Qs on P2?
May not finish w/ Browning today--but keep up with the reading, as we will surely be able to at least get started on Tennyson on Tuesday.
In starting the Victorian Age with Barrett Browning, it might seem that we're messing up our scheme somewhat: none of the poems we've read for today are dramatic monologues, and the last section of Aurora Leigh seems to call for a poetry directly opposed to the "perspectival" poetry we talked about last time, at least insofar as that would involve writing about a character from a different age: "...if there's room for poets in this world/...Their sole work is to represent the age,/Their age, not Charlemagne's..." She probably has Tennyson in mind here, but the argument could just as easily be made against her husband's dramatic monologues.
Moreover, if we start looking for affinities of Barrett Browning's poetry with other kinds of poetry, the most evident connections take us outside the Victorian era: the Sonnets from the Portuguese are most like Elizabethan sonnets; "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" is often mistaken for one of Shakespeare's. Aurora Leigh is very like Wordsworth's Prelude, in that it is an account of the "growth of a poet's mind."
But I would argue that Browning's poetry, and especially Aurora Leigh, is quintessentially Victorian. Even if none of these poems are dramatic monologues in the strict sense, there are movements in the direction of the dramatic monologue that are worth noting. First, although the sonnets in Sonnets from the Portuguese were written to Robert Browning, these very personal poems are distanced from the author by the device of calling the poems translations. It's a neat trick which both protects Barrett Browning's privacy--probably her main object--and allows her to play with slightly archaic language and more generally with the resources of the sonnet tradition. We probably won't do this, but it would be worth asking how this assumption of a mask differs from what Robert Browning is doing in Andrea Del Sarto.
Aurora Leigh has some of the same tendencies. It's true that the act of telling the story of a poet's growth is very like what Wordsworth does in The Prelude, but Aurora Leigh is nevertheless a fictional character; the events in her life differ quite a bit from Barrett Browning's. How different her VIEWS are is another matter. And the biggest similarity between the Browning and Aurora Leigh is huge: both are female writers.
And that is probably what is most Victorian about this poem. In the "Debating Women" section, we read a number of defenses of women as writers, or at least as wits; but not one of those poems were published under the authors' names, and some were not published at all. In Barbauld, we see a female author who is self-consciously a poet, but to some degree Barbauld accepts the inferior place assigned to her by past male poets (she argues against feminism, or what she perceives feminism to be, in "Woman's Place," and by doffing the buskins in "Washing Day" she seems to accept that a poem about women's experience would be a lower form). Aurora Leigh, on the other hand, is in part an explicit defense of women's poetry, written in direct opposition to the prevailing ideology of women's roles, which not only got published, it was quite popular. If Barrett Browning is not a perspectivist in the way the Robert Browning is--and that remains to be discussed--then at the very least she is one of the those "alternate voices" that make perspective so important.
Sonnets from the Portuguese 32
32: what is the position of woman as artist in this poem?(who is the artist figure in the poem, and what is she in relation?)--> what place is there for a woman as a subject in the poetic tradition? Women are traditionally muses--they inspire poetry rather than write it. One of the first orders of business for the female poet, then, is to carve out a space in which to be a subject.
Generalize from this to the following question: how does a woman write poetry in a male-dominated culture and a male-dominated poetic tradition? By a male-dominated culture I mean one in which any of the following is routinely assumed:
http://titan.iwu.edu/~wchapman/britpoet/femtrad.html
By a male-dominated poetic tradition I mean the following:
Possible strategies for fighting the culture:
Possible strategies for finding a place in the tradition
|
assumptions
of culture
|
conventions
of poetic tradition
|
| •Women
can't write (good) poetry. •Women shouldn't write poetry, because it distracts them from their proper duties and makes them unfeminine. • Women's lives aren't fit subjects for poetry--they're full of petty domestic stuff rather than important things like war and politics. • Women are morally and intellectually inferior (vain, frivolous, sentimental, sexually voracious, etc.) |
•a tradition
in which the fore-mentioned cultural assumptions are frequently expressed
|
|
respond
how?
|
find
a place how?
|
|
•fight back
in kind: Montagu against Swift |
• imitate
male poets
• subvert
the tradition |
In sonnet 32, Browning imitates the male tradition, staying within the tradition in the sense that she represents herself as an object rather than a subject.
Aurora Leigh does some of all of the above. Insofar as the poem is a female Prelude, she is imitating a male poet. However, she assumes a strong role as subject in the poem, and, insofar as the poem is a deliberate attempt to name and get beyond the confines of the female role, she is subverting the tradition. She was also starting a new tradition, although she may not have known to what degree this was true--among the female authors to whom Barrett Browning was important were Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf.
Today: want to look at the pressures that conspire to make Aurora into a certain kind of woman and, to the extent that we can tell from the excerpts we have, what Aurora does in order to become a poet in spite of them.
The aunt:
Choosing her crown, 2.1-59. Why the ivy? What's her reception?
Romney:
[BTW, Romney is not a stand-in for R. Browning:]
<http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/loveletter.htm>
<http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/lpg1.jpg>
January 10th, 1845
New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey
I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett, -- and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write, --whatever else, no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius and there a graceful and natural end of the thing.... I do, as I say, love these Books with all my heart -- and I love you too: do you know I was once seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to me one morning "would you like to see Miss Barrett?" -- then he went to announce me, -- then he returned ... you were too unwell -- and now it is years ago -- and I feel as at some untorward passage in my travels -- as if I had been close, so close, to some world's-wonder in chapel on crypt, ... only a screen to push and I might have entered -- but there was some slight ... so it now seems ... slight and just-sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be! Well, these Poems were to be -- and this true thankful joy and pride with which I feel myself.
Yours ever faithfully
Robert Browning
The next day, Barrett wrote to a friend that Browning's letter 'threw me into ecstasies'."