Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Stone, Marjorie

Religion forms the most dominant strain in this year's work on EBB, in keeping with the general resurgence of interest in the subject reflected in Volume 31 (2003) of Victorian Literature and Culture on "Victorian Religion," and the important new collection Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism (2004), edited by Jude Nixon, among other publications. Material under review here includes a special issue of Studies in Browning and His Circle on EBB's religious and philosophical thought, as well as new essays on the importance of EBB's Congregationalist and Swedenborgian contexts (one in Nixon's collection). Other studies focus on the political and aesthetic philosophies expressed in her unjustly neglected juvenilia, her response to French literature (especially George Sand), and the metaphors of the gendered body pervading Victorian criticism of her poetry.

Volume 26 of SBHC (which I read in proofs kindly furnished by the Armstrong Browning Library) brings together eight essays on EBB first presented as papers at an "International Symposium on the Philosophical and Religious Thought of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning" at the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Texas, in October 2001. (The companion volume featuring essays on Robert Browning from the conference appeared more than a year ago.) Religious themes predominate over philosophical ones in the issue, which includes considerations of a range of EBB's works: Aurora Leigh, Sonnets from the Portuguese, A Drama of Exile, "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus," "Where's Agnes," and EBB's delightfully witty juvenile essay, "A Thought on Thoughts." As one might expect, however, these religious issues prove to be inseparable from EBB's poetics, her aesthetic strategies, and her formal innovations, as well as, in many cases, integrally related to developments in Victorian and present-day cultural and literary history.

Jude Nixon's "[S]he shall make all new: Aurora Leigh and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Re-Gendering of the Apocalypse" (pp. 72-93), for example, adeptly situates EBB's novel-epic within Victorian representations of the apocalypse by Charlotte Bronte, Browning, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Hopkins, then draws on contemporary theories of apocalyptic writing by Jacques Derrida, Tina Pippin, and others to show how, for "Barrett Browning, the apocalypse is as much political as it is religious," intimately concerned with issues of "power and authority," and therefore of gender (p. 75). As Nixon points out, EBB's interest in rewriting Revelation in the "apocalyptic postures" that proliferate in the end of Aurora Leigh is reflected in her densely woven invocations of "the Mosaic Cosmogony, 'The Six-day Worker,' the numerological seven, the Noaic flood, 'Art's fiery chariot,' the Egyptian and apocalyptic plagues, the Tower of Babel, Ezekiel's Valley of Dry Bones, Moses's burning bush and the pillar of white cloud, Lot's wife and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the implosion of the walls of Jericho, the buried city of Atlantis, the prophet Balaam ... and his oracles, some 'close-approaching' advent, the 'come' motif, the emphasis on writing things down, and the travail and resurrection" (pp. 75-76). Demonstrating EBB's deep knowledge of biblical texts and controversies--a point emphasized by several other critics this year--Nixon also considers formal and generic issues, arguing that EBB's choice of epic both contests "what to most Victorians was a waning heroic tradition," and reflects her "recognition that the epic convention is conducive to the apocalyptic." As he amply demonstrates, in Aurora Leigh apocalypse is "not some far off divine event to which the whole creation moves, but is, instead, something far more deeply interfused, containing at once the end and the beginning" (p. 79), in part because Barrett Browning invokes not only John's Revelation, but also "'the eschatology of British socialism'" (p. 87).

Nixon's analysis of Aurora as a figure of the prophet resonates with Corinne Davies' illuminating consideration of the links between the woman poet and Christ in "Aurora, the Morning Star: The Female Poet, Christology and Revelation in Aurora Leigh" elsewhere in the same special issue of SBHC (pp. 53-60). Interpreting EBB's novel-in-verse in light of "modern feminist and liberation theologies," as well as "the nineteenth century's cultural incarnations of Christ" as a "'Poet of the Spirit'" and as a "'Liberator,'" Davies argues that Aurora Leigh reflects its author's "carefully examined responses to nineteenth-century constructions of the figure of Christ, her own poetic and sociopolitical reading of the Book of Revelation, and her poetry's enactment of the central Christian mystery as she sees it" (p. 54). Davies presents Aurora as a "Christ-poet" whose language mediates "between the body and the spirit, between time and space and eternity" (p. 57). She also points to previously unnoted allusions to Revelation in the poem's ending, contesting as Nixon does prevailing readings of its gender politics. In her terms, the "vision of Book 9 is not a traditional Christian cop-out; it is the end of the soul-making and soul-saving process of this poem by the female Christ-poet" (p. 58).

Nathan Camp treats one of the more important influences on the relatively unorthodox dimensions of EBB's religious thought in "The Christian Poetics of Aurora Leigh (With Considerable Help from Emmanuel Swedenborg)," (pp. 61-71), one of two articles on this subject to appear this year. Camp argues that Swedenborg's thoughts on the "interaction between the soul and the body" are "essential to an understanding of Aurora's Christian poetics" (p. 64), as well as EBB's representation of the prophetic poet's "double vision" (p. 65), and her concluding focus on "the Divine attributes" of "both Wisdom and Love. Without love, Aurora is incomplete, personally and artistically" (p. 68), he emphasizes. Like Nixon and Davies, Camp contests the reading by "many feminist critics" of the ending of Aurora Leigh as a "conventional capitulation to social roles," agreeing instead with Christine Sutphin that "Aurora's choice of both marriage and poetry can be seen as the most radical idea of the poem in its original context" (p. 68). Elsewhere, continuing interest in the Brownings among present day Swedenborgians is reflected in Richard Lines's article, "Swedenborgian Ideas in the Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning," appearing in a special issue of the Journal of the Swedenborg Society (vol. 3), entitled In Search of the Absolute-Essays on Swedenborg and Literature ([2004]: 23-44). "It was accepted among Swedenborgians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the poetry of both the Brownings had been influenced by Swedenborg," Lines points out (pp. 39-40); he also describes the connections between the two poets and Swedenborgians such as Charles Augustus Tulk and the American artists Hiram Powers and William Page. The "over 120 references to Swedenborg in the Brownings' correspondence" noted by Lines do not include the Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Her Sister Arabella (2003), and he overlooks some critical studies in claiming that "Browning scholarship has been slow to recognize the influence of Swedenborg's religious philosophy on both poets" (p. 23). Lines does, however, offer an interesting analysis of the echoes of Swedenborg's Conjugal Love in Aurora Leigh, as well as its Swedenborgian concept of the "Divine Human" (Blake's "Human Form Divine"), and its theory of correspondences. Neither Lines nor Camp explores some of the intriguing parallels between Swedenborgian dimensions in EBB's thought and the thought of William Blake, a subject that invites further exploration, the more so because the Brownings' elderly friend Tulk had also been a friend of Blake's.

Among other investigations of contexts for EBB's religious thought, the special issue of SBHC includes an article of my own, "A Heretic Believer: Victorian Religious Doubt and New Contexts for Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'A Drama of Exile,' 'The Virgin Mary [to the Child Jesus]' and 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point'" (pp. 6-39). This essay first examines "the reasons for the neglect of EBB's religious poetry and thought, in both traditional criticism and more recent feminist criticism," attributing it to the "binary opposition of faith and doubt" in approaches to Victorian literature, compounded by "gendered oppositions" between her works and those of Robert Browning (pp. 8, 10). Arguing that EBB, like Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte's Villette, was a "heretic believer," the essay then considers the heterodox nature of her religious beliefs as they are revealed in her letters and in three of her poems read against previously uninvestigated contexts. The unconventional elements of her Eve in "A Drama of Exile" are underscored through comparisons with the very different portrayals of Eve in two much reprinted nineteenth-century religious epics that the poet mentions in her correspondence: Robert Pollok's apocalyptic epic The Course of Time (which EBB praised and possibly echoed in The Seraphim), and Robert Montgomery's The Messiah (which she much more critically dismissed as something her dog Flush might have written). Montgomery's portrayal of Mary also provides a point of comparison for EBB's innovative portrayal of the Virgin as a new mother in the 1838 dramatic monologue, "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus," while a reprinting of this poem in a Victorian pamphlet entitled The True Mary indicates how it entered into Victorian debates over the dogma of Mary's Immaculate Conception. A final section of the essay argues that the iconoclastic representation of a fugitive slave's theological speculations in "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" was directly influenced by the slave theodicy presented by Frederick Douglass in his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.

"A Drama of Exile" is also considered elsewhere in the SBHC special issue by Sandra Donaldson in "Three Readers of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'A Drama of Exile': Discoveries Made During Collation, and a Most Dramatic Incident" (pp. 105-111). Drawing on work that led to her role as the General Editor of the scholarly edition of EBB's complete poems now under preparation, Donaldson considers three variants in reprintings of "A Drama of Exile," as well the addition of a twenty-eight-line opening soliloquy by Lucifer to the 1853 text of the lyrical drama. The last substantial addition reflects the poet's response to critiques in the 1844 reviews of her Lucifer as lacking "the dignity of Milton's Satan," Donaldson suggests (p. 107). The "dramatic incident" Donaldson analyzes furnishes additional evidence for the importance of readers' responses to the publication of "A Drama of Exile." As the correspondence reveals, EBB considered suppressing her ambitious treatment of Miltonic subject matter in publishing her 1844 Poems, determining to include only "'one or two extracts from Lucifer's speeches' in the form of a 'monodram[a]'" (p. 108). Her cousin John Kenyon, however, dramatically intervened to save the poem and win over her self-doubt, when he convinced her to publish it, despite his own opposition to "'sacred subjects'" and her "'mystical tendencies'" (p. 109).

Barbara Neri offers a refreshing change of direction in the SBHC special issue by considering not only the biblical and Christian but also the classical and pagan dimensions underlying EBB's religious thought in her article, "'Sonnet I' and 'Sonnet II' of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese: Setting the Stage for Divine Reunification" (pp. 40-52). Noting that EBB referred to Christianity as a "'worthy myth,'" Neri stresses the "unorthodox" nature of her approach to Bible stories, and investigates how the poet intermingles "Greek myths and Christian beliefs" in the opening to her famous sonnet sequence (pp. 40-41). She focuses in particular on the important context that the allusion to Theocritus activates in Sonnet I, in invoking a story of two Greek women journeying to see a festival "celebrating the return of Adonis to Aphrodite" (p. 41) in which the goddess Minerva (or Athena) also plays an important role. Neri connects the story by Theocritus to the echo of Pope's translation of the Iliad that EBB subsequently sounds in Sonnet I, when the speaker describes how a "mystic shape" drew her "backward by the hair" as the hero Achilles was once drawn. Neri then extends this analysis into her consideration of Sonnet II, considering how its representation of God, the poet, and her lover as a holy trinity is layered over the indirect allusion to Adonis and Aphrodite in Sonnet I. "EBB seems to deliberately mix the voices who speak and hear the word love" in Sonnet II, Neri argues: "The pagan deities, the male and female voice of the beloved, and the lover are all united with the sacred and the divine voice of God" (p. 45). She also considers some Petrarchan contexts for Sonnet II, which speak to the conflicts between human and divine love that EBB is negotiating.

While Neri's analysis brings out the complex and conflicted eroticism activated by the web of classical, Christian, and literary allusions in the Sonnets from the Portuguese, Alison Chapman focuses in "Spirit Sisters: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Sophia Eckley" (pp. 112-122 of the SBHC special issue) on the strangely erotic connection that EBB experienced, for a period of time, not with Browning, but with Eckley. The intimacy was fostered through the experiments with "seances, automatic writing, and drawing" that EBB engaged in with Eckley between 1857 and 1859 (p. 113). As Chapman notes, this relationship has often been examined by biographers and critics. Her treatment, however, brings out both the "erotic charge" of the friendship and the way in which this was focused on "the act of writing and receiving letters and words" (p. 115). Automatic writing problematizes both authorship and authority, Chapman argues, and EBB's experiments with mediumship and its uncanny materialization of "the body into writing" was associated for her with a poetics of sensibility that she mistrusted (pp. 119-120), and ultimately repudiated in "Where's Agnes," the posthumous work in Last Poems (1862) often read as her marking her sense of betrayal by Eckley.

The SBHC special issue also includes an essay by Beverly Taylor, "Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Political-Aesthetic Philosophy: The Poetics of Engagement" (pp. 94-104). Taylor is the author of two of the new essays appearing this year, both of them giving welcome attention to EBB's large body of juvenilia, as well as to philosophical and political dimensions in her writing. The second essay, "Childhood Writings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 'At four I first mounted Pegasus,'" is included in The Child Writer from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (2005), edited by Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster (pp. 138-153). In her SBHC article, Taylor opens with a suggestive analysis of the scene from Franco Zeffirelli's 1999 film Tea with Mussolini in which a coterie of Englishwomen in Florence celebrate the seventy-fourth anniversary of EBB's death, as the Italian Fascists "precipitate war with Britain." Her reading aptly illustrates how the poetics of engagement manifested even in EBB's "earliest writings" is ironically muted in this scene, as it too often is in literary history (p. 95). Taylor then shows how this poetics was "consciously formulated" as an "aesthetic philosophy" by the young poet "partly as a rejoinder to Plato's remarks on poetry in the Republic," in her comic allegorical essay, "A Thought on Thoughts," written when she was seventeen, and subsequently twice revised before its publication in The Athenaeum in 1838 (p. 97). The essay simultaneously functions as a critique of Benthamite attitudes towards the arts, Taylor suggests, especially in its later versions, when revisions associated "Philosophical Thought" not with "Platonic idealism, but with utilitarian, mechanistic modern progress" (p. 99). A parallel analysis of EBB's engagement as a child "with both psychological and political issues" is more extensively developed in Taylor's wide-ranging essay on the poet's "Childhood Writings" (p. 138), which includes particularly thought-provoking treatments of the young writer's first published poem (on the injustice of impressment into the British navy), the motif of child mortality in her juvenilia, her 1820 verse drama championing Queen Caroline against the calumnies of the Prince Regent, and her autobiographical essay, "Glimpses into My Own Life."

EBB's neglected essay "A Thought on Thoughts" is again among the texts considered by Alexandra M. B. Worn in "'Poetry is where God is': The Importance of Christian Faith and Theology in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Life and Work," Chapter 10 in Jude Nixon's collection, Victorian Religious Discourse, pp. 235-252. Whereas Taylor emphasizes EBB's critique of Platonic philosophy, however, Worn finds "Christian Platonic instincts" to be central to the poet's vision and aesthetic practice (p. 242). For "Barrett Browning poetry, nature, and God were interlinked," Worn argues; moreover, the poet's understanding of all three was strongly shaped by her Congregationalist background (p. 235). At the same time, Worn contends that EBB increasingly emancipated herself from her father's "Pelagian" strain of Congregationalism as she matured, developing a doctrine that "located divine glory in the imperfections of the world" (pp. 236-237). Through an extended reading of "A Drama of Exile," Worn illustrates how, "Janus-faced," EBB looks "both ways": gazing back to the "ultimate good" of a lost Paradise, yet also engaging with "the unregenerated world" (p. 243) and fashioning a "richer vision of Eve as a loving, caring and doubting woman" (p. 246).

Like Worn, Karen Dieleman stresses the importance of EBB's Congregationalist background in "Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poetry and the Liturgy of Congregationalism," appearing in Anthony Giffone and Marlene San Miguel Groner's edition of the Proceedings of the 2003 Northeast Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature [2004], pp. 33-37. In one key respect, however, Dieleman and Worn present diametrically opposed arguments. Whereas Worn finds a "gradual but drastic shift" in EBB's "depiction of God," from "divine remoteness to the closest intimacy with his creation" (p. 239), expressing her resistance against the religion of her father, Dieleman argues that "rather than viewing her Congregationalist background as restrictive," EBB "actually developed her religious voice along Congregationalist principles and pursued in her poetry what Congregationalism embodied in the sermon of its liturgy" (p. 33). Dieleman throws new light on the impact of the sermon on EBB's poetic practice, especially the sermons of the Reverend James Stratten of Paddington Chapel in London, which the poet often praised in her correspondence. In fact, Dieleman points to evidence indicating that Stratten's sermons may have suggested the subject matter of The Seraphim. Like Congregationalist preachers such as Stratten, she argues, EBB demonstrates her "extensive Scriptural knowledge and sophisticated hermeneutics" in The Seraphim by weaving texts from Genesis, Samuel, Job, Isaiah, Revelation, all four gospels, and the epistles of John and Peter into an interpretive whole" (p. 35).

EBB's rich use of classical traditions, as opposed to biblical traditions, tends to prevail in Linda Lewis' "Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and the Labors of Psyche" (pp. 99-133), Chapter 3 in her wide-ranging book, Germaine de Stall, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist (2003). Noting that like "most other English female readers of her generation," EBB had "an advanced case of George Sandism," Lewis argues that Aurora Leigh is "much indebted" to Sand's epic female odyssey Consuelo and its sequel, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (pp. 100-101). As Lewis rightly points out, it "has become a truism that Barrett Browning's artist heroine owes much to Stael and Sand, but the effect of the English poet's allusions to her French precursors, especially in the case of Sand, has not been traced" (p. 105). While Lewis' treatment of the echoes of Stall's Corinne in Aurora Leigh usefully consolidates and extends work in this area, the most original aspect of this study is her exploration of the parallels and differences between EBB and Sand's uses of the allusions to Psyche to represent "female desire and the female quest" (p. 121). The latter includes a brief and illuminating treatment of the unfinished lyrical drama EBB collaborated on with Richard Hengist Horne, Psyche Appocalypte..

While her invocations of the Psyche myth reveal EBB's concern with representing the soul and its conflicts, she herself was largely represented by critics through metaphors of the invalid, disfigured, and monstrous body in her lifetime and immediately following it, according to Elizabeth Johnston in "Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Textual Bodies and the Rhetoric of Gender in Nineteenth-Century Critical Discourse." This article appears in thirdspace (4:1 [2004], http://www.thirdspace.ca), a new Canadian-based international on-line journal with the mandate of publishing "top-quality, refereed" articles by "emerging feminist scholars" that demonstrate "the broad range of applications for feminist theory and methodology." Johnston's chief argument is that Victorian critics "fetishistically and methodically corporealize" EBB's poetry through metaphors of the infirm, contaminated, unruly, cross-dressed, and monstrously deformed body like those reflected in W. E. Aytoun's portrayal of the poet as an oracularly raving Pythoness "'foaming at the mouth, her eyes goggling, her breasts heaving, her voice indistinguishable and shrill.'" Johnston's examples are convincing, if selective: one could easily construct a much more heroic set of recurrent signifiers for the poet from a different set of reviews and critical commentaries than she chooses, written by her many defenders, ranging from Margaret Fuller to Oscar Wilde. EBB, in other words, was a textual body that became a site of sustained and fascinating conflict over Victorian gender ideologies-a conflict that Johnston's single-minded focus tends to mute. This article nevertheless achieves the ambitious standard set by the editors of thirdspace. Drawing perceptively on feminist theories of the body by Elizabeth Grosz, Bram Djikstra's exploration of late Victorian cultural misogyny in Idols of Perversity, and Sandra Donaldson's annotated bibliography of reviews of EBB, Johnston's analysis is theoretically sophisticated and compelling: a promising example of the work being produced by a younger generation of scholars as we move towards the bicentenary of EBB's birth in 2006.

Two articles and a book call for some final mention here, although they treat EBB more peripherally. In "'Hardly Shall I Tell My Joys and Sorrows': Robert Browning's Engagement With Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poetics" (VP 43 [2005]: 75-97), Britta Martens demonstrates that "engagement with EBB's poetics was a constant preoccupation for Browning" during the courtship and in the years following their marriage. While Martens presents the conventional opposition between Browning as a dramatic poet and EBB as a "self-expressive," subjective poet, notwithstanding the latter's numerous dramatic monologues, she does note that Browning was "guilty" of some "simplification" in glossing over the difficulties EBB registered in her attempts to write a poetry that was the "'completest expression'" of her being (p. 76). Eliza Richards's engaging article, "Outsourcing 'The Raven': Retroactive Origins" (VP 43 [2005]: 205-221), includes a consideration of the influence of "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" on the genesis of Edgar Allen Poe's most famous poem (p. 207). Finally, while Maria H. Frawley's comprehensive study Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2004) makes only passing mention of EBB as one of the noteworthy examples of invalid Victorian intellectuals and artists, it furnishes rich material for a fuller appreciation of the ways in which narratives of invalidism in the period may have shaped the poet's experience and artistic identity.