The document provides an overview of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's long poem Aurora Leigh (1856). It summarizes the poem's themes of feminism and women's independence. It also discusses the poem's innovative style which combined genres like autobiography and dialogue. The document also analyzes Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market" and discusses various interpretations of its religious, sexual, and colonial symbolism.

1. The Victorian Experience

2.  1844 Poems
 1848 The Runaway Slave
at Pilgrim’s Point
 1850 Sonnets from the
Portuguese
 1856 Aurora Leigh
 (Married Robert
Browning 1846)

3.  Reproaches poets who depict women as timid and
subservient creatures, poets who "Paint . . . The
trembling, melting voice of tenderness, / And all that
Mother, Sister, Wife impart / To nurture, solace and
subdue the heart/ of man”.
 Proclaims her goal "To bend to nobler thoughts the
British fair" by "Founding] the proud path, where ...
[Woman] stands the equal of her Master Man,"

4.  ”I want to write a poem of a new class, in a measure - a
Don Juan, without the mockery & impurity" of Byron,
"admitting of much philosophical dreaming &
digression" but "having unity, as a work of art" (EBB,
Letters, 1844)
 A verse-novel, 9 ‘books’, over 11,000 lines
 one of the most important long poems of the Victorian
period
 one of the major works of the female literary tradition
in English
 A Bildungsroman, also Kunstlerroman
 combined the genres of autobiography, dialogue,
narrative, prophecy, satire and treatise

5.  ‘the most mature of my
works, and the one into
which my highest
convictions upon Life
and Art have entered'.
(Dedication)
 “I look everywhere for
grandmothers and see
none.”
Of writing many books
there is no end
And I who have written
much in prose and verse
For other’s uses, will write
now for mine,
Will write my story for my
better self. (I. 1-4)

6.  Women may be
educated, Aurora
scornfully says, "As long
as they keep quiet by the
fire /. . . their angelic
reach / Of virtue, chiefly
used to sit and darn".
 As the earth
Plunges in fury, when the
internal fires
Have reached and
pricked her heart […]
–thus, my soul […]
Let go conventions and
sprang up surprised
 (Discovers her father’s
library, Book 1, ll. 845–
52)

7.  ‘men/ and still less women, happily, / Scarce need be
poets,’ (II. 92-93).
 You write as well...and ill...upon the whole, /As other
women (II.146-7).
 ‘this same world/ Uncomprehended by you, must
remain/ Uninfluenced by you. – women as you are,
/Mere women, personal and passionate’ (II. 220-21).
 ‘let me feel your perfume in my home/ to make my
sabbath after working days’ (II. 832-33).’

8. I too have my vocation,—work to do,
The heavens and earth have set me since I changed
My father's face for theirs, and, though your world
Were twice as wretched as you represent,
Most serious work, most necessary work
As any of the economists'.
(2, 455-60)

9.  Aurora Leigh's Dismissal
of Romney ("The Tryst")
by Arthur Hughes (circa
1860)

10.  a feminist activist
network that advocated
changes in women's
employment, education,
and marital law. Formed
in the 1850s, it has been
characterized as the first
organized feminist
movement in England
 The Group took its name
from the offices of the
English Woman’s
Journal, the periodical
through which the Group
expressed their views,
which was based at 19
Langham Place, London
W1.

11.  the working-class figure Marian Earle , a ‘fallen
woman’: 'man’s violence,/ Not man’s seduction, made
me what I am’ (Book 6, ll. 1126-7).
 EBB indicates the need to break free from interiorized
male constructions of women (see Book 5)
 EBB draws upon novels written by women, esp.
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847)

12.  EBB engages in the emerging concept of literary
realism
 In an 1855 letter to Ruskin, EBB refers to herself as ‘a
realist in an out-of-the-world sense – accepting matter
as a means (no matter for it otherwise!)’ and in a letter
of 1859 she says ‘I am what many people call a mystic
and what I myself call a ‘realist’ because I consider that
every step of the foot or stroke of the pen here has
some real connection with a result in the hereafter.’

13. .
Poets in Book I described as
...the only truth-tellers now left to
God,
The only speakers of essential
truth,
Opposed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths...(1. 857- 62)
...while your common men
Lay telegraphs, dig railroads, reign,
reap, dine,
And dust the flaunty carpets of the
world,
For kings to walk on, or our
presidents,
The poet suddenly will catch them
up
With his voice like a thunder –
‘This is soul,
This is life, this word is being said
in heaven,
Here’s God down on us! What are
you about?’ (1. 869-76)

14. In Bk 5, Aurora’s theory of realism is coded in terms of
the classical mythology familiar from her upbringing, as
she says that she cannot believe:
That Homer’s heroes measured twelve feet high.
They were but men – his Helen’s hair turned gray
Like any plain Miss Smith’s who wears a front,
And Hector’s infant whispered at a plume. (V. 146-149)
For EBB, realism did not necessarily preclude idealism,
but formulated it in more precise terms.

15.  John Ruskin ‘the greatest poem the century has
produced in any language’
 George Eliot: ‘a deeper sense of communion with a
large as well as a beautiful mind’ ‘the first woman who
has produced a work which exhibits all the peculiar
powers without the negations of her sex’
 EBB: “never did a book so divide opinions in London”.
Some persons cant bear it,—& others . . Monkton
Milnes, for instance, & Fox of Oldham, besides Ruskin
& the Pre-Raffaelites, crying it up as what I am too
modest to write’

17.  attracted to the High Church religion (Anglican in
denomination, but ‘High’ or Catholic in ritual and
spirituality) increasing in popularity at the time.
 the ‘Art Catholic’ (DGR)
 ‘how spiritual and how sensuous’ (Alice Meynell).

20.  ‘Irregular measure . . . is the chief calamity of modern
poetry . . . your sister should exercise herself in the
severest commonplace of metre until she can write as
the public like.’ (Ruskin, 1861)
 ‘breathless rhythms and eccentric rhymes’ (Joyce Carol
Oates)

21. ‘Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries; –
All ripe together
In summer weather, –
 These are mouthwatering
descriptions, reminiscent of
some of Keats’ descriptions in
‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, and
perhaps some of Tennyson’s
language too. But perhaps we
should be uneasy about the fact
that these fruits would not all
naturally be available at the same
time, in the same season: ‘all
ripe together’.

22. She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than
pearl,
Then sucked their fruit globes fair
or red.
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flowed that
juice;
She never tasted such before,
…
She sucked until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away
But gathered up one kernel stone,
And knew not was it night or day
As she turned home alone.
 : ‘Golden hair, always a potent
signifier of feminine beauty in
Pre-Raphaelite art, is a symbol,
in Goblin Market , of a ‘natural’,
and apparently renewable,
innocence and purity likened to
blossoms and snow.’
 (Lorraine Kooistra, ‘Christina Rossetti’ in
PretteJohn, the Cambridge Companion to the
Pre Raphaelites CUP 2012 164-162)

23. She no more swept the house,
Tended the fowls or cows,
Fetched honey, kneaded cakes of wheat,
Brought water from the brook:
But sat down listless in the chimney-nook
And would not eat.
Jeanie has obviously succumbed to the same addiction pushed by
the goblin men. Even in death, the poem hints, she is barren and
infertile, and rejected by nature. As Laura’s longing for the goblin
fruits increases, her hair also goes grey and there is a sense of her
withering away, ‘with sunk eyes and faded mouth’. As the poem
goes on, she falls into a listless inactivity again very similar to that
of a drug addict, neglecting her domestic duties

24.  It has been read in a number of ways: as a fairy tale; a
religious allegory, a meditation on rape, money or
sexuality.
 As critic Linda Peterson suggests, the poem ‘can also
be read as a tale exhibiting fear of the racialized or
colonial Other, with pure, white English maidenhood
triumphing over the dusky, animal bodies of the goblin
men.’ *
 the doubleness of their responses – one virtuous, one
yielding to the evils of temptation – suggests the
tendency to categorise women as pure or fallen, virgins
or whores

25.  ‘Goblin Market’ has also been interpreted as a
specifically Christian allegory, with a re-enactment of
the temptation in the Garden of Eden and a Christ-like
offer of redemption through sacrifice
 a reading encouraged by Lizzie's greeting, ‘Eat me,
drink me, love me; / Laura, make much of me.’ – This
is similar to the words of Christ used in the liturgy of
the Mass or Eucharist – ‘ take, eat, this is my body,
which is given for you’.

26.  can also be read as a tale of female erotic desire, with
Laura’s attraction to the goblin men’s wares as
heterosexual longing, or Laura and Lizzie’s embrace as
same-sex desire.
 A subtext that Laura's transgression is a sexual one, as
she tasted forbidden and sensually described fruit. She
therefore becomes a ‘fallen woman’

27.  In early 1859, CR began volunteering at the St. Mary
Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate, a charitable
institution for the reclamation of ‘fallen’ women (i.e.
prostitutes). As an ‘as she sociate’ at Highgate, Rossetti
was known as ‘Sister Christina’ and wore a black
uniform with a veil, as though she was a nun or ‘sister’
herself.