Aurora Leigh

In this section of the poem, Barrett Browning clearly means to address and critique the so-called “woman question,” which is the rather condescending phrase that the poet’s contemporaries used to refer to the ongoing debate of how to define and interpret both the innate nature and proper, accepted roles for women in English society. The debate was often revived in various contexts during the 19th century. Barrett Browning likewise takes up the challenge herself in Book 2 when Aurora makes the controversial decision to maintain her own social and artistic freedom by rejecting her cousin’s offer of marriage in order to pursue her dreams of success and acclaim in the literary world. In the context of both the poem’s plot and the larger philosophical debate raging through society, Romney stands as a representation of the era’s notoriously stodgy, conservative views when he claims, “Women as you are / Mere women, personal and passionate, / You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives, / Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints!” (Lines 221-24). Such “stock characters” of traditional womanhood reflect aspects of the so-called “Angel in the House,” a figure that the acclaimed feminist writer Virginia Woolf later criticized so harshly in her examination of the conventions of the era. Thus, Barrett Browning’s implied skepticism toward the inherent virtues of such roles proves her to be far ahead of her time as she explores aspects of Female Identity and Value in the Victorian Era, and she stands as a veritable proto-feminist whose influence would help to fuel the works of future writers in the same philosophical field.

Within the context of the poem, Romney argues that all of Aurora’s poetic achievements would be intellectually limited by the clear-cut roles to which her status as a female must necessarily limit her. Tainted by condescension, his marriage proposal therefore meets with Aurora’s objection, and through Aurora’s actions, Barrett Browning seeks to deliver a definitive answer to the so-called “woman question” by declaring her protagonist (and herself) to be independent of the limitations that society would impose. The rejected Romney grieves that his honest proposal of marriage has been less effective than the effusions of courtly love, another standard that the poem, with its ultimate vision of spiritual love, goes on to exceed even as it delivers sound critiques of society’s perception of women’s roles both within and beyond the realm of courtship. Thus, her argument reflects aspects of Social Justice in 19th-Century England.

As ever in the conversations between the cousins, their argument articulates the contrasting opinions that historically divided 19th-century British society into different philosophical factions. For example, Aurora roundly rebuts her cousin’s traditional and condescending attitude toward women by exclaiming, “You misconceive the question like a man, / Who sees a woman as the complement / Of his sex merely” (Lines 433-35). Her argument, though framed by the marriage proposal, delivers a much broader rebuke both to her cousin and to any man who assumes his own professional aspirations to be superior to those of a woman, who is often expected to bury her ambitions and stoop to becoming a mere instrument to her husband’s success: bound to his identity and bereft of her own. Accordingly, Aurora laments the fact that many women who agree to marry too soon ultimately end up with unsatisfying lives. In this section of the poem, the tension and electricity between the two characters is palpable, even in verse form, and Barrett Browning comes very close to throwing off the thin veneer of her Aurora disguise when she demands, “Does every man who names love in our lives / Become a power for that?” (Lines 525-26).