3/31/09 Elizabeth Barrett Browning continued; Tennyson

P2. Optional for this paper: conference instead of comments.

P1: someone asked to be able to revise the revision of P1. I have no objection to this principle, so long as this is logistically possible and fair to all. So here's the question: would anyone think it unfair to allow a second revision, given that those who didn't revise a first time don't have that chance, and also given that it is somewhat unlikely that there will also be a second chance to revise the second paper?

Looking ahead: We are a bit behind, and we have a lot to cover in Tennyson. So:

• Thursday: finish Tennyson, concentrating especially on "Lady of Shallott"
• next Tuesday: skip "Fra Lippo Lippi," include "Karshish" in the Victorians and Religion thread. In effect we'll be skipping Robert Browning as a separate figure. However, we'll still have read two poems by Browning, one of them also about art, so "Lippi" is probably the most expendable.

What we've seen so far in Aurora Leigh:

• A way to sum up what we said about AL's education is to say that she is taught by her aunt to be a proper Victorian lady: pious, serious, restrained, "womanly," domestic, full of polite accomplishments but not trained sufficiently to be an artist, just knowledgeable enough to converse with men but not knowledgeable enough to talk seriously about anything.
• She is, in other words, being trained to be much like the aunt herself. Her aunt's life is very constrained: she is quiet, harmless (she would call it virtuous), hemmed in. She does the right things, but without a lot of commitment: she is charitable, but has a sense of the poor as deserving clothes of less quality than those of her own class. She is, in Aurora Leigh's terms, a caged bird.
• Aurora Leigh condemns the education she gets at her aunt's hands--it kills or sickens, literally or metaphorically, women "of the feebler sort." She herself manages to avoid this fate; having relations "in the Unseen," i.e. either with some kind of vaguely Wordsworthian divinity or just with nature in a hidden life, she remains alive.
• When she is twenty, and stands "incomplete,/ [And] credulous of completion" as both woman and artist, she crowns herself with leaves to proclaim her future success. But in doing so she doesn't accept the usual role as either artist or woman: she doesn't choose the bay laurel, which is the traditional laurel of male poets, but she also doesn't choose traditionally feminine leaves such as the "passionately fragrant" verbana or the "too slight" guelder rose. Instead she chooses ivy: it is bold to grow high and strong enough to climb, it suggests immortality because it can adorn graves, it connects her to the "womanly male god" Dionysius, and therefore to passion, fertility, ecstasy, divine madness. It is also pretty "(and that's not ill)." In effect, she is defining herself not just as a poet but as a female poet and thus someone distinctively different.

We left off by noting that she is caught donning this crown by Romney.

Romney:

• 2.77-115: what is Romney's position on Aurora's poetry? What is A's counterargument?
• what women are suited for, according to Romney: 2.343-356. What is A's counter 356-364?
• 372-375 weak for art, strong for duty,421 took the woman to be nobler than the man; 435 A's reply, R sees woman as complement to man only

In general: how is Browning making her place within a male-centered culture and poetic tradition?

[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'."]

Tennyson

Who wrote the following? [stanza 5 of Choric Song in "The Lotus-Eaters"] And this? [sts. 1,6 in "Ode to a Nightingale"]

I've said that Victorian poetry is much more continuous with romantic poetry than romantic poetry is with Augustan; Tennyson as much as anyone is an example of both the continuity and the change.

• Similarities: same attraction to dream world, same recognition that the painful demands of life are sometimes just too much and the corresponding recognition of the attraction of just letting go. Same vividness of description, melancholy tone, richness of language.
• Note how much at odds this is with our picture of the Victorians, of the proper gentleman or lady with a stiff upper lip, firmly repressed desires, and a rigid devotion to duty. (E.g. the aunt in Aurora Leigh.)
  [a lot of Victorian poetry might best be understood as a struggle with that image of what is proper and fitting--not a complete rejection of it, but a struggle with it.]
• --> one thing that's different about the poem is the voice; Ode" is in Keats' own voice, or at least a recognizable lyric "I"; Tennyson starts out with a third-person narrator--nothing unusual in narrative poetry--but the second half of the poem is in the voice of the mariners after they have eaten the lotos. A big step towards the dramatic monologue, although it isn't quite there yet.
• How much distance does that move give, do you think? Is "Lotos-Eaters" about urge to just let go, or about the destructiveness of this urge to let go?
• Another difference: Tennyson is willing to push the boundaries of sensible language much further than Keats is, at least in this poem. [stanza 8]: consonance and assonance, excessive rhymes, long lines, internal rhyme--almost to the point where the language is used for its own sake. In this respect, Tennyson is headed not just to the Victorian age but to the modern era.

"Ulysses"

U is arguably the first dramatic monologue, or very close to it.

Without looking, tell me about the character of Ulysses. (heroic, strong, fearless: "strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield").

Curious, considering the circumstances: written in 1833, when T was still grieving Arthur Henry Hallam; his father had in the not too distant past drunk himself to death, leaving T to fend for himself; he himself was subject to depression and not at all sure what to do with himself.

So let's see if Ulysses measures up to our heroic picture on closer examination.

• ¶ 1: setting. How does he fit into the world? Restlessness, alienation.
• ¶ 2: Mostly about his past. What was he like then? thirst for life, but also restlessness. Talking about action, but there's no description of action. Can Ulysses' thirst ever be quenched? "margin fades forever". End of paragraph: what would it mean to follow a "sinking star" beyond the utmost bound of human thought? Death wish, here?
• ¶ 3 back to the social world. How does he feel about Telemachus? Is there any self-interest in his view?
• ¶ 4 The apparent new beginning. But what does he anticipate finding? Note setting...sail beyond the sunset? until he dies... note the last words--not "prevail" or "triumph," but "not to yield"