“Tulips on Dunghills”: Regendering the Georgic in Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh

Abstract

Of the mutual admiration she shares with her brother Edward, referred to as Elizabeth Barrett Browning claims, Our minds our souls are united by the same opinions, the same interests! ... If there be any tie stronger than these, know not of it!; later in the same essay she writes, Let those who have perused together the Roman & Greek Classics, and who have together resisted difficulties of style & language decide whether or not our attachment be founded on folly--! (1) And yet despite her claim to their identical interests and opinion, we learn that their devotion was at the same time in many ways kept alive by a tension founded in their differences. Elizabeth again: I am not content till excel; but Bro is satisfied with mediocrity--! ... My imagination is perhaps exalted & glowing than my dear Bro's but in judgement he infinitely surpasses me! His abilities are more solid & profound, hers more refined & dazzling; she prefers literature Poetry Metaphysics & fanciful philosophy, he, the sober reasoning of the Historian (Correspondence, 1:357). As will suggest, the interplay between these factors--including their differences of character as reflected in her reading of the Classics--serves as touchstone for my reading of Barrett Browning's poem Aurora Leigh, particularly as it is nuanced by her sense of genre and of gender. This convergence of factors is developed in her letter to Hugh Stuart Boyd, one of Barrett Browning's great intellectual companions, where she confesses her failure to appreciate Virgil (I have tried hard to like olives & the Aeneid upon principle--and could succeed on neither point) in contrast to her love of Homer (Critics who think it necessary to compare Virgil & Homer [they may as well compare the with the mountain!) after delivering up the praise of judgement to are graciously pleased to leave the fire with Homer). (2) Virgil is the mouse here, Homer the mountain; Virgil judgement, Homer fire. Virgil's character traits here she attributes to Bro, and likewise Homer's to herself. As such, Bro, reflecting the Roman, is rational, reflective, moderate, and judicious, while she, the Greek, is imaginative, inspired, enthusiastic, and ardent. Elsewhere in her essay, On Ancient and Modern Literature, the contrast is hyperbolized between the plagiarist Virgil, and the sublime conceptions of Homer the father of the lyre. (3) Browning, claim, invokes these distinctions in Aurora Leigh in order for Aurora to cultivate her own aesthetic, drawing from each perspective and regendering both as feminine. so doing, she appropriates Virgil's georgic, infuses it with the ardent enthusiasm of her Homer, and uses it, finally, to critique Romney's Virgil. As such, she challenges masculinist Greek and Roman views of history and offers instead a history inspired by her own vision, one anticipating Kevis Goodman's recently developed sense of modernity in Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism. (4) Echoing the Virgilian georgic themes in her poem, she transforms conventional georgic roots in agricultural labor to include both tending the soil and also tending social ills, human relationships, and words themselves. While still young and living with her English aunt, Aurora the aspiring poet famously decides to crown herself with some headlong ivy, rationalizing that she may In sport, not pride ... learn the feel of it, / Before my brows be numb as Dante's own. (5) She is interrupted by her cousin Romney who reminds her that women Scarce need be poets, and warns her to Keep to the green wreath, / Since even dreaming of the stone and bronze / Brings headaches, pretty cousin, and defiles / The clean white morning dresses (2.93, 93-96). Her response: I perceive / The headache is too noble for my sex. / You think the heartache would sound decenter, / Since that's the woman's special, proper ache (2. …