Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Glad Rags for Lady Godiva: Woman’s Story as Womanstance in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh

1994; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 20; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1994.0018

1913-4835

Susanna Egan,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

GLAD RAGS FOR LADY GODIVA: WOMAN’S STORY AS WOMANSTANCE IN ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S AURORA LEIGH SUSANNA EGAN University of British Columbia X ENSIONS between gender and genre remain central to discussion of the writing of nineteenth-century women both because we are now reading the dilemmas embedded in their subject matter and because of the generic choices that they made. For no work can this discussion be more heated at the moment than for Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning’s generic anomaly, novelized epic, collage, or hybrid novel-poem.1 Aurora Leigh demonstrates close ties with the traditions of novel and of poetry, but combines these gen­ res in order to achieve a double purpose: presentation of a narrative familiar to readers of prose fiction and simultaneous subversion of this same narra­ tive by means of a dense imagery more common to poetry. Where the novel works realistically with a broad cross-section of characters and scenes from contemporary life and tells a familiar story of love frustrated and then ful­ filled, the poem introduces key images that recur with cumulative semantic power and radically affect the novel’s conclusion. (Figurative language es­ sentially constitutes the poetic elevation in a work that is neither condensed nor mellifluous.) In particular, Barrett Browning uses images of Lady Godiva and of Danae to enrich her treatment of marriage and prostitution and of the woman as artist; for both figures and with both (related) topics, vulnerable nakedness becomes the source of power. One virtue, furthermore, of the presenta­ tion of Godiva and Danae as images rather than as narratives (for Barrett Browning’s purposes, Danae actually originates in a painting) is their wide metaphoric value; she releases them, as it were, from an arrested iconic pose into the narrative situation of women both in and beyond this work, thus en­ abling them to describe significantly related but distinctive modes of passive resistance to abuse as well as the political value of that resistance. Barrett Browning also associates Lady Godiva’s hair and Danae’s shower of gold with the symbolic mantle of the prophet/poet, thus specifying the particular assumption of power that originates in this work in a woman’s initial condition of weakness.2 That this combination of extreme weakness with remarkable power was central to her purpose becomes clear when we recognize that Marian (the traditional victim in terms both of gender and of 283 class) rather than Aurora is the central determiner of meaning for both these images. Margaret Reynolds points out that “Barrett Browning gave Marian Erie, and not Aurora, a personal appearance which very closely resembled her own. . . . That Marian should be depicted as her author’s physical self, while the character of Aurora portrayed her intellectual self-construction in writing, suggests . . . the inevitable duality which Barrett Browning con­ ceived as necessary to the writing woman, a crossbreed, evolving out of a feminine nature and a masculine order” (45). Such double focus that dis­ closes two equally demanding identities has been described as a structural pattern of women’s autobiography (Mason 210), reminding us that the is­ sues that are central to Aurora Leigh were, of course, central also to Barrett Browning’s life. The woman figure who welcomes the new dawn is therefore richly composite; she is designed both to represent all her sisters and to refigure a woman’s stance in literature. This, of course, is why Aurora Leigh has become so important to feminist critics. Although it was popular when first published, Aurora Leigh was largely ignored for many decades after Barrett Browning’s death and only reinstated (beginning with Woolf’s appreciation) fairly recently. Feminists are placing it back in the literary canon both because of its considerable merit and because it is the Kunstlerroman of a woman poet. But reinstatement has invited troubled discussion about the hybrid nature of the work, essentially because its genres seem to work against each other: the woman poet creates herself through the process of her poem, which celebrates female power and female subjectivity, and which values her art, in the process, above marriage and motherhood; the novelist, on the other hand, seems to renege on this...