Refiguring the subversive in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”

Abstract

The standard critical reception of Elizabeth Barrett Browning as the first radical female poet of the English literary tradition is by now a popular one. To be sure, this assumption survives on two theoretical positions, viz: one, that Browning’s poetry falls outside the so-called “sentimental” poetic tradition of her female precursors and, two, that her poetry resists comparison, for that reason, with female precursors and/or contemporaries. The implication is that Barrett Browning’s poetry will only have to be compared with that of her male contemporaries such as Tennyson, Clough, Robert Browning and Arnold. While this comparative approach appears on the surface to endorse Barrett Browning’s poetry, it fails considerably because of its implicit assumption that the male poetic tradition is the starting point for discussing both the successes and failures of either a Romantic or Victorian woman poet. In order to re-align Browning’s aesthetic practices with her female contemporaries, I demonstrate in this paper the many angles from which Browning’s gynocentric strategies of subverting patriarchal hegemony in Aurora Leigh connect closely with those of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”. Using this comparative model, I hope to return Browning’s poetry to the larger feminist pool to which it rightly belongs. At the same time, I renegotiate the status of Rossetti whose reputation has suffered as a result of her poetry being judged in the light of male poets.