SUSAN BROWNexplodes the generic and thematic scope of the Victorian poetess, fusing
lyric with novelistic, dramatic, satiric, and "sage" discourse to create a new
kind of epic. 35
In her relationship with her philanthropic cousin Romney, Aurora - the
woman poet whose autobiography the poem records - works both concep-
tually and practically through the cultural contradictions in the construc-
tion of the poetess. Ostensibly a socialist, Romney emerges as a sexual
conservative who, like many Victorian critics, grounds his dismissal of
Aurora's poetic ambitions in her gender - "You write as well... and ill...
upon the whole, / As other women" (II. 146-47). Moreover, he dismisses
the social efficacy of poetry for its feminized insulation from the world:
"this same world, / Uncomprehended by you, must remain / Uninfluenced
by you. - Women as you are, / Mere women, personal and passionate" (II.
220-21). Echoing the terms of Coventry Patmore's paean to wedlock (The
Angel in the House [1854-61]), he urges Aurora to become his domestic
angel and pursue both poetry and domesticity on the model of diffuse
feminine influence: "let me feel your perfume in my home / To make my
sabbath after working-days" (II. 832-33). Indubitably, these are Ellis's
terms: woman as living poetry, not dedicated poet.
Aurora rejects Romney's domestic ideology and moves determinedly
with her poetry into the public sphere. First, she settles in London to live
an idealized and sanitized version of the professional woman writer's life,
but doing the kind of work associated with the annuals, writing for the
sake of money, grappling with the reviewers and their patronage of
women. Her success, while not predicated on a Sapphic self-consumption
for the sake of love, is explicitly based on sexual self-repression, since
domestic womanhood proves incompatible with her vocation. As she
instructs a friend:
"[M]y dear Lord Howe, you shall not speak
To a printing woman who has lost her place
(The sweet safe corner of the household fire
Behind the heads of children), compliments,
As if she were a woman." (V. 805-9)Here the professional writer supplants the improvisatrice (whose mode is
spontaneous oral performance). But the conflict between art and love
reasserts itself in a different way. Aurora desexualizes herself to avoid being
trapped by the aestheticization of female abandonment. Yet this maneuver
threatens to become another species of self-consumption. Aurora's most
despairing experience, when her desire for Romney threatens to turn her
life into the one that Ellis promoted where women can "save men by love"
194