Aurora Leigh

When Marian resurfaces at a flower stall, surrounded by Aurora’s musings about flowers and memories of Romney, she is the ultimate Romantic “heroine.” Aurora’s description hauntingly echoes Tennyson’s eponymous 1832 poem: “That face persists / It floats up, it turns over in my mind, / As like to Marian, as one dead […]” (Lines 307-09). As Book 6 progresses through the details of Aurora and Marian’s tumultuous meeting, the imagery of death that surrounds Marian intensifies considerably, particularly when she relates the devastating events that led to her pregnancy. Just as Aurora conceives Marian’s poor room to be “scarce larger than a grave” (Line 550), Marian herself is often described in doleful, sepulchral terms, with a wan, saddened visage that emphasizes the depths of the multiple tragedies that have befallen her. 

It is also important to note that all of Marian’s current misfortunes are tied to the day of her failed wedding, and as the two women awkwardly share news, the true extent of Lady Waldemar’s treachery becomes apparent. With the sensational revelation that Lady Waldemar’s toxic jealousy is the source of Marian’s disappearance and subsequent trauma, Barrett Browning once again explores the darker aspects of Social Justice in 19th-Century England, for the decided injustice of this situation highlights the true impotence of those who inhabit places of low station. Marian’s true crime, in the eyes of Lady Waldemar, was to aspire to gain a status higher than her own by daring to marry above her station, and likewise, Marian’s lack of social power prevented her from fending off the other woman’s manipulations. In the moment of Marian and Aurora’s meeting, the true disparity between their respective positions in society becomes painfully apparent, not just in the mundane details of Marian’s threadbare hovel, but also in the lofty and judgmental assumptions that Aurora utters in every ostensibly well-meaning question. Thus, Marian’s comment that Aurora is infallibly “good” gains an element of irony, for the verses make it clear that Aurora’s goodness is also accompanied by a fair measure of obliviousness to the harsh realities that those in Marian’s position must endure.  

Reiterating the imagery of death surrounding Marian, Book 6 closes with Marian imagining the sunset as a “sepulchre / Which angels were too weak to roll away” (Lines 1272-73). The birth of her “fatherless” (Line 645) son is yet another Biblical motif to accompany the miraculous reappearance of Marian. In a sharp contrast to the judgmental perspective that Aurora initially holds of Marian’s current lifestyle, her outcast state is redefined within the verses to become a form of redemption that is deeply Christian in its nature, for she claims that her former self died in the moment of her assault, and only the essence of the mother survived. Thus, it is clear that from this point forward, she is determined to live for her child alone; all former ambitions of love have utterly deserted her, and from the death of her old self, she must reforge a new life from the ashes of her ruin.