Crafting Social Criticism: Infanticide in “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” and Aurora Leigh

Abstract

What kind of poetry can promote meaningful social change? Can women rite such poetry? These are two of questions Elizabeth Barrett Browning grappled with in her 1857 novel-poem Aurora Leigh. Romney Leigh is voice of dissent in poem. Early in text, he informs Aurora women are weak for art and only fitted for and duty. (1) According to Romney, this is a result of women's inability to generalize from individual cases of oppression to larger social problems cause oppression: human race To you means, such a child, or such a man, You saw one morning waiting in cold, Beside gate, perhaps. You gather up A few such cases, and, when strong, sometimes Will write of factories and of slaves, as if Your father were a negro, and your son A spinner in mills. (2.189-196) Romney's accusation is drawn from actual debates over women's capabilities taking place in Victorian press. (2) However, examples he gives in passage above are tailored specifically to fit Barrett Browning's own body of work. Just as Aurora proves Romney wrong about woman's capacity to create significant art, Barrett Browning in her own poetry demonstrates importance of tempering generalization on social problems with kind of individual approach Romney deplored. In her anti-slavery poem The Runaway at Pilgrim's Point (one of poems she was likely referencing in passage above) and in Marian Erie's story of white urban poverty in Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning employs popular motif of infanticide in order to write tales of domestic suffering attack general hypocrisy and oppression surrounding single motherhood while not losing sight of important differences set runaway slave and Marian Erie apart from one another. infanticidal plot of The Runaway at Pilgrim's Point has inspired many articles. Scholars have written about poem's relation to Barrett Browning's life and family history, its rhetorical connections to Garrisonian abolitionist circle, its representations of infanticide, its textual history, and its thematic links to Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. (3) However, important connections between infanticide represented in this poem and Marian Erie's story in Aurora Leigh have yet to be fully explored. intersections between these two poems demonstrate Barrett Browning was aware of the analogy between middle-class marriage market and slave trade and she viewed slavery as a feminist issue was connected to oppression of white British women. (4) However, these poems also show she was sensitive to differences between white female oppression and African slavery. A close examination of infanticide narrative in each poem shows Barrett Browning maintains separate nature of enslaved woman's experience from of Marian Erie, despite way their stories echo one another. When Barrett Browning chose to incorporate an act of infanticide into The Runaway Slave and allusions to infanticide into Aurora Leigh, she linked her texts with many other works by social reformers on both sides of Atlantic who also used infanticide as a symbol of catastrophic failure of various social systems. Infanticide played this important symbolic role on both sides of Atlantic because of commonly held assumption during nineteenth century that all women, whether biological mothers or not, had a maternal instinct. (5) This instinct was credited ... with making women nurture their children as a matter of nature, not choice. (6) Authors, working from this assumption, often used infanticide as an extreme example of how manmade systems subverted and/or destroyed allegedly natural order of things. For this reason, infanticide was, as Laura Berry writes, separated from a discourse of individual guilt and criminality and was invented instead as a widespread social problem. …