The Victorian poetessVOne particularly well-known Victorian poem sought to redefine the ways
in which the poetess imagined herself as a self-consuming aesthetic
artifact, became further commodified in demeaning memoirs, and made
her reputation in a market that also yoked her to a debased exchange
value. As Linda H. Peterson claims, in its early books Elizabeth Barrett
Browning's epic Aurora Leigh (1856) responds to L.E.L.'s "A History of
the Lyre," creating a shift "from a male viewer to the female poet, from
art produced to satisfy masculine desire to art for the sake of the female
poet, from a literary tradition of biographical memoirs about women
poets to a new tradition of autobiography by women writers." 31 There
are certainly compelling reasons for reading Barrett Browning's bildungs-
roman-in-verse as a highly successful intervention in the construction of
the poetess. Early in her career, Barrett Browning recognized what mascu-
line poetic tradition did to women. An "Essay on Woman" (probably
written in 1822 when she was in her teens) berates "Imperious Man" -
represented by the famed satirist of woman, Alexander Pope - who would
"teach her a lovely, object thing, to be!" 32 Over thirty years later, Aurora
Leigh works in innumerable ways to make the woman and the woman
poet - she pointedly eschews the term "poetess" - the subject rather than
the object of her poem. Instead of presenting an aestheticized female
object for consumption, this remarkable poem from the outset asserts the
self-sufficiency of its project:
Of writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others' uses, will write now for mine,
Will write my story for my better self (EBBAL I. 1-4)To be sure, like Hemans and L.E.L. before her, Barrett Browning takes the
woman poet, her body and her life, for her subject matter. But here we find
a new aesthetic economy where self-consumption allows the woman poet
to thrive rather than expire.
Barrett Browning's engagement with her female poetic precursors is
oblique but pervasive, despite - or perhaps because of - her famous claim
that she "look[ed] everywhere for Grandmothers and [could] see none." 33
Her work simultaneously affirms and repudiates the aesthetics of both
Hemans and L.E.L. Significantly, she weaves that uneasy legacy together
with other threads in earlier women's poetry - based in what Anne K.
Mellor has called the tradition of the "woman poet" who draws on
scriptural authority - to forge a poetic voice and vision. 34 Aurora Leigh
193