Like with Lord Byron and his Don Juan, Elizabeth Browning's Aurora Leigh bares many resemblances to Browning's own life. Aurora Leigh is a girl, who finds herself in a new world of London after the death of her mother, trying to find her own poetic voice; this is rather like Browning, whose mother died in 1828, and shortly after moved to London in 1835. Browning hated London, rather like Aurora Leigh, who described it as
"Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog,
Involve the passive city, strangle it
Alive, and draw it off into the void" (page 551, lines 179-181).
Another similarity, or rather an inferential similarity, is when Aurora Leigh describes poetry.
"As the earth plunges in fury, when the internal fires
Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat
The amrts and temples, the triumphal gates
And towers of observation, clears herself
To elemental freedom--Thus, my soul,
At poetry's divine first finger-touch,
Let go conventions and sprang up surprised" (page 540, lines 845-852)
Her passionate, deep, descriptive feelings of the world of poetry can only come from Browning's own feelings on her first taste of poetry.
One of the more entertaining passages of this story is the rejection of Aurora Leigh's cousin, Romney, which I sincerely hope was taken from a personal experience. Aurora wittily dismisses his proposal, telling him
"Sir, you were married long ago.
You have a wife already whom you love,
Your social theory. Bless you both, I say.
For my part, I am scarcely meek enough
To be the handmaid of a lawful spouse.
Do I look a Hagar, think you?" (page 546, lines 408-413)
She also confronts his opinion of women, advocating that women are equal to men, not just the "complement" to males (page 547) and that "every creature, female as the male,/Stands single in repsonsible act and thought." (lines 437-438). This passage, among it's amusing dialogue, displays how Browning became influential to many women's rights activist, along with her own belief in women's rights.
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I agree that Browning had great influence on woman through her writings. It's obvious that she was a strong-willed woman and she was definitely able to display her opinions and individuality through her creative writing.
ReplyDeleteLeanne,
ReplyDeleteI am glad you wrote about Aurora Leigh, as it is such an interesting and impressive poem. In this post you provide some good specific passages for analysis, but I would like to see you discuss them in more depth and detail. Here you seem to skim the surface, or make unsupported speculations. I don't think the poem is as autobiographical as you suggest, though. While the poet did lose her mother, it did not happen as early as it did to Aurora, her father was not dead (unlike Aurora), and she had had no suitors until Robert Browning successfully proposed and they eloped. The biographical notes and the podcast would have helped on these points.