"Judge no more what ladies do": Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Active Medievalism, the Female Troubadour, and Joan of Arc

Abstract

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's engagement with and contribution to cultural discourse of Victorian medievalism is an area of her work which deserves far more critical attention than it has received: indeed whole question of female-authored medievalism has received scant discussion. (1) Medievalism, way the Middle Ages have been stretched in many directions in order to provide ideological space in which society can explore and articulate concerns which are otherwise repressed, (2) especially nineteenth-century medievalism, has received attention in recent years in Clare A. Simmons's Reversing Conquest (1990), Kathleen Biddick's Shock of Medievalism (1998), and Elizabeth Fay's Romantic Medievalism (2002), (3) following seminal studies by Alice Chandler and Marc Girouard. (4) However, all these critics largely focus on work of only celebrated male medievalists of nineteenth century, with exception of Fay, who gives equal focus to male and female writers, considering work of Anna Seward, Mary Robinson, Letitia Landon, and Mary Shelley alongside male poets within her Romantic time-frame. When critics have addressed EBB's medievalism, they often suggest that poet's view corresponds with that expressed by Aurora Leigh: I do distrust poet who discerns No character or glory in his times, And trundles back his soul five hundred years, Past moat and drawbridge, into castle-court. (5) Some critics have judged EBB's endeavor to use medieval images and forms failure. For example, while suggesting that EBB's ballads provided a covert but thorough-going reassessment, often total repudiation of Victorian ideas about womanliness to which they ostensibly appeal, Dorothy Mermin proposes that poet's use of medieval settings and ballad form were part of her search for world which would give scope for passion and action, quest would later deem misdirected and repudiate in fifth book of Aurora Leigh. (6) Mermin places use of medieval forms and settings by women poets firmly within ideology of Victorian medievalism as [male] constructed cultural movement, and thus judges it futile: In terms that would matter most to women who felt imprisoned in women's sphere--the relative freedom or fixity of social roles --nineteenth-century medievalism's dream of order thoroughly retrogressive.... Elizabeth Barrett's ballads investigate resources of medievalism, which one of main imaginative alternatives in nineteenth century to constrictions of modern life, and reject it as nostalgic folly. (p. 94) This verdict fails to assess, however, power of EBB's use of medieval chivalric images to demonstrate hypocritical and unjust gender confines of contemporary life, expectations and demands of feminine behavior. She uses medievalism for her own purposes, not aligning herself entirely with belief system of movement. Instead, clearly refutes gender constructions of chivalry while highlighting contemporary social problems. In her innovative use of ballad form, most obviously in The Romaunt of Page and Rhyme of Duchess May (both from Poems, 1844), as Marjorie Stone points out, she employs starker power structures of medieval society to foreground status of women as objects in male economy of social exchange, and to unmask subtler preservation of gender inequities in contemporary Victorian ideology. (7) By contrast, Karen Hodder has focused on EBB's medievalism, and provided rare and thorough analysis of her translation of Chaucer's Annelida and Arcite, which poet's contribution to 1841 volume Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized. (8) Hodder argues convincingly that EBB's work was not just brushed by fringes of Romantic and Victorian medievalism, but that serious medievalist, that is scholar who applied her knowledge seriously; and that her familiarity with primary medieval texts, like that of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Morris, not temporary or superficial, but developed and woven into fibre of her art (p. …