Changing Positions: Sexual Metaphors and Duality of Voice in the Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Tamara Slankard, Master’s Student, English

 

Although Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work is widely anthologized, there are still critics who refuse to acknowledge that the poet has earned a place among literary feminists. In Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy, for example, Deirdre David asserts that the poet’s work is valuable insomuch as it demonstrates a masculine control of language in a patriarchal society. However, drawing on an inherent disagreement with Barrett Browning scholar Cora Kaplan, David suggests that a work cannot be considered “feminist,” merely by examining its language for hints of masculine or feminine characteristics. Furthermore, David argues that Barrett Browning’s work does nothing to support the existence of “female language”—a suggestion by Kaplan and others that David regards as futile. In fact, David sees Barrett Browning’s gender politics as not explicitly feminist because the poet acknowledged her belief in the “inequality of intellect” between men and women.

 

However, what David fails to acknowledge is that a claim similar to Barrett Browning’s had been made before—and by one of the most pronounced of the eighteenth-century feminists. In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft made note of the state of male versus female intellect, but suggested that women could not hope to be anything but intellectually inferior until they were afforded an equal education. Therefore we cannot consider Barrett Browning’s comments on the female intellect to be entirely without a feminist angle. Nor can we dismiss her poetry as being un-feminist. On the contrary, her work is inscribed with both overt and subdued forms of feminism, the latter of which is evident only when we consider sexuality in her poetry in contrast to her Victorian society’s views on female sexuality. Although strong cases have been made regarding Barrett Browning’s overt feminism—especially in her prose-like poem Aurora Leigh—my focus is on the more subdued form of feminism one finds in “A Musical Instrument” and Sonnet XXIX of “Sonnets From the Portuguese.”

 

But there is something else going on here. It is not enough to say that Barrett Browning’s poems contain sexual imagery; we must also ask why these images do not immediately present themselves: why might she veil these images in metaphors rather than display them overtly? Perhaps, as Virginia Woolf would later write in “Professions for Women,” Barrett Browning was mindful of her own “Angel in the House”—the inner voice—of every woman, which seeks to destroy her fulfillment from the inside out. If a woman becomes a writer, Woolf asserts, then the Angel of the House always hovers overhead. In this way, there are two voices at work in Barrett Browning’s poetry: using the first, she speaks out against the repressed female sexuality of her society by weaving sexual imagery throughout her poetry; yet at the same time a second voice emerges in which these images are disguised in metaphors, suggesting that she did not feel free to express this sexuality openly.