Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Stone, Marjorie
This year, in EBB criticism, the politics of race, empire, and
nation feature prominently, helping to counter the relative absence of
"racial issues" in the work by the new wave of Victorian
poetry scholars that Isobel Armstrong reflects on in her playful and
probing article, "The Victorian Poetry Party" (VP 42 [2004]:
9-27). Interest in EBB's generic experimentations with the ballad,
the dramatic monologue, the sonnet, and Victorian sage discourse also
remains very strong. There is new work on her relationship to the
changing canon of Victorian poetry; on Last Poems, her Italian contexts,
and her relation to the figure of the poetess; on her sonnets "To
George Sand" and her response to the French novelist Eugene Sue;
and on the religious contexts of A Drama of Exile and Aurora Leigh.
Theories of performativity form still another thread, aptly so in light
of postmodern performance art respired by Sonnets from the Portuguese. A
full-length study of EBB's poetry in conjunction with Robert
Browning's poetry amplifies and calls in question representations
of their artistic relationship in two new biographies of Robert
Browning, while a newly published reminiscence of EBB nicely complements
an ample new anthology of materials on nineteenth-century responses to
the Brownings. Other work covered in this review deals with her impact
on Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot, the forgeries of her works, and her
mythic role in Jamaican tourism today.
Joseph Bristow's "Whether 'Victorian' Poetry: A
Genre and Its Period" (VP 42 [2004]: 81-109) offers an instructive
starting point because he turns to the example of EBB's erasure from literary histories to interrogate the broader epistemic formations
associated with "Victorian" and "Victorianism."
Unlike the "literary-historical" formations of
"Romanticism" and "the Renaissance," the
"monarchical moniker" of Victorianism has never transmuted
into a topic of meta-critical theoretical inquiry; it is "the
literary-period-designator-that-does-not-think," he wittily
observes (pp. 86-88). Bristow's wide-ranging analysis of late
nineteeth-century uses of "Victorian" includes a detailed
consideration of Victorian Poets (1875) by Edmund Clarence Stedman. This
is of particular relevance to EBB because Bristow, like Tricia Lootens
in Lost Saints (1996), holds Stedman partly responsible for the idolatry that transformed the period's most influential woman poet into an
angel in Robert Browning's house (p. 98)--although one might argue
that later studies, such as Margaret Oliphant's The Victorian Age
of English Literature (1892) and Hugh Walker's The Literature of
the Victorian Era (1910) contributed more to EBB's metamorphosis
into a minor woman poet than Stedman's. Bristow argues,
provocatively, that the term "Victorian" has "little or
no pertinence to the writings" of EBB because her poetry belongs to
a period in which it still had "little or no meaning" (p. 97).
The example of her ballads, in particular, shows how the "unhelpful
associations" of "Victorian" and period "divisions
between 'Romantic' and 'Victorian'" have
"clouded scholars' understanding of how specific poetic genres
circulated" in the nineteenth century (p. 90). Noting earlier work
reassessing EBB's ballads, he expands this to "consider more
generally the larger poetic community in which this distinctly social
genre thrived" (p. 102). This argument is developed through an
insightful analysis of "The Poet's Vow" in the context of
the "liberal and radical poets" associated with the New
Monthly Magazine, in which the poem first appeared (p. 102).
The social and political dimensions of EBB's poetry, together
with its formal and generic features, are also integral to E. Warwick
Siren's Victorian Poetry' as Cultural Critique: The Politics
of Performative Language (2003), which includes as Chapter Three,
"The Mark as Matrix: Subject(ion) and Agency in Barrett
Browning's 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's
Point'" (pp. 56-89). The critical methodology that frames this
timely and cogent book is of particular value to EBB scholars because
Slinn so adeptly combines poetics with politics, calling for renewed
attention to "the intensive use of language" in Victorian
poetry (p. 1), while nevertheless resisting capitulation to a narrow
neoformalism. Arguing for the need to "de-polarize" text and
context, he turns to theories of performative language and
performativity as a "dynamic model for the interconnection of
language (and hence literature) with cultural reality" (p. 23). The
concept of the performative that Slinn draws on is a "complex
accretion," derived from work in philosophy, post-structuralist
theory, rhetorical criticism, queer theory, and performance studies (pp.
14-25), enriched by his own subtle articulation of the capacity for
poetry to effect political critique--which he helpfully distinguishes
from "subversion" (pp. 25-31). Slinn's treatment of the
"formalist features" of "The Runaway Slave at
Pilgrim's Point" and its generic hybridity as
"inseparable from its political and cultural themes" (p. 80)
are in keeping with his larger project. He opens with an analysis of the
inscription of the "mark" in the poem, interpreting it as a
polyvalent signifier within the poem's "cultural and
discursive matrix" (pp. 56-59). This matrix as he reconstructs it
includes biographical contexts, literary antecedents in English poetry,
discursive contexts in nineteenth-century treatments of infanticide, and
the poem's first publication context in the 1848 issue of the
Boston anti-slavery annual, the Liberty' Bell. In treating the
biographical contexts, Slinn raises but strategically sidesteps the
speculations about EBB's own "mixed blood" resurrected by
Julia Markus in her 1995 biography of the Brownings, Dared and Done (on
this slippery issue, see Joseph Phelan below), then aptly questions the
reiterated claim that EBB derived her poem from a story given to her by
her cousin Richard Barrett. By contrasting the poem with a story that
immediately preceded it in the 1848 Liberty Bell, he brings out the
"political force" of EBB's work, with its representation
of a "doubly alienated" black woman who "speaks
directly" (pp. 65-66). Shifting from context to text, he analyzes
the verbal performatives in the poem's "unfolding drama of a
perplexed subject" (p. 68), then interprets the actions and
statements of looking in the poem (the reiterated phrase "I
look") in light of Hegel's dialectic of subjectivity, in which
"consciousness achieves self-consciousness, or social subjectivity,
through 'recognition'" (pp. 73-74). Two final sections of
this original, theoretically nuanced essay treat the generic hybridity
of "The Runaway Slave" and its representation of power and
agency. The interpretation that Slinn's essay most chimes with
(though it is not one that he cites perhaps because its title makes its
treatment of "The Runaway Slave" easy to miss) is Susan
Brown's sophisticated 1995 reading of the poem's
representation of alienated subjectivity in "'Black and White
Slaves': Discourse of Race and Victorian Feminism" (Gender and
Colonialism [1995]: 124-138).
The politics of race, along with those of gender and nation, are a
central focus again in two essays on EBB in Alison Chapman's
collection, Victorian Women Poets (2003): Chapman's "The
Expatriate Poetess: Nationhood, Poetics and Politics" (pp. 57-77),
and my own "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Garrisonians:
'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point,' The Boston Female
Anti-Slavery Society, and Abolitionist Discourse in the Liberty
Bell" (pp. 33-55).
Both converging with and diverging from Slinn's treatment of
"The Runaway Slave," the latter essay contests the privileging
of biographical approaches to the poem over investigation of its larger
historical and cultural contexts, a pattern evident in interpretations
praising its radical gender politics as well as in readings of it as a
conservative appropriation of voice. I also critique the tendency to
rely on traditional methods of source attribution, as opposed to
"theories of intertextuality that foreground the circulation of
literary conventions with social and political matrices," pointing,
as Slinn does, to the problems with the traditional identification of
the poem's source (pp. 35-37). Turning to the thins-Atlantic
abolitionist and Liberty' Bell contexts of the poem, I argue that
these had a much greater influence on "The Runaway Slave" than
the Richard Barrett story, given evidence that EBB received gift copies
of the 1844 and 1845 issues of the anti-slavery annual, and given the
evidence provided by the poem's unusually convoluted draft
manuscript (which includes an abandoned opening section with a male
speaker and possible echoes of Frederick Douglass in his 1845 Narrative
of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave). Part one of this essay
considers the trans-Atlantic networks of Garrisonian abolitionists that
led to the commissioning of the poem for the Liberty' Bell, the
birth of the annual in the "battle of the fairs" (when the
Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society was split by inner conflicts over
gender and religion), and the increasingly militant and feminist tone of
the Liberty' Bell by 1844. Part two traces the convoluted
compositional sequence in the draft manuscript of "The Runaway
Slave," interpreting the phases of composition in light of
abolitionist topoi such as the slave theodicy, the slave mother's
anguish, the invocation of Pilgrim's Point as a signifier of
liberty, and the slave romance. Examples of all of these topoi can be
found in the Liberty Bell, but there is no poetical precedent in the
annual for the poem's graphic representation of infanticide, which
anticipates both Frances Harper's "The Slave Mother, A Tale of
the Ohio" and Toni Morrison's Beloved.
In "The Expatriate Poetess: Nationhood, Poetics and
Politics," her own contribution to Victorian Women Poets, Chapman
throws new light on EBB and other Victorian women poets by investigating
"why Risorgimento Italy was such a productive subject" for so
many of these writers, and "how the identity of the woman
expatriate poet, displaced from her own nation and audience, is
creatively and professionally enabling" (p. 58). In addressing
these questions, she analyzes the over-determined figure of the poetess
in mid-century Britain as an epitome of "the national
character" that is nevertheless "predicated on
foreignness," given "the legendary figures of Sappho and
Corinne." Thus the poetess becomes a "mobile category" of
"repressed national hybridity," signifying "her
patriotism paradoxically through devotion to nations not her own"
(p. 59). Chapman perceptively re-frames EBB's much discussed
reference to searching for poetic "grandmothers" in her letter
to Henry Fothergill Chorley of January 1845, by noting how "the
search for a poetess" in this context is repeatedly linked with a
nationalist discourse (p. 61). Part two of her essay breaks new ground
in treating the intertextual relations between poems by the expatriate
English-Florentine poet, Theodosia Garrow Trollope, and both Casa Guidi
Windows and Poems before Congress. This analysis suggestively reveals
how EBB forged a "very different public poetics of agency"
than Garrow "by manipulating the foreignness embedded in the
English figure" of the poetess (p. 59), and by "struggling to
break free" from the tradition of the improvisatrice and its
"legacy of excessive sensibility" (p. 70). At the same time,
Chapman demonstrates that EBB's Italian poems, as well as Aurora
Leigh, share many tropes with Garrow's poetry (metaphors of the
dawn and allusions to Aurora, for example, with an overtly political
resonance), as well as the rhapsodic, "destructive and
apocalyptical" voice that served as a channel for
"revolutionary energies" (pp. 75-77). In both Garrow's
and EBB's work, "lyricism has an explicit performative
function as the woman poet appropriates the energy of Italian
patriots" (p. 74).
Other essays in Chapman's Victorian Women Poets of particular
relevance to EBB include Patricia Pulham's
"'Jewels-delights-perfect loves': Victorian Women Poets
and the Annuals" (pp. 9-31), which briefly considers the
"spectres" of the annuals' commodified femininity in
Aurora Leigh (pp. 16-17), and Glennis Byron's "Rethinking the
Dramatic Monologue: Victorian Women Poets and Social Critique" (pp.
79-98). The latter essay, like chapter four in Byron's Dramatic
Monologue (2003), incisively explores the question of whether "men
and women conceptualize and exploit the form" of the dramatic
monologue "differently," arguing that Victorian women poets
such as EBB, Augusta Webster, and Amy Levy "tend to sympathize more
with their speakers" (p. 87) and to use the form "for the
purposes of social critique" (p. 84).
Chapman is also the author of a second substantial article this
year, '"In our own blood drenched the pen': Italy and
Sensibility in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Last Poems
(1862)," appearing in Women's Writing, Volume 10: The
Elizabethan to the Victorian Period (2003), pp. 269-286. This is a
multi-faceted, original new reading of the thematic and structural logic
of the posthumously published Last Poems, which also persuasively
contests Sandra Gilbert's interpretation of EBB's engagement
with the Risorgimento as a mode of personal rejuvenation. Arguing that
the poet's "response to Italian politics radically alters
between her elopement to Italy in 1846 and her death in 1861, in
contradistinction to Gilbert's static model," Chapman contends
that in Poems before Congress EBB "conveys emancipation as a
struggle against both Italy's [feminized] artistic representations
and the female poet's symbolic equivalence" with the
"emerging nation" (pp. 269-271). Last Poems further
"revises the public role of the woman poet," grappling with
the legacy of Corinne's self-destructive heroinism: "Barrett
Browning repeatedly performs her rejection of the self-consuming
heart" associated with female poetic creativity within the
sentimental tradition "in order to refigure women's active
political agency in poetry" (p. 271). Exploring previously unnoted
connections between EBB's numerous Pan poems (including "The
Dead Pan," "A Reed," and "A Musical
Instrument") and her representations of Italy, Chapman argues that
in "A Musical Instrument" EBB "puts Pan back into the
centre of her poetics and at the centre of the Italian question"
(p. 277). While some might question the extent of the italian
associations in "A Musical Instrument" as Chapman presents
these, her analysis of EBB's poetic sequencing in Last Poems
provides intriguing evidence for her subtle argument. The logic of this
sequencing is related to the structural logic of the entire collection
of Last Poems, Chapman argues. "The poems about sensibility and
women's poetic creativity that make up the majority of the first
half of Last Poems, play out an ironic counterpart to the political
poems of the second half.... Rather than the body of the woman poet as
the site of sensibility and poetic expression, the political poems
refigure agency as a performance that refigures the mechanics of
writing" (p. 281).
The performative dimensions of EBB's poetry treated by both
Chapman and Slinn are brought to life in a different way in the striking
work of postmodern performance artist Barbara Neri. Neri mines, resists,
and transmutes the popular fables of EBB's identity as a romantic
heroine, reconstructing her "closet autbiography" from her
garments and other artifacts, while dialogically recontextualizing the
Sonnets from the Portuguese in a multi-media, layered collage of new and
old contexts (philosophical, postmodern, poetical, popular--from Plato
and Boethius to the risque representations of Victorian
"stereocards" to poststructuralist theory). Her work,
described on her website (http://www.barbaraneri.com), is further
reflected in two published works this yea,: "The Consolation of
Poetry: A Performance by Barbara Neri" (TDR 47 [2003]: 45-77), and
"Ten Dream Drawings (2001)" (Performance Research 9 [2004]:
57-60). In the script for the multi-media performance piece, "The
Consolation of Poetry," Neri begins as herself, and unfolds the
process of "becoming EBB" within a dressing room, initially
against the backdrop of digital projections of late-Victorian
stereocards of women in various stages of undress and dress. "What
has SHE to do with the postmodern, contemporary body?" (p. 52) is
one of the questions Neri is working through in this scene, which
interweaves personal reflections with allusions to and quotations from
Plato's Symposium, Petrarch's letters on the split between the
body and the spirit, Sonnets from the Portuguese, and Aurora Leigh (Book
7, 11. 857-865, in which Aurora expresses the need for man to
"reverence" his body "which now he counts so vile").
"But how did all of this begin?" the speaker asks, well into
the performance (p. 56), explaining that "Elizabeth Barrett
Browning was the furthest thing from [her] imagination" until she
experienced a "mysterious dream on October 23, 1995."
Neri's performance piece includes a description of this dream, and
vividly records her initial resistance to being taken over by this dead
woman as muse and turned into her "personal shopper!," her
"maid, the slave," much to the consternation of her postmodern
artistic colleagues (p. 50). In the second half of "The Consolation
of Poetry," Neri, initially clad in a wrapper, and then in white
undergarments and a symbolically and visually suggestive cage crinoline,
engages in a dialogue with a digitized projection of EBB (Neri plays
both parts) about art, EBB's "history" as a "fable
agreed upon" (p. 59), and the transformation of Sonnets from the
Portuguese into a commodity used to sell, among much else, "a
submarine sandwich!" (as the speaker reforms the EBB image,
explaining to her what a submarine sandwich is). The EBB video-image
sighs in response and cites, "with irony," Sonnet 41:
"Oh, to shoot my soul's full meaning into future years"
(p. 60). Much of this dialogue between past and present, EBB and Neri,
media image and stage personality, unfolds through extended commentary
on interpolated quotations from Sonnet 43, "How do I love
thee?," a work that Neri endeavors to defamiliarize so that its
meaning and poetic power might emerge from the accretions of popular
culture and myths that deny EBB the artistic name and fame of Petrarch
or Dante, with their analogous love poems to their muses. Neri's
refraining of Sonnet 43 ends in a postmodern questioning of EBB's
discourse of a love and a life that will survive death; Neri chooses to
conclude instead with Sonnet 22's evocation of love "on
earth" where "pure souls" find a "place to stand and
love in for a day" (p. 65). "The Consolation of Poetry"
also includes reflections on the gender perfomativity at play in Harriet
Hosmer's representation of the Brownings' clasped hands (p.
71), and in EBB's identity as a "cross-dresser."
The "large-brained woman and large-hearted man / Self-called
George Sand" was, of course, a "cross-dresser" whose
genius EBB especially admired. Margaret Morlier's "The Hero
and the Sage: Elizabeth Barrett's Sonnets 'To George
Sand' in Victorian Context" (VP 41 [2003]: 319-332) does much
to explain the complex (even bizarre) metaphors and puzzling features of
what she rightly describes as "two of Barrett's most difficult
poems"--viewed as "'awkward'" even by those
sympathetic to the poet like Elaine Showalter (pp. 319-320).
Acknowledging that some of the sonnets' more convoluted features
may arise from what Dorothy Mermin describes as EBB's
"'profoundly mixed'" attitude to Sand, Morlier
argues that, read in their Victorian context, the poems reveal
"carefully chosen diction that responds to specific issues raised
in the English press--about Sand, of course, but about other public
issues as well, like heroes and heroism, and even the value of literary
and Biblical texts" (p. 320). Morlier first situates the sonnets
within the debate over Sand in the English press "between the
mid-1830s and mid-1840s," with defenders such as the "Italian
exile Joseph Mazzini" on one side, and the critics of Sand's
sensuality and '"moral contagion'" on the other (pp.
320-321). EBB's contribution to this debate involved
"reshaping the public image of Sand by redefining key words and
phrases": countering not only Sand's detractors but also her
defenders in some instances--like Mazzini, who had asserted in defending
Sand that '"man lives more by the brain, woman by the
heart'" (p. 321). Morlier's article includes a
particularly interesting discussion of the term "unsex" in
relation to the reviews (p. 322), as well as an analysis of the
poems' Carlylean allusions to biblical and literary heroic
figures--though "unlike Carlyle, EBB included women in her
history" such as Delilah, in the process challenging conventional
representations of Delilah as a fallen Eve figure (pp. 323-324). Other
phrases and images in the sonnets to Sand, Morlier points out, link her
to "another famous, French cross-dresser," Joan of Arc (p.
325). Turning to the technical aspects of the sonnets to Sand and to
their generic hybridity, Morlier examines EBB's use of the
"heroic/political sonnet form" (p. 326), together with the
conventions of Victorian sage discourse as John Holloway, George Landow,
and others have defined them (pp. 327-329). Combining close textual
readings of diction, metaphor, and form with reconstruction of the
historical matrix that shaped EBB's sonnets to Sand, Morlier's
article exemplifies the integration of text with context that Slinn
calls for, although it is Antony H. Harrison who directly influences her
approach, with his call for"'pan archeology that will
eventually expose the complete and particular contexts surrounding the
production, publication, and reception of literary works'" (p.
320).
Another article exemplifying the "archaeology" Harrison
calls for is Terence Allan Hoagwood's "Biblical Criticism and
Secular Sex: Elizabeth Barrett's A Drama of Exile and Jean
Ingelow's A Story of Doom (VP 42 [2004]: 165-180). Hoagwood
interprets A Drama of Exile within two neglected contexts: EBB's
writings on patristic exegesis in her 1842 essay on the "Greek
Christian Poets," and the hermeneutics shaped by "Higher
Criticism" of biblical texts. A Drama of Exile "has nothing to
do with religion in any sense that would be understood by a literal
believer," he roundly declares (p. 165). Instead he finds two main
themes: firstly, "in terms of gender, the law of the Father is
repudiated for the love of the Mother," and secondly,
"historical relativity and multiplicity of interpretations"
are affirmed rather than "the dogma of the Church Fathers" (p.
166). In his apt words, "the gender politics of the poem are also
exegetical politics" (p. 168). While the reaction of Victorian
critics suggests that many did see A Drama of Exile as a religious work,
Hoagwood's argument for the strain of hermeneutical relativism in
EBB's religious thought is vigorously advanced and supported by
the evidence he presents from her essay on the "Greek Christian
Poets," her 1831-32 Diary, and other sources. (He might have found
additional support in the letters gathered in The Brownings'
Correspondence, a rich resource he does not cite.) Hoagwod engages in an
especially interesting analysis of "three different values" in
A Drama of Exile--"mortal motherhood and its love, the incarnation,
and the tangible beauties of art" (p. 166). His argument that EBB
was influenced by German Higher Criticism is less convincingly
supported. Nevertheless, his article opens the door to an interesting
possibility. The bulk of this article is concerned with A Drama of
Exile, although Hoagwood does point to a passage in Ingelow's A
Story of Doom that recalls EBB's poem (p. 174).
Mary Wilson Carpenter reconstructs a neglected mid-Victorian
context for Aurora Leigh and re-opens the debate about the poem's
violent mutilation of Romney in her fascinating study, Imperial Bibles,
Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market
(2003). Chapter Six, "Victorian Schemes of the Apocalypse: Profits
and Prophecy," is a timely consideration of the lucrative
"'discourse of disaster'" (p. 147)--prophetic books
interpreting social, political, and military events in light of the Book
of Revelation--which has continued to exercise a wide influence through
the twentieth century and into our own post-millennial age. Carpenter
begins by describing the flood of Victorian apocalyptic writings, noting
in particular the influential writings of the Reverend John Cumming and
the production of thirty commentaries on the Apocalypse by women between
1845 and 1900 (pp. 128-129). Emphasizing the imperialist paranoia of
much of this writing, and its misogynist sexual violence against the
"Whore of Babylon," she finds a parallel violence against men,
a "gender apocalypse," and a call for a "Holy
War"--"a jihad in effect"--in some late twentieth-century
feminist writers such as Mary Daly (p. 130). Within this framework, she
analyzes Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh, arguing that both are
"apocalyptic fictions" that transfer Revelation's
violence against the "Whore's body" to the "male
body." In this and other ways, these works thus "make
visible" the mid-Victorian "commodification of the
Apocalypse," which "packaged" it "not only in terms
of current events and recent history, but as promotion of British
national identity with its religious and racial exclusions" (p.
131). Aurora Leigh comes off better in terms of its complicity in
imperialism and chauvinism than Jane Eyre. Carpenter cites Romney's
description in Book 8, 11. 903-911 of the "vicar" denouncing
his Fourierism, who "preached from 'Revelations' (till /
The doctor woke), and found me with 'the frogs'"--that
is, with the unclean spirits of the sixth vial in the Revelation. This
places Romney among the French socialists, "with the
'frogs' whose 'infidelity' acts as a contaminant to
English 'purity,'" Carpenter argues (pp. 140-141). Yet
she lays more emphasis on the ways in which EBB "plays with
apocalyptic imagery and form throughout her novel in verse, alternately
satirizing apocalyptic exposition and revisioning the
Apocalypse"--most radically by presenting "a whore's
apocalypse, turning upside-down the misogyny of Revelation and
celebrating the female body instead of burning and consuming it,"
and by presenting a woman as her text's "seer" (pp.
143-144).
While Carpenter emphasizes EBB's complicity in British
imperial chauvinism in her analysis of the "frogs" passage in
Aurora Leigh, Berry Chevasco emphasizes the opposite in an engaging
article, "'Naughty Books': Elizabeth Barrett
Browning's Response to Eugene Sue" (BSN 28 [2003]: 7-17).
Chevasco rightly points out in this treatment of EBB's response to
French novels that one characteristic of the poet "that does not
always receive the attention it deserves is her insight as a critic of
prose" (p. 7). "The candid approach to sexuality in much
French fiction" meant that it was viewed as "unsuitable
reading" for "respectable women" in the early Victorian
period--Jane Carlyle "confessed to using an alias to acquire French
books through the London Library in 1843" (p. 7). Contrary to still
lingering views of EBB as bound by a pietistic morality, Chevasco paints
a more accurate portrait of her delight in the "'wicked Gallic
geniuses,'" who, she said, "'light me up, & make
me feel alive to the ends of my fingers'" (p. 8). There is
also a much reiterated view that EBB had an aversion to evil that had a
dampening effect on Browning's preliminary interest in the
sensational Roman murder trial he wrought into The Ring and the Book--a
view still evident in at least one of this year's new Browning
biographies, noted below. Chevasco, however, cites her zest for
Sue's writings precisely because the French novelist
"'glories in all extremities, & intensities of evil &
passion'" (p. 11), and persuasively shows that EBB did not
view French fiction within the "context of the prevailing ethical
controversies," but took a more "dispassionate" and
"remarkably modern" view of the French "'prose
poets,'" as she called them (pp. 8-9). This article also
considers the explicit reference to Sue's serial Les Mysteres de
Paris (1842-43) in Aurora Leigh (Book 3, ll. 584-596) and analyzes the
influence of Sue's social reform and his portrait of a prostitute
on the representation of Marian Erle (p. 15). Those interested in EBB
should not pass by the next article in this volume of Browning Society
Notes as well, Bill Goldman's "The Archaeology of a Letter: RB
to EBB, 9 July 1846" (pp. 18-35). Although Goldman is primarily
interested in analyzing a letter written by RB that reveals his response
to William Blake, he also addresses to some degree EBB's view of
Blake. In addition, he includes an interesting analysis of the contexts
for "Catarina to Camoens" (pp. 29-32), in which some errors in
earlier scholarship are corrected.
The Brownings' parallel response to Blake points to one of the
many affinities in literary taste that drew them together, along with
their shared cultural contexts. Unlike many previous books on the
Brownings in conjunction, Mary Sanders Pollock's Elizabeth Barrett
and Robert Browning: A Creative Partnership (2003), in Ashgate's
Nineteenth Century series, focuses on "the work of writing" at
the "core of their relationship" (p. 1), not on the story of
their romantic courtship or the reiterated accounts of the personal and
political conflicts of their married years. Pollock's study,
approaching the creative exchange between the two poets through a
comparative analysis of works written during their sixteen years
together, marks a new and refreshing departure in its scale. There have
been many interesting articles and essays on aspects of the
Brownings' writing relationship, or comparatively treating the
intertextual connections between particular works--by Dorothy Mermin,
Mary Rose Sullivan, Nina Auerbach, Adrienne Munich, Mary Ellis Gibson,
Daniel Karlin, John Woolford, and Yopie Prins, among others. But there
has not been, at least in recent decades, an entire book focused on
comparing and analyzing in conjunction poetical works produced by the
Brownings. Approaches to the Brownings as poets too often mirror the
larger segregations of the sexes within the field of Victorian poetry.
As Virginia Blain indicates in "Period Pains: The Changing Body of
Victorian Poetry" (VP 42 [2004]: 71-80), a "major future
challenge" in the field is to "reintegrate men's and
women's poetry" (p. 75). Pollock points out (p. 7) that her
work builds on Dorothy Mermin's insightful 1984 essay, "The
Domestic Economy of Art: Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning," as
well as Julia Markus' Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth
Barrett and Robert Browning (1995). Like both Mermin and Markus, she
emphasizes the harmonies of the Brownings' partnership, arguing
that "their working relationship enabled each to develop assurance
and a greater range of expression." RB's most important
contribution to EBB's development is manifested in her
experimentation with new forms and her greater engagement with the
world, according to Pollock, while her most important contribution to
his artistic growth led him to "reconsider the transaction between
author and audience" and the alienating effects of the
"confusing polyvocality" in his earlier works (p. 2). Pollock
draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogical language and form
to frame this analysis, maintaining that after "the poets began to
work together in early 1845, Elizabeth Barrett, especially, began to
write a more confident and fluid language. In Bakhtin's
terminology, her work started to become more
'novelistic'" (p. 6).
Sonnets from the Portuguese, Casa Guidi Windows, and Aurora Leigh
are the works by EBB that Pollock analyzes in most detail in chapters
three, five, and seven of her book respectively (structurally, after
chapter one, she alternates between the two poets). Her treatment of
EBB's career up to and including Poems (1844) includes a more
cursory discussion of An Essay, on Mind, "The Romaunt of the
Page," and the sonnets "To George Sand" with little or no
mention of other works, including ambitious longer 1844 works such as A
Drama of Exile. This is the section of this study in which the
scholarship on EBB seems thinnest, with the absence of reference to
relevant criticism that might have led to a more nuanced argument
concerning her early artistic practice. Chapter two, moving into the
courtship period, and considering the collaborative exchange that
occurred as EBB provided detailed, substantive suggestions for revision
in RB's unfinished poem "Saul," offers a richer analysis,
as Pollock builds on Sullivan's work on this collaboration, and
considers some of the many parallels in the two poets' use of
poetic language (p. 62). Pollock analyzes Sonnets from the Portuguese as
"Barrett's first attempt at generic
experimentation"--indeed "a quantum leap" in her
development, and "the first in a series of radical experiments
which she would undertake during the next decade" (pp. 87, 102).
There is ample reason (as Bristow's article above indicates) to
question the claim that EBB did not significantly experiment with genre
before RB's direct influence on her in 1845. Nonetheless,
Pollock's analysis of the Sonnets as a dialogical "'lyric
sequence' with the characteristics of the Victorian novel" (p.
87) extends Loy D. Martin's interpretation of its dramatic
monologue qualities (p. 91), and contributes to further understanding of
EBB's play with sonnet conventions. In analyzing Casa Guidi
Windows, Pollock considers parallels between EBB's representation
of Giotto's tower and RB's, as well as the similar role of
this two-part experimental work in EBB's artistic development and
the role of RB's experimental two-part poem Christmas-Eve and
Easter-Day in his. She also notes echoes of Sordello in Casa Guidi
Windows, and the ways in which it anticipates Aurora Leigh. Less
convincing are her claims that, generically, Casa Guidi Windows is an
extended conversation poem, that it was dismissed by the critics (in
fact, the reviews of it were mixed), and that Browning acted both as
"the enabler" of the poem, and "the audience within
it" (p. 122). Aurora Leigh is read by Pollock as EBB's most
sustained and successful experiment with genre, a novelized epic in
Bakhtin's terms that "could not have been written"
without the "generative power of Browning's presence" in
her life (p. 175). The most original aspect of her treatment of Aurora
Leigh is the interpretation of it as a "portrait," analogous
to RB's Men and Women, which she interprets as a picture gallery.
While numerous critics have discussed the many echoes of Aurora Leigh in
The Ring and the Book, Pollock does not address these, or the debates
they have generated. Instead, she focuses an "Afterword"
principally on the representation of EBB in RB's Balaustion's
Adventure, interpreting its heroine as a figure who "synthesizes
the poetic theories of both Brownings" (p. 211). She concludes as
she begins, emphasizing the harmonies of the Brownings'
partnership. "Each was the ideal audience for each other, and each
enabled the other to develop the flower prefigured in the root" (p.
215).
A very different view of the Brownings' relationship than
Pollock's appears in one of two new biographies of RB this year,
which I note only briefly here for their representations of EBB. By far
the more interesting and better researched of these is Pamela
Neville-Sington's Robert Browning: A Life After Death (2004). As
her title suggests, Neville-Sington takes as her primary subject the
period in RB's life after EBB's death. She also, however,
weaves in accounts of earlier periods in his life, using an innovative
structure that moves Hack and forward in time rather like a Browning
monologue. Her biography is strengthened by use of Scott Lewis'
2002 edition of EBB's letters to her sister Arabella and other
correspondence, as well as archival materials. Neville-Sington also
frankly addresses the "partial abstinence" which seems to have
followed EBB's fourth and worst miscarriage in 1850, given the
doctor's warning that she must not risk pregnancy again, and hints
in her letters that she had "'no prospects'" of
another pregnancy after that time. As she comments, this, combined with
"Elizabeth's growing infirmity, must have left Browning not
only emotionally drained but also sexually frustrated" (pp.
106-107). A more contentious aspect of this biography may be the way in
which it constructs EBB as well as the Brownings' creative
relationship, as Neville-Sington describes Elizabeth "churn[ing]
out" poetry, "while Robert's own poetic font seemed to
dry up in the course of their life together" (p. 98). Two pages
later, Elizabeth is again described as "churn[ing] out verse,"
this time "in the drawing room as she sat curled up on the sofa
looking like a King Charles spaniel" (p. 100). But Elizabeth is far
from as innocent as the "churning" and "spaniel"
metaphors imply. Neville-Sington claims that Browning's career was
"bedeviled" not only by "Elizabeth's ill
health," but also by the "acute sensibilities" and
aversion to evil that produced her distaste for the Old Yellow Book (pp.
110-111) and therefore long delayed Browning's composition of The
Ring and the Book. Indeed, she "turned out to be the Siren ... of
Homeric myth, disabling men with her song," casting a
"soporific, opiate spell" over Robert's "own poetic
genius" (pp. 112-114). This characterization of the relationship
forms a striking contrast to Pollock's and Mermin's reading of
the poets' time together as the most generative and productive
phase in each of their lives. (RB did, after all, write Men and Women in
this period.) Elsewhere in this biography, the representation of EBB is
less driven by overdetermined metaphors. Neville-Sington's focus on
RB's later life is especially interesting in its treatment of his
almost religious reverence for his dead wife (p. 201), as well as the
conflicts that his devotion to this "ghostly consort" (p. 141)
produced in him.
The other new biography this year, Iain Finlayson's Browning:
A Private Life (2004), is aimed at a popular not an academic audience,
and unlike Neville-Sington's, relies principally on earlier
biographies, making little use of recently published and archival
materials. (His list of sources does not even include the fourteen
invaluable volumes of The Brownings' Correspondence.) Since
Finlayson is presenting what RB calls, in his essay on Shelley,
"the straw of last year's harvest," his construction of
EBB falls into predictable patterns. For instance, he characterizes her
letters to Mary Mitford--letters that teem with discussions of
literature and writing--as "rapturously devoted, for the most part,
to the incomparable beauties" of the poet's dog, Flush (p.
170).
In an off-hand remark (p. 23), Finlayson obliquely refers to but
does not otherwise address the rumors that have persisted since the late
nineteenth-century concerning RB's racial ancestry, commenting that
the poet's paternal grandmother, Margaret Morris Tittle, was
"reputedly a Creole (and said, by some, to have been darker than
was then thought decent)." In light of comments like this, as well
as the controversial theory of EBB's mixed blood advanced by Julia
Markus in her 1995 biography, Dared and Done, it is good to see Joseph
Phelan's "Ethnology and Biography: The Case of the
Brownings" (Biography 26 [2003]: 261-282), subjecting the long
history of speculations about both of the Brownings' racial
inheritance to historically informed scrutiny. As Phelan astutely points
out, such speculations rely upon nineteenth-century
"pseudoscientific deductions of racial theory," "racial
essentialism," and a "'hereditarian racialism'"
that divides people into different ethnic groups with differing
characteristics and abilities (p. 262). Situating the hydra-headed
theories about the Brownings' racial antecedents in the wider
context of Victorian ethnology and anthropology, as well as
nineteenth-century discourses concerning the exotic mixtures of race in
artistic geniuses such as Alexander Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas (pere),
Phelan includes an incisive analysis of the inventive use of evidence,
illogic, and racial essentialism at work in passages of both
Markus' biography, and Jeannette Marks's 1938 study, The
Family of the Barrett: A Colonial Romance (pp. 273-279). Phelan does not
cite Richard S. Kennedy's earlier critique of the "myths"
resurrected by Markus (see the 2001 "Year's Work," p.
33), and his approach is very different, informed both by biographical
theory and a historicist methodology. Yet in many respects, their
conclusions are parallel.
The appearance of essays such as Phelan's, together with the
dated constructions of EBB in this year's new biographies of
Browning, suggests how much we need a new biography of EBB, drawing on
the rich resources of the letters to Arabella and other new materials,
and incorporating her literary life and artistic development. Beverly
Taylor's "A Date for an Undated Letter and an Unpublished
Reminiscence of the Brownings" (BSN 28 [2003]: 67-72) furnishes
another example of new material for such a biography. Taylor presents an
unpublished letter by EBB in the Armstrong Browning Library (brought to
her attention by Philip Kelley), together with an intriguing glimpse of
the poet as she was viewed by a younger American woman among her
contemporaries, Emily Burgwyn, and by Emily's niece Katharine Mary
MacRae. The charming "reminiscence" is MacRae's,
recording her visit with her aunt as a child to Casa Guidi on May 31,
1858, written down in 1912. The visit had been prompted by her aunt
Emily's anonymous gifts of flowers from the gardens of the Cascine
in Florence, as she reflected on "the shut-in life of the poet Mrs
Browning, and ... thought that if Mrs Browning could not come to the
Cascine, the flowers of the Cascine could be brought to her" (p.
68). Taylor's very helpful "Commentary" points out that,
though the pleasure grounds of the Cascine were often associated with
scenes of "flirtation and assignation," they may have had a
political significance to EBB as an Italian patriot, given her use of
them as a setting in "The Dance" in Poems before Congress (p.
71). While MacRae's reminiscence is itself hazy about dates, Taylor
dates the visit precisely at the end of May 1858, drawing on EBB's
unpublished letter to "Miss Burgwyn," and information in
Emily's diary. MacRae's memories of a "very fragile &
delicate looking lady" stooping to "kiss" her form the
core of this reminiscence, but its attendant details are also
suggestive. After describing "Mr Browning" showing her %
[sketch] of Tennyson," and speaking "in high praise of the
Poet Laureate," McRae observes, "I knew that my Aunt's
preference was for the poems of Mrs Browning. 'The Lost
Bower,' 'The Cry of the Human,' etc." (p. 68).
Mention of"The Lost Bower," focusing on the lost pleasures of
a pastoral childhood, suggests that this poem, in particular, may have
inspired Emily Burgwyn's gesture.
Taylor's article indirectly connects to Katerine Gaja's
"White Silence: Body and Soul in the Letters of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning and Hiram Powers (TLS 229 [June 26, 2003]: 16-17), since the
Burgwyns were acquaintances of the American sculptor in Florence at this
time. This is one of two treatments this year of EBB's
relationships with artists and art critics; the other is by Michele
Martinez. Oaja's article focuses on "three unpublished
letters" from EBB to Powers, written on August 1, 1853, from Bagni
di Lucca, and on January 3 and February 29, 1856, from Paris; her source
for these is identified as "transcripts of Powers's
correspondence acquired by the Batineto Vieusseux of Florence in
1997" (p. 16). Presumably Gaja was not given the permission to
publish these transcriptions in full, since the article cites only brief
phrases and passages. The bits, however, are tantalizing, as are the
excerpts from Powers' replies. Gaja also illumines the context for
"Hiram Powers' 'Greek Slave,'" the parallel
artistic views of the poet and the sculptor, and their shared interest
in Swedenborg and spiritualism. The 1853 letter concerns The
Athenaeum's delay with an article by Powers the Brownings had
helped him to publish, praising the pure white marble of classical
sculpture; this letter also concerns "'mystical
handwriting'" experiments. In his August 7 reply to EBB's
1853 letter, Powers writes of the relations between body and soul and
"the legitimate aim of art," observing, "A nude statue
should be an unveiled soul, and not a naked body." Significantly,
as GaD notes, when the Brownings "wrote quotations from their work
in the visitors' book Powers kept in his studio," in June
1858, EBB chose the passage from Aurora Leigh in which Aurora asserts to
Romney, "It takes a soul, / To move a body." The 1856 letters
(the one of February 29 evidently including a note by RB at the end)
concern the debates over spiritualism prompted by the 1855 seance in
London conducted by the medium Daniel Home, a catalyst for conflict
between the Brownings. While Gaja focuses on EBB's relationship
with Powers (though without making use of the new information about this
in the Lewis edition of EBB's letters to Arabella), Martinez treats
networks of women painters, sculptors, and art critics in "Women
Poets and the Sister Arts" (VP 41 [2003]: 621-628). This article
further illumines EBB's relations with Harriet Hosmer, the
emancipated female sculptor, and the art critic Anna Jameson.
Among biographical materials, the most comprehensive new general
resource for EBB scholars and students this year is Simon Avery's
The Brownings, welcome one in a Pickering and Chatto series on Lives of
Victorian Literary Figures II (2004), following on the heels of the
important new critical study Elizabeth Barrett Browning Avery
co-authored with Rebecca Stott last year in the Longman series (see the
2003 "Year's Work," pp. 73-75). The "General
Introduction" to the Pickering and Chatto series points out that it
approaches writers' lives contextually; by "recovering
anecdotal material about them, published during their lives or soon
after their deaths, the editors of each welcome complicate and contest
the received biographical image" (p. xii). Arguing in his
"Introduction" that the "mythic narrative" of the
Brownings' romance has had a more negative influence on EBB's
reputation than on RB's, Avery alludes to Virginia Woolf's
famous description of EBB in the servants' quarters of the mansion
of literature banging "'the crockery about'" and
eating "'vast handfuls of peas on the point of her
knife,'" then comments that, whereas Browning has been cast as
a "key progenitor of literary modernism, his wife is transformed
into either fairy-tale princess or madwoman in the basement" (p.
xxiii). His "Introduction" also briefly considers the
Brownings' differing views of biography, their courtship and
married life, and EBB's juvenile autobiographical writings
(excerpts of these are included in his anthology). This 424-page
anthology will be very useful, especially for those working at a
distance from resources like the British Library, since it includes
excerpts both from often-cited accounts of the Brownings and their
poetry, and from much less well-known materials. Given the current
interest in "Michael Field," readers will be happy to find
extracts (pp. 305-326) from this correspondence with the Brownings. The
extract from Thomas Adolphus Trollope's memoir (pp. 163-173) is
also very interesting to read in light of Chapman's work, noted
above, on the poetry and patriotism of Theodosia Garrow, Trollope's
wife. The selections brought together in the series are "reproduced
in facsimile from the first editions" (p. xlvii), with original
page numbers in the sources provided in a prefatory note. Since the
sources chosen are generally those out of copyright, in the case of
selections from EBB's autobiographical writings the facsimile text
is H. Buxton Forman's Hitherto Unpublished Poems and Stories
(1914). Careful scholars will want to check this against the more
definitive text provided by Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson in an
appendix of volume one of The Brownings' Correspondence,
particularly given this year's reminder by Nicholas Barker of
Forman's connections with the literary forgeries of Thomas Wise
(see below). In this connection, a note or prefatory comment by Avery
pointing out that the 1847 Reading edition of the Sonnets from the
Portuguese referred to by Edmund Gosse (p. 103) is in fact the most
notorious of the forged pamphlet editions of Victorian poems
manufactured by Wise and his associates would have been useful, at least
for those relatively unfamiliar with EBB.
Avery provides prefatory introductions on each of the authors and
sources. There are occasional inaccuracies in some of these
introductions, such as the statement that "Barrett was the
author" of the essays on "Tennyson, Wordsworth and
Carlyle," among others, in A New Spirit of the Age, the anthology
of criticism she collaborated on with Richard Hengist Home. (As Appendix
IV in volume 8 of The Brownings' Correspondence indicates, EBB
contributed portions of the essays on Carlyle and Tennyson only.) In
general, however, Avery's introductions to the extracts are
detailed and helpful, as in the case of Alice Meyncll, where it is
especially useful to be informed of her conversion to Catholicism and
speculate on its relationship to her harsh critique of Casa Guidi
Windows and of EBB's representation of the Papacy in that work, in
particular (pp. 294-296). The contrast with the poet Agnes Mary Frances
Robinson's admiration in the same period for EBB's approach to
"'the psychology of races'" and her political
passion in Casa Guidi Windows is striking. These comments and others
from Robinson's photographically illustrated edition of the poem
are briefly but suggestively considered in Helen Groth's
consideration of analogies between Victorian poetic and photographic
forms, "Consigned to Sepia: Remembering Victorian Poetry" (VP
41 [2003]: 611-620). In his introductions to each extract, as well as
his "introduction" to the volume, Avery vigorously
deconstructs the myths about EBB. One is nevertheless left wondering if
the best means to do so is through the predominantly biographical focus
of the collection of materials gathered here? Avery does, however, throw
the emphasis more on the art than the lives of the Brownings in choosing
to conclude with some poems addressed to each of them, in EBB's
case by Dora Greenwell, Bessie Rayner Parks, Dinah Maria Mulock Craik,
and Emily Dickinson.
The remaining work this year deals with EBB's poetic legacy
for Dickinson and T. S. Elicit, as well as her textual, economic, and
colonial afterlife. In "Dickinson's Enchantment: The Barrett
Browning Fascicles" (Symbiosis 7 [2003]: 75-98], Ann Swyderski
fruitfully extends her examination in an earlier article of this
poetical relationship (see the 2001 "Year's Work," p.
446). Closely examining the structure and sequencing of the fiascicles
or folded manuscript booklets in which Dickinson copied her poems, and
drawing on new research on the dating of these, Swyderski argues that in
each "of the three fascicles" that "contains an overt
elegy to Barrett Browning" (transcribed in 1863), Dickinson
"chose to embed these poems in gatherings of other poems which
explore her own development as a woman and poet." The
"internal coherence" of these fascicles thus reveals "a
movement in her career and a coming to terms with Barrett
Browning's influence" (p. 78). Swyderski adopts a Bloomian
model of anxiety of authorship to explicate both the inspiring effects
on Dickinson of EBB's "revision of male precursors," and
the "inhibiting aspects of Barrett Browning's legacy" as
Dickinson's most powerful female precursor. Her analysis results in
illuminating, contextual readings of Dickinson's elegies to EBB,
and shares the interest in the structure and sequencing of poetic
volumes that Chapman's work on Last Poems also manifests. One can
only lament that Swyderski seems to be speaking primarily to Dickinson
specialists, and makes very little use of revisionary scholarship on EBB
that might be germane to her investigations. EBB and Dickinson critics
still tend to form "two solitudes" (to use a Canadian phrase),
like critics of EBB and RB.
Antony J. Cuda's "Eliot's Quotation from Elizabeth
Barrett Browning's 'Shadows for My Company'"
(N&Q 51 [2004]: 164-165) is brief but pithy, concisely summarizing
earlier scholarship on the echoes of EBB in T. S. Eliot's work, and
noting additional echoes of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Scholars have
discerned EBB's influence on "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock" (an echo of a letter), on "Sweeney Among the
Nightingales" (its title interpreted as a parody of "Bianca
Among the Nightingales"), on the Four Quartets (with echoes of
"The Lost Bower"), and on Eliot's reassessment of the
metaphysical poets (anticipated in EBB's review of English poetical
history, "The Book of the Poets"). Cuda argues that the only
line of poetry in T. S. Eliot's dissertation on the epistemology of
E H. Bradley, "I lived with shadows for my company," is an
echo of the opening line of Sonnet 26, "I lived with visions for my
company." "After quoting the line," Eliot refers only to
an unidentified figure, "the poet," and applauds her for
"'announcing at once the defect and the superiority of the
world she lived in,'" Cuda points out. He then tracks some
additional echoes in Eliot's poetry of the opening line and
subsequent lines in the same sonnet, observing that in 1916 Eliot, in
his work as a tutorial instructor, assigned EBB's Sonnets from the
Portuguese to his students. Eliot also gave an evening lecture on the
"'quality of her genius,'" reviewing, in addition to
the Sonnets, other works such as "The Lost Bower"--the
favorite poem that seems to have prompted Emily Burgwyn's gift of
flowers in the reminiscence discussed by Beverly Taylor above.
Eliot's attention to "The Lost Bower" in his lecture
underscores the extent to which much of EBB's poetic canon remained
a living body of texts into the early twentieth century.
Nicholas Barker's "A Note on Two Poems" in Form and
Meaning in the History of the Book: Selected Essays (2003), pp. 354-363,
is in fact a multi-faceted analysis of the pamphlet Two Poems, pairing
together EBB's "A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London"
and RB's "The Twins" in a publication designed to raise
money for Arabella's work with a refuge for destitute girls. The
"oddly matched couple" in this pamphlet (p. 355), as Barker
aptly describes it, is the outcome of the only occasion in their
lifetime when the Brownings did produce a joint volume (their plans
early in their marriage for a collaboration on a joint volume of poems
on Italy, revealed in Lewis' edition of the letters to Arabella,
was never realized). Barker is one of the authorities in the material
history of the book who has contributed to a fuller understanding of the
pamphlet editions of nineteenth-century poetry forged by Wise and his
partners in crime. Significantly, in relation to the changing
reputations of EBB and RB and the gender ideologies Avery notes in his
anthology, Barker points out that, even though EBB's was the more
substantial poem, Wise listed the pamphlet under RB's name in
catalogues published in the 1920s (p. 359). Barker's reference to
"A Plea for the Ragged Schools" as "direct propaganda, in
the moralistic tradition ... of social reformers" reflects the view
of Victorian ballads Bristow interrogates (see above) and shows little
appreciation for the poem's Shelleyean echoes and rhetorical
strategies, but he does note in passing that "there is more art
than at first sight appears in the rough rhymes and ballad
scansion" (pp. 355-356). The most interesting aspects of this
article arise from Barker's expert analysis of the material history
of Two Poems and the part it played as a model in the Wise forgeries (as
the probable model for the forged edition of "The Runaway Slave at
Pilgrim's Point," among others). He also casts new light on H.
Buxton Forman's role in the forgeries, and on the economic motives
that fuelled the trade in literary commodities made valuable by the
cachet of their authors' flame.
Felipe Smith's "The Economics of Enchantment: Two Montego
Bay Jamaica Great House Tours" (m Caribbean 2000: Regional and/or
National Definitions, Identities and Cultures [2000]: 21-32)--an essay I
missed in earlier reviews--brings us up to the present day in Jamaica,
and reveals the continuing role that EBB's artistic fame and family
history play in the economic structures of neo-colonialism. Smith's
subject is the function of Caribbean "great house" plantation
tours and "plantation cultural performances" in recent times
as "sites of simultaneous demystification and remystification of
slavery's human and social costs." He analyzes how
"nostalgia for the slavery past" and the "repeating
plantation myth" generate capital within the exploitative economic
structures of the "late twentieth century ideology of
capital"--or what he later terms "'trickle down'
voodoo economics" (pp. 21-22, 27). The article turns on an
oxymoronic contrast between two greathouses in Montego Bay, Jamaica:
Greenwood and Rose Hall, the former associated with EBB through her
cousin Richard Barrett (the cousin mentioned above, in relation to
"The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point"). EBB "never
set foot in Greenwood and her branch of the Barrett family did not own
it," Smith observes, "but her reputation as the author of
enchanting love poetry invests the property with the allure of the
British landed gentry," as well as an aura of benevolent
abolitionism arising out of the fact that Greenwood survived the fires
and assaults by rebellious slaves that destroyed many other greathouses
(pp. 22-23). Its aura of abolitionism does not, it seems, arise out of
popular awareness of EBB's anti-slavery poems. Rose Hall estate,
meanwhile, has an opposing myth associated with it, the legendary story
of a poor Irish girl with a knowledge of voodoo who became a sensational
murderer (of her own husbands, among others), and who therefore became
known as the "White Witch of Rose Hall." In its promotional
approach, Greenwood "narrates its history as humane slaveholding in
the interests of high culture," and is marketed as such through the
exploitation of EBB as a "complex signifier" embodying the
"myth of slavery as an enlightened institution." In contrast,
"Rose Hall promotes itself as the chamber of horrors of slavery in
Jamaica" (pp. 23-24), Smith argues. As he perceptively
demonstrates, however, the two opposing mythic stories, presenting two
apparently opposing faces of the colonial slavery system, are
revealingly entangled, in their shared histories, in the local
mythologies they generate, and in their parallel exploitation of a
neo-colonial economic regime dependent on the use of impoverished
Jamaican labor.
One anecdote, in particular, brings this point home, as Smith
recounts the story of an entrepreneurial unofficial tour guide who
intercepts tourists on the way to Rose Hall for the official tour, and
skillfully exploits "great house appeal" and the
"public's appetite for an identifiable mistress" at its
center. "'Let me tell you about Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
the White Witch of Rose Hall,'" he tells tourists.
"'She was 4 foot 8 inches tall, and she strangle three
husband. How she do that? She was a poet, you know, in England, but she
come to Jamaica and she does strangle three husband'" (p. 29).
While Smith's representation of this guide itself participates in
the economic system he analyzes (as my own re-representation of it does
here), it does provide an interesting glimpse of an additional image of
EBB within the cultural imaginary: along with the madwoman in the
"basement" of English literature, the angelic "lost
saint" in Browning's haunted house, the "siren" who
cast an "opiate" spell over his poetic genius, the demanding
muse of Barbara Neri's performance art, and the "foreign
lady" whose "Tomes of solid Witchcraft," in
Dickinson's words, caused "Conversion of the Mind."
I would like to thank Lesley Newhook for her assistance in tracking
down materials considered in this review, and Andrea Collins for
assistance in proof-reading.