SOURCE: "Aurora Leigh: The Vocation of the Woman Poet," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 35-48.

[In the essay that follows, Gelpi sees Aurora Leigh as a metaphorical investigation of Browning's changing attitudes toward herself her profession, and womanhood in general]

In recent years Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh has reemerged, after more than half a century of neglect, as a strikingly important Victorian poem, historically significant in its interaction with the works of other Victorian writers and immediately relevant in its depiction of a feminist consciousness. Cora Kaplan's essay on the poem uses the earlier insights of Ellen Moers and Patricia Thomson to bring both these aspects of the poem together.¹ She demonstrates that the plot of Aurora Leigh, far from being a pastiche of those scenes and characters from other writers which had caught Barrett Browning's fancy, is in fact "an overlapping sequence of dialogues" with other texts. The borrowings from Madame de Staël, George Sand, Charlotte Brontë, Alfred Tennyson, and others give Barrett Browning the opportunity to comment, positively and negatively, on the responses of these writers to various aspects of Victorian society, including "the woman question," and to define her own ideas—coming in the process to feminist insights applicable and significant today.

Barrett Browning's witty and broad-ranging treatment of her society is marred only, Kaplan points out, by the intellectual and imaginative constriction in her presentation of the working class, particularly of working-class women. Her sentimental depiction of the poor seamstress Marian Earle shows Barrett Browning to be limited by class values which she accepts without question, even while questioning so much else in her society. The effectiveness of her feminist vision is thereby hampered both for her own day and for ours.

Except in terms of this social consciousness, Kaplan's excellent analysis only glances at Aurora Leigh as a reflection of Barrett Browning's sensibility. Yet the poem is a bildungsroman as well as a novel/poem of social concern: "I have put much of myself in it—I mean to say, of my soul, my thoughts, emotions, opinions; in other respects, there is not a personal line, of course," Barrett Browning wrote.² Although no personal line comes through the plot, the images of the poem tell a separate story: not the public story of a woman poet living in Victorian society but the inner story of such a woman's feelings about herself, particularly about her femininity. In her concern for the poor, Barrett Browning seems to have been unaware of how much her thinking was narrowed by the presuppositions of her class, but when thinking about women, whether poor or affluent, she recognized very clearly the influence of a similar conditioning. That is, she saw women's central problem as the antifeminine biases they had themselves internalized. While telling Aurora's story, then, Barrett Browning is also describing the process by which she herself threw off those "mind-forg'd manacles," an underplot which unfolds primarily through the metaphorical language of the poem.

When Aurora Leigh was widely and enthusiastically read, its imagery was in the accepted judgment its chief drawback: "Mrs. Browning's greatest failure is her metaphors: some of them are excellent, but when they are bad—and they are often bad—they are very bad" ran the 1857 criticism of the Westminster Review. The³ critic then went on to give as his chief and best example of "a perfect shoal of mangled and pompous similes" a passage from Book I which describes a portrait of Aurora Leigh's mother. The portrait, Aurora explains, was painted after her Italian mother's death, which occurred when Aurora was four. In place of the shroud customary in such funerary portraits the mother was, at the insistence of her grieving maidservant, robed in her best red brocade. The resulting picture was a source of fascination yet also of terror to Aurora as she was growing up:

I mixed, confused, unconsciously,
Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed,
Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful,
Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque,
With still that face . . . which did not therefore change,
But kept the mystic level of all forms,
Hates, fears, and admirations, was by turns
Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,
A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,
A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,
A still Medusa with mild milky brows
All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes
Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or anon
Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords
Where the Babe sucked; or Lamia in her first
Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked
And shuddering wriggled down to the unclean;
Or my own mother, leaving her last smile
In her last kiss upon the baby-mouth
My father pushed down on the bed for that,—
Or my dead mother, without smile or kiss,
Buried at Florence.

(I. 147-168)⁴

Nothing that we learn about Aurora's mother either before or after this passage justifies the association with her of such negative figures as the Medusa or a Lamia. She is described as deeply and passionately loved by both her English husband and their child, a love just as deeply returned. One might consider the possibility that, ahead of her time, Barrett Browning realized the depths of irrational anger which a child—or even we adult, older children—have for a loved one who by dying has, as it were, abandoned us and so left us feeling as Aurora did:

I felt a mother-want about the world,
And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb
Left out at night in shutting up the fold.

(I. 40-42)

The images in these lines themselves suggest such a sense of betrayal on the lamb's part from the mother-shepherd who has, seemingly, deserted it. However, such an image contains none of the ferocity present in the Medusa passage. If Barrett Browning meant to argue for feelings as violent as those in the child's heart, she would be artistically obliged to explain them.

Nor can the Medusa passage be considered an eruptive autobiographical digression expressing Barrett Browning's feelings toward her own mother. Perhaps the most negative comment ever made by her about her mother was the description to Robert Browning of her mother's nature as "harrowed up into some furrows by the pressure of circumstances," and that seems more a comment on the unhappy effects of her father's dominating spirit than on the mother's hurt and narrowed one.⁵ Beside it too must be set these lines from Barrett Browning's personal diary, written when she was twenty-five, three years after her mother's death. They begin with what appears to be a remembrance of something said by Mrs. Barrett herself:

"You will never find another person who will love you as I love you"—And how I felt that to hear again the sound of those beloved, those ever ever beloved lips, I wd. barter all other sound & sights—that I wd. in joy & gratitude lay down before her my tastes & feelings each & all, in sacrifice for the love, the exceeding love which I never, in truth, can find again. Have I not tried this, & know this & felt this: & do I not feel now, bitterly, dessolately, that human love like her's, I never can find again!⁶

Thinking of the description of the portrait as applicable either to Aurora's fictional mother or Barrett Browning's real one only confuses interpretation. This strange piling up of ambivalent and paradoxical images—"angel" and "witch"; "loving Psyche" and "still Medusa"; Lamia as she "wriggled down to the unclean" and "my own mother, leaving her last smile / In her last kiss upon the baby-mouth"—is explicable within the context of the whole poem if we think of the portrait before which the young Aurora sits brooding not as the image of her mother but as the image to her of womanhood itself.⁷ The phrases thus interpreted describe the deep ambivalence she feels about being a woman. Central to their paradoxes is the thought that if as woman she is to be an artist, she will betray her role as mother; yet the mother in her will also in turn betray and transfix the artist. So the artist's "dauntless Muse" and "loving Psyche" will never find fulfillment, turned to stone by the "mild milky brows" of her mothering role. At the same time, the mother's reward for having suckled babes will be the swords of her unfulfilled artistic ambitions.

It is noteworthy that with the exception of Aurora's mother and of the faithful servant Assunta, whose appearances are very brief and early, and of Marian Earle, whose significance will appear later, there are no attractive women in Aurora Leigh. There is even something emulative, sycophantic, and therefore untrustworthy about Aurora's worshipping admirer Kate Ward, who "desires the model of my cloak, / And signs 'Elisha to you'" (III. 53-54). Aurora's difficulty in finding the companionship of women congenial may be the result in part of her mother's absence. From her mother, Aurora says explicitly, she might have imbibed a loving openness of spirit which her father's earnest concern for her could not replace: "Fathers love as well [as mothers] / —Mine did, I know,—but still with heavier brains, / . . . So mothers have God's license to be missed" (I. 60-64). Then also, the English aunt who takes over Aurora's education after her father's death is a cold, unloving woman, much concerned with Aurora's acquisition of "feminine" accomplishments yet harsh in her feelings towards women. "My father's sister was to me / My mother's hater," says Aurora (I. 359-360).

These apparently coincidental circumstances begin to seem part of a pattern when we realize that there are no other more appealing mothers or mother-surrogates in the poem. No matter what their social class, mothers are presented as cold, self-centered, and destructive. Marian Earle's father is a drunken wastrel and a wife-beater, but the child's experience of beating is from her mother: when beaten by her husband, "she turned / (The worm), and beat her baby in revenge" (III. 868-869). Even a mother-surrogate who makes a "cameo" appearance adds, in what seems to be her only function in the poem, yet another instance of womanly hardness of spirit toward other women. Marian goes to the aid of another seamstress, Lucy Gresham, dying of consumption. Aurora's cousin, Romney Leigh, enters the room after Lucy has died, at which Lucy's bedridden grandmother, taking him for the undertaker and fearing lest she be confused with the corpse, speaks these words of grief:

If Lucy here . . . sir, Lucy is the corpse . . .
Had worked more properly to buy me wine;
But Lucy, sir, was always slow at work,
I shan't lose much by Lucy.

(IV. 71-74)

One further quick example: Marian says of a woman who makes a white slave of her, selling her to French brothel-keepers, "('Twas only what my mother would have done) / A motherly, right damnable good turn" (VII. 9-10).

Lady Waldermar, the most significant villainess of the poem though not herself a mother, provides us with the most important further clues to the meaning behind the images describing Aurora's mother's portrait. The latter was in physical appearance made up of sharply contrasted red and white:

That swan-like supernatural white life
Just sailing upward from the red stiff silk
Which seemed to have no part in it nor power
To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds.

(I. 139-142)

Several books later, without alluding to the grotesque resemblance-in-difference, Aurora thus describes Lady Waldermar at a soirée:

The woman looked immortal. How they told,
Those alabaster shoulders and bare breasts,
On which the pearls, drowned out of sight in milk,
Were lost, excepting for the ruby clasp!
They split the amaranth velvet-bodice down
To the waist or nearly, with the audacious press
Of full-breathed beauty.

(V. 618-624)

In one description the white breast rising from the crimson bodice becomes an image of heavenly aspiration in the other of worldly enfleshment; yet the images, just as images, are striking in their similarity.

Again, when Aurora hears from Marian Earle of Lady Waldemar's role in preventing Marian's marriage to Romney Leigh, the epithets with which Aurora mentally describes her dwell continually, obsessively, on the image of a Lamia: "that woman-serpent" (VI. 1103); "The Lamia-woman" (VII. 152); "Lamia! shut the shutters, bar the doors / From every glimmer on thy serpent-skin!" (VII. 170-171). These are only a few examples; they recur with virtually every allusion to Lady Waldemar from this point in the story.

Indeed, Aurora "over-reacts" to Lady Waldemar's villainy, taking it for granted, for instance, that Lady Waldemar planned for Marian a journey which would end not in Australia but in a brothel—a suspicion later shown to be untrue (IX. 84-92). Her vehemence betrays Aurora as being in what C. G. Jung would call a "shadow relationship"⁸ with Lady Waldemar: that is, some of Lady Waldemar's attitudes and reactions are uncomfortably and unadmittably close to Aurora's own. When she blames Lady Waldemar for persuading Marian Earle to flee from marriage, she seems to have forgotten the words of Marian's farewell letter to Romney. In it Marian mentions Lady Waldemar's nine or ten visits but makes even more significant the single visit from Aurora: "ever since / I've pondered much a certain thing she asked . . . / 'He loves you, Marian?'" (IV. 944-946). Thinking of Lady Waldemar as the "shadow" aspect of Aurora's own psyche gives added significance to Lady Waldemar's parting words. In her farewell letter to Aurora she sneers at women poets as capable of scattered fine thoughts but wanting "string to tie our flowers" (IX. 59). She continues, "Male poets are preferable, straining less / And teaching more" (IX. 65-66). Hers is the voice of Aurora's own self-distrust, the disabling faithlessness of the inner oppressor.⁹

To recapitulate then: The portrait of Aurora's mother, not as it looks in fact (that, of course, is unknowable) but as in Aurora's imagination it appears, mirrors her ambivalence toward femininity itself. This ambivalence means that as a woman she "but slenderly knows herself," thus unwittingly causing both herself and others great pain and leading her to share, albeit unconsciously, in the very circle of woman-evil she wishes to avoid.

Because of her divided attitude toward being a woman, Aurora cannot recognize her own love for Romney—although other women in the poem, good and bad, know her feelings (IX. 685-687). Instead, she turns away from painful ambivalence by becoming identified with masculinity, a process in which Romney figures with importance yet with another kind of ambivalence. We must take it as highly significant not only that Romney is a first cousin who bears the same name but that he looks like Aurora: "Your droop of eyelid is the same as his," writes Lady Waldemar contemptuously (IX. 163); "Your cousin!—ah, most like you!" (IV. 939) is Marian's comment. Remembering Barrett Browning's love for her younger brother Edward, we might take the counsinship to be both vehicle for and bar to fantasies of incest. Without discounting that actual relationship as the creative source for Aurora's imagined one, I would suggest that the resemblance and relationship between them are significant in that they make of Romney Aurora's "alter ego," the brother in her soul. That thought was expressed as long ago as 1861 by J. Challen in the National Quarterly Review, who noted that "The whole of the interest of the story consists in the intellectual and moral development of two personages, both of whom are projections of Mrs. Browning's own nature" (Works, IV, 231), but the idea has had little subsequent exploration. Seeing Romney and Aurora in this way, as the dual expression of a single though ambivalent mind, provides a different, interiorized plot to the poem.

On Aurora's twentieth birthday Romney catches her as she is crowning herself with ivy leaves in a daydream of poetic success. He teases her and makes light of her capabilities, not only because he thinks little of the worth of poetry but because he believes that she as a woman can never write poetry of the first order. Then (with the worst possible sense of timing) he asks that she devote her life instead to helping him, as his wife, in the philanthropical works he thinks truly significant. In the verbal sparring between them which surrounds Romney's clumsy proposal, her subsequent refusal, and her departure for London, the metaphors used clearly show Aurora's identification with the masculine. Yet because her womanhood can never be completely denied or forgotten, the metaphors also blend and blur masculinity and femininity.

In thinking about herself as a poet, for instance, Aurora imagines herself as the effeminately beautiful young Trojan prince, Ganymede, whom Zeus's eagle carried up to Olympus to serve as cup-bearer. The cup of her poetry becomes in the image a masculine not a feminine instrument giving pleasure to the effeminized mouths of the gods, as she keeps "the mouths of all the godheads moist / For everlasting laughters" (I. 924-925).

Again, belief in herself as a poet leads Aurora to escape when possible from her conventional life as an English young lady and see herself as a deer—but a stag, not a doe: "I threw my hunters off and plunged myself / Among the deep hills, as a hunted stag / Will take the waters" (I. 1071-73). There are too many such examples to cite them all, but consider the complex image with which Aurora describes her father's instruction to her in the classic languages. She compares her situation to that of the young Achilles when his mother, Thetis the sea-nymph, hid him in women's clothing among the maidens at the court of Lycomedes so that he might not be called to serve in the Trojan War. He was wrapped in women's garments through a mother's agency, Aurora in man's through a father's:

And thus, as did the women formerly
By young Achilles, when they pinned a veil
Across the boy's audacious front, and swept
With tuneful laughs the silver-fretted rocks,
He wrapt his little daughter in his large
Man's doublet, careless did it fit or no.

(I. 723-728)

The poor "fit" of the doublet creates two problems. First of all, dividing as it does her sense of a self which is learned, poetic, and masculine from a self that is social, visible, and feminine, the masculine identification tends to exacerbate the very ambivalence toward the feminine which it promised to circumvent. Worse still, the doublet becomes a shirt of Nessus (if I may myself be allowed a metaphor) since it involves identification not only with learning and poetic power seen as male prerogatives but with all male attitudes, including male derogation of the feminine. So the sense of herself as masculine, which she feels she needs in order to think seriously of herself as a poet, becomes the sense also which eats into the flesh of her self-esteem. She is manlike (according to the culture's associations with masculinity) in some respects but not, after all, a man, just as Achilles was not a woman. Yet through cultural conditioning she shares men's feelings that men are inherently superior to women.

Thus in their first quarrel Romney's questioning of her powers is in fact only an expression, a projection of her own divided feelings about herself. We know Romney only through Aurora's consciousness of him, and at this point in their relationship he functions for her as the intellectual Charles Tansley does for Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse: a voice in her head repeating, "Women can't write. Women can't paint." Or, to phrase the thought in Romney's image: "When Egypt's slain, I say, let Miriam sing! / Before—where's Moses?" (II. 171-172). A few lines later he repeats the idea more explicitly:

Women as you are,
Mere women, personal and passionate,
You give us doating mothers, and perfect wives,
Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints!
We get no Christ from you,—and verily
We shall not get a poet, in my mind.

(II. 220-225)

To the Aurora who, as we have seen in the images just discussed, passionately identifies with male power and male leadership, and turns shuddering away from "doating mothers" and "perfect wives," Romney could find no bitterer terms than those which deny her any likeness to a Moses or a Christ. Her answering strategy is to use images that sneeringly feminize him. When she learns from her aunt after she has rejected Romney's proposal that in fact Romney agreed to an arrangement made years before between her father and his that the cousins marry in order to preserve for Aurora a share in the family fortune, she feels no gratitude. She enjoys instead seeing him in the situation of one of the most helpless women in mythology, the maiden Iphigenia sacrificed at Aulis so that the winds might blow her father's ships to Troy. Aurora herself becomes powerful and dominant (and therefore male), contemptuously ordering not death but release:

Ah, self-tied
By a contract, male Iphigenia bound
At a fatal Aulis for the winds to change
(But loose him, they'll not change).

(II. 778-781)

As she leaves for London, Romney writes one last appeal, bungling matters as hopelessly—or as stubbornly—as ever by seeing her still as his feminine "angel in the house":

Write woman's verses and dream woman's dreams;
But let me feel your perfume in my home
To make my sabbath after working-days.

(II. 831-833)

The Keatsian synesthesia of his "let me feel your perfume" gives her the retort she needs. In an image reminiscent of that which describes the virginal Madeline of "The Eve of St. Agnes"—"Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray"—Aurora writes back to Romney:

I know your heart,
And shut it like the holy book it is,
Reserved for mild-eyed saints to pore upon
Betwixt their prayers at vespers.

(II. 836-839)

Her image makes him one in spirit and kind with the angel-wife he has described and transforms her into a Byronic worldling with a heart of gold who resists attempting the angel's seduction.

In the short run this reversal of roles is a satisfying vent for anger. The difficulty at its center lies in the fact that by feeling the lofty kindness mixed with contempt typical of a masculine cavalier toward a Romney whom she has made feminine and passive, she shares in the very derogation of the feminine which she justly resents. She cannot really win that way either. By the end of the second book of the poem, in fact, we can see—and the images underline the fact—that her male identification has led her to scorn women and has cut her off as well from the possibility of loving a man.

The plot of this verse novel is blocked out in the traditional form of introduction, rising action, turning point or crisis, falling action, climax, and resolution. Near the center of the poem comes the critical insight which will show her the way through the psychic impasse just described. At what was to be his wedding, as Romney lamely attempts to explain Marian's nonappearance to an angry mob of paupers and instead rouses them to attack him, Aurora suddenly "sees":

with a cry
I struggled to precipitate myself
Head-foremost to the rescue of my soul
In that white face.

(IV. 873-876)

Interestingly, just before that moment, Romney is described for the first time in strongly masculine terms as standing his ground "with his masterful pale face,—/ As huntsmen throw the ration to the pack" (IV. 850-851). The image, coming where it does, suggests that the conscious recognition of how deeply she is identified with Romney, how much, that is, she has internalized masculine values, makes it possible for Aurora to return his masculinity to him as something which, so to speak, they share. The same consciousness, though, brings the first glimmering sense of how much her femininity suffers from this identification, an awareness which will make eventually possible her reconciliation with her own womanhood. But first the glimmer must grow. She must see how negative a force the "Romney-in-her-mind" is to her poetic gift. In the long meditation on art which begins the fifth book, Aurora chides herself as "womanish" for her dependence on Romney's good opinion of her and comes in the process to see that her image of her poetic power as a masculine figure is the source also of her self-doubt. She describes that image with the word used earlier of Romney, "my soul":

But I am sad:
I cannot thoroughly love a work of mine,
Since none seems worthy of my thought and hope
More highly mated. He has shot them down,
My Phoebus Apollo, soul within my soul,
Who judges, by the attempted, what's attained,
And with the silver arrow from his height
Has struck down all my works before my face
While I said nothing. Is there aught to say?
I called the artist but a greatened man.
He may be childless also, like a man.

(V. 410-420)

"Epipsychidion"—"soul within my soul"—the phrase which for Shelley signified union with a feminine Muse leading to the rapturous artistic fertility which is the concluding vision of his poem—is for Aurora a sterile union because she can think of any artist, herself included, only as a man. Her first use of the word "man" in the lines just quoted seems generic, but the second, emphasizing as it does the humanly biological, shifts its meaning subtly to give the impression that real poets are in fact men. That niggling thought sterilizes her imagination.

The next important stage in Aurora's process of self-understanding is described not through images but in overt action and statement, consistent with the increasing clarification she experiences. After she has heard Marian's pathetic story of being sold to a brothel and there raped, angry at herself for the mental judgments she has been making about Marian's illegitimate child, Aurora embraces her. She uses a significant phrase to describe the moment: "I . . . / With woman's passion clung about her waist / And kissed her hair and eyes" (VI. 778-780, my italics). And as she asks Marian to accompany her to Italy, she calls her a friend. Together they will be "two mothers" to the child (VII. 124). Thus, her identification with Marian as woman both in the sexual humiliation Marian has endured and in the ecstatic joy of motherhood she has experienced reconciles Aurora more than ever before in the poem to her own womanhood. The incident has another significance as well in what Barrett Browning calls the "double action" of the poem.¹⁰ It is the first instance in which we see the imaginative Aurora involved in the physical care of a fellow human being, while just at this time, we learn later, the actively charitable Romney lies quiet for the first time, listening to and deeply moved by Aurora's poetry. The split between "masculine" activity and "feminine" spiritual insight is disappearing.

The new advance in Aurora's acceptance of womanhood brings with it a virtually simultaneous recognition of her true feeling for Romney, but a recognition mingled with despair at the belief that she has lost him to the villainous Lady Waldemar. Broken in spirit, she is still enough the old Aurora to despise her tears as womanish; yet even this thought brings with it a sudden understanding of the problem described earlier with so many obscure images: "It seems as if I had a man in me, / Despising such a woman" (VII. 212-213). Previously her sense of this internal man's contempt had made all her struggles to act creatively seem petty and useless. Open recognition of his presence makes it possible for her to use him—in this case to act in making Marian's true history known to Romney:

If, as I have just now said,
A man's within me,—let him act himself,
Ignoring the poor conscious trouble of blood
That's called the woman merely.

(VII. 229-232)

It remains for these new insights to permeate, inform, and metamorphose her sense of herself as an artist, yeast in the loaf. Their effects become visible in Aurora's culminating meditations in Book VII on the meaning of art. The terms of her ideas themselves are deeply neoplatonic, but explication of them, while important to any consideration of Barrett Browning's aesthetic theory, is not relevant to the theme I have been tracing. What is significant in that connection, however, is the image Aurora associates with the artist both at the beginning and at the end of the passage on artistic endeavor. She sees the artist, she sees herself as an artist, no longer as boyish Ganymede plucked up by Jove's eagle, but as Io, the young girl whom Jove transformed into a heifer to hide her from a suspicious Juno. The myth usually describes Juno, not fooled for a moment, as the deity who sends a gadfly to pursue Io. Aurora, interestingly, associates the gadfly instead with Jove as another version of the tormenting yet activating "man within." The artist's sense of truth hounds her, she says:

As Jove did Io; and, until that Hand
Shall overtake me wholly and on my head
Lay down its large unfluctuating peace,
The feverish gad-fly pricks me up and down.

(VII. 830-833)

The final reconciliation with her womanhood comes in a Florentine church as she watches the women—of course they are women, she notes—praying. A detached observer, male or at least asexual in that she is detached from these women worshippers, she sees a hunchbacked spinster, a young girl, an old woman. Out of the confused and drab lives of these "poor blind souls," she muses, God must somehow bring salvation. Then a sudden jolting recognition interrupts these thoughts in which she as artist hobnobs with God, as it were, about the spiritual condition of beings very different from herself. She has described the women as young ravens who "cry for carrion." There comes a break in the line, and she exclaims:

O my God,
And we, who make excuses for the rest,
We do it in our measure. Then I knelt,
And dropped my head upon the pavement too,
And prayed, since I was foolish in desire
Like other creatures, craving offal-food,
That He would stop His ears to what I said,
And 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.

(VII. 1263-72)

If I may skip ahead for a moment, I believe that these lines offer the true explication for the famous statement near the conclusion, "Art is much, but Love is more!" (IX. 656), which is often interpreted as Aurora's utter capitulation and retreat into Victorian domesticity as the angel in Romney's house. I believe Barrett Browning's point rather is that although the artist—here the literary artist—uses words and forms them into images, "the deep truth is imageless," and her response to that truth as a human can only be wordless. Her thought is one put in other terms by T. S. Eliot when he writes in Four Quartets: "The poetry does not matter." Neither Eliot nor Barrett Browning, of course, is denying the worth of the struggle to express artistically the vision of life which each holds true, but they both believe that vision to transcend any possible expression of it.

The silence of the moment in the church lengthens out, becomes a period for which Jungians could use the alchemical term "nigredo"—a blackening, a deliquescence and decomposition of materials in the alembic whose conclusion seems annihilation but is actually metamorphosis. Barrett Browning's image carries the same thought as she describes "quickening glooms" in which Aurora sits, not reading, writing, or even thinking, "Most like some passive broken lump of salt / Dropped in by chance to a bowl of oenomel" (VII. 1308-09).

In that state of dissolution, the speck of salt drowned in the honey-drink, she gazes out one evening on what in one sense is the city of Florence spread out beneath her but is more truly the vision of her own inner depths, seeing "some drowned city in some enchanted sea, / Cut off from nature" (VIII. 38-39). There her quickening imagination spies "the man within" but in a new form:

a sea-king with a voice of waves,
And treacherous soft eyes, and slippery locks
You cannot kiss but you shall bring away
Their salt upon your lips.

(VIII. 41-44)

Not Phoebus Apollo now with his arrow of judgment to annihilate her work, nor Jove to goad yet mock her with unfulfillable fantasies of power, but a force through which she can explore her own inner deeps—that is what he has become. All his negative qualities seem to have vanished save for the treachery in his "soft eyes" and the slipperiness of a presence no sooner promised than withdrawn.

Then Romney Leigh appears on her balcony: "the sea king! In my ears / The sound of waters. There he stood, my king!" (VIII. 60-61). He is hers, and he is blind.

But why? Why did Barrett Browning feel that Romney must be blinded? An exhaustive answer to that question would demand an essay of its own, involving as it does a number of fictitious Victorian gentlemen blinded and often maimed as well by their feminine creators to the unease of Victorian reviewers and the horror of later Freudian critics.¹¹ Barrett Browning's ladylike but implacable response to remonstrance on the subject, "He had to be blinded, observe, to be made to see . . . I am sorry, but indeed it seemed necessary,"¹² is not a particularly enlightening answer, since Aurora too comes to "see" herself and others very much better in the course of the poem but is physically unscathed in the process.

Many difficulties involving the justice meted out to Romney as a fictional personality become irrelevant, however, if we continue to think of him as a projection of the man within Aurora and thus a vehicle for Barrett Browning's extended meditation on the experience of being both woman and artist. In these terms, the answer to why the sea-king's soft eyes are "treacherous" will also explain why Romney must be blinded. And surely that answer lies in an association between the sea-king's eyes and the eyes of Phoebus Apollo which aim his "silver arrow" of judgmental criticism. Blinded, the sea-king/Romney is not castrated or weakened; on the contrary, he is a far more effective because an undivided source of poetic power.

Up to this point in the poem the "man within" had been essentially Aurora's critic and thus an aspect of that self-distrust which Barrett Browning sees as the principal barrier to women's achievement.¹³ When she has Aurora complain of the prating about "women's rights" and "women's mission," she is speaking to this point, not rebuking feminist effort; a woman's lack of faith in herself—"she must prove what she can do / Before she does it" (VIII. 818-819)—makes her talk rather than act, stultifying her creative élan.

As Aurora comes to love and trust her own womanhood, Romney, no longer a critic, becomes a Muse. As such he is the dramatic projection of that faith in self-blind faith if you will—and self-acceptance which underlie all true creativity, whether in the arts, in social endeavor, or in human interaction. Aurora's creative gift and Romney's belief in it form "Love, the soul of soul, within the soul, / Evolving it sublimely" (IX. 880-881). Their reunion on the starlit balcony is not a prelude to a life of Victorian domesticity with the roles amusingly reversed, she the worker, Romney the loving helpmate; much less is it an idealized version of the Brownings' romance. "They," Aurora and Romney, are the united spirit of a creative woman at last trustful of her power.

Notes

¹ Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City, N. J., 1976), pp. 55-62; Patricia Thomson, George Sand and the Victorians (London, 1977), pp. 54-60; Cora Kaplan, "Introduction," Aurora Leigh and Other Poems (London, 1978), pp. 5-36.

²The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon (London, 1897), II, 228.

³ Rpt. in The Complete Works of Mrs. E. B. Browning, Arno edition, ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke (New York, 1901), IV, 206. Ellen Moers compares the "jumble of metaphors in Aurora Leigh" to "the clutter of objects on a Victorian table top" (Literary Women, p. 62).

⁴ All citations from Aurora Leigh are taken from Volumes IV and V of the Arno edition, hereafter cited as Works. Roman numerals refer to the nine books of the poem, Arabic to the line numbers.

⁵ Barrett's words are "Scarcely was I woman when I lost my mother—dearest as she was & very tender,. . . but of a nature harrowed up into some furrows by the pressure of circumstances.... A sweet, gentle nature, which the thunder a little turned from its sweetness—as when it turns milk—One of those women who never can resist,—but, in submitting & bowing on themselves, make a mark, a plait, within,... a sign of suffering" (The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845-1846, ed. Elvan Kintner [Harvard Univ. Press, 1969], II, 1012).

⁶The Barretts at Hope End: The Early Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Elizabeth Berridge (London, 1974), p. 137.

⁷ Kaplan has a similar thought when she describes the portrait as "the representation of women in western culture" (Aurora Leigh, p. 20), but does not explain the ambivalent images.

⁸ C. G. Jung, "The Shadow," Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Princeton Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 8-10.

⁹ The thought is close to Barrett Browning's "secret profession of faith" made to Robert Browning in July, 1845, but is not, given my interpretation of Aurora Leigh, to be taken as her final opinion: "There is a natural inferiority of mind in women—of the intellect .. . not by any means, of the moral nature" (Letters, ed. Kintner, I, 113).

¹⁰Letters, ed. Kenyon, II, 243.

¹¹ One of her reviewers, for instance, murmured, "We think the lavish mutilation of heroes' bodies, which has become the habit of novelists, while it happily does not represent probabilities in the present state of things, weakens instead of strengthening tragic effect" (Works, IV, 204). The best-known modern statement of distress over the Victorian literary women's imaginary violence toward their heroes is Richard Chase's essay, "The Brontës, or Myth Domesticated," in Forms of Modern Fiction, ed. William Van O'Connor (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1948), pp. 102-119. For a reconsideration of the meaning of the motif, cf. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), p. 150.

¹²Letters, ed. Kenyon, II, 242.

¹³ I am grateful to Sandra Donaldson, whose comments on an earlier version of this essay helped me to clarify this point. The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale Univ. Press, 1979) was published while this paper was in press, and so I could not incorporate the fine ideas of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar about Aurora Leigh.