Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Religious Poetics: Congregationalist Models of Hymnist and Preacher

Abstract

T n recent work on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's conception of poet figure, JLseveral critics have situated Aurora Leigh within context of Victorian sage discourse. Sage discourse, defined by John Holloway as expression of notions about world, man's place in it, and how he should live, appealed to Victorian writers as mode of expression because rapidly shifting dynamics of their age seemed to call either for new understandings of human significance or for recovery of values that were being lost.1 Thomas Carlyle set terms of sage discourse early in period: whoever else may forget this divine mystery [of Universe], he declared, the Vates, whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is man sent hither to make it more impressively known to us.2 As gendered wording of Carlyle's (and Holloway1 s) definition reveals, Victorian sage discourse identified vates as a man. According to this configuration, only male poets and prose writers could claim visionary authority of an Old Testament prophet to critique Victorian culture and offer alternative world views. The ideological configurations of respectable femininity also discouraged women writers from participating in such public and authoritative discourse. Yet, as Thais Morgan argues in her introduction to Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourses: Renegotiating Gender and Power, women writers frequently critiqued and subverted patriarchal model of sage discourse by boldly entering the Masculine' world of socio-economic conflict, theological polemic, and sexual politics, despite risks associated with adopting Masculine' tone of authority.3 Margaret Reynolds and Marjorie Stone have each argued persuasively that Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh is just such revisionary, gynocentric form of sage discourse.4 Stone argues, for example, that while Aurora Leigh enters tradition of Victorian sage writing through representation of prophetic speaker and its vision of new social and spiritual order, it intentionally subverts authoritative stance of sage figures such as Carlyle by embodying