you Aurora, with the large live
brow
And steady eyelids, cannot
condescend
To play at art, as children play
at swords,
To show a pretty spirit, chiefly
admired
Because true action is
impossible.
Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856)
is a work which takes on the impossible – combining poetry and the novel in its
form and feminising the epic genre. Its narrative has many of the ingredients
of your typical Victorian novel – orphan-hood, illegitimacy, frustrated love
matches and familial pressure – but its main subject is to prove that its
heroine is not an impossibility, that there is
scope for a serious female artist. Romney, the cousin of our protagonist, the
aspiring poet Aurora, is of a different opinion. For him the female artist or
poet can only ever be a weak imitation of the male and admired as such for
displaying ‘a pretty spirit’ like a playacting child. While Aurora, for him, is
above such juvenile behaviour, this does not mean she can transcend the
limitations of her sex – Aurora as an active agent of her story cannot exist.
Aurora Leigh's Dismissal of Romney ('The Tryst'), Arthur Hughes |
Romney
expresses his views shortly after Aurora has put forth her own poetic manifesto
on the morning of her sixteenth birthday. Aurora is crowning herself as a poet
in the garden of her home and chooses her plants carefully, symbolically
rejecting the more feminine pursuit of love in favour of her artistic ambitions
as a writer:
Nor myrtle - which means chiefly
love; and love
Is something awful which one
dare not touch
So early o' mornings
Aurora’s
caution here (‘dare not’) suggests that she too anticipates difficulties in
being a woman poet, but it is not until Romney’s entrance to the scene that she
struggles to retain her subjectivity and
is converted instantly into an art object, losing all agency as a creator. As
she goes to fasten her garland, Romney disturbs her:
And fastening it behind so,
turning faced
...My public! - Cousin Romney -
with a mouth
Twice graver than his eyes.
I stood there fixed –
My arms up, like the caryatid,
sole
Of some abolished temple,
helplessly
Persistent in a gesture which
derides
A former purpose.
The
comparison with a caryatid is telling. Romney’s gaze turns Aurora to stone, not
only converting her to a female statue (the ultimate symbol of the man as
artist/woman as art object dichotomy in the Pygmalion myth) but to a type of
statue whose architectural function and very etymology suggests entrapment and
punishment.
Caryatids |
This is
not the first time Aurora has faced the alignment of the feminine with the
passive and objectified in art. From her earliest years, in one of the
poem/novel’s most memorable passages, she has viewed her mother’s portrait and
the weight of cultural heritage which comes along with the depiction of women
in art. Her mother is compared to a list of stereotyped and specified mythic models:
Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy,
witch, and sprite,
A dauntless Muse who eyes a
dreadful Fate,
A loving Psyche who loses sight
of Love,
A still Medusa, with mild milky
brows
All curdled and all clothed upon
with snakes
Whose slime falls fast as sweat
will; or, anon,
Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed
with swords
Where the Babe sucked; or, Lamia
in her first
Moonlighted pallor, ere she
shrunk and blinked,
And, shuddering, wriggled down
to the unclean;
Or, my own mother, leaving her
last smile
In her last kiss, upon the
baby−mouth
This is
not just a list but one in which the women listed are increasingly passive and
robbed of all activity themselves. The Muse can only ‘eye’, Psyche cannot see
at all, and the powerful Medusa is bereft of her powers, ‘still’ now and so
paired with passive verbs (‘curdled’, ‘clothed’). The choice of the Lady of the
Passion takes the most famous example of female passivity – Mary who acts as a
vessel for God’s will – and chooses to depict her as the object of phallic
violence, seeing the stabbing, alarmingly, as a continuation of the passive
suffering of motherhood. Lamia isn't even a whole person – ‘wriggled down to
the unclean’ suggests the version of the myth where she is a serpent from the
waist down and it is this inhuman characteristic, as well as her suffering,
which is emphasised, not her own violent actions. The list culminates in Aurora’s
mother who, while active here, is in fact painted only after her death – her body
an object for the male artist to work from.
It is
this burden of cultural inheritance then, not only Romney’s prejudice, which
Aurora (and Barrett Browning) must undo in order to establish herself as a true
artist.
Michele Gordigiani's portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1858) |
While
many have discussed Romney’s blinding at the end of the novel/poem as a symbol
for his enlightenment, comparing him with Rochester in Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), few have noted that,
while Rochester is blinded attempting to save Bertha, Romney has returned to
the burning house in order to save another portrait – that of his ancestor Lady
Maud. At this moment the female art object becomes active and exerts revenge on
the man who previously described artistic action by a woman such as Aurora as ‘impossible’.
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