Gendered Poetic Discourse and Autobiographical Narratives in Late Victorian Sonnet Sequences

Abstract

Gendered Poetic Discourse and Autobiographical Narratives in Late Victorian Sonnet Sequences Patricia Rigg (bio) In the second half of the nineteenth century in England, when laws and cultural traditions concerning love, marriage, and sexuality were in flux, the sonnet was a poetic form well suited to express the conflict between shifting expectations of Victorian social propriety and increasingly liberal expressions of human desire. As Stephen Burt and David Mikics point out in The Art of the Sonnet, "the sonnet form thrives on, and fosters, within the self, a thorny internal monologue."1 Italian poetic forms such as the sonnet and the rispetto that evolve out of a long and distinguished amatory tradition associated with carnal love allowed English poets in the later nineteenth century to express a new ideal of love that could accommodate and reflect sexual desire in a changing social framework. In this essay, I focus on the ways in which sequencing these poetic forms with attention to coherence and order enabled gendered discourse on what was conventionally unsayable, particularly when inspiration for that discourse was autobiographical. Sequencing sonnets and rispetti creates a hybrid form, a form that combines the subjectivity of the lyric voice with the objectivity of an implicitly fictional narrator in lyrics that contribute to an overarching storyline. Consequently, poetic expression of intimate and even forbidden desire unfolds with relative impunity. I am interested in the ways in which sequencing lyric poetic forms to create a hybrid genre-fostered poetic autobiography that discretely and subversively wrestles with late-nineteenth-century anxieties about marital infidelity, sexual desire, and sexual orientation and that contributes to a gendered discourse on the nature of the sacred and the profane in these matters. As the nineteenth-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim points out, the sacred could be good and it could be evil, just as the profane could be either.2 Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese is the first [End Page 201] significant autobiographical sonnet sequence in the Victorian period, and it substantiates Durkheim's argument that one society's profane is another society's sacred; Barrett Browning was criticized for violating Victorian standards of reticence and discretion in making public the intimacy of her developing love for Robert Browning, while modern feminist audiences have been less forgiving of her self-abasement and self-denigration in the earlier sonnets of the sequence. Barrett Browning did not view herself as transgressive, and she did not publish her work with the intent to express subversive ideas about love, but she did publish a poetic autobiography. In contrast to Sonnets from the Portuguese, there are autobiographical sequences that reveal fissures in Victorian marriage—fissures that highlight marital infidelity, such as George Meredith's Modern Love, published in 1862, a sequence that reveals the sordid and cruel elements of the heterosexual love that Barrett Browning idealizes and that arises out of Meredith's own experience in a failed marriage. Because these sequences are autobiographical, their narratives come out of distinctly masculine and feminine life contexts in which the poetic discourse on these subjects unfolds, a discourse sometimes available to us today through memoirs and other documents that have passed through post-death restrictions on access and that now form a meta-commentary on the poetry. For instance, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's "The Love Sonnets of Proteus," included in The Love Lyrics and Songs of Proteus, embeds the sequence "A Woman's Sonnets" in its poetic narrative, but these sonnets were actually written by the married woman with whom Blunt had an affair, Lady Augusta Gregory. John Addington Symonds and A. Mary F. Robinson challenge assumptions about gendered desire, suggesting alternatives to heterosexual love and even to sexual love itself. Symonds's "Stella Maris" was inspired by and written for his male lover, Angelo Fusato, and Robinson's rispetti sequence "Tuscan Cypress" arose out of her jealousy of Vernon Lee's friendship with Alice Callander. In all these sequences, the poet relies on what we might call the mask-lyric or, as Augusta Webster puts it, the assumption that in lyric poetry "I does not mean I."3 It is not surprising that gender—as it is related to life experience—informs...