An Ecofeminist Reading of Woman Vision in Elizabeth B. Browning’s A Dead Rose

Abstract

Elizabeth B. Browning is one of the most influential poets in the literary arena of the Victorian age who boldly had challenged the constriction of the patriarchal culture scratching her name in the history of the greatest poets. Her natural revolutionary notions and highly conscious awareness, acquired from her pursuit and thirst for knowledge which is not available for women in the nineteenth century, unleashed the conscious female identity inside her to be the mother tongue of the oppressed women. Thus, many literary studies have tackled Elizabeth Browning`s works within the lenses of feminism. However, these literary studies overlook the role of nature that dominates much of Browning`s poetry as a womb nurtures women`s awareness and empowers her vision to roar against woman’s marginalization and nature’s oppression. Therefore, this study employs the ecofeminist frame of Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her to investigate the relationship between woman and nature in Elizabeth Browning’s A Dead Rose. Women and Nature refute the patriarchal contentions that the closeness between women and nature is an expression of passiveness and weakness. Accordingly, this study concludes that the relationship between woman and nature is a relationship of regeneration and activation.