47 pages • 1 hour read
Elizabeth Barrett BrowningAurora Leigh
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1856A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Social Justice in 19th-Century England
The poem engages with the widespread social change in England that accompanied the exodus of farm laborers to work in the factories during the Industrial Revolution. During this time frame, the enclosure of the land forced farm workers to seek new employment in the cities’ factories, and this trend radically reshaped both the social structure and topography of Britain, introducing a disquieting element of uncertainty around the proper distribution of formerly communal natural resources.
As a result of this social upheaval, geographical and psychological metamorphoses are linked in the British poetry of the time, and this trend is most notable in the first generation Romantic poet laureate, William Wordsworth, whose poetry is often location-specific and elides walking, thinking, and writing into one collective activity. Within the second generation of the Romantic Movement, Barrett Browning’s work displays her own awareness of the social changes that surrounded her, for despite her family’s economic and social prosperity due to her father’s status as an enslaver, she made it a point to write two poems urging for the abolition of slavery: “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” and “A Curse for a Nation.” She also publicly expressed her pleasure when the Emancipation Act was passed in 1833, despite the fact that her father’s Jamaican business incurred losses as a consequence of the new legislation. Her family members remained wealthy but were forced to sell their lavish home, Hope End. Given these real-life occurrences, it is clear that the financial sacrifices made by Aurora and the good works undertaken by Romney Leigh are designed to reflect Barrett Browning’s own fluctuating family fortunes, as well as her philosophical sensibilities to the events of her time. Additionally, Barrett Browning and her husband, Robert Browning, became close friends with French writer George Sand, and it is clear that the poet has incorporated the essence of George Sand’s republicanism and activism into the pages of Aurora Leigh, especially in her mentions of Romney’s many good works.
Female Identity and Value in the Victorian Era
Queen Victoria was crowned in 1837, and under the auspices of a strong female monarch, the question of female identity and value became all the more prominent. Historically (if problematically) known as the “Woman Question,” an intense debate arose over the proper social role of women in 19th-century British society, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning became one of the many celebrated female writers and philosophers of the time who took up the mantle of forging and promoting the early ideals upon which feminism would be built. Upon reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which Wollstonecraft claimed that “the most perfect education” would “enable the individual to attach such habits of virtue as will render it independent,” Barrett Browning became an impassioned advocate of proto-feminist ideas. This dynamic becomes immediately apparent in Aurora Leigh, for the characters all display considerable independence while struggling with the strictures of contemporary society. Aurora Leigh therefore treads a fine line between the endorsement and parody of traditional female archetypes. For example, Aurora, Lady Waldemar, and Marian respectively represent the maiden, seductress, and mother archetypes, but the characters also manage to emancipate themselves from these stereotypical roles by expressing their individuality and establishing their own agency in the larger world that surrounds them.
As a subtype of these stock characters, the trope of the dead mother is one that overshadows the poem from its outset, even with Aurora’s birth. Just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning herself will one day perish, Aurora’s mother dies shortly after giving birth to her daughter, and as the poem dramatically states, “the mother’s rapture slew her” (Book 1, Line 35). Thus, the haunting cycles of birth and death hover over the poem. Yet through the abeyance of the mother figure, Barrett Browning is provided with unimpeded access to a lineage of poetic fathers such as Homer, whom her name and nationality conjure. Within the context of the story, the death of Aurora’s mother ultimately serves more as a boon than a tragedy, for without a mother figure to limit her ambitions, Aurora is at least partially liberated from the entrenched misogyny that hampers the social mobility of many of the women who surround her.
Barrett Browning reframes female creative endeavor as both virtuous and ascetic in Aurora Leigh. Abjuring social status and financial security, Aurora leads a modest life while she pursues her poetic career. This is a neat reversal of Barrett Browning’s reality, for she willingly sacrificed her inheritance when she married Robert Browning without her family’s knowledge or blessing. Her poet husband also wrote on contemporary gender politics, though his two-part collection of poems, Men and Women, received far less critical acclaim than Barrett Browning’s own works. Thus, it is appropriate that Aurora Leigh literally crowns herself with ivy, standing as the “woman artist” (Book 2, Line 61) celebrating her own prowess even when the society that surrounds her fails to do so, caught as it is in misogynistic and misplaced judgments on women’s value to the artistic fields. Aurora Leigh therefore remains a foundational feminist text in the English language, and its poetic and moral light continues to shine brightly today.
The Conceptual Hallmarks of the Romantic Movement
The association of the tragic with the profound is one that modern readers make automatically. This connection, which seems so natural to the modern mind, had its origin in Romantic literature. The Romanticist aesthetic was already well established when Barrett Browning wrote Aurora Leigh. Hearkening back to classical models, Romanticism glamorized the concept of melancholia and framed artistic enterprise as a predominantly melancholic act. The notion of art as a sublimation of pain may be traced back, in large part, to Edmund Burke’s influential 1757 essay A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. An intangible concept that is notoriously difficult to grasp or define, the Romantic conception of the sublime builds on Burke’s essay and focuses upon using poetry to evoke a moment that forges a connection to the ineffable mystery of transcendent and awe-inspiring phenomena, whether they be inspired by the unutterable beauty of a landscape or a more ethereal contemplation of qualities such as vastness and magnificence. Throughout the Romantic Movement, capturing the realization of the sublime in words represented the very highest artistic standard that a poet could achieve, and both Barrett Browning and her contemporaries strove to capture this elusive concept in each of their emotion-laden works.
By opening with the loss of Aurora’s parents, Barrett Browning’s poem announces itself to be part of the Romantic tradition of art rooted in melancholia and loss. Quoting from Wordsworth in Book 1 and describing her dead mother as a “Muse,” Aurora Leigh adopts this Romantic aesthetic, which is one characterized by lack and loss. This dynamic becomes even more evident when Aurora willfully rejects Romney’s marriage proposal in favor of pursuing the more nebulous goal of personal success and fulfillment through her own poetry. Biographically important for the characters, the significance of this structural pivot point is flagged for a contemporary readership when Aurora rejects Romney by quoting a Latin phrase commonly written on tombstones as a reminder of mortality: “siste, viator,” or “pause, traveler” (Book 2, Line 853). Here, Barrett Browning shifts the poem’s register ingeniously from a mundanely romantic tone to the Romantic Movement’s obsessive search for the sublime in all aspects of existence, even in the contemplation of death itself, which stands as yet another type of lack.
This is a critical shift because Aurora Leigh is a poem situated in Romantic lack in a variety of ways. In the eyes of Barrett Browning’s initial readers, for instance, her protagonist was perceived as lacking something essential purely because she is a woman. This represents a crucial way in which the poem’s hidden messages fails to translate for a modern audience, whose own enculturation perceives no inherent lack in merely being female. Although the discourse of feminism remains highly relevant today, many of the poem’s more polemical elements (for example, industrialization, slavery, nationalism, and religion) are less significant for a modern readership. Despite these difficulties, it is still possible to marvel at the elegance with which Barrett Browning’s poem manipulates the concept of Romantic “lack” to allow the poet to actively transcend the societal limitations that society placed upon those of her gender. To this end, Aurora Leigh is designed to tap into contemporary feeling by engaging radically with social subordination. Through her participation in the Romantic tradition, Barrett Browning was able to draw considerable attention to gender and class inequalities.
The conflation of the natural with the spiritual, or the discovery of profundity in nature, is another Romantic idea on which the poem is based. For instance, Aurora says in Book 1, “out-door sights sweep gradual gospels in,” and “escape / as a soul from the body, out of doors” (Lines 655, 694). With the loss of common land and the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the zeitgeist was concerned with the loss of the natural. In Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning both gives voice to this aspect of contemporary consciousness and sublimates it, through reference to a remote yet attainable spiritual grace. By aligning poetic with religious ecstasy, she both reified and legitimized her poem, and, with it, her own status as a poet.
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By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
