Falling into Hope: Wisdom Poetry and the Reinterpretation of Suffering in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's A Drama of Exile

Abstract

Falling into Hope:Wisdom Poetry and the Reinterpretation of Suffering in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's A Drama of Exile Denae Dyck (bio) Although Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter, EBB) claimed in her preface to Poems (published in 1844 by Edward Moxon) that A Drama of Exile was "the longest and most important work" that she had "ever trusted into the current of publication," many of her initial readers disagreed with this assessment (WEBB 2: 567).1 Originally issued in two installments in the July and August 1844 issues of the United states Magazine and Democratic Review, A Drama of Exile featured as the lead work in this two-volume collection, which appeared only a few months later in America as A Drama of Exile: and Other Poems (1845). These widely reviewed books had the effect of making EBB "England's most internationally recognized poet," as Marjorie Stone observes; however, this recognition was not primarily because of the lead poem. While A Drama of Exile was not unilaterally disliked, reviewers dismissed it as an inferior piece, preferring EBB's sonnets and other shorter poems: this trend is evident in the Atlas, the John Bull, the sun, the Examiner, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the Critic, and the Westminster Review.2 EBB herself appears to have tempered her opinion of her work post-publication, writing to her friend and fellow poet Thomas Westwood, "I assure you I have no vain puffings up about the Drama of Exile—& I can easily believe that, as a whole, it may be a failure" (BC 9: 217). Nevertheless, her continued revisions to this poem for its republication in subsequent collections (in 1850, 1853, and 1856) imply that such disillusionment coexisted with ongoing aspirations for this piece. But then, perhaps it is strangely fitting that A Drama of Exile was seen as lacking: the poem is nothing if not a sustained engagement with the experience of limitation. Beginning where the third chapter of Genesis concludes, A Drama of Exile reinterprets the story of humankind's expulsion from Eden. This innovative starting point distinguishes A Drama of Exile from its literary [End Page 27] precursors, John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) the most obvious among them.3 Rather than retell the biblical fall narrative, EBB's dramatic poem reflects on what might be more precisely termed "the fallout of the fall," taking up challenging questions about the ordering of the cosmos and the meaning of suffering. Her revisionary engagement with biblical texts thus extends beyond the opening chapters of Genesis: EBB adapts both the topics and the forms of biblical wisdom poetry, the dialogues featured in the Book of Job in particular. Over the course of its 2,270 lines, A Drama of Exile gives voice to Adam, Eve, Lucifer, Gabriel, Christ, Eden spirits, Earth spirits, and angelic choruses. These speakers interrogate the distinction between prelapsarian and postlapsarian states, the rule that the Genesis 1 text assigns to humankind, and the idea that all suffering is punitive. If A Drama of Exile is indeed a "failure," as EBB remarked to Westwood (BC 9: 217), then it is a grandly ambitious one. To analyze the scope of EBB's ambition, this article situates the poem in relation to the interpretive debates sparked by the dissemination of biblical higher criticism in Victorian Britain. Originating in the work of German scholars including Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, and Johann Gottfried Herder, this criticism challenged accepted ideas about the Bible's divine inspiration and doctrinal unity, emphasizing instead its diverse historical contexts, theological inconsistencies, composite authorship, and generic plurality. My approach aims to supplement the growing body of scholarship that highlights the feminist energies of A Drama of Exile, from Dorothy Mermin's claiming of A Drama of Exile as "Eve's story" in 1989 to subsequent studies including those by Stone, Linda Lewis, Alexandra M. B. Wörn, Terence Allen Hoagwood, and Karen Dieleman.4 Building on Hoagwood's discussion of this poem's recourse to "the symbolic terms of the [biblical fall] myth for representation of contemporary social themes" (p. 173), I argue that EBB's engagement with what the Victorians called the Woman Question issues from her response to widespread...