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  • 标题:Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
  • 作者:Stone, Marjorie
  • 期刊名称:Victorian Poetry
  • 印刷版ISSN:0042-5206
  • 出版年度:2004
  • 期号:September
  • 语种:English
  • 出版社:West Virginia University Press, University of West Virginia
  • 摘要: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.
  • 关键词:Poets

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.

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