Notes 3/16: Aurora Leigh

Aurora Leigh...the third great epic poem? It is a growth story, a coming of age story--about a female poet.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
She published her first book of poetry when she was 22. She was so famous as a poet, that they considered making her Poet Laureate. Her father cloistered her; she became an invalid and developed a dependence on morphine. In 1845, she met Robert Browning (through a letter) and they kept up a secret correspondence. She and Robert eloped, lived in Italy, and were very radical in their beliefs and lifestyles. She and Robert loved each other to the end of her life, 15 years after they met.

Elizabeth's life is very different from the beginning of Aurora Leigh's life:
After her mother and father die, Aurora goes to live with her aunt (her father's sister). She differentiates between living in a worldly, "living and breathing" sense and living in a spiritual, more "real" sense. Aurora's father is older when he meets her mother in Italy. He is made uncommon, but doesn't take a step forward to cultivate his genius. When his wife dies, Aurora's father is totally bereft, and refocuses his love upon Aurora.

*What shapes our minds and makes us who we are?
We're shaped by our parents, the media, what we read, who we interact with, music. and everything around us...EBB is exploring this idea in her poem.

First Book:

"I have not so far left the coasts of life
To travel inland, that I cannot hear
That murmur of the outer Infinite
Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep
When wondered at for smiling" (lines 10-14).

In these early lines, Aurora is talking about becoming acculturated, and that fact that infants can sense the divine and the infinite because they have not yet been shaped by culture. At this point in the poem, Aurora refers to her mother's understanding of such divine moments. In fact, her mother "could not bear the joy of giving life/The mother's rapture slew her" (34-35). Her mother was quite adoring, like Victor's mother, and Aurora searches for her mother's deep, unconditional love after her death. Aurora compares a mother's love to a father's love, saying that women know how to raise children, and have a way of making children feel completely loved. Every word a mother says to her children is meaningful, and she in turns understands every attempted word her child utters. This is how children are brought into language, acculturated into civilization. These words that a child learns tell her how to view the world, how to feel about the world. But instead of just saying that words are cutting (like knives), she instead says that words are beautiful, like corals.