The Victorian poetess(VII. 185), is accompanied by a sense of self-dissolution like "some passive
broken lump of salt" (VII. 1308). This image builds on an earlier metaphor
of consumption as womanly fulfillment:
where we yearn to lose ourselves
And melt like white pearls in another's wine,
He seeks to double himself by what he loves,
And make his drink more costly by our pearls. (V. 1078-81)The threat of consumption from hankering after bourgeois femininity is
finally resolved in large part through a violent reconfiguration of Rom-
ney's masculinity that makes possible a reversal, and perhaps a reconcep-
tualization, of the gendered terms of Victorian culture. Aurora Leigh
returns us to the poem from the Langham Place circle with which we
began: the eponymous speaker's "living voice," which is also in its vatic
capacity the "soul's voice," reveals the poetess politicized. Published the
same year as Barrett Browning's monument to the Victorian woman poet,
"To a Poetess" anticipates Aurora's claim to the entire domain of human
activity in a poem that puts various social causes - women's oppression,
class conflict, urban poverty - in dialogue with lofty aesthetic aims and
incisive social satire. Aurora Leigh appeared when Barrett Browning, the
most prominent English woman poet of her day, had shown practical
solidarity with what was known as "The Woman's Cause" by collecting
signatures for the Langham Place group's petition for married women's
property reform.
Following her death in 1861, Barrett Browning became revered as the
"Great Poetess of our own day." 36 These words come from the preface to
"Monna Innominata" (1881), Christina Rossetti's response to both Barrett
Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and the tradition of
woman as silent object of love poetry. 37 The sheer scope of Barrett
Browning's oeuvre and her critical status set the bar for women's poetry for
the rest of the century. Even as late as 1888 Oscar Wilde, in an essay on the
poetess, upholds her as "an imperishable glory of our literature," pro-
claiming her the greatest female poet since Sappho. 38 For those working
through the cultural contradictions surrounding women as poetic produ-
cers, her poems regularly draw on sexual difference as the basis of poetic
power. The salt that threatened to dissolve Aurora in self-pity over the
conflict between gender and poetic vocation gives the sting to the powerful
political poetry of Barrett Browning's final years: "A curse from the depths
of womanhood / Is very salt, and bitter, and good" ("A Curse for a Nation"
[i860]; EBB 47-48).
195