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Strategic Self-Centering and the Female Narrator: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnetsfrom the Portuguese"Author(s): Sarah PaulSource: Browning Institute Studies, Vol. 17, Victorian Popular Culture (1989), pp. 75-91Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25057847 .

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STRATEGIC SELF-CENTERING AND THE FEMALE NARRATOR:

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING'S SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE

By Sarah Paul

As the first love sonnet sequence written by a woman in English, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese challenged the conventions of amatory poetry when it was published in 1850.

The genre, which had always required its female inhabitants to

maintain an aloof and icy silence, was not accustomed to female

voices. Certainly a speaker like the narrator of Barrett Browning's sonnets, loudly proclaiming her right to adopt postures of adora

tion and unworthiness toward a male love object, had never before

disturbed its rarefied spaces. The radical nature ofthe work, how

ever, seems to have been lost on its nineteenth-century audience.

Victorian readers saw nothing shocking or immodest about the

sonnets and actually admired them a great deal, particularly because

they seemed, oddly enough, to uphold an idealized model of devout

and reticent femininity. Hall Caine called them "essentially femi

nine in their hyper-refinement, in their intense tremulous spiritual

ity" (310-n), while Eric Robertson wrote that "no woman's heart

indeed was ever laid barer to us, but no heart could have laid itself

bare more purely" (281). Twelve years later Edmund Gosse spoke ofthe cycle's "noble dignity," "stainless harmony," and "high ethi

cal level of distinguished utterance" (11, 21). Neither these nor any other nineteenth- or early twentieth-century critic saw anything

revolutionary in the sequence. Only in the past dozen years have

feminist critics re-evaluating Sonnets from the Portuguese discovered

75



76 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES

within its self-deprecating stanzas an "enterprise of heroinism" as

serting a woman's "right" to be the active subject of both poetry and feeling rather than their passive object.1

Paradoxically, whereas some critics have begun to show renewed

interest in the Sonnets - still published in gilt special editions but

rarely required reading in schools - the sequence has become prob lematic for many readers. The cringing posture of the female nar

rator as she guides us through each stage of her experience, her fears

of inadequacy, her self-pity and self-hatred, her frequent references

to tears and ashes, pale cheeks, and trembling hearts make us want

to look away. As Dorothy Mermin points out, we find the sequence

"awkward, mawkish, and indecently personal - in short, embar

rassing" (352). We also find it unfeminist. The author's avowed

conviction that a fundamental inequality limits the relationship be

tween a woman and her "king" informs every stanza. And the

elaborate modesty of the speaker, which Victorians found so

charming, is more likely to strike the modern reader as hysterical and melodramatic. What, after all, is one to make of lines like these:

Can it be right to give what I can give? To let thee sit beneath the fall of tears As salt as mine, and hear the sighing years

Re-sighing on my lips renunciative

Through those infrequent smiles which fail to live

For all thy adjurations? (ix)2

Or these:

For frequent tears have run

The colours from my life, and left so dead And pale a stuff, it were not fitly done To give the same as pillow to thy head. Go farther! let it serve to trample

on.

(vni)

Although Barrett Browning broke with tradition when she decided

to write a set of sonnets in the female voice, the voice she created

was sufficiently laden with what one Browning scholar calls "his

trionic reticence" to please her contemporaries and so grate on

modern ears (Karlin 257).

Dorothy Mermin suggests that it is the generically incongruous

presence of a female speaker in the sequence that causes these "pain



STRATEGIC SELF-CENTERING 77

ful dislocations in the conventions of amatory poetry and thus in

the response ofthe sophisticated twentieth-century reader" (352). As Mermin notes, Barrett Browning avoids the indelicacy of com

pletely reversing traditional gender roles: the female speaker ofthe

Sonnets describes not her wooing ofthe male lover, but his - initially

unsuccessful - wooing of her. Thus she comprises both speaking

subject and passive object ofthe Sonnets, conflicting roles that result

in "a devaluation ofthe erotic object that casts the whole amorous

and poetical enterprise in doubt" (352). This, in turn, leads to our

embarrassment.

I would like, however, to propose an alternate reading, one that

treats painfully cloying passages such as those cited above, not as

the inevitable fruits ofthe poet's attempt at a traditionally masculine

genre, but as weapons in a struggle for power. Far from being a

self-abnegating figure, the speaker of the Sonnets is a profoundly self-centered one whose elaborate (false) modesty serves a number

of strategic functions, primary among which is to focus attention

on her presence in the Sonnets as an autonomous entity with distinct

feelings and experiences - albeit feelings of unworthiness and self

pity - while at once reminding both lover and reader that she is

unfit for anyone's pedestal. Thus, the overweening self-effacement

ofthe speaker results from neither the hypothetical insecurity of an

invalid experiencing her first courtship at the age of thirty-eight

(the biographical approach taken most frequently by critics), nor

the difficulty of reversing generic sex roles during the mid

nineteenth century. Rather, it derives from a conviction shared by Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning that the ostensibly subser

vient role in a love relationship, that ofthe adoring but unworthy lover, is preferable at almost any cost to the role of adored angel.

Yet the veil of "hyper-refinement" behind which the speaker conducts her campaign to secure this traditionally masculine role

provides imperfect camouflage. Although nineteenth- and early

twentieth-century critics were able to accept (ostensible) female

self-abnegation at face value ("The poet speaks to us without veils, and we listen eagerly to the revelation" writes one reviewer in 1874

[Smith 487]), today's reader - Dorothy Mermin's reader-looks for

contradictions and blemishes in the speaker's beatific fa?ade. And

indeed, the violent imagery surrounding courtship in many ofthe

sonnets; the speaker's propensity to assume masculine guises and

attributes while endowing the lover with feminine traits; her efforts




to deprive him of certain sensory powers; and most of all her em

phatic presence as an active, governing will in every poem of the

sequence consistently reveal her as possessing an underlying agenda - an agenda whose chief purpose is to forestall covertly (that is with

out alienating her audience) that reduction of the female to the

status of disempowered icon that had marked previous efforts in

the genre. The love sonnet, like all poetic forms, has long been a distinctly

male preserve. And, as Angela Leighton asserts in her recent study of Barrett Browning, it is a preserve in which the "politics of subject and object... is traditionally a sexual politics, by which the woman

is desirable and inspiring for being, herself, without desire and

without language" (104). Neither Beatrice nor Laura nor any of the

other heroines of sonnet tradition can be said to possess particular character or force beyond their beauty. They are works of art,

objects "killed," as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar put it, into

"'perfect' image[s]" of themselves (15). Despite their elevation to

the level of moral and physical paragons, they are powerless and

deprived of speech, intellect, and feeling -

fetishized, in fact, by the

very adoration that, in a sense, brings them into being in the first

place.3

That such fetishization could occur in life as well as art was

known to Elizabeth Barrett. Even before meeting Robert Brown

ing in 1845, she had suffered the indignity from her friend Mr.

Hunter, who saw in her an "angel of Heaven" worthy only of the

purest "principle of adoration" (Letters 589). She was trying to rid

herself of his attentions when Browning arrived and began, in the

words of Betty Miller, "conscientiously renewing the chains of her

captivity" (100). For, as the letters testify, having "taken [his] place at [her] feet for ever" (994), Browning desired nothing more than

to spend the rest of his life "lost in one wide wondering gratitude and veneration" ( 538) in "a worship of you that is solely fit for me, - fit by position" (543). Secure in his inferiority, and with an appar ent need to maintain it, he told her "There is no love but from

beneath, far beneath" (950), and "I am yours to dispose of as that

glove" (428). "Have pity on me," she pleaded in turn, "& consider

how I must feel to see myself idealized away, little by little, like

Ossian's spirits into the mist" (640). But he had been schooled at

home in the arts of dependency and could not relinquish "the pro

longed relation of childhood" wherein he had "been accustomed,




by pure choice, to have another will lead mine" (960). Though she

begged him to see her as she really was ("I do wish you wd. [...] consent not to spoil the real pleasure I have [...] by nailing me up into a false position with your gold-headed nails of chivalry," she

wrote [125] ; "you slew & idealized me" [663]), she eventually found

herself settled in a life of continual competition - over "how the

love-account really stands between us" (638) - with a man whose

fondest wish was to live "wholly in your life, seeing good and ill,

only as you see, -

being yours as your hand is, - or as your Flush,

rather" (388)/ Elizabeth Barrett herself knew the pleasures of what she called

hero worship only too well (Letters 99, 488). She had spent much of

her life repressing the (for a girl) inappropriate passions of her child

hood under a paradoxically more powerful passivity. Sequestered in that famous sick room, the object of her father's particular vigi lance and love, she became the governing principle of the Barrett

household. No domestic arrangements could be made, no holidays

planned, which did not revolve around her comfort. Brothers and

sisters organized their schedules according to her needs. And she

was released from all domestic responsibilities. Deriving in this

way great strength from weakness, the wild tomboy - the child

who had climbed trees and studied Greek with her brothers - came

to see herself as one of "that pitiful order of weak women who

cannot command their bodies with their souls at every moment, &

who sink down in hysterical disorder when they ought to act &

resist" (1032). In fact, her sense of unworthiness could rival even

Browning's: she too felt that "I never could love (in this way of

love) except upward very far & high" (958). Despite her susceptibil

ity to the "praeternatural submissiveness" ofthe poet (614), accord

ing to Betty Miller "it was none the less the 'inflexible will' of the

tyrant that continued, to the end of her life, to inspire in the invalid

the deepest emotional response" (114). It should therefore come as no surprise that throughout Sonnets

from the Portuguese Barrett Browning attempts to usurp for her

female narrator the traditionally masculine role of adoring but un

worthy lover, and that such an usurpation involves calling on just such reserves of will and strength that one would expect to find, hidden under layers of practiced repression, in the poet herself. As

Daniel Karlin argues in his book on the Browning courtship, "Self

pity was not so much Elizabeth Barrett's vice as her resource. Her



8o BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES

display of suffering and endurance brought her to public notice, and simultaneously shielded her from importunity" (257). Simi

larly, the narrator of the Sonnets spends much of her time attempt

ing to prove that she is unfit for the role of heroine - at least as

traditionally drawn. As Mermin points out, she succeeds to such an

extent that the reader begins to believe her. And, believing her, the

reader also begins to notice that for a self-effacing person, the

speaker takes an unusual number of opportunities to display herself

overtly, in all her grief and infirmity, in the text.

There are 138 active first-person verb phrases in the forty-four sonnets, that is, roughly one every four and a half lines. For exam

ple, she writes :

/ lift my heavy heart up solemnly, As once Electra her sepulchral urn,

And, looking in thine eyes, / overturn

The ashes at thy feet.

(v, my italics)

In addition, there are 145 uses of other forms of the first person

singular. The sequence begins "I thought," and ends "tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine" (italics supplied). Six other sonnets (v,

XVIII, xxvi, xxix, xxx, and xli) begin with the personal pro noun, and four begin with "My" (xvn, xxvn, xxvui, and xlii).

One might argue that an extensive use of the first-person is neces

sary for the generation of any lyric. Indeed, it is not so much the

number of personal references that surprises as their juxtaposition with superficially self-abnegating statements. All the most overtly humble passages are peppered with reminders of the speaker's sub

jective (and thus indispensable) presence. For instance, in Sonnet

xli, professing to abase herself before those listeners (or readers) who have been kind enough to provide her with an audience, she

cannot help implying, quite immodestly, that such recognition is

well-deserved:

I thank all who have loved me in their hearts, With thanks and love from mine. Deep thanks to all Who paused

a little near the prison-wall, To hear my music in its louder parts, Ere they went onward, each one to the mart's

Or temple's occupation, beyond call.

But thou, who, in my voice's sink and fall

When the sob took it, thy divinest Art's




Own instrument didst drop down at thy foot, To harken what I said between my tears, ..

Instruct me how to thank thee! -

Oh, to shoot

My soul's full meaning into future years, That they should lend it utterance, and salute

Love that endures, from Life that disappears!

The extent of the narrator's self-pity in this sonnet is such that

one can hardly help reading it as deeply ironic. The sarcastic fawn

ing of "Deep thanks" and "Instruct me how to thank thee!", the

barely-concealed pique of "Ere they went onward, each one to the

mart's / Or temple's occupation, beyond call" hint at an underlying resentment on the narrator's part of those passers-by who only

pause "a little" when her music is "in its louder parts. " More impor

tant, however, is the way her humility becomes a vehicle for self

aggrandizement. Purporting to abase herself before a greater artist, she instead suggests her own superiority. The lover has divine art, and yet he cannot resist the magic of "my voice's sink and fall"

(italics supplied) even as it is wracked by sobs that evoke heightened

sensitivity while seeming to indicate a flaw in "my music" (italics

supplied). Neither the lover nor the friends and passers-by who

have paused "near the prison-wall" are as worthy as "My soul's full

meaning" of the immortality that poetry can bring (italics

supplied). Yet when the lover drops his instrument in tribute, she

has him lay it at the base of his own pedestal rather than hers; in this

way she deflects his reifying - and thus debilitating

- worship while

at once asserting the power of her own genius. Likewise, the

speaker of Sonnet xliii, dodging the issue of why she loves her

suitor (which would lead her to write a poem about him), indulges instead in an orgy of self-reference :

How do J love thee? Let me count the ways. / love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach_

/ love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. J love thee with a love / seemed to lose

With my lost saints, - / love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life!

(my italics)

Here, as in Sonnet xli, the speaker's "soul" not only determines the

boundaries of experience and perception, but also it has become the




absolute Standard against which love is measured, the center of a

hermetic universe enclosed by the word "my" in which the object of all that love himself has no place. It is her capacity to love, her

power to initiate feeling, that we celebrate in this stanza, rather than

her faded (but still potent) powers of attraction. While in others of

the sonnets the speaker sometimes displays less than absolute con

fidence in her ability to maintain a hold on the subjective voice, in

this one she is tenacious.

Throughout the Sonnets the speaker uses self-abasing language as

a veil behind which to promote herself as the sequence's physical and emotional cynosure. In addition to emphasizing the centrality of her own feelings and experiences, she tells us a great deal about

her own bodily appearance but almost nothing about the lover's.

While descriptions ofthe speaker's hair, cheeks, heart, manner of

walking, and more root her firmly in reality, he remains an abstrac

tion, "princely" (vni), "noble" (xvi), "A guest for queens" (in), mantled with laurels and anointed with sacred oil. In fact, by the

end of the sequence he has been elevated repeatedly to that fatal

pedestal from which Barrett Browning herself tried so assiduously to descend:

'My future will not copy fair my past' -

I wrote that once; and thinking at my side

My ministering life-angel justified The word by his appealing look upcast To the white throne of God, I turned at last,

And there, instead, saw thee, not unallied

To angels in thy soul!

(XLIl)

Conversely, the speaker is careful, while foregrounding her own

(female) body in keeping with sonnet tradition, to maintain a care

ful distance from that pedestal herself. From the first sonnet and

throughout the sequence, she casts herself as physically and emo

tionally defective - "poor, tired, wandering" (in), a woman "all

faint and weak" (xn) whose "languid ringlets" (xxvn) fall on "two

pale cheeks ... / Taught drooping from the head that hangs aside /

Through sorrow's trick" (xviii). "Cheeks as pale / As these you see, and trembling knees ... fail / To bear the burden of a heavy heart" (xi). Her tears, flowing from the first sonnet, where she

begins to review the "sad years, the melancholy years ... of my own life," rarely cease. Her "inferior features" offer a rueful con




trast to the carefully adumbrated attractions of conventional sonnet

heroines (x). "I am not of thy worth nor for thy place!" she tells her

lover (xi). And again: "We are not peers" (ix). Thus, as Mermin notes, the speaker appropriates for herself the

pallor and weariness generally associated with the male in love

poetry. Such a radical appropriation cannot be effected, however, without a struggle, the existence of which under the surface of these

sonnets sometimes reveals itself in the speaker's tone as she pro claims her unworthiness. For instance, in Sonnet in, she likens her

lover to a court musician and defies him to place her on his level.

The bitterness of "What hast thou to do with ... me," bristling out

from between lines of hyperbolic admiration hints at an underlying resentment on the part of the speaker. Likewise, the obsequious salute of Sonnet iv,

Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor, Most gracious singer of high poems!... And dost thou lift this house's latch too poor For hand of thine? and canst thou think and bear To let thy music drop here unaware ... ?

provokes the reader's suspicion by verging on the bathetic. One

hears a taunting emphasis on "thou" and "thine." And the speaker's

patently feigned disbelief in the possibility that this singer can

"bear" to bestow his music on such a pitifully unreceptive audience

makes a mockery of his attentions.

This acidulous undercurrent is just one of the speaker's many defenses against her lover's persistent worship. In order further to

forestall his attentions, the speaker tries to prevent him from look

ing at her altogether -

by telling him that she is old and unattractive,

by keeping to the shadows, by taunting him, as we have seen, with

his superiority. "And wilt thou have me ... hold the torch out, while the winds are rough, / Between our faces, to cast light on

each?" she asks in Sonnet xm; "I drop it at thy feet." At the same

time, she appropriates his gaze - with all its concomitant powers of

possession and domination - for herself.5 With the first sonnet, she

establishes herself as the subject of sight, as well as its object:

I thought once how Theocritus had sung Of the sweet years, the dear and wished for

years ...

And, as I mused it in his antique tongue, I saw, in gradual vision through my tears.




She thinks, she muses, and - finally

- she sees. Of course, Barrett

Browning mitigates the gesture somewhat, here and throughout the sequence, by blurring her speaker's vision with tears. But surely such tears - in addition to arousing pity and suggesting humility

-

serve to remind the lover that his beloved possesses working eyes and that these are not the reflecting pools sonneteers are used to

finding in their mistresses, but organs of autonomous emotion and

will.

In a number of other passages Barrett Browning seems to go to

great lengths -

committing infelicities of both phrase and metaphor - to disguise her ostensibly enervated heroine's power to originate vision. At the same time, she reinforces this power. For instance, in

the second sonnet God places a curse on the speaker's eyes that

prevents her from seeing her lover. The wording ofthe passage is

far from clear, however, and leaves the reverse impression:

But only three in all God's universe

Have heard this word thou hast said, - Himself

beside Thee speaking, and me listening! and replied One of us .. that was God, .. and laid the curse

So darkly on my eyelids, as to amerce

My sight from seeing thee.

Here, the speaker conceives of sight in much the same way that a

poet conceives of his inspiration or 'vision': as an entity apart from

herself, subject to "amercement," that is, to punishment (and loss). Yet the elaborate awkwardness of "to amerce / My sight from

seeing thee," while drawing our attention, defies ready exegesis. God has laid his curse on the speaker's eyelids rather than on her

eyes, "as to amerce" rather than simply "amercing," amercing from as opposed to the usual construction, amercing by, and making the

lover alone invisible. Amid the confusion, only the centrally placed

"My sight" rings on in our ears as an insistent reminder of the

speaker's subjective powers; the final impression is one of strong

vision, rather than weak.

This deceptive modesty on the part of the speaker continues to

befuddle in Sonnet x, in which she decides that "love, mere love, is ...

worthy of acceptation" after all. Here, acting against type, she

surrenders herself to the lover's gaze:

... and when I say at need

/ love thee .. mark! .. J love theel .. in thy sight




I stand transfigured, glorified aright, With conscience of the new rays that proceed Out of my face toward thine_

And what I feel, across the inferior features

Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show How that great work of Love enhances Nature's.

Male poets have often looked at women to find their own reflec

tions. But in this passage the female speaker, reversing the equa

tion, casts the lover as a mirrored foil for refracted love that "trans

figure^]" and "glorifie[s]" her. Although she stands beneath his

benevolent "sight," the rays of light that allow him to see her "pro ceed / Out of my face toward thine.

" Thus the gaze originates from

the speaker rather than the lover, derived from her feelings flashing across her face rather than his. Later, she calls his vision false:

On me thou lookest, with no doubting care,

As on a bee shut in a crystalline,

-

Since sorrow hath shut me safe in love's divine,

And to spread wing and fly in the outer air Were most impossible failure, if I strove To fail so.

(xv)

He treats her like a fragile object, frozen apart from the world of

action and desire. But, as the originator of subjectivity in these

poems, she immediately reminds him that it is she who looks "on thee .. on thee,

" rather than the other way round, and that her

vision is far-reaching, "Over the rivers to the bitter sea," and pro found, "Beholding, besides love, the end of love." Her position, "As one who sits and gazes from above," evoking as it does that

genre-bound pedestal, implies a compromise, a degree of passivity. But her refusal to be looked at, here and in other sonnets, her

insistence that the lover stand alone in the sunlight while she

watches from the shadows, most of all her subtle transmogrifica tion of the pedestal into a watchtower underscores her own power in these sonnets, power that she derives, paradoxically, from the

very traditions she purports to unravel.

The extent of the speaker's campaign to appropriate masculine

subjectivity becomes even more striking when we look at the vio

lent imagery with which Barrett Browning surrounds the

courtship. Although siege imagery can be found in other love

poetry, women usually figure as passive prizes. Barrett Browning's




speaker actually fights back, repeatedly giving more than token

resistance to the man who sues for her love. At the same time, the

poet continues to shroud her narrator's activities in feminine weak

ness, obscuring the outcome of her battles.

From the attack in the first sonnet of the frightening "mystic

Shape" that pulls the speaker backward by the hair like a centaur

abducting a virgin, to the conceit in Sonnet xvi wherein she be

comes a "vanquished soldier" who "yields his sword / To one who

lifts him from the bloody earth, "

the sequence is filled with conflict.

There are ambushes ("Thy soul hater snatched up mine all faint and

weak," xn), devouring conflagrations that threaten to "scorch and

shred" the lover's hair unless "in scorn" he "tread[s] them out to

darkness utterly" (v), even guardian angels who "strike athwart /

Their wings in passing" (in). Her speech salted with words like

"overcome," "prevail," "sovranty," "fling," "trample," and "con

quer." The speaker also has a propensity for giving orders. "Stand

further off then! go" she demands at the end of an early sonnet (v). And, later on, "love me, Love! look on me .. breathe on me!"

(xxni). Yet such orders can only temporarily mask the fact that the

speaker, proud, as we have seen, of her weakness and infirmity, must, by these same tokens, surrender to the lover. As the bloody

soldier she puts up a fight but is nevertheless vanquished. As the

victim ofthe mystic shape, she has no choice but to succumb. "Go

from me" she demands in Sonnet vi:

Yet I feel that I shall stand Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore

Alone upon the threshold of my door Of individual life, I shall command The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand

Serenely in the sunshine as before.

Even in a passage of apparent resignation such as this, however, Barrett Browning inserts a moment of ambiguity

- in this case the

inversion of subject and verb in the fourth line - that makes us look

again for another possible interpretation ofthe speaker's meaning. "Nevermore shall I command" would have sounded more natural

than the form she uses but would have lacked its confident ring, its

vigorous assertion ofthe speaker's power and subjectivity in a mo

ment of ostensible vanquishment. The authority of "I shall com




mand / The uses of my soul" belies the "nevermore" which mod

ifies it.

In her attempt to maintain a position that is at once inferior and

superior to the lover (inferiority entailing superiority in the com

plex etiquette of love sonnets,6 she also plays games with gender. In an extension of her appropriation of pallor and weariness (the lover, by contrast, is described as a king whose "purpureal tresses"

bespeak "that strong divineness which I know / For thine," xix,

xxxvn), she takes for herself masculine traits and powers, while

viewing her suitor in feminine terms. She likens herself to a "van

quished soldier" (xvi), a "swooning" acolyte (xxx) and a "ship wrecked Pagan" (xxxvn), all male figures

- weakened, however,

to maintain their overt inferiority. In Sonnet x, rays of light phalli

cally "proceed / Out of my face toward thine," in Sonnet xlii her

"pilgrim's staff" (italics supplied) buds out with green leaves at his

touch; while in Sonnet xli, in a kind of insemination fantasy, she

longs "to shoot / My soul's full meaning into future years, / That

they should lend it utterance." Meanwhile, she calls the lover

"dovelike" (xxxi), and envies his maternal ability to "Brood down

with [his] divine sufficiencies" (xxxi). Barren herself (her "house"

is filled with "bats and owlets"), she envies his fecundity, his "folds

of golden fulness" and his "pregnant lips" (iv) able to blow a "life

breath" into weakened limbs (xxvn). She compares his hair to that

of the (female) Muses, and in the first sonnet transforms him into

Athena pulling Achilles (herself) out of battle. She even treats him

like a woman by casting him as a visually pleasing object:

Thou, bethink thee, art

A guest for queens to social pageantries, With gages from a hundred brighter eyes Than tears even can make mine, to ply thy part Of chief musician.

(in)

She notes that "The dancers ... break footing, from the care / Of

watching" him (iv), and remembers that she "lived with visions for

my company, / Instead of men and women, years ago, /_Then

thou didst come .. to be, / Beloved, what they seemed" -in other

words, the object of her vision (xxvi). In a bold reversal, she asks

him for a lock of his hair (xix). Finally, in a last ironic gesture, she

begs his forgiveness, not for objectifying him but for doing so

imperfectly:




Pardon, oh, pardon, that my soul should make

Of all that strong divineness which I know For thine and thee, an image only so

Formed ofthe sand, and fit to shift and break.

It is that distant years which did not take

Thy sovranty, recoiling with a blow, Have forced my swimming brain to undergo Their doubt and dread, and blindly to forsake

Thy purity of likeness, and distort

Thy worthiest love to a worthless counterfeit.

As if a shipwrecked Pagan, safe in port, His guardian sea-god to commemorate,

Should set a sculptured porpoise, gills a-snort,

And vibrant tail, within the temple-gate.

(xxxvn)

In her study of Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bront?, and Emily Dickinson, Margaret Homans proposes an explanation for the scar

city of female poets before the twentieth century. "To be for so long the other and the object made it difficult for nineteenth-century

women to have their own subjectivity," she writes. "To become a

poet, given these conditions, required nothing less than battling a

valued and loved literary tradition to forge a self out ofthe materials

of otherness" (12). Homans examines the ways Wordsworth,

Bront?, and Dickinson responded to the male monopoly on poetic voice.

Dislocation from the phallogocentric community causefd] Dorothy Wordsworth great difficulty in creating a central sense of self in poetry. She

embrace[d] this difficulty because that centrism is as objectionable as it is difficult to imitate, and yet it [was] equally difficult for her to imagine other structures with which to replace that centrism_The same dislocation

create[d] for Bront? an interminable struggle for possession of poetic power; it finally cause[d] Dickinson to seek a different kind of language with which to constitute a different kind of self (36).

Homans omits Elizabeth Barrett Browning from her discussion

because she considers Barrett Browning's poetry polemical, con

cerned with social issues, and so more vulnerable to thematic and

experiential, rather than textual, analysis (7-8). Yet Sonnets from the Portuguese yields up a wealth of information

on the response of an important nineteenth-century poet to her

society's disbelief in the possibility of a female poetic consciousness.

Like Dorothy Wordsworth, Barrett Browning found it difficult to




find a voice that was central without being overly obtrusive; like

Bront?, she engaged in a ferocious "struggle for possession of po etic power.

" But unlike either woman, the author of the Sonnets

waged her struggle not only with literary forefathers, but also with a living male poet, her lover and future husband Robert Browning.

That it was a struggle in reverse, with each party trying to prove that the other had more genius and was the better person and poet,

only testifies to the pair's delicate understanding of power

dynamics. When Browning himself, in a letter to Julia Wedgwood written after his wife's death, refers to the poems as "a strange,

heavy crown, that wreath of Sonnets, put on me one morning unawares," he reveals his own awareness of the undercurrent of

aggression, perhaps even of hostility, that characterizes the se

quence (Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood 99).7 The speaker of Barrett Browning's sonnets employs a number of

different strategies to insure that she maintains a firm hold on the

subjective voice. She objectifies her lover, changes his sex, engages in violent combat, and appropriates his visual powers. At the same

time she tirelessly asserts her own inferiority and un worthiness.

This strategy serves a number of functions. In the first place, it

protects her from suffering, along with her fellow lyric heroines, a

disempowering objectification at the hands of her lover. Second, it

puts her in the position of the one who loves most, an active rather

than passive role. Third, it gives her an opportunity, by providing a forum for constant self-analysis, both to project and occupy the

central spotlight of the poetry, to assert repeatedly in the use of

personal pronouns her driving, active will. And fourth, it serves as

excellent camouflage for her "unfeminine" activities and motiva

tions, shrouding the entire poetic enterprise in the self-abasing sen

timentality that Victorian readers might find pleasing in a woman

speaker.

It is a brilliant strategy, this self-centering, marred only by a lack

of control - an excessive enthusiasm - stemming, perhaps, from

insecurity in what must have been an extremely tenuous position. It is this lack of control -

leading, as it does, to an overly emphatic

presence and, ultimately, a cloying and self-pitying tone - that has

led many late-twentieth-century readers to turn away from the

sequence. That these have joined nineteenth- and early twentieth

century readers in misreading Sonnets from the Portuguese as an

expression of unalloyed romanticism in the voice of selfless




womanhood reveals, I think, how far we will go to ignore and thus

suppress those who revolt against sexual stereotypes.

NOTES

i. See, for instance, Leighton and

Moer s (164-70). 2. Quotations from the Sonnets are

from the Variorum edition. References

are to sonnet number.

3. Simone de Beauvoir describes ar

chetypal woman as "Soul and Idea ...

Beatrice guiding Dante in the beyond, Laura summoning Petrarch to the lofty summits of poetry_ no longer

...

flesh, but ... glorified substance ...

fluid as water, wind, memory; for chiv

alric love, for les pr?cieux, and through all the tradition of gallantry, woman is

no longer an animal creature but is

rather an ethereal being, a breath, a

glow ...

[a] transparency" (202?03). For a discussion of the ways in which

men tend to fetishize women in art - by

making a cult of their physical beauty,

by stressing their links with nature -

see Horney and Kaplan (309-25).

4. Daniel Karlin finds Betty Miller's

reading of Browning's personality in

this regard simplistic. He writes: "[Mil

ler's] account of him explains why he

wrote as he did; but if he meant what he

wrote, he and Elizabeth Barrett would

probably never have met, let alone

eloped together. After all, to look at the

process of the courtship is to see

Browning acting, step by step, to im

pose his will on Elizabeth Barrett; ini

tiating every significant stage in their

relationship, from the writing of the

first letter to the decision about the date

of the wedding; willing (if not compel ling) her, in the division of her feelings

between the desire for life and the desire

for death, to choose life" (138-39). Kar

lin does not, however, dispute the exis

tence of an intense literary competition for self-abasement between the two

poets.

5. In "Is the Gaze Male?" Kaplan ar

gues that "men do not simply look;

their gaze carries with it the power of

action and of possession that is lacking in the female gaze. Women receive and

return a gaze, but cannot act on it_

[T]he sexualization and objectification of women is not simply for the pur

poses of eroticism; from a psychoana

lytic point of view, it is designed to an

nihilate the threat that woman (as cas

trated, and possessing a sinister genital

organ) poses" (311). 6. As Kate Millett suggests, "From

the perspective of sexual politics, it is

possible to regard European courtly love as either a cruel joke

- or the first

entering wedge in patriarchal consis

tency. For by an anomaly social history is helpless to explain, the courtly lover,

though de facto master, chose to play the role of servant to his lady" (472). As

we have seen, the courtly lover serves

an essentially passive master.

7. In her study of the influence of

Sonnets from the Portuguese on Brown

ing's Men and Women, Laura Haigwood also comments on the ambiguous tenor

of the poet's response, which "reveals

[his] ambivalence about the 'heavy'

weight ofthe sonnets and the potential

oppressiveness of such a gift_[He] finds the weight of his wife's adoration

burdensome" (101). I would suggest,

however, that it is the sequence's com

petitive tension that provokes his am

bivalence, rather than Barrett Brown

ing's ostensibly overbearing adoration.




WORKS CITED

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