulchered alive in this close world / And want more room” (V. 1039-40).

Aurora is not the only female character “buried alive” in this narrative. Marian, too, experiences a type of death after she is raped. After Aurora finds and attempts to assist her, Marian claims “I was … simply murdered” (VI. 769-70) and “I waked up in the grave” (VI. 1217). Aurora notes that Marian lives in a hovel “no bigger than a grave” and Marian concludes that she is “dead” (VI. 818). While Marian possesses insight that others seem to lack and an attraction to nature that offers a way to connect to the spiritual world, Marian is not “murdered” for her insight. Rather she is “murdered” and confined by a man merely because she is a woman. This attempt to circumscribe her life reduces her to an essential body that can be taken by men at will.

Aurora Leigh focuses on and critiques the social, psychological and spiritual death of women brought about by rigid moral and societal expectations, but it is also profoundly concerned with the ways women's lives and society may be transfigured. In “Juno's Cream: Aurora Leigh and Victorian Sage discourse,” Majorie Stone argues that Aurora Leigh is part of the “tradition of Victorian sage writing” through its reliance on the “prophetic speaker,” its “polemical sermonizing on the times,” its “quest for a sustaining ‘Life Philosophy,’ and its vision of a new social and spiritual order.”⁷ Stone is correct to link Aurora Leigh to a prophetic tradition, but I would argue that the position Aurora Leigh takes on prophecy's relationship to poetry and the spiritual vision represented places this poem closer to the Romantic tradition, particularly to the poetic cosmology of Blake, since both prophetic/poetic traditions draw on the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist and seer.

Some critics have noted Barrett Browning's interest in Swedenborg, but most have concentrated on her spiritualist excursions into automatic writing, mesmerism, and seances.⁸ Because of possible social criticism and its effect on how Barrett Browning's work would be perceived, Barrett Browning's son Pen endeavored to “conceal” his mother's interest in spiritualism and he sought to “delete” from her letters “passages which reveal too much spiritualism,” in particular during the period between 1854-1856, the time during which her intense reading of Swedenborg coincided with her writing of Aurora Leigh.⁹ This has tended to obscure her more serious study of Swedenborg.

I would argue that Aurora Leigh demonstrates Barrett Browning's profound embracement of Swedenborg's philosophy which rejects Protestant notions of human sinfulness and promotes notions of the immanence of God, the reawakening of the human spirit, and the transformation of society. For Barrett Browning, Swedenborg's philosophy serves as an impetus for social change. In linking the spiritual vision of the prophet/seer to women's poetic vision, in advocating that women can glimpse heaven, and “travel” between the earthly and spiritual worlds, Barrett Browning foregrounds women's instrumental role in transforming society.

According to Signe Toksvig, much of Swedenborg's thought is based on Neoplatonism¹⁰ but his theology goes beyond abstract philosophy in that Swedenborg believed himself to be a traveler between the earthly world and the spirit world.¹¹ Comparable to what we would now consider a clairvoyant, shaman, or “visionary leader,” Swedenborg based his theology and later his vision of a New Jerusalem on his visionary experiences. According to Swedenborg, in the words of Bernhard Lang, “only a thin veil divides heaven from earth”¹² and heaven is the “distilled essence of the true and beautiful found in earthly existence.”¹³ Swedenborg considered the material world a “gift” from God, an aide in transforming humanity¹⁴ and he conceived of heaven and hell as “states of the soul,” not physical locations.¹⁵

Many of these beliefs are expressed by the narrator in Aurora Leigh. As already mentioned, from childhood on Aurora reveals that she had “relations with the Unseen” and despite attempts to thwart her spirit and intellect, she develops her “sight,” a visionary insight that in most people, including Romney, is “dulled” (I. 818).

According to Aurora, the role of the poet is to “keep open roads between the seen and unseen. … God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond / Both speech and imagination” (II. 467-68, 471-72).

Later in the poem, Aurora speaks of the requisite vision of the poet:

                              But poets should
Exert a double vision; should have eyes
To see near things as comprehensively
As if afar they took their point of sight,
And distant things, as intimately deep,
As if they touched them.

(V. 183-88)

If the role of the poet is to break through the thin veil that separates earth from heaven, the poet must also then see as a god, seeing distant objects as if they were close and proximal objects from a distance. The poet develops a god-like comprehensive and intimate vision of the levels of life, of the natural material world that merely reflects the goodness of the spiritual and of the spiritual that is the essence of the earth. This “double vision” then sees both worlds at once and hardly differentiates between them since they are so close in nature.

When Aurora joins with Marian and takes her to Italy to build a home for them, she locates a house on a hill in Florence and the house is a “tower which keeps a post of double-observation” (VII. 516-17). Since Marian is the only other character who seems to possess some of the insight accorded to Aurora in that she too is linked to the natural world and she reads when books are made available to her, she is the perfect companion for Aurora in this “post of double-observation,” a place where they can attempt to see the natural and spiritual worlds and enhance their ability to see as gods.

Much in the way that Swedenborg regarded heaven as the “distilled essence of earth,” an archetype from which beauty emanates, so too does Aurora find that heaven is an undeniable aspect of earth. Earth and heaven are joined in that “Earth's crammed with heaven / And every common bush afire with God” (VII. 821-22). One does not have to transcend the earthly realm to locate God and heaven, nor is heaven a distant physical location. According to Aurora, when the poet recognizes the immanence of God in the common bush, she experiences the divine state of the soul.

Likewise, Aurora further advocates a Swedenborgian theological view when she states:

If genuine artists, witnessing for God's
Complete, consummate, undivided work:
—That not a natural flower can grow on earth,
Without a flower upon the spiritual side. …

(VII. 838-41)

Again, according to Aurora's insight, the earth and heaven are so closely intermingled that a natural phenomenon on earth has its spiritual component in the heavenly state.

Aurora also comments on the spiritual insight lacking in those who polarize the natural and spiritual realms. In particular, she appears to address this criticism to Romney who only recognizes the natural world and who attempts to rectify social ills without addressing the spiritual component of humanity. Creating such dichtomies brings about a type of death:

                              Natural things
And spiritual,—who separates those two
In art, in morals, or the social drift,
Tears up the bond of nature and brings death. …

(VII. 763-66)

Seen from this point of view, many persons lack spiritual insight and are spiritually dead: Romney and his aunt, and the whole cast of characters both wealthy and poor. Characters, such as Lady Waldemar, act out of selfish desire and they do not attempt to recognize the spiritual world and therefore bring about lasting social change. The poor also are described as “blind”; they look as though they have been “stirred up” from “hell” (IV. 587-88), and it appears that “not a finger-touch of God” is “left whole on them” (IV. 581-82), indicating that they lack spiritual vision. While Barrett Browning is criticized by Cora Kaplan for her treatment of the poor, their “blindness” is no different from the blindness of the upper classes or from the way Romney is characterized. Because he lacks spiritual insight, he lives in a type of hell. And, according to Swedenborg's viewpoint, hell is “constituted by a confirmed love of self,”¹⁶ a type of blindness that cannot see beyond the self and its ambitions. In Aurora's view, if people possess on a daily basis the spiritual vision of the poet, their entire world view will be altered:

                              If a man could feel,
Not one day, in the artist's ecstasy,
But every day, feast, fast, or working-day,
The spiritual significance burn through
The hieroglyphic of material shows,
Henceforward he would paint the globe with wings,
And reverence fish and fowl, the bull, the tree,
And even his very body as a man. …

(VII. 857-64)

Attainment of heaven and spiritual vision requires a “regeneration of the spirit” in Swedenborgian theology.¹⁷ This is precisely what occurs at the end of the poem, when Romney's blindness is superseded by Aurora's vision.

In “‘Art's a Service’: Social Wound, Sexual Politics and Aurora Leigh,” Deirdre David claims that Aurora Leigh is not “revolutionary” because the “art of the woman performs a ‘service’ for a patriarchal vision of the apocalypse.”¹⁸ However, I would argue that the poem is indeed revolutionary because the woman poet's insight leads the male to a new and more comprehensive understanding of women and their role in the cosmos.

After acknowledging that Aurora's book has “shown” him the “truth” (VIII. 263) and that the book is now in his heart, Romney also confesses that “We surely made too small a part for God in these things” (VIII. 555-56), referring to his earlier attempts to correct social ills without recognizing a spiritual component. He also criticizes himself and others, especially Christians, who cannot see with a spiritual vision:

Ay, many Christian teachers, half in heaven,
Are wrong in just my sense, who understood
Our natural world too insularly, as if
No spiritual counterpart completed it. …

(VIII. 615-18)

Giving up his own vision, blind Romney embraces Aurora's. He even acknowledges that her vision is now his own, when he states: “Come thou … my dear sight” (IX. 907). And he advocates along with Aurora not an apocalyptic destruction and condemnation of humanity but a rebuilding of the earth based on a spiritual vision. Aurora desires a “new world all alive with creatures, new sun, new moon, new flowers, new people” (VII. 1199-1200) and Romney agrees that seeing with the poet's vision will engender “new churches, new economics, new laws, admitting freedom, new societies” (IX. 947-48). This vision of the New Jerusalem is much like Swedenborg's in that the second coming will not be a physical return of Christ but a spiritual regeneration of humanity, a time when humanity will attain spiritual sight and there will be a “true church” of those who love goodness.¹⁹ Romney's transformation and his acquisition of the poet's vision represents this societal transformation catalyzed by Aurora's unflinching spiritual insight.

It is ironic that Barrett Browning's obsession with death, illness, and spirituality gave us one of the first testaments to women's ability to see the grand scope of all things. In writing the female epic, Barrett Browning resurrects both women and the poetic vision. In shattering female stereotypes and in loosening the tongue of the woman poet, Barrett Browning unwraps the binding cloth of the sepulcher and gives all of us “more room” in this close world.

Notes

1. George Pickering, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” Creative Malady: Illness in the Lives and Minds of Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New York: Oxford UP, 1974) 257.

2. Margaret Forster, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988) 28. Some scholars suggest her illness was psychosomatic and linked to her brother Edward's education at Charterhouse. Elizabeth became ill around the time she was required to remain at home while “Bro” was sent off to school. She developed severe headaches, twitching and convulsions, and her physician prescribed bed rest and no intellectual stimulation. Dorothy Mermin claims there was evidence of “hysterical neuroses” (Dorothy Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989] 28) and Peter Dally (Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Psychological Portrait [London: Macmillan, 1989]) notes evidence that Barrett Browning suffered from agoraphobia and anorexia nervosa. According to George Pickering, Barrett Browning was a complete invalid from the ages of 32-40.

3. Katherine H. Porter, “The Voyaging Mind,” Through a Glass Darkly: Spiritualism in the Browning Circle (Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 1958) 32. It seems ironic that this isolation, dictated by nineteenth-century medicine, helped Barrett Browning develop her poetic talent. This isolation gave her the opportunity to avoid female social obligations, to concentrate on her work, and to develop a life of the mind. This type of invalidism is much like the invalidism that Florence Nightingale experienced when her family forbade her involvement in the nursing profession.

4. Regina Barreca, “Introduction: Coming and Going in Victorian Literature,” Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Regina Barreca (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1990) 4.

5. Tess Cosslett, “Madonnas and Magdalens,” Woman to Woman: Female Friendship in Victorian Fiction (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities International P, 1988) 49-75.

6. References in the text are to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (London: Chapman and Hall, 1857).

7. Marjorie Stone, “Juno's Cream: Aurora Leigh and Victorian Sage Discourse,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New York: St. Martin's P, 1995) 138.

8. Katherine Porter notes that the Brownings took part in seances and that Elizabeth was intrigued by Harriet Martineau's “magnetic trance” experience (34-35). Elizabeth was also friends with Mrs. Sophia Eckley, an American spiritualist, whom Elizabeth at first thought to be “standing on the brink of that vast spiritual sea—to hear the waves of it murmuring, murmuring” (59). According to Porter, Barrett Browning “sought confirmation of the things she already believed: that there is a spiritual world and that communication with it is a possibility” (30).

9. Porter 56. In 1857, Barrett Browning called herself a Swedenborgian.

10. Signe Toksvig, Emanuel Swedenborg: Scientist and Mystic (New Haven: Yale UP, 1948) 112.

11. There is considerable disagreement among scholars regarding Swedenborg's rationality. Kant thought him “mad” and academics of his time considered him heretical because his interpretations of scripture went beyond the literal. However, according to Ernest Benz, this is probably what led to Swedenborg's influence over the Romantic poets. Since Swedenborg was rejected by his academy, his ideas went “underground” and later influenced the Romantic movement, particularly Blake (Stephen Larsen, “Introduction,” Emanuel Swedenborg: The Universal Human and Soul-Body Interaction, ed. and trans. George F. Dale [New York: Paulist P, 1984] 19). He also influenced Transcendentalists such as Emerson.

12. Bernhard Lang, “Glimpses of Heaven in the Age of Swedenborg,” in Swedenborg and His Influence, ed. Erland Brock (Bryn Athyn: The Academy of the New Church, 1988) 309.

13. Lang 315.

14. Lang 314.

15. Larsen 24.

16. Cora Kaplan, “Aurora Leigh,” Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture, eds. Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfeldt (New York: Methuen, 1985) 134-64.

17. John Howard Spalding, An Introduction to Swedenborg's Religious Thought (New York: Swedenborg Publishing Association, 1966) 30.

18. Deirdre David, “‘Art's a Service’: Social Wound, Sexual Politics, and Aurora Leigh,” Victorian Women Poets: Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, ed. Joseph Bristow (New York: St. Martin's P, 1995) 108-31.

19. Spalding 223.