DECONSTRUCTING THE SAVIOR NARRATIVE:

THE BROWNINGS, AGENCY, AND THEIR CULTURAL AFTERLIFE

A Thesis

by

KRISTA DIANE SIFERS

BA, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, 2017

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

in

ENGLISH

Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

Corpus Christi, Texas

December 2020
© Krista Diane Sifers

All Rights Reserved

December 2020
 DECONSTRUCTING THE SAVIOR NARRATIVE:
THE BROWNINGS, AGENCY, AND THEIR CULTURAL AFTERLIFE

A Thesis

by

KRISTA DIANE SIFERS

This thesis meets the standards for scope and quality of

Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and is hereby approved.

Dr. Lucy Sheehan, PhD

Chair

Dr. Jennifer Sorensen, PhD Dr. Jarred Wiehe, PhD

Committee Member Committee Member

December 2020
 ABSTRACT

Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love story has quite the cultural

afterlife. Articles describing their epic literary love often appear around Valentine’s Day, and

there have been many fictionalized narratives re-telling their story. However, this project’s main

goal is to show the problems with the Browning-as-savior narrative these narratives create.

Whereas re-tellings might lead readers to believe that Browning or his love “saved” EBB from

her life before him, close analysis of the Brownings’ letters and poetry complicate this idea by

showing the complexities of ideas behind gender, power, and disability. These analyses show we

should not buy into these fictionalized salvific ableist heterosexual narratives that require re-

writing the past and controlling the future. Rather, this project seeks to influence readers to

consider three things: 1) EBB’s disability and the numerous ways it affected her embodied

experiences as a woman and a writer within her relationship to Browning, 2) the problems

fictionalized narratives have created in terms of understanding disability, gender and power, and

3) the ways in which Browning and EBB slipped in and out of stereotypical gender roles over the

course of their relationship.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS
CONTENTS PAGE

ABSTRACT.................................................................................................................................... v

TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................... vi

CHAPTER 1: THE HETERO COUPLE AND THE SOCIETY .................................................... 1

CHAPTER II: A COLLABORATIVE AFFAIR--LETTERS OF LOVE…..................................30

CHAPTER III: EXPRESSION OF POWER IN THE BROWNINGS' POETRY….....................53

CODA…........................................................................................................................................83

WORKS CITED…........................................................................................................................89

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 CHAPTER I: THE HETERO COUPLE AND THE SOCIETY

Biographical Background

Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s relationship is one that is still

celebrated today, over 130 years after their deaths (EBB in 1861 and Browning in 1889).

Whether the fascination lies within an appreciation for their bodies of literature, interest in

reading their extensive collection of love letters, general curiosity for a couple whose love story

has been repeatedly fictionalized and publicized, or a combination of these things, both literary

and relationship enthusiasts alike still maintain The Brownings’ cultural and literary afterlife to a

level not achieved by many other couples.

Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812 in London (Clark 2). The oldest of three

children, Browning was studying music, art, English literature, and Latin from his parents before

finally being able to attend school at the age of ten (Clark 3). By the time Browning left

university, he was influenced by the works of Byron, Shelley, and Keats and was determined to

make poetry his life’s work, a desire that his parents did not object to even though a career as a

writer might have seemed uncertain at the time (Clark 4). Though Browning saw some success

with his earliest poems, he was also met with criticism. Browning’s third long poem, a piece

where he experimented with point-of-view and form, provided him hope that he would establish

his promise within the literary world; Sordello, however did not garner the reception Browning

had hoped for, causing him to turn to a successful stint in playwrighting for a time before

returning to verses and persistently growing his reputation as a poet (Kennedy and Hair 67-68).

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB), was born in 1806 and always showed an affinity for

reading and writing; by ten years of age, she spoke of reading to inform her writing, and by

eleven she had decided she wanted to be an authoress, with her parents playing a vital role in her

1
interests and helping to shape her perceptions of separate spheres (Mermin 10). According to

Mermin, “…her mother represented a private, inward, hidden world of nurture…her father stood

for…the public world which measured, judged, and awarded praise and blame” (16), where her

mother served as source of inspiration for her poetry and her father served as its recipient and

critic (Mermin 16). Both parents supported EBB’s writing, and EBB dedicated many of her first

musings to her father, Edward Moulton-Barrett. In regards to him, EBB even writes, “Always he

has had the greatest power over my heart” (Mermin 15). Though EBB revered him, his affection

from her childhood toughened “…before time and misfortune hardened him into the infamous

domestic tyrant of Wimpole Street” (Mermin 15) after her mother’s death in 1828 (Leighton 54).

As EBB grew older, her father continued ruling his household as a dictatorship and determining

what EBB could and could not do. Though dramatized depictions of EBB’s life like Besier’s

play, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, “…[hint] at Mr. Barrett’s repressed incestuous love for

Elizabeth,” (Leighton 7), it could be true that part of Mr. Barrett’s oppressive nature was in

response to her illness.

Though once a daring and sprightly child, the onset of her illness “…marked the first

stage of the change from a lively, active, self-confident child to a shy, reclusive invalid which

constituted in her life the outward form of growing up” (Mermin 29). Deemed a disease of the

spine though doctors could find no signs of spinal ailment, her health never fully improved, and

she lived with lifelong symptoms including, “…attacks of racking coughs, pain, struggle for

breath, phlegm, and…loss of appetite” (Markus 17), which, according to biographers, rendered

her a recluse in her father’s house. However, EBB insisted that, “though both doctors and

[herself] could see an emotional component to her physical decline…” (Markus 17), the

suggestion that her prognosis could be modified with will-power was false (Mermin 29), and

2
though there were seasons where EBB felt better than others, there was never a full recovery

from her condition. Susan Sontag’s Ilness as Metaphor, reveals the “the punitive or sentimental

fantasies concocted about [illness]” showing that “…illness is not a metaphor, and that the

most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified

of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking” (Sontag 3). However, many of the modern re-tellings

of EBB’s story that I have come across seem to, indeed, metaphorize EBB’s condition, likening

it to a mysterious obstacle that she needed to overcome. This feeds into the ableist narrative that

an effort on her part to place mind over matter might miraculously improve her condition.

Furthermore, Sontag’s scholarship explains that as medical breakthroughs occurred and the

reliance on medicine and its ability to cure ailments increased, mysterious diseases not yet

understood seemed to be a “theft of life,” (Sontag 5), which helps to explain why so many

modern-day re-tellings of EBB’s love story paint her as the lifeless damsel in distress figure,

trapped in her home waiting for someone like Browning to save her. This problematic notion sets

up not only an inaccurate savior-narrative but also a disturbing narrative in which heterosexuality

provides a cure for disability.

So, the continuously re-told though extremely problematic savior narrative begins in

1845 when, much to her father’s disapproval, Browning wrote to a then Elizabeth Barrett

Moulton-Barrett, and the two exchanged praises over each other’s poetry. Browning began,

“I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett…and I love you too” (Browning). She

replied by admitting she was “a devout admirer and student of [his] works” (Kennedy and Hair

109), which began a correspondence of over 500 letters before they eloped and relocated to Italy

in 1846, freeing her from her father’s influence. During this time together, though they lived in

several cities, they mainly resided in Florence in a palace called “Casa Guidi,” in which EBB

3
composed her poem influenced by the place, “Casa Guidi Windows” (Clark 9). It was here that

in 1849, they had a son together, Robert Weidemann (called Pen), who grew up to become a

renowned painter and sculptor (Clark 12). Until EBB’s passing in June of 1861, Browning and

EBB composed many new texts, including EBB’s Sonnets from the Portuguese a collection of

love poems to Browning, and Browning’s Poetical Works, both serving as the other’s lover,

reader, and reviewer, a relationship first established in their collection of letters.

Today, the love story of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB) is one

that has garnered and sustained a following by both literary and romance enthusiasts and has

been the foundation for several interpretations of their lives and courtship. These interpretations

include the stage play-turned-movie, The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1930 & 1982), Virginia

Woolf’s inventive blend of fiction and non-fiction, Flush: A Biography (1933), detailing life

through the eyes of E.B.B.’s cocker spaniel, and several other biographical fiction novels about

E.B.B. including Laura Fish’s Strange Music (2008). In fact, a quick internet search for either

Browning or E.B.B. pulls up an extensive list of romantically-centered biographies detailing

their love story. Furthermore, The Armstrong Browning Library and Museum at Baylor

University in Waco, Texas, does not only serve as a research center and museum dedicating to

the exploring the Brownings’ work and lives together, but also as a popular wedding venue. All

of these examples show a strong, cultural afterlife committed to the preservation of the

Brownings’ love story that creates an imagined past in which the Brownings’ relationship

naturalizes Victorian ideas about gender complementariness, a hetero-normative savior narrative,

and ableist attitudes.

4
Re-imaging the Relationship

In order to unpack the issues of this imagined past, the multi-faceted nature of their

relationship must be explored because both parties served as the other’s companion, lover, critic,

and creative partner over the course of their written courtship and eventual marriage. What began

with one letter from Browning proclaiming love for both the poet and her poetry not only grew

to influence future views of love and marriage, but the complex relationships between writing,

embodiment, and gender in the Victorian era. I argue that the Brownings’ relationship is well-

suited for analysis under a lens of gender ideology because of their different experiences as male

and female and varying levels of expected constraint prompted them to utilize different methods

of exploring and expressing desire and sexuality. For example, Browning is able to express

desire utilizing more direct approaches (particularly through dramatic monologue in his poetry

and directness in his letters, while EBB expresses desire through more indirect approaches

(particularly through symbolism and other figurative language in her poetry and throughout the

letters). However, the shape those expressions of desire take are drastically different, in part to

show the relationships between power and subordination.

One of the goals of this thesis is to analyze these gendered moments of power-play

throughout the Brownings’ writing where readers are provided the unique opportunity to analyze

gendered restrictions within a single union, a lens that would not be accessible between other

writers not in a relationship with each other. Another is to synthesize the voices of prominent

Victorian writers who seem to agree that men and women each have a distinct role within society

and set of gendered expectations that accompany those roles with the voices of modern critics

who have seemed to agree that EBB struggled against those expectations in order to become a

literary feminist hero. I complicate this consensus, however, by noting the important work that

5
both EBB and Browning do to work within and around societal expectations, the reasons why

this work was necessary, and the back and forth power dynamics and levels of performativity at

play that allowed for the Brownings to find success both within their relationship and their

bodies of writing. Because of the Brownings’ highly celebrated, at times romanticized, cultural

afterlife, our understanding of their work—EBB’s writing, in particular—is colored by those

hetero-romantic idealizations. Instead of arguing whether or not that tethering of romance and

artistry is warranted, I propose that the complexities of their romantic relationship and their

working partnership are important to keep in mind when analyzing their interpretations of

themselves, each other, their writing, and the differences between them. In doing so, I assert that

it is beneficial to analyze their relationship and writing from both separate and joint perspectives

to better understand each writer’s unique position and the influence they had upon each other

throughout their union. The initial understanding of their unique backgrounds, such as the fact

that EBB was already an established poetess and Browning was rising though virtually unknown,

and expectations within society will further allow readers to recognize the differences in both

their commentary and styles though events they verbalize are often shared between the two

lovers over the course of their relationship.

On one hand, it does seem that Browning saved EBB from a certain patriarchal tyranny at

the hands of her father, as multiple accounts of EBB’s home life describe her father as a man

with complete “…emotional and financial dominion of his family” (Leighton 23) with his

ultimate stipulation for all of his children, whether male or female, being that they were never

allowed to marry under the penalty of disinheritance (Markus 5). However, her relationship with

Browning was still a back-and-forth balance of power constructed by their understanding of

Victorian gender norms and expectations. Though Browning’s presence offered EBB the

6
romantic love her father forbid her from having, power dynamics were still clearly at play.

Though EBB gains more agency and freedom to speak out against what men dictate—at least, in

terms of Browning and her father, she is forced to recognize the limitations of being a female

writer in a male-dominated society in order to do so. For example, after the couple’s first in-

person meeting, Browning sent a letter to EBB which was later destroyed due to EBB’s aversion

toward it. In her response to the letter, she expresses the pain she feels due to his “wild” words

and begins the letter by recognizing that her admittance of her opposite views might be seen as

“disobedience,” but proceeds to write in the assurance that she does so in order to be deemed

“worthy of his generosity” towards her, simultaneously acknowledging his perceived elevated

power over her while challenging that power structure by way of referring to her expected

deference and loyalty towards him. Browning responded by seeking to “undo the bad effect of

[his] thoughtlessness, and at the same time exemplify the point [he had] all along been honestly

earnest to set [EBB] right upon ... [his] real inferiority to [her]” (Browning). This early instance

of Browning deliberately placing himself in an “inferior” position establishes a pattern of the

couple’s acknowledgement of expected gender roles and power dynamics that are both

mentioned and upheld in some instances and seemingly dismantled in others. Because Browning

and EBB experience the exact same events from different perspectives, the interpretation of

those moments and the feelings that result from them, described throughout their correspondence

and poetry, offers a particularly fruitful space for discussing how desire and intentions are

expressed differently by differently gendered writers during the time period. However, as

previously mentioned, it is first important to note each writer’s background and experiences

before examining their writing under a joint lens.

7
 Though modern interpretations might make the Brownings’ story feel timeless, it is

important to remember the Victorian era from which it occurred—a period in which the idea

separate spheres was standard and a set of gendered expectations not only existed but was

expected. For example, in 1865, in his lecture, “Lilies: Of Queens’ Gardens,” John Ruskin

summarizes Victorian beliefs that men and women have separate, innate natures, different but

dependent upon one another. He argues, “The man’s power is active […] He is eminently the

doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention” (32),

while women’s intellect “…is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement,

and decision” (32). This Victorian ideal that a woman’s place is not one for creation or invention

complicates our understanding of EBB’s relationship and marriage to Browning as she was

already an established poet at the start of their courtship. As previously mentioned, her poetry is

what drew Browning’s attention and began their courtship. Therefore, because EBB was already

an established artist, their relationship began as a union that already deviated from the idea of

separate spheres (public, or the masculine space centered around business, politics, and social

interactions, versus private/domestic, or the feminine space centered around the home), which

“…underwrote an entire system of institutional practices and conventions…ranging from sexual

division of labor to a sexual division of economic and political rights” (Poovey 8-9). So, from the

relationship’s inception, the Brownings were working both within social norms to explore their

relationship outwardly and around social norms in order to explore their relationship both behind

closed doors and through their written relationship. As Mary Poovey asserts, “…both men and

women were subject at midcentury to the constraints imposed by the binary organization of

difference and the foregrounding of sexual nature…however…men and women were subject to

different kinds of ideological constraint” (Poovey 22-23). In other words, what was permissible

8
for men and women to say differed greatly based on which attributes and tasks within society

were deemed appropriate for both genders. Here, I once again cite Ruskin’s socially-accepted

ideas that a woman’s place is not one for creation or invention, though Browning still may have

needed to filter what he chose to write about or dramatize it in order for it to be accepted within

society, EBB seemed to have a more difficult task of framing the entire product of her writing,

no doubt a task of “creation,” in such a way that was also acceptable to society, which is an

important distinction to keep in mind in later chapters when comparing their writing.

Both Ruskin’s lecture and Sarah Stickney Ellis’s The Women of England, Their Social

Duties, and Domestic Habits (1838) are Victorian sources that describe gender

complementariness, creating rules for how men and women should behave based on their innate

natures and the idea of separate spheres that each depend upon the other. Ruskin describes this

dependency and sexual difference, stating, “Each [sphere] has what the other has not: each

completes the other, and is completed by the other: they are in nothing alike, and the happiness

and perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only

can give” (31). Similarly, Ellis writes that neither sphere is more important than the other as they

both support and depend upon one another as the sun and the earth do. She says:

As if the earth [feminine domain/private sphere] that fosters and nourishes in its

lovely bosom the roots of all the plants and trees which ornament the garden of

the world, feeding them from her secret storehouse with supplies that never fail,

were less important, in the economy of vegetation, than the sun that brings to light

their verdure and their flowers [masculine domain/public sphere], or the genial

atmosphere that perfects their growth, and diffuses their perfume abroad upon the

earth. (43-44)

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In other words, Ellis is saying that the sun might be viewed as having a more important role in

the creation of life because the action of giving light is more of an active duty than the earth that

nurtures growth in a more understated way. In the same way, men and women both have pivotal

roles within society, thereby using the idea of gender complementariness, or the idea that men

have active power and primary function while women’s power, though different, is designed

only to supplement men, to create problematic hetero-normative fantasies. Both Ruskin and

Ellis’s descriptions of separate but equally important spheres work to disguise how limiting this

framework is for Victorian women, highlighting the importance of domestic duties while folding

in the implications for public constrictions. For a couple like the Brownings, this is a particularly

complex issue due to the similarities of their professions as writers. Furthermore, Ruskin’s ideas

surrounding education complicate this matter more, as he claims men and women should be

educated on the same concepts, but that men should be commanding and progressive with the

knowledge while women should only use it for daily or helpful use in the service of men (Ruskin

45). However, since E.B.B.’s and Brownings’ crafts were so similar, and since E.B.B. already

had a fan following before Browning reached out to her, this notion was already moot before the

couple ever met.

Gendered Ideals & Identity

In continuing to examine separate, though intertwined, spheres, Deborah Gorham

explains how the cult of domesticity was constricting because it, “…assigned to women both a

separate sphere and a distinct set of roles” (4). In terms of roles, the ideal Victorian woman,

“…was willing to be dependent on men and submissive to them, and she would have a

preference for a life restricted to the confines of home” (Gorham 5), but this ideal was

conflicting because it required a woman to be both an agent in her own home while still

10
subservient to men. Though the home was characterized as the space belonging to women,

women were only given this authority by their dis-empowered relationship to men. According to

Karusseit, “Men owned and ruled domestic space, while women were confined to and

maintained it. As a result, the home was re-invented as woman’s natural place. Her identity,

status and being were powerfully determined by the concept of house and home” (Karusseit 43).

In other words, the idea that women got dominion over the home is flawed because, even in the

domestic space, women were still confined and only given the power that men allowed them to

have; conversely, men were free agents, able to move inside and outside the walls of the home.

As John Tosh explains, “Home was the place where, in theory, masculine and feminine were

brought together in a proper relation of complementarity….It might mean a rigid assertion of

patriarchal control, or an acceptance by the husband of his wife’s preeminence in the home” (7).

Even though the woman’s place was considered to be within the cult of domesticity because that

was the one place she was allowed to take up space, how much space and how much power

within that space she garnered was ultimately still up to the man. Additionally, “Tosh contests

the doctrine of separate spheres, in that it neglects the distinctively masculine privilege of

enjoying access to both the public and the private sphere” (Karusseit 42). Browning provides a

physical example of this male privilege during his courtship to EBB because of his ability to

frequently enter and exit her domestic space. As can be seen from the letters, Browning actively

comes and goes from EBB’s house during their visits because of his status as a man, while EBB

does not enjoy such freedoms, doubly because of her status as a woman and her illness.

Therefore, it seems that all domestic spheres, though described as womanly sanctuaries, are

actually “integral to masculinity. To establish a home, to protect it, to provide for it, to control

11
it…have usually been essential to a man’s good standing” (Tosh 4), perhaps even before one

domestic sphere is shared by a heterosexual couple.

As briefly mentioned, viewing the home as an area of confinement for women carries a

double meaning in terms of EBB, who was confined to her home not only due to the patriarchal

rule of her father, but also because of paternalism’s ability to confine chronically ill women to

the walls of their sickrooms. On one hand, ideal Victorian women were expected to act as help-

meets for their fathers before turning that domestic attention to their husband’s households.

Furthermore, Victorian women were expected to make amends for their father’s flaws. Of the

ideal Victorian girl, Gorham writes, “…it is her helplessness, innocence and immaturity that

touch the heart of the selfish, dissolute or wayward father. She has an especial capacity to arouse

the conscience if she is in sad circumstances - ill or half-orphaned” (Gorham 42). EBB met both

sets of “sad circumstances” as she was half-orphaned by the death of her mother and rendered ill

after the onset of her spinal ailment. Therefore, EBB would have been even more so expected to

maintain a sense of innocence and softness in stark juxtaposition to her tyrannical father.

In the midst of these domestic obligations to her father, however, spinsterhood, though

once considered unacceptable, emerged as a viable option for women of inheritance (a pathway

her father had accepted), However, as it so happened, the ideal Victorian woman would still

prefer marriage if the opportunity presented itself. According to Gorham, “A girl would now

seek in a prospective husband a man who could be 'comrade, friend and lover,' but if she were an

ideal modern girl, she would also want him to be her 'superior in attainments and talents' , and, in

spite of the education she had received, or the work she had done, she would, when the time

came, give it all up for love” (Gorham 57). This notion that EBB should give up her writing

12
career in favor of Browning’s did not come to fruition. Rather, EBB entered a back-and-forth in

which she upheld several feminine ideals and deviated from others.

On one hand, she did not “give up all the work she had done,” in order to hand the

spotlight over to Browning (Gorham 57). Instead, the two continued to write together and even

influence and critique each other’s work, pushing back against the expectations that a woman’s

place was solely in support of her man. Yet, the fact that EBB was also a home-bound woman in

the eyes of society, bound to the private sphere not by her illness but society’s restrictions for

women with illnesses, offers insight into how EBB was able to break gendered expectations for

authorship, even publishing under her own name unlike many other women writers during the

period who used pseudonyms as to not be judged by their gender. Because EBB was a member

of the public sphere only through her writing, but not actually through her body, her presence in

her public sphere was not fully observed. Poovey writes, “Because they were positioned as

nonexistent, women at midcentury did not have institutionally recognized power, no matter how

much moral influence they could wield” (23). This is important for underscoring EBB’s

simultaneous existence versus nonexistence as she was home-bound and seemingly separate

from the rest of society, though she still had to operate under socially excepted norms in her

public writing at least to a certain degree for her work to be accepted. At the same time, though,

her letters to Browning which were only intended for a private audience of one did not have to

operate under such heavy constraints. Julia Markus writes, “Elizabeth Barrett wished them to go

past the formalities of etiquette between the sexes. She told him to write to her just as if she were

a man; that she was an invalid gave her absolute freedom of expression” (7) because she was

already expected to exist outside the bounds of “normalcy.” Able-bodiedness and hetero-

normativity too often pose as non-identities, according to Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory (1).

13
Here, it is evident that the presence of EBB’s illness complicates the ideas that able-bodiedness

and hetero-normativity are determiners of normalcy; while society’s constraints impede EBB

from fully-entering the public sphere, they are also able to offer her artistic freedom due to her

bodily separation from the public sphere.

In examining EBB’s work, I argue that it is important to consider all aspects of her

identity in order to fully understand her writing. As Angela Leighton explains, there was a

certain separation that took place around the beginning of the twentieth century that painted EBB

not as the admirable poetess she had been considered when living and in the years immediately

following her death, but as the “heroine of a love story” with Browning (Leighton 3-4), a

“romantic idealization” that separated her joint identity as woman and poetess into separate

entities, rendering “admiration for the one very often [entailing] an implicit depreciation of the

other” (Leighton 4). Though I support Leighton’s affirmation that it is important to view EBB in

conjunction as both a woman and poetess in order to understand how her relationship with

Browning both affected and influenced her work as a writer, I assert that it is also equally

important to view EBB’s identity in totality, including her unique influence as a woman writer in

Victorian society who also had a disability that affected her presence both within the public and

private spheres.

Normalcy and Identity

In order to understand EBB’s deviation from Victorian understandings of normalcy, it is

important to understand the concept of normalcy in general. “Introduction: Normality, Power,

and Culture,” Lennard Davis unmasks the construction of “normalcy” in terms of the disabled

community to show, “…the ‘problem’ is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way

that normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person” (1). Davis asserts,

14
“…the application of the idea of a norm to the human body creates the idea of deviance or a

‘deviant’ body” (5). In other words, because society has created guidelines for what is considered

normal and what is considered deviant, people with disabilities are viewed as problematic

because they diverge from society’s fabricated definition of normalcy. According to Rosemarie

Garland-Thomson in her work “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,”

normalcy, or “the normate” is “ the corporeal incarnation of culture's collective, unmarked,

normative characteristics” (10). In other words, what is considered normal is what is unmarked

by identifiers of disability or deviance. Therefore, the ways in which Victorian society views her

deviance is problematic and disqualifying, seeming to exclude her from personhood.

A Feminist-Disability Studies Approach

The connections between her gender and disability are either too often ignored or

problematic in the way they are framed. First, as Christine Kenyon Jones summarizes, many

scholars believe EBB’s letter correspondence to Browning deconstructs her distinctiveness as a

disabled individual and develops her as a “practically non-disabled persona” (22). Second, as

Leighton summarizes from the timeline of EBB’s perceived loss of agency, other scholars

believe her authorship was successful in spite of her gender and disability, as if these two facets

of her identity were obstacles needing to be overcome, such as Oliver Elton stating it would have

been better to know EBB than to read her works or Osbert Burdett claiming that EBB’s writing

was too womanly to ever be great (Leighton 2-5). Similarly, Dorothy Mermin summarizes how

many reviewers always note EBB’s gender with their reviews of her work, with one journal even

noting how profound her writing was particularly because they came from a woman’s mind

(Mermin 114). Furthermore, Mermin’s scholarship shows the shifting of attitudes between

reviewers during the Victorians who regarded EBB’s work with general praise, such as EBB

15
being “the most remarkable poetic genius of [the] day,” to reviews in the twentieth century

referring to her as “the foremost of women poets” specifically (Mermin 113-114). In order to

resolve the issues with that consensus, throughout this analysis, I argue it is better to

acknowledge EBB’s gender and disability as embodied experiences that influenced both her

writing and her relationship to Browning than to speculate whether or not such experiences were

a concrete empowerment or impediment because doing so excludes certain aspects from both

sides of the binary opposition. In other words, because embodiment functions as an intersection

of disability, sexuality, and gender, and because everyone has a unique embodied experience, it

is neither the case that her disability and/or gender is what defines her or enables her to be a great

writer, but it is thinking about the complexities of her embodied relationship that is interesting.

Before a feminist-disability lens emerged, Gilbert and Gubar’s work describes how as a

Victorian woman with a disability, EBB was faced with what could be described as a double

impediment. Using the language of disability and frequently mentioned words such as “crippling,

debilitating, and disabling” in order to describe the fictional versions of women that society and

male writers, in particular, creates, Gilbert and Gubar assert, “It is debilitating to be any woman

in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be

monsters” (53), solidifying the binary opposition of ideal versus deviant in the male’s mind in

regard for women. The perception that women should either be perfect or deemed monstrous

preceded women’s writing, so a woman often struggled not against writing that revealed men’s

perceptions of the world but men’s perceptions of women, a term Gilbert and Gubar coin

“anxiety of authorship” (53). In EBB’s case, because the idea of normalcy is defined by society

and society’s decisions belonged to males, she had to struggle not only against conceptions about

her as a disabled figure, but also as a woman. As Mermin articulates, male writers who function

16
as their own speakers within poetry traditionally create female characters to serve as the “other”

within a written work—an other crafted by the male fantasy lacking her own voice. Female

poets, then, have a “doubled presence” within their writing because they are writing as both “self

and other,” “subject and object,” (Mermin), which closely resembles Gilbert and Gubar’s

argument that no matter which persona a female writers assumes (angel or monster), the female

writer certainly feels the effects of the debilitating images her culture has of her as a result of

male depictions of her (Gilbert and Gubar 57). Then, female writers have the doubled

responsibility of both crafting a narrative and re-crafting and reclaiming previous narratives at

the same time.

Yet, though Gilbert and Gubar’s work is helpful in showing how some of the challenges

EBB faced intersect, it is too reductive to state that femininity is disability. Rather, Gilbert and

Gubar provide a starting to place to examine the complex relationships between gender and

disability. Because the femininity that Gilbert and Gubar describe here functions as a disabling

symptom of the patriarchy, EBB’s writing is directly affected as a result. This impact is a critical

component readers should keep in mind when analyzing her work and the reason I propose the

most apt examinations of her work come from utilizing a lens of feminist disability theory, like

that of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, rather than feminist perspectives or disability theory alone.

For example, as mentioned earlier in the chapter, EBB starts to experience a gradual loss of

agency as a writer after her death. During her life, she often received high praise for her work.

After her death, however, reappraisals of her work start to highlight the connections between her

writing and gender. Instead of being hailed as a great writer, she is noted as a great poet for a

woman. This loss, or, at least, fragmentation of agency is cemented with EBB regarded as a

feminist hero in respects to her relationship with Browning rather than with respect to her writing

17
at the beginning of the twentieth century, resulting in an idealized image of her femaleness that

supersedes her agency as a poet (Leighton 4). Noting this established issue with studying the

woman in conjunction with the poet, it is important to also discuss her illness as an aspect

needing to be at the forefront of consideration. Utilizing a feminist disability theory in the

analysis of EBB’s work allows for a full understanding of the intersectionality of her identity

without excluding facets of her experience that have previously been overlooked or separated. A

feminist disability theory asserts that, disability, like femaleness, is not an impediment but a

socially prescribed narrative of the body (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson 5), meaning that a

feminist disability theory recognizes that the impediment does not lie within the female or

differently-abled body but rather within society’s assumptions that both femaleness and

disabilities somehow make a person lesser-than. This is a different, more current perspective that

Gilbert and Gubar who began by asserting that femaleness is an impediment. Because of EBB’s

resistance to normalcy, we can see the complex relationships between her identity as a woman,

an individual with a disability, and an author documenting those specific embodied experiences.

Female Authorship and Disability

In many ways, EBB’s sickroom allows her the freedom and opportunity to write. Unlike

Browning who first attributes reading and writing to the worsening of his condition in a letter

postmarked June 23, 1845 and several times after that, EBB’s writing flows from the sickroom,

as she is “capable of a great deal of that sort of work,” (EBB, June 24, 1845) or, writing under

ailments, that Browning is not. Because women seemed to pose a threat to a man’s upward

mobility or the preservation of his current station, it was important women were careful about the

ways in which they entered the public sphere—like through their writing (Poovey 5). For these

reasons, women traditionally had two options for distributing their writing: either through private

18
circulation with a close group of friends or through anonymous publication, an option many

female writers chose during the time period (Poovey 36). However, neither was the case for EBB

due to her unique position within society. As Christine Kenyon Jones mentions, the addition of

“invalid” made the conjunction of the words “woman” and “writer” more palatable (22).

Because, at least in part, EBB’s words, a product of the physical process of her body, could enter

the public sphere but her physical body could not, she was able to publish wide-spread writings

under her gender. Though this seems like a body/mind split, her words are actually an extension

of her body. To understand the complexities of this phenomenon, Margaret Price introduces the

term singular term “bodymind,” in juxtaposition to the separate terms of body and mind

“because mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each

other—that is, because they tend to act as one, even though they are conventionally understood

as two” (2). So, an understanding of bodyminds allows readers to recognize a different form of

mobility, allowing for her writing to be more wide-spread. Plus, though her letters to Browning

were never meant to be seen by anyone other than him, it is interesting to analyze them in

juxtaposition to her poetry as women were said to be especially suited for writing “polite letters”

because of sentimentalism (Poovey 38). Sentimentalism, or the expression of emotions, allowed

women the freedom to write and to have a voice within society because “…feeling was one

significant theater of experience that could not be completely denied to women” (Poovey 37).

Both EBB’s letters and poetry center a great deal around her feelings—feelings that reveal how

she considers herself, others, and the world around her, which could be another reason why her

poems were so highly regarded and more easily accepted. The outpouring of feelings led to “One

of the most persistent dilemmas of the woman writer during this period…the problem of

controlling her own attraction to ideal compensations, along with the difficulty of subordinating

19
to her aesthetic design the powerful things that generated this attraction” (Poovey 38). Mermin

adds, “It has too easily been assumed that women’s pens are impelled by their emotions, their ink

a kind of expressive fluid or involuntary secretion—men make works of art, women’s feelings

ooze out onto the paper (4). This description of women’s writing places a heavy focus on the

body, both sexualizing the act by using terms like “expressive fluid” and “involuntary secretion,”

and disembodying the process of writing by making it seem like an involuntary act, failing to

recognize the conscious act of creation by the bodymind. This is one instance that shows how

important it is to understand the bodymind as a single concept rather than assuming there is a

body/mind split. In understanding the connections between the bodymind, readers can further

become aware of EBB’s total embodied experience rather than viewing EBB’s brilliant mind as

something trapped behind the prison of her ailing body as narrative accounts have done in the

past.

A way in which women seemed to overcome the challenges of writing in a male-

dominated field is through “…strategies of indirection, obliqueness, and doubling that were

imaginative counterparts of the paradoxical behavior they were encouraged to cultivate in every

day life” (Poovey 42) because they “characterized women’s learned or internalized responses to

the objective female situation” (Poovey 43). In other words, women’s claims in writing were

often implicit because of the learned behaviors that made the expression of thought more socially

acceptable. In EBB’s case, she frequently employs these strategies through her use of elaborate

figurative language, particularly metaphor, and her emphasis on emotion. Female writers who

could strategically link their creations to emotion were not viewed as veering outside of their

lane, whereas male writers though they agreed that “feelings” were “both necessary for virtue

and art” worried those necessary tools would be deemed too womanly and would be considered

20
“relegated to a woman’s sphere” (Mermin 7). Yet, this fear is contradictory to society’s

expectations based on Ruskin’s claim that women are not suited for creation or invention if

“feminine” emotions are necessary for successful poetry. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons

why Browning consistently praises EBB’s poetry throughout their letters, insisting his own

inferiority to her verses, a pattern that will be further developed in Chapter 2.

Metaphor and Personification

Another figurative tactic surrounding EBB is the use of prevalent metaphors throughout

her writing and the metaphors critics have used to create imagined re-tellings of her life. In terms

of disability, metaphors often serve as constructive rhetorical devices used to create meaning. By

writing, “The ability of disabled characters to allow authors the metaphorical ‘play’ between

macro and micro registers of meaning-making establishes the role of body in literature”

(Mitchell and Snyder 62). A term in disability studies that helps us understand the complexities

of EBB’s situation is narrative prosthesis, which is “…the dependency of literary narratives upon

disability as a means for representational power, disruptive personality, and analytical insight”

(Mitchell and Snyder 46), and is used as a “a stock feature of characterization” (Mitchell and

Snyder 42). Narrative prosthesis is especially relevant to EBB because though disability can

serve as a unique interpretation of the world through individual embodiment instead of “posing a

riddle in search of a narrative solution” (Mitchell and Snyder 61), both scholars and authors tend

to frame their critical theory and creative renderings of EBB’s life within a traditional structure

of narrative prosthesis (deviance is exposed, narrative calls to know the deviance’s origins and

consequences, the deviance becomes the focal point, the story aims to fix the deviance, a cure is

found, society becomes more accepting, the deviant body is exterminated, there is a reevaluation

of a different mode of being) (Mitchell and Snyder 47). In several interpretations, EBB’s illness

21
is discussed, possible causes are discussed (most often regarded as a riding accident), symptoms

are described but it is articulated that an exact diagnosis is unknown, the implications the illness

has on EBB’s life are revealed, EBB’s relationship to Browning is described as “the cure,”

society praises EBB’s resilience and ability to perform her duties as a wife and mother, EBB

passes away (thereby exterminating the deviance), and, finally, there is a reevaluation of her life

and work.

One of the most succinct examples of this narrative comes from the first few chapters of

Julia Markus’s biography on the Brownings’ marriage, Dared and Done. In the beginning,

Markus describes EBB as a lively child struck down by a mysterious illness when she was

fourteen—an illness her two younger sisters also contracted but recovered from—possibly

exacerbated by injuries sustained from a riding accident, though a spinal injury was never

confirmed. Her ailments are described in some detail before she is, in effect, branded a recluse,

until the “power of love” allowed her to open up to Browning (Markus 17-18). To further cement

this point, Mermin asserts that “…a life is not just a set of circumstances imposed from without.

It is also a story invented as it goes along...On the crudest level of plot, Barrett Browning’s is an

archetypal romance: a greatly gifted and talented maiden is imprisoned…until a bold poetical

lover rescues her” (4). Here, Mermin further helps articulate the level of narrative liberties

scholars and critics have taken over EBB’s story, and this repeated, fictionalized narrative

structure allows us to see what is troublesome about the retold savior narrative between

Browning and EBB. A narrative that supports the idea that Browning is able to “cure” her from

her disability, thereby reinforcing cultural stereotypes that view disabled women as “asexual,

unfit to reproduce, overly dependent, [or] unattractive—as generally removed from the sphere of

true womanhood and feminine beauty” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson 17) plays right in to

22
society’s need to eradicate deviant bodies because of their difference. It is possible that

Browning helps to strengthen EBB, but viewing him as her “cure” as so many narratives do

diminishes the work that EBB does on her own and casts her disability as a deviance to be fixed

instead of recognizing her unique embodied experience.

Additionally, though disability is too often treated as a problem in need of solving, it

seems that because of EBB’s embodied experience, the metaphors she uses to describe disability

in her own writing come from a different place. It is not the case here that an individual without

experiences with disability is attempting to make sense of a disability; rather, an embodied

experience from a woman with a disability is described so that able-bodied individuals can

derive meaning from the words. So, while Mitchell and Snyder’s criticism allow us to see the

ways in which disability might exclude those with illnesses from the normalized human

experience creating by society’s constructions of that normalcy, Garland-Thomson “suggests

that disability gathers us into the everyday community of embodied humankind” (339). EBB also

has a habit of personifying non-sentient objects with disability. In a letter postmarked March 21,

1846, she writes, “I do not understand how my letters limp so instead of flying as they ought

with the feathers I give them” (EBB). She describes her letters as having a physical impairment

despite the able-bodied characteristics she gives them, perhaps indicating the understanding that

though she is a creator, some circumstances are beyond control. These instances of metaphor

continue on and are prevalent throughout the letters and her poems, and more will be analyzed in

chapters two and three as a way of understanding how EBB described her own experiences in

juxtaposition to the prescriptive narratives others have attempted to describe for her.

The connection between women’s writing and affliction is a tricky one in EBB’s case. It

is not clear whether EBB’s own affliction afforded her the ability to be less affected by the fear

23
of writing due to her unique position as mentioned above, or whether the anxiety of authorship

exacerbated her condition at times. Though this idea is unclear, it important to consider all of the

factors influencing EBB during the Victorian era as we move forward in analyzing her work, one

of which relating to the idea of complex embodiment.

To fully understand the internal and external experiences of disability, it is important to

understand complex embodiment. In “Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment—For

Identity Politics in a New Register,” Tobin Siebers reveals the ways in which society views

“constructed” identities in relation to ability and disability. He asserts bodies, in one light, are

only a means in which humans “…contain or dress up the spirit, the soul, the mind, the

self...[and] convey who [they] are from place to place” (Siebers 278). Siebers creates a complex

understanding of ability—or able-bodiedness—because it places immense value on the body’s

ability to grant or deny full “…human status to individual persons” based on what their bodies

can and cannot do (Siebers 279). Thus, ability seemingly creates what society perceives to be

deviant identities as a reflection of complex embodiment. The theory of complex embodiment

shows that the medical model of disability is problematic because it assumes disability is

encompassed solely in a physical or cognitive impairment and the social model of disability is

problematic because though it acknowledges society’s organization and constructions of

normalcy as disabling, it ignores the embodied experience.

The Sickroom and Performativity

One of the ways in which creative adaptions and biographies of EBB’s life focalize her

illness is through the lens of the sickroom. Within the privacy of the sickroom, EBB and

Browning are able to slip in and out of the constructed binaries of feminine/masculine and

24
caregiver/patient as their relationship to one another develops and understanding is built. We are

reminded of Butler’s theory that:

Gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature,

language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put

on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if

this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to

expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds.

(Butler 531).

The Brownings’ roles are put on and performed as a result of a specific set of circumstances,

when afforded the opportunity, beyond the public eye.

Additionally, the sickroom serves as a dominant connection between illness and authorship

because it was a space of both confinement and creativity through that confinement. It is also

largely reminiscent of separate spheres, as the sickroom offered the “sanctity, rectitude, and

peace of home life versus the competitive struggles and ethical ambiguities of the public world”

(Bailin 19). However, though sickrooms are certainly indicative of the domestic and linked by

nature to the private sphere, sickrooms did get some public traffic, still, resulting in a kind of

performance. For example, one creative interpretation of EBB and her illness, Woolf’s Flush,

“…shows how the Victorian sickroom functioned as a kind of stage in which the ill and well

perform their identities. In company, Barrett becomes an actress—she ‘laughed, expostulated,

exclaimed, sighed too, and laughed again,’ but she would sink ‘back very white, very tired on her

pillows’ once her visitors left” (Xiaoxi 60). So, though the sickroom offered freedom from some

obligation, performative duty to appear acceptable to society is not eliminated completely. For

instance, after Browning’s first visit, he sent a letter postmarked May 24, 1845 that was since

25
destroyed in which he spoke “wildly,” according to EBB, about their encounter, “like a misprint

between [Browning] and the printer,” (EBB) even though the occurrence took place seemingly

separate from societal roles and expectations. Though she admits to wanting to see him again,

she reminds him, “that [she is] in the most exceptional of positions; and that, just because of it,

[she is] able to receive [him] as [she] did on Tuesday; and that, for [her] to listen to 'unconscious

exaggerations,' is as unbecoming to the humilities of [her] position, as unpropitious (which is of

more consequence) to the prosperities of [his]” (EBB). In other words, whichever desires might

be surfacing on both of their parts, her unique position through her disability allows for meeting

that would otherwise not be possible, so it is imperative that they conduct themselves and

perform their societal roles appropriately with respect for their positions.

Also, a great deal of caregiving between EBB and Browning was made possible by way of

the sickroom, both within his scheduled visits to her home and through the letters she is able to

create within its walls. In terms of gender, “Nursing the sick was, for both men and women, as

sanctified an act as suffering itself [and] was repeatedly invoked to verify the genuineness of

one’s affections” (Bailin 11), though “The disabled male under the care of a woman permits

imaginative, if not actual, access to traits that were associated with femininity” (Bailin 40). In

other words, though caregiving and nursing within sickrooms was expected of both men and

women, it was associated most often with femininity. This did not stop Browning from

constantly checking on EBB’s condition, though, it did afford him the opportunity to create a

kind of “…benevolent competition between the lovers as to who could express the greater

solitude for the others’ weakness” (Kenyon Jones 27) by detailing the suffering of his headaches

to EBB who often assumed the role of caregiver though she was the one confined to her home.

Though Browning consistently asks how she is feeling throughout the letters and bases their

26
timeline for eloping around the status of her health, EBB also inquires about his health and

nervous condition by way of citing her personal experience with illness. In a letter postmarked

June 24, 1845, she asks whether or not he has visited a medical professional who actually knows

anything about his condition because there is no excuse for not seeking the greatest help for

ailments or to continue suffering when pain can be alleviated. She questions, “Why not try the

effect of a little change of air—or even of a great change of air—if it should be necessary, or

even expedient? Anything is better, you know ... or if you don't know, I know—than to be ill”

(EBB). By citing her own experience with illness as a sort of expertise, she is able to offer

knowledge she has over Browning and to speak with him on a level that would not be possible if

not for her unique circumstances, because it was not acceptable for women to be experts over

men, creating one instance where she performs the stereotypically masculine act of advice-giving

as a result of illness and the privacy of the sickroom.

The sickroom, and the idea of disability itself, might have afforded EBB certain privileges

not granted to other middle/upper class Victorian women, as the sickroom provided the

reconciliation of “contemporary social conflicts and formal disjunctions within the natural

domain of bodily process and exigent circumstance” (Bailin 13) as a “…haven of comfort, order,

and natural affection” (Bailin 6). Within sickrooms, “Illness authorized the relaxation of the

rigidly conceived behavior codes with governed both work and play within the public realm”

(Bailin 12). So, with the objectives of healing and restoration in an environment that granted a

relaxed approach to gender codes, the sickroom not only allowed for the creation of poetry and

prose, but for the creation and exploration of sexual desire. Within the confines of the sickroom,

caregiving actions can blur and double as the actions of a lover as “…confidences are exchanged,

clothes removed or readjusted, soothing caresses administered to aching limbs, and basic wants

27
given utterance—all of this within the bedroom turned sickroom, a site suggestive of these

intimacies which these activities both disguise and express” (Bailin 23). Through the privacy the

sickroom affords for embodied illness and embodied sexuality, EBB invites Browning into the

explorative space, past the barriers of the letters. In a letter postmarked May 13, 1845, she writes,

“I will tell you—I ask you not to see me so long as you are unwell, or mistrustful of—

No, no, that is being too grand! Do see me when you can, and let me not be only writing myself”

(EBB). Though she hesitates at first to call him into her space at first, she ultimately admits her

desire to see him, even in both of their “unwell” and his “mistrustful” states, in the openness of

her sickroom. In a follow-up letter, she asks to see him again, writing:

Well!—but this is to prove that I am not mistrustful, and to say, that if you care to

come to see me you can come; and that it is my gain (as I feel it to be) and not

yours, whenever you do come. You will not talk of having come afterwards I

know, because although I am 'fast bound' to see one or two persons this summer

(besides yourself, whom I receive of choice and willingly) I cannot admit visitors

in a general way—and putting the question of health quite aside, it would be

unbecoming to lie here on the sofa and make a company-show of an infirmity.

(EBB)

EBB’s opening line, a request for a chance to prove she is not mistrustful of Browning, indicates

a level of intimacy because mistrust can only be disproven with openness, assurance, and an

elevated level of comfort between the two parties. Furthermore, EBB’s assertion that Browning

will not discuss his visits to her further cement her desire for privacy, or shelter from a society

where she is expected to be chaste and pure. This desire for freedom from expected Victorian

repression is further asserted when she mentions how “unbecoming” it is for a woman to “lie on

28
the sofa,” an evocative position mirroring a bedroom, to receive company. This is reminiscent of

Bailin’s description of the sickroom turned bedroom and helps to understand the sexual freedoms

the sickroom afforded, as certain permissions were afforded to Browning and EBB differently

based on their unique positions and perspectives.

In the coming chapters, I will use a feminist disability studies perspective under the larger

umbrella of a gender ideological lens as discussed in this introductory chapter to analyze the

letters between EBB and Browning in Chapter 2 and the Brownings’ poetry in Chapter 3 in order

to examine the different ways in which the Brownings navigated their prescribed roles within

society.

29
 CHAPTER II: A COLLABORATIVE AFFAIR—LETTERS OF LOVE

A Joint Effort: Epistolary Works

Though Browning and EBB trade ideas about writing throughout their letters, offering

praise and constructive criticism for each other’s work-in-progress, an officially co-authored

piece did not materialize until their son published their collection of letters in 1899 (Mermin

117), a large proof of courtship that not only sheds light on the couple as lovers but writers as

well. The Brownings’ letters offer a lens for interpreting the different ways in which they

expressed desire because, although they were eventually published, originally they were private

conversations between the lovers, each getting to spend time switching roles back and forth

between writer and reader, unlike their poetry which was meant for larger audiences.

Janine Utell describes letters as “couple biographies” (3) in which couples, “engage in the

act and practices of intimate life writing such that individually and together they undertake and

narrativize a process of becoming as subjects in relation to, and with, and in recognition of a

significant other (1). This collaboration creates a back-and-forth unified persona through partial

biography and autobiography of the self and the other, made understood through the joint efforts

of reader and responder. The personas that are created are “…always in process, always

contingent, [and] always relational (Utell 3) because of the multi-faceted and malleable

perceptions of both reader and writer. Therefore, I argue that in viewing the Brownings’ letters

as a form of dialogical discourse, we can see how the personas they create of themselves and

each other change through the gender performances enclosed within the pages and can see a

blending of the line between public and private spheres as their writing changes as a result of

each other. Though elements of gender complementariness that lead to the naturalized

subordination of EBB are evident in places, there are also ways in which the blurring of these

30
lines allow the Brownings to take on actions stereotypically accepted of those of the opposite

sex, where a freedom in gender performativity can be seen. The Brownings’ correspondence is

particularly fruitful for mapping the development of their relationship because letters are their

own literary form, creating opportunities for collaboration and dialogue not available in other

genres. To me, the Browning letters are unique because of three distinct features.

First of all, letter writing is a collaborative event that unfolds over time, and no letter

should be analyzed as a stand-alone document because it belongs to a specific place in time that

needs context to make sense. Because letters are both so private and personal, it is important to

note the danger of how easily they are to misinterpret when taken out of time and context. On the

interpretation of letters, Hermione Lee asserts that unlike a singular poem or prose piece, “…it is

a mistake to think of a letter as a solitary, independent, free-standing document. It must be seen

as part of a relationship that moves through time. And the evidence provided by letters can never

quite be trusted” (19). Furthermore, Janet Gurkin Altman asserts, “Caught up in the particularity

of its writer-reader relationship, epistolary discourse is also governed by its moment of

enunciation. The letter writer is highly conscious of writing in a specific present against which

past and future are plotted” (122). Finally, Jonathan Ellis writes, “Most letters are written in the

present tense as a way of appearing in one place when physically elsewhere” (2). The consensus

amongst the scholars is that letters are written with time in mind, are time-bound, and have a

specific context that cannot be removed without changing the meaning of the letter. Therefore,

instead of analyzing each letter on its own, similar to the way I analyze the Brownings’ poetry in

the following chapters, I propose that it is important to analyze key pieces of evidence from the

letters as a collection, carefully considering the gendered constraints of the time from which they

31
were composed, and to consider the implications of such a collection for their tripled

relationship as a whole, both as lovers, readers, and writers.

Secondly, again because of their collaborative nature, letters contain multi-faceted

depictions and assertions of identity, revealing both what the writer thinks of the reader and of

themselves. Letter writing itself is an inherently collaborative venture containing both parties’

perspectives, positions, biases, etc., that must be taken into account. Altman writes, “Perhaps the

most distinctive aspect of epistolary language is the extent to which it is colored by not one but

two persons and by the specific relationship existing between them” (118). Therefore, in the

Brownings’ case, we should analyze the letters not only in the context of lover to beloved but of

mentor to mentee whose language shapes and influences distinct personas of the self and the

other in relation to the collaboration, roles in which Browning and EBB switch between

throughout the correspondence.

Finally, letters simultaneously function as disembodied forms that can move within

Victorian society where physical, gendered bodies cannot, and function as forms deeply

connected to embodied experiences (even just the physical act of writing itself) in that they are

the medium in which those experiences are recorded; because of these functions, letters blur the

line between separation versus unity, embodied work versus extension beyond the body, and

public versus private dialogue. Ellis’s theory reminds us that, “Letters bring people closer

together without them ever actually touching. They are perhaps the closest literary form to

physical flirtation, hence the popularity of letter writing as a means of courtship and seduction”

(Ellis 2), but letters also can act as a self-portrait, providing the medium to record more direct

reflections (Ellis 2).When acting as a tool of seduction or flirtation between sender and receiver,

Altman explains:

32
 As an instrument of communication between sender and receiver, the letter

straddles the gulf between presence and absence; the two persons who "meet"

through the letter are neither totally separated nor totally united. The letter lies

halfway between the possibility of total communication and the risk of no

communication at all. In seduction correspondence is an intermediate step

between indifference and intimacy; on the other side of seduction it is an

intermediate step between conquest and abandonment. The same seducer who

uses the letter to engage his victim at the beginning of a relationship may

substitute the letter for his actual presence when he wishes to disentangle himself.

(3)

Because letters are the result of the embodied experience of writing but fulfill their purpose when

away from the physical body, the connection created between the writer and reader exists, but

not in a physical sense unless functioning as a metonymy of the sender’s body. Therefore, as

Altman explains, the sender and receiver are in a liminal state between separate and united.

Letters can be used to create distance or to bridge it, depending on the intention of the writer.

Additionally, it may seem that this private correspondence leaves less room for creative

interpretation than the poetry because direct contact seems more likely to provide a medium for

explicit communication regarding desire than a work meant for widespread publication.

However, it is important to consider the context, private allusions and references, and why the

Brownings “…[chose] to write about an event in a particular way” (Lee 20) to each other, in

particular, instead of treating every word as a literal expression. Furthermore, letters, for the

time, were not infrequently published. Though the Brownings did not choose to publish their

letters during either of their lifetimes, that does not mean it was never considered or that the

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intention was not there. Because we know that one letter, the one in which Browning speaks

“wildly” about his first interaction with EBB, was destroyed after their disagreement, they were

obviously aware of the risk of interception. So, while the letters seemingly present more freedom

of expression based on a private audience of one rather than a public audience of many, the risks

associated with putting sentiment into writing were not lost on the Brownings. Therefore, it is

important to analyze the letters with the mindset they were still very much operating under

society’s restrictions, even if the medium feels private to a certain degree, not unlike the

enclosed walls of EBB’s sickroom was still a space within society.

I propose that the Brownings’ letters can help analyze their relationship in two ways: 1)

by acting as a record of their courtship, showing the development of their relationship and the

differently gendered expressions of desire within Victorian society and 2) serving as literary

criticism, documenting their own and each other’s views of their poetry and authorship through

their vastly different perspectives on life due to gender, illness, and embodied experiences (such

as Browning’s frequent headaches and EBB’s invalidism) and how those conditions affect their

relationship and writing. Both of these tasks also contribute to the larger argument of showing

how the viewing letter as a collaborative form allows us to analyze the differently gendered

expression of desire in this period and see the highly performative roles the Brownings slip in

and out of to influence each other’s work, change each other’s writing style, and create each

other’s literary personas.

Development of the Relationship

The letters are helpful in showing the development of the Brownings’ relationship from

timid pen pals to their elopement because the medium of communication offered a socially

acceptable opportunity for it to grow from a safe distance, both because of Victorian

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expectations for chastity and EBB’s unique predicament. The letters are also vital in showing the

conflation of stereotypically feminine and masculine, classed ideals that happens as the

Brownings learn from each other’s writing strengths and develop new writing habits because of

each other’s influence. Finally, the letters show the tug-of-war power dynamics of EBB’s fight

for agency as Browning conflates EBB’s identities as a woman and a writer, as she pushes back

in some instances and acquiesces in others. Waithe’s theory shows that “written communication

occurs at a ‘safe distance’ without incurring such risks of disappointed spectacle. Its ebbs and

flows were not only predictable with the post, but susceptible to regulation and control. Love ‘on

the page’ could be purified of the physical, and its development carefully regulated, at least until

the beloved became a lover in turn” (133). However, the Brownings’ letters began to push these

boundaries from the beginning of the correspondence with Browning’s admission of love for

EBB through their written discussions about what “wild” fantasies could and could not be

expressed. Through written communication, both Browning and EBB could control what and

how much progression to reveal, creating a series of shifts in the power dynamics of their

relationships tracked through the letters.

As previously mentioned above, critics such as Leighton, Markus, Mermin, and Kingma

Wall have shown how people have found it difficult to weigh EBB’s roles as woman and poet, as

one’s value has often become lost in the other’s throughout time. In fact, Browning seems to

conflate these two aspects of EBB’s identity in this first letter to her. The letter, post-marked

January 10, 1845, begins by expressing his love for E.B.B.’s poetry and ends by asserting his

love for her. He writes, “…the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos

and true new brave thought; but in thus addressing myself to you—your own self, and for the

first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I

35
love you too.” (Browning n.p.). This bluntness is not only reminiscent of Ruskin’s ideas of

masculinity, with a man’s power being active in comparison to feminine passivity (Ruskin 32),

but revealing of Browning’s inability to separate EBB’s worth as a poet from her gender. In

referring to the “fresh strange music, affluent language, exquisite pathos, and new brave thought”

as EBB’s “own self” directly instead of acknowledging them as creations extended outside of

herself, he is limiting the separation of woman from poet by professing his love for her writing,

and, in conjunction, her. Later in their correspondence, in a letter post-marked March 12, 1845,

he does this again by telling EBB, “through what you have written, not properly for it, I love and

wish you well!” (Browning). Though he is careful to make the distinction that her work is not the

reason for his affection, he does insist that he loves her because her work is the avenue that

allows him to do so, a blurry treatment between her and her work, common to the reception of

Victorian women poets and their writing (Mermin 118). Because of the praise Browning

associates with her work and the connection between that acclaim and his eagerness to meet her,

she uses metaphor to explain the differences she feels between her work and herself. In a letter

post-marked May 16, 1845, she writes, “If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the

flower of me… the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and the dark…I feel

ashamed of having made a fuss about what is not worth it; and because you are extravagant in

caring so for a permission, which will be nothing to you afterwards” (EBB). EBB’s fear that

Browning’s perception of her is falsely built up through her poetry shines through, as she admits

she is worried he expects the “flower” when, aside from her poetry, she only sees herself as the

“root,” fit for “darkness,” intended past the spotlight of the public sphere (where only her poetry

goes, not herself). Though EBB says she views flower in terms of her poetry, or her written

self/persona, as the flower, and deemphasizes “the rest of her,” or what seems to be her identity

36
as a woman, as a root, fit for nothing but “ground and dark,” she downplays the critical functions

the root plays in budding of the flower. Her embodied experiences allow her give bloom to the

self she expresses a poet.

This attention to gender and the distinctions between expectation versus reality continues

throughout the correspondence, but it plays a special role in establishing the expectations for

each other’s writing at the beginning. In the sixth letter, EBB writes to Browning, requesting to

speak beyond the confines of what is expected of them because of their genders. In a letter post-

marked February 3, 1845, she writes:

…And if you will only promise to treat me en bon camarade, without reference to

the conventionalities of 'ladies and gentlemen,' taking no thought for your

sentences (nor for mine)…why, then, I am ready to sign and seal the contract, and

to rejoice in being 'articled' as your correspondent. Only don't let us have any

constraint, any ceremony! Don't be civil to me when you feel rude,—nor

loquacious when you incline to silence,—nor yielding in the manners when you

are perverse in the mind. See how out of the world I am! Suffer me to profit by it

in almost the only profitable circumstance, and let us rest from the bowing and the

courtesying, you and I, on each side. You will find me an honest man on the

whole. (EBB)

EBB’s comment about the “conventionalities” of gender show both an understanding of

Victorian gender norms and a desire to move beyond them to speak frankly without the

constraints of societal expectations. She refers to herself as “out of the world,” a phrase

reminiscent of her earlier metaphor of the flower and the root, describing, perhaps, her unique

position as a woman separate from traditional spheres because of her condition, urging him to

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utilize their unique position to their advantage, “profiting” from an otherwise unprofitable

circumstance. In her earlier metaphor, she downplays the connection between the root and the

flower, treating them instead as separate entities bound by separate “worlds,” or spheres. The

root is left “out of the public world,” trapped in the domestic sphere away from her creations that

are allowed to exist in the public domain. Additionally, she wraps up the sentiment by calling

herself an “honest man,” ascribing masculinity to herself as a form of praise, a notion Leighton

notes as common for EBB, whose “…praise of women often re-allocates the virtues traditionally

ascribed to the other sex” as a way of disconnecting with what she perceived to be her “feminine

duties” (Leighton 60). According to Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the

Subversion of Identity, “…acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or

substance, but produce this on the surface of the body through the play of signifying absences

that suggest, but can never reveal, the organizing principal of identity as a cause” (136). In

describing herself as an “honest man,” she accepts the opportunity, in this instance, to behave in

ways contradictory to Victorian feminine ideals by performing masculinity and adopting some of

its freedoms.

However, though she expresses these societally-deviant desires in the beginning of the

letters, she often returns to the expression of traditional feminine ideals in later letters as her

relationship with Browning develops further. After their first meeting, for instance, her earlier

fears that she will not live up to his expectations are not realized. As mentioned earlier, the letter

he sent immediately following their first in-person encounter was not well received by EBB.

After reminding Browning of the societal norms by which it seems like they must abide and

chastising him for his “wild” speaking, in a letter post-marked May 24, 1845, Browning writes,

“Will you not think me very brutal if I tell you I could almost smile at your misapprehension of

38
what I meant to write?—Yet I will tell you, because it will undo the bad effect of my

thoughtlessness” (Browning). Browning, therefore, seizes the opportunity through his response

to assure her that no moral code had been broken, an act meant to salvage her perception of his

masculinity and “conceal hurt pride,” (Leighton 92), an act to which EBB assists by replying, “I

owe you the most humble of apologies dear Mr. Browning, for having spent so much solemnity

on so simple a matter, and I hasten to pay it” (EBB), in a letter post-marked May 25, 1845.

Furthermore, In a letter post-marked October 22, 1845, she writes, “…if you came too often and

it was observed, difficulties and vexations would follow as a matter of course, and it would be

wise therefore to run no risk” (EBB). Therefore, as their relationship progressed and he started to

request permission to see her more often, she continued to maintain stereotypical Victorian

beliefs about femininity by reminding him of the scrutiny they would face if his frequent visits

caused a negative perception of their relationship. By December 20, 1845, as she expresses her

growing fondness more and more, the instances of EBB upholding traditional ideals of female

Victorian gender expectations comes to an intense peak. She admits, “Talking of happiness—

shall I tell you? Promise not to be angry and I will tell you. I have thought sometimes that, if I

considered myself wholly, I should choose to die this winter—now—before I had disappointed

you in anything. But because you are better and dearer and more to be considered than I” (EBB).

This moment of submission emphasizes the problems with gender complementariness. Masked

by the sweetness of the depth of her affection, this letter reveals the extent to which women are

expected to submit to men and helps to establish the hetero-normative savior narrative forced on

EBB’s story with Browning by those who fail to see the insidiousness of this moment.

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Criticism, Praise, and Power

The power dynamics at play that can be seen from the growth of their relationship and

their unique expressions of desire can also been seen throughout their professional relationship—

a rapport in which they discuss writing in general and each other’s work and in which Browning

clearly both dismantles and upholds conventions of masculinity throughout his praises for EBB’s

writing . While EBB and Browning were developing a romantic relationship, they were also

building on a relationship between writer and editor/writer and reader, roles in which they both

adopted interchangeably. Browning began their correspondence with praising EBB’s poetry, and

that praise and admiration continued throughout the letters, with EBB returning the sentiment.

Any criticism, even when requested, was also cushioned with praise. According to Leighton,

“Robert insisted on placing her above himself [so that] from her high place, she could give him

sympathy and assistance,” which is why his praises often led back to conversations regarding his

own work (93). For instance, in a letter post-marked February 19, 1845, Browning writes:

One thing vexed me in your letter—I will tell you, the praise of my letters. Now,

one merit they have—in language mystical—that of having no merit. If I caught

myself trying to write finely, graphically…nay, if I found myself conscious of

having in my own opinion, so written, all would be over! yes, over! I should be

respecting you inordinately, paying a proper tribute to your genius, summoning

the necessary collectedness,—plenty of all that! (Browning)

Additionally, Leighton shows that in another letter, post-marked March 12, 1845, Browning

responds to EBB’s intention to write a “long, contemporary poem” (94), by both praising her

ability to do so and simultaneously mentioning that it was always his intention to do so, saying,

“The poem you propose to make, for the times; the fearless fresh living work you describe, is

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the only Poem to be undertaken now by you or anyone that is a Poet at all…it is what I have been

all my life intending to do, and now shall be much, much nearer doing, since you will along with

me” (Browning). Though it is possible Browning refers to his own writing and methods while

praising her talents as a way of furthering their connection by demonstrating a common interest,

it is also possible that it is an attempt to perform ideal Victorian masculinity, or to uphold the

idea that men should be more skilled in trades than women. This is reminiscent of Ruskin

mentioning that a woman should be:

…Wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never

fail from his side: wise, not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but

with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely

applicable, modesty of service—the true changefulness of woman.” (34)

Through one perspective, Browning seems to be praising her work above his own, opposite of

what Ruskin believes acceptable. However, by directing the conversation back to him and his

own work, he is maintaining that balance of power believed to be acceptable for a Victorian man

in a heterosexual relationship. This is also another example of how the expected submission of

women to men can feel romantic.

EBB’s initial reaction to Browning’s consistent praise is so overwhelming that it is

perceived as an overreaction. Where she seems to desire to come across as meek, she mistakenly

tells him his acclaim is coming across as flattery. When Browning does not respond as positively

to this exchange as she had hoped, she corrects herself. In a letter post-marked June 20, 1845,

she writes:

Perhaps I said something about your having vowed to make me vain by writing this or

that of my liking your verses and so on—and perhaps I said it too lightly ... which

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 happened because when one doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry, it is far best, as a

general rule, to laugh. But the serious truth is that it was all nonsense together what I

wrote, and that, instead of talking of your making me vain, I should have talked (if it had

been done sincerely) of your humbling me—inasmuch as nothing does humble anybody

so much as being lifted up too high. (EBB)

By retracting her comment about Browning making her vain in the way he mentions loving her

she chooses to, instead, employ a gentler phrase filled with more gratitude. In telling him that he

“humbles her,” she is assuming less authority, and allowing the power to positively influence her

mood be placed back on Browning after his reaction prompts her to change. This switch is more

aligned with Victorian female/male power structures in which the female receives her power

from the male’s permission.

EBB’s praise for Browning, conversely, is even more exaggerated. In instances where he

downplays his writing (again, perhaps to seem humble and agreeable or perhaps to create a space

for her to praise him), she consistently showers him in acclaim. Even when he requests her

honest criticism, in a letter post-marked June 20, 1845, she writes, “If you persist in giving too

much importance to what I may have courage to say of this or of that in them, you will make me

a dumb critic and I shall have no help for my dumbness,” and continues by saying she will try to

be critical if that is what he really wants of her, but only if he promises not to take too much

stake in what she says (EBB). First of all, her use of the words “dumb” and “dumbness” continue

to draw on metaphors of disability, hinting at an inability to speak and articulate what she aims to

express. Secondly, her timidity in offering criticism shows both an attempt to uphold patriarchal

power structures in her personal relationship along with “hero-worship” type admiration for

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Browning’s work (EBB). Her praise is not only represented in her lack of criticism, however. In

a letter post-marked January 15, 1845, she writes:

Why should you deny the full measure of my delight and benefit from your writings? I

could tell you why you should not. You have in your vision two worlds, or to use the

language of the schools of the day, you are both subjective and objective in the habits of

your mind. You can deal both with abstract thought and with human passion in the most

passionate sense….Then you are 'masculine' to the height—and I, as a woman, have

studied some of your gestures of language and intonation wistfully, as a thing beyond me

far! and the more admirable for being beyond. (EBB)

By describing Browning’s writing as a “benefit” to her because of his ability to deal with “two

worlds” when she can only deal with one, she praises his ability to understand both “abstract

thought,” reminiscent of the public-sphere, or a male-dominated space, and “human passion,”

reminiscent of the domestic or private-sphere, a female-dominated space, by saying he is

“masculine to the height.” Whereas doubly because of her gender and her condition she is

constrained to the domestic, Browning (with qualities of the ideal Victorian man, and, therefore,

attributed as being masculine) is able to move between the spaces and provide a perspective she

cannot. For these reasons shown by the obvious power imbalance between them, she “studies”

his writing as something she aspires to create to rise to from her position below. The continually

shifting power dynamics examined here work to show the ways in which the Brownings

performed certain gender tasks in order to achieve specific purposes and maps out the ways in

which their perspectives may have begun to bleed into each other’s work, a process further

described below.

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 Though it is clear that both EBB and Browning praise and criticize themselves and each

other at times, Margaret Homans’s work reminds readers why it is important to keep gender in

mind when discussing the different intentions behind doing so. She writes, “Each writer gains an

advantage over the other through adopting a pose of abject humility, but…this apparently

gender-neutral strategy has differing resonances for a man’s and for a woman writer’s authority”

(237). So, one question we should ask ourselves is how is it different for a woman to place

themselves lower than for a man? As previously discussed, one reason Browning seems to take

the self-abnegated position is to further express his dominance. He often praises EBB as a way to

bring attention to his own thoughts in juxtaposition to hers. In EBB’s case, however, it is

different. In leaning into her submissive role, she performs her “duty” to him as a woman as a

method of creating a closer bond to him, and, in effect, exacting a subtle form of power. This

strategy will also be discussed more in depth when analyzing the Browning’s poetry.

Differing Perspectives

Their vastly differing perspectives had an effect on their writing and how they viewed

each other’s writing, most likely because their own views of what writing is were so different.

While EBB viewed the embodied act of writing as pleasurable, Browning considered it work, an

argument I will unpack below. These differences in thinking about the purpose for writing are

directly attributed Browning’s inability to see disability as more than an impediment. EBB, on

the other hand, sees the value in her uniquely embodied experiences as an individual with a

disability, and she is able to use those experiences in her work. These differences in how they

viewed disability affected the ways in which they were able to connect to their poetry as well, a

claim I investigate throughout this chapter and the next. In terms of their varied thinking about

writing, Dorothy Mermin asserts that what Browning so much admired in EBB, her ability to

44
self-reflect and write in ways that expressed her own thoughts, EBB was “tired of” (123).

Whereas Browning praised EBB for writing honestly, she praised his ability to write

dramatically, a task she believed she could not accomplish because of her limited experiences. In

a letter post-marked March 20, 1845, EBB explains this feeling by writing:

And what you say of society draws me on to many comparative thoughts of your

life and mine. You seem to have drunken of the cup of life full, with the sun

shining on it. I have lived only inwardly…Books and dreams were what I lived

in—and domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the

grass…And do you also know what a disadvantage this ignorance is to my art?...I

have had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness and self-

analysis, I make great guesses at Human nature in the main. But how willingly I

would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge

of books, for some experience of life. (EBB)

Here, she favors Browning’s perspective of life who seems to have “drunken of the cup of life

full,” an experience she feels robbed off from living “inwardly” in only “books and dreams.” Her

insistence that she has only lived inwardly again mirrors her earlier metaphor regarding the

flower and root. This is another instance in which she sees herself as inward, buried in the

ground instead of in the public sphere, getting to see the success of her work. She considers the

domestic sphere, a place that gave her the numerous opportunities to write because of her gender

and invalidism, a “disadvantage to her art,” even though it allowed her the awareness of her self-

conscious, a trait Browning envies in her. Because of her sheltered upbringing, she goes on to

refer to herself as a “blind poet,” in an earlier letter a metaphor grounded in the language of

disability that shows how much she perceives her lack of experience to affect her work.

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 Yet, where EBB feared that her life experiences and invalidism were too limiting to

achieve what she desired in her work, Browning feared the opposite; he worried that his art was

too separated from his life and that his own voice was not present enough in his poetry (Mermin

118). Even in the letters, a private, personal correspondence not intended to entertain a wide-

spread public audience but to open up to a companion, Browning frequently admitted to writing

“dramatically,” or creating a sort of character to give voice to rather than documenting his own.

In a letter post-marked May 24, 1845, after EBB wonders about truly knowing him, he admits, “I

am utterly unused, of these late years particularly, to dream of communicating anything

about that to another person (all my writings are purely dramatic as I am always anxious to say)

that when I make never so little an attempt, no wonder if I bungle notably—'language,' too is an

organ that never studded this heavy heavy head of mine” (Browning). Browning discusses his

prior insistence of keeping his personal information private until his desire to share it with EBB,

again, mentioning his writing is purely dramatic and not personal; however, he also mentions his

nuanced attempts to share that personal information with her now and how difficult it is because

it is unfamiliar. The word “bungle,” with its negative connation shows his opinion that his

attempt is somehow lacking.

According to Browning, however, EBB did not have trouble opening up and expressing

herself. In one of his first letters to her, post-marked January 13, 1845, he writes:

I report… that your poetry must be, cannot but be, infinitely more to me than

mine to you—for you do what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only seem now

likely to do for the first time. You speak out, you,—I only make men and women

speak—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light,

even if it is in me. (Browning)

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Here, Browning verbalizes the self-awareness EBB’s writing showcases, though lacking in his

own work. In saying that EBB speaks out, he seems to be praising her for her ability to use her

own voice and incorporate her own perspectives more directly in her writing, whereas he admits

several times before his habit of “dramatizing” his writing or creating characters who speak for

him. The metaphor of his words presenting truth in fragments, “prismatic hues” rather than “pure

white light,” helps to show the honesty and straight-forwardness he feels he is lacking, forcing

readers to create meaning for themselves from pieces of truth he cannot verbalize. Even so,

however, EBB does show a change in openness and vulnerability from her initial letters to the

later ones. Though “Her earlier letters are sometimes marred by signs of effort and uncertainties

of touch…she learned to seem more spontaneous” (Mermin 127). Unlike the retraction in her

wording in the letter where she changes the idea of flattery to the idea of humbleness,

characterized by dashes, commas, and ellipses meant to work through a rough idea and turn it

into a polished sentiment, her later letters display a greater freedom of expression and less

restraint. In a letter post-marked March 16, 1846, EBB writes to Browning in a familiar format,

though repurposed to provide heightened expression. Where dashes and commas were once

inhibiting punctuation marks urging censorship, dashes and commas turn into spaces of

opportunity to express and reveal more. She writes, “How will the love my heart is full of for

you, let me be silent? Insufficient speech is better than no speech, in one regard—the speaker

had tried words, and if they fail, hereafter he needs not reflect that he did not even try—so with

me now, that loving you, Ba, with all my heart and soul, all my senses being lost in one wide

wondering gratitude and veneration, I press close to you to say so, in this imperfect way, my dear

dearest beloved!” (EBB). Whereas she once chose words so carefully, she admits here that

47
“insufficient speech is better than no speech,” unbridled and unfiltered when describing her love

for Browning, proof that her writing style developed as her affection for Browning developed.

However, as much as EBB’s reliance on writing seemed to fuel her passion for it, writing

seemed to be less of a labor of love and more of just a labor for Browning. Where EBB tells

Browning of a love for writing incepted at an early age in a letter post-marked February 27, 1845

by saying, “I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to

kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them

out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of

the new place” (EBB), Browning’s relationship with writing was more strained. In a letter post-

marked March 12, 1845, he admits:

I have no pleasure in writing myself—none, in the mere act—though all pleasure

in the sense of fulfilling a duty… But I think you like the operation of writing as I

should like that of painting or making music, do you not? After all, there is a great

delight in the heart of the thing…but—I don't know why—my heart sinks

whenever I open this desk, and rises when I shut it. (Browning)

Though Browning acknowledges a certain kind of love for art, like “painting” or “making

music,” he categorizes writing as “fulfilling a duty,” further evidence that writing, in Browning’s

case, is associated with the masculine public-sphere associated with work and public duty while

writing, in EBB’s case, is associated with emotion and the private sphere (though still successful

in the public one). Conversely, EBB, further upholding Victorian feminine norms, offers to assist

Browning’s work. In a letter post-marked June 24, 1845, EBB assures him, “I will promise to be

ready afterwards to help you in anything I can do ... transcribing or anything ... to get the books

through the press in the shortest of times—and I am capable of a great deal of that sort of work

48
without being tired, having the habit of writing in any sort of position,” despite her own illness

(EBB). EBB’s willingness to step in and aid Browning through his impediment and her

insistence that she is capable of the job provides the first insight into the exchange of “sympathy

and concern” that the letters provide (Waithe 137). According to Waithe, “Browning’s

complaints of a headache, and Barrett’s evident pleasure in returning sympathy and concern,

indicate the extent to which such reports became a currency to be traded” (137). However, this

currency was not equal. Though both parties make a point to open or close each letter with a

wellness check for the other, the ways in which they discuss their own illnesses are quite

different. Browning’s experience with male privilege results in his discussions of his headaches

seeming as detrimental, while EBB, whose experience with illness drastically impacted her life

experiences, often tries to downplay the seriousness of her ailments, showing readers how her

illness is an accepted part of her life, unlike Browning.

EBB’s frequent “downplaying her condition as a temporary impediment” (Waithe 129) in

favor of focusing her writing on writing itself or the development of their relationship is a

common occurrence that sheds more light onto how their extremely different perspectives and

embodied experiences shaped both their writing and their connection. In a letter post-marked

March 20, 1845, EBB apologizes to Browning for the delay in her letters, saying:

It was kind of you to wish to know how I was, and not unkind of me to suspend

my answer to your question—for indeed I have not been very well, nor have had

much heart for saying so…Yet for me, I should not grumble. There has been

nothing very bad the matter with me, as there used to be—I only grow weaker

than usual, and learn my lesson of being mortal. (EBB)

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Furthermore, in another letter post-marked November 15, 1845, she, again, glosses over her

ailments by saying, “…I want to explain to you that although I don't make a profession of

equable spirits, (as a matter of temperament, my spirits were always given to rock a little, up and

down) yet that I did not mean to be so ungrateful and wicked as to complain of low spirits now

and to you. It would not be true either: and I said 'low' to express a merely bodily state” (EBB).

These are both examples of the numerous instances throughout the letters in which EBB admits

to feeling ill, but immediately assures Browning that her situation is not so dire as to worry him.

In the second example, she even mentions the distinction between bodily lows and spiritual lows,

insisting that though her body struggles, she does not allow it to interfere with her spirits. In the

first letter, even upon admitting that her condition makes her aware of her own mortality, she

insists that she is not as unfortunate as she has been in prior situations. In doing so, EBB keeps

the focus off of her illness, an action foreign to Browning.

As briefly mentioned, though EBB’s illness is most referenced, the letters also show that

Browning suffered from debilitating headaches, a condition he believes is exacerbated by

reading and writing. Unlike EBB, who, in a letter post-marked August 8, 1845, reveals that she

prefers writing to the few occasions she feels well enough to go for walks, Browning blames his

headaches on reading and writing and often uses them as an excuse for not returning her letters.

In a letter post-marked June 23, 1845, he writes, “For me, going out does me good—reading

[and] writing do me the harm” (Browning). One explanation for their drastically opposite

attitudes for discussing their aliments could be that Browning, a man with the power to take up

space in both public and private spheres while moving freely between the two spaces, views any

changes to those freedoms (like his headaches) as catastrophic, severely impacting his way of

life. EBB, on the other hand, who has been confined to the domestic sphere and her

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sickroom/writing room, accepts her ailment as a way of life, figuring ways to work around it

through the act of what she loves doing most: writing. So, Browning, a figure of male privilege,

is unable to see disability as anything more than a disruption to his upward mobility, but EBB, a

woman with a disability, is able to see the value in her uniquely embodied experiences and

utilize the concept of her bodymind to create nuanced work.

Another explanation for EBB’s hesitancy to discuss her condition might be because she

was fearful he only cared for her because he felt a chivalrous need to take care of her. In a letter

post-marked October 25, 1845, she admits:

I have sometimes felt jealous of myself ... of my own infirmities, ... and thought

that you cared for me only because your chivalry touched them with a silver

sound—and that, without them, you would pass by on the other side…And the

silent promise I would have you make is this—that if ever you should leave me, it

shall be (though you are not 'selfish') for your sake—and not for mine: for your

good, and not for mine. I ask it—not because I am disinterested; but because one

class of motives would be valid, and the other void... (EBB)

In having Browning promise to never assume the best care for her, she works to abate the

concern she feels that he might base relationship decisions on a well-being he discerns for her. In

writing this, she reveals she does not want a savior from her impediments; rather, she only wants

acceptance and her needs to be understood.

To further show the ways in which she has adapted her work ethic to her unique situation,

EBB employs the language of imprisonment to describe the freedom she feels from writing and

receiving letters. In a letter post-marked February 3, 1845, she writes, “…it would be strange and

contradictory if I were not always delighted both to hear from you and to write to you, this

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talking upon paper being as good a social pleasure as another, when our means are somewhat

straitened. As for me, I have done most of my talking by post of late years—as people shut up in

dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls” (EBB). In this excerpt, she not only

recognizes letters as fulfilling a societal function for communal pleasure that she would

otherwise be unable to fulfill, but compares her experiences of writing to those of people trapped

in confinement, writing on the walls as their only means of expression. Where Browning relies

on excuses, such as his headaches, to relieve him from his “duties” for writing, EBB finds any

excuse to continue to write, accepting her invalidism as opportunity.

In summary, because letters are a product of the bodymind that can enter physical spaces

that bodies at times cannot, the Brownings’ letters are an interesting way of showing how both

gendered power and self-definitions of authorship are established over the course of their

relationship. Through the Brownings’ constant praise and criticism of each other and themselves

throughout the letters, readers can see the ways in which they each adopted and performed

stereotypical aspects of masculinity and femininity in order to gain more access to each other,

not only showing the differences in their embodied experiences, but tracking the ways in which

they began to cement themselves in each other’s life and negotiate and define their identities and

roles within that union. Yet, those differences in perspective that are uncovered, Browning’s

outer perspective that EBB seems to lack and EBB’s inner perspective that Browning seems to

lack, are important to keep in mind when analyzing the ways in which they continue to explore

gender norms and power dynamics in their poetry, which will be discussed in the next chapter.

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 CHAPTER III: EXPRESSIONS OF POWER IN THE BROWINGS’ POETRY

Browning, Domination, and Dramatic Monologue

In order to understand the strategies EBB had to employ to be able to write about her

feelings of desire in a direct semi-autobiographical manner, it is important to compare those

tactics to the strategy most utilized by her husband. Whereas EBB’s sonnets are evidently

autobiographical, Browning’s dramatic monologues are much less so. Though they illustrate

larger global situations associated with the masked, violent side of gender complementariness

that situates the Browning’s union, the specific events described in Browning’s dramatic

monologues are not directly representative of the couple. As referenced in the letters, Browning

admits to writing “dramatically,” or creating a character other than himself (and often male) to be

the narrator behind many of his poems. This style later became known as dramatic monologue, a

poetic form in direct contrast with the confessional poetry largely expected from women writers

for the time. By taking the extra step to create a proxy that might express desire or deviance,

Browning adds a layer of distance between his commentary that EBB does not, allowing him to

write more indirectly about elements of heterosexual relationships. Browning’s dramatic

monologues, such as “Porphyria’s Lover”, “My Last Duchess,” and “Evelyn Hope,” are able to

maintain a distinction between fact and fiction because of the dramatic monologue form. The

ways in which Browning’s speakers are able to turn the women of their desires into literal

objects to be controlled, either in the form of corpses or artistic renderings, reveals the sinister

repercussions of the idea of gender complementariness that overwrote Victorian gender ideals. In

placing males in a seat of power and only allowing women to exhibit control in complementing

that power, Browning comments on a system of naturalized subordination by creating situations

that show how that abuse of power is physically lethal to female bodies. For the first section of

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this chapter, I have chosen to focus on Browning’s dramatic monologues, predominately because

this style provides the best depiction of Browning expressing the patriarchal views that dictate so

much of the Brownings’ relationship—views that EBB constantly has to struggle for agency

against, evident in my discussion of her sonnet sequence. My reading will show the ways in

which she destabilizes the savior narrative by analyzing the ways in which EBB negotiates

agency. Before doing so, however, I propose that it is most valuable to first spend time analyzing

Browning’s perspectives of gender and power through his most famous dramatic monologues,

which most concretely show the most violent views of male domination. As we can see from the

letters in the previous chapter, Browning takes on a number of roles and perspectives that

solidify his recognition of male domination and privilege in some places but reconcile these

views with expressions of collaboration and notions of romance and equality in others. To me, it

makes sense to begin with poems like “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess,” dramatic

monologues published before the beginning of the Browning letters, therefore lacking any

influence from Browning’s relationship with EBB. In analyzing these poems both

chronologically and by style, we can see how the version of Browning as the patriarchal male

dominant is connected to the version of Browning as lover and collaborator and track when his

perspectives and experiences may have begun to change.

In “Porphyria’s Lover,” the reader sees an unbalanced power dynamic (where Porphyria

seemingly begins with more power than the male speaker) that the male speaker must rectify by

punishing her body. This punishment suggests that the poem is meant to act as a didactic

resource, reinforcing restrictions for women by painting an ominous picture of what happens

when they are ignored. In doing so, Browning enforces stereotypical masculinity throughout the

poem. He explores the darker sides of heterosexual love by using dramatic monologue as an

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avenue to explore madness and perverse sexual desires without directly appearing mad or

perverse. Browning’s speaker exhibits these characteristics while the dramatic monologue form

of the poem distances Browning the poet from these qualities.

To begin this commentary, the poem begins by sketching out an image of what the ideal

Victorian woman should be, but that image quickly disintegrates making way for the depiction of

the type of woman that Victorian society warned young girls about becoming. As the image

changes from ideal to aberrant, the poem begins to warn about how one alteration of

stereotypical gender codes results in chaos. Since expectations were much more lenient on male

behavior than female behavior, the poem lends itself to the interpretation that Browning upholds

those ideals by creating a male character who gets away with bending gender expectations and a

female character who is severely punished for the same thing throughout the poem. The poem

opens with a very apt illustration of the cult of domesticity. The speaker states that Porphyria

enters her lover’s home and immediately begins to “shut out the cold and the storm / And

kneeled and made the cheerless grate / Blaze up, and all the cottage warm” (7-9). This indicates,

in the first few lines of the poem, that Porphyria embodies the idea that a woman should make a

house feel like home, mirroring Ruskin’s assertion that, “Wherever a true wife comes, [the]

home is always round her” (78). Additionally, the act of making a fire could be viewed as a gift

to her lover, and, in 1839, Sarah Ellis writes, “there is a principle of a woman’s love, that renders

it impossible for her to be satisfied without actually doing something for the object of her regard

(n.p.)” The image of Porphyria coming in and creating a fire is an example of how women in

Victorian England were supposed to behave. However, her behavior changes suddenly, and the

effects of that sudden change manifest in ways that ultimately lead to Porphyria’s demise further

into the poem.

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 After making the fire, Porphyria “laid her soiled gloves by / […] and, last, sat down by

[the speaker’s] side / And called [him]” (12, 14-15). The use of the word “spoiled” indicates

impurity, and the gloves function as an extension of her body as a way of letting the reader know

the speaker considers her unchaste. Nevertheless, it is this “spoiled” female character who

summons the male speaker at will, turning her attention to him when she chooses to enter back

into the private sphere. Then, she reveals her bare shoulder and pulls her lover against her body,

murmuring that she loves (presumably) him (10-20). The poem then reveals that Porphyria, “Too

weak for all her heart’s endeavor / To set its struggling passion free / From pride, and vainer ties

dissever, could not give herself to [her lover] forever” (21-23), presumably in holy matrimony. It

seems that Porphyria, though she claims she loves the speaker, cannot bring herself to marry

him. Yet, Deborah Gorham says that “in a real world…middle class females who did not marry

were considered ‘redundant,’ or were said to have ‘failed in business’” (57). If a “good”

Victorian woman is supposed to hope for marriage, then Porphyria is acting adversely to her

prescribed gender expectations. Furthermore, the phrase “give herself” indicates a lack of will on

the female’s part, a show of power the male speaker cannot allow. Additionally, line 26, “but

passion would sometimes prevail” indicates that Porphyria had “given” her body to her lover

before, though sexual purity was one of the strictest requirements for women in the gender

codes. Gorham even writes that Victorian girls were expected to be sexually pure and ignorant as

well. Anything less than ignorance put them at risk of being unchaste (54). Therefore, with those

ideals securely in place, according to the speaker of the poem, the fact that Porphyria wanted to

be sexually unified with him but not unified in marriage proves her love to be “all in vain”

(Browning 29), aside from carrying out her own physical pleasures.

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 So, there is a clear divide between Porphyria’s body and her consciousness. Though she

is willing to “give” her body to the speaker, she is unwilling to be possessed in totality, which is

unacceptable to the male speaker. Shrivastava’s criticism shows that Browning is consistently

interested in “the idea of union of the soul and flesh” in his dramatic monologues, especially in

terms of his female characters, further cementing the idea from earlier chapters that the body and

mind function as one bodymind instead of as separate entities body/mind. Furthermore,

Shrivastava says:

In fact, Browning’s justification for the claims of body’s role on the canvass of

broad picture of life, that too in married life, is very fresh and striking because it

combines both opposites and unites the moral with sex or the soul with sex,

whereas according to the Victorian beliefs, body and flesh and basic human

instincts too were an obstacle to spiritual progress and emancipation. On the

contrary, sailing against the Victorian current, he extolled in writing the due

significance of the claims of sex and body. (101)

Because of Browning (and his male speaker’s) insistence on the fusion between soul and body

and Porphyria’s willingness to surrender one and not the other, his speaker reaches the

conclusion that the only way to exhibit full male control is through the preservation of the female

body by a process of not just figurative, but literal objectification. In creating a corpse, the male

speaker exhibits full control.

Furthermore, when the speaker reaches this decision, he decides to strangle her with her

own hair, a part of the woman’s body associated with femininity and given as a sign of affection

to a lover. According to Carol Christ, hair is also commonly used as a synecdoche for the corpse

(398), so this mode of killing connects to the ultimate goal of bodily preservation. John Henry

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Newman writes, “Hence it is that is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never

inflicts pain,” and that a Victorian gentleman is “tender, gentle, and merciful” (n.p.) Clearly,

strangulation is inherently painful, but because the speaker seems to be so conscious of the

gender expectations, he makes sure to state, and then reiterate, that Porphyria felt no pain

(Browning 41-42). Because of these things, “Porphyria’s Lover,” is clearly a didactic warning

meant to dissuade Victorian women from acting outside of traditional gender roles in a “submit

or be punished” fashion. It is also true that because of the extreme nature of such a punishment,

Browning projects it onto characters through dramatic monologue in order to express those

opinions. However, the other lesson present is one that focuses on a progression meant to female

subordination that continues throughout his other dramatic poems.

The creation of other characters as a method for commenting on heterosexual male sexual

fantasy in Victorian society continues both in Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and “Evelyn

Hope,” for example. Throughout both of these poems, Efird shows that “…Browning employs

sexually restrained male speakers in order to signal the pathology of patriarchal gender

constructions and sexual desire defined by bourgeois limitations” (Efird 152). In this way, the

Duke in “My Last Duchess” mentions all of his late Duchess’s faults, including how she was

“too easily impressed” and “liked whate’er / She looked on, and her looks went everywhere”

(Browning 23-24). So, instead of looking only towards her husband as Victorian women are

meant to, the Duchess looked towards other means for pleasure as many who “passed her”

received the same smile the Duke did (Browning 44-45), as “…she ranked [the] gift of a nine-

hundred-years-old name with anybody’s gift (33-34). For these outward dissents against his

masculinity, the Duchess pays with her life when the Duke “…gave commands; / Then all smiles

stopped together” (45-36), indicating that the Duke makes the Duchess pay in the same fashion

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Porphyria’s lover makes her pay as well. This connection cements the “…deanimation of a

female by the speaker’s narcissistic desire to control the world around him” (Efird 152), as Efird

asserts. This deanimation of female sentience in favor of the animation of corpses creates a

compelled relationship between the male speakers and the female objects that can be likened to

the form of the dramatic monologue itself. For example, Valiska Gregory asserts:

The rhetorical dynamics of his monologues, which metaphorically force

themselves on their readers, parallel the dynamics of sexual violence. Sexual

conflict is, of course, largely about domination, and Browning's sustained

preoccupation with how to force readers to listen to his highly personal lyric

outpourings echoes the structures of one of the most intimate forms of violence.

In short, Browning's monologues create a dynamic of forced intimacy. (495-496)

As readers are forced to adopt the perspective of the speaker, so the female object is expected to

succumb to the desires of the speaker or be subjected to bodily harm.

Likewise, though we begin with a female’s corpse instead of ending with one in “Evelyn

Hope,” Christ’s criticism shows that death can be interpreted as a punishment Browning’s male

characters are able to inflict upon their female counterparts as penance for disrupting their

masculine ideals. Death can also be seen as “a denial of [male] possibilities” as the third stanza

shifts from “…the unlived life of Evelyn Hope to the unlived life of the aging speaker” (Christ

397). For example, though the speaker admits that “It was not her time to love” (Browning 12),

indicating that he knows she was too young to love him in this life, they still have the

opportunity to love each other in the afterlife when she “…will wake, and remember, and

understand” (Browning 56) his confessions of desire over her corpse. The speaker continues to

admit he has loved Evelyn though he is three times her age and she lived her life, as far as he can

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tell, in purity (Browning 18-48). So, unlike Porphyria and the Duchess, Evelyn is lamented as

pure (the Victorian feminine ideal) by the male speaker, which is part of the reason why he

desires her so much even after her death. Therefore, instead of enacting a form of female erasure

in the hands of male dictation seen in “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess” as both male

speakers craft creative renderings of female corpses (Porphyria as an almost puppet and the

Duchess as a portrait), the speaker of “Evelyn Hope” acknowledges an afterlife in which Evelyn

might choose to be with him, despite all earthly limitations. Yet, again, desire is understood

strictly through a male lens, and though Evelyn is not punished by the speaker, she is denied a

voice regarding desire as the reader is only permitted to see her as a corpse instead of a sentient

being.

With those highly patriarchal, oppressive, and violent perspectives being expressed,

however, it is also important to refer back to more of the gendered dynamics described in the

letters. There, Browning accepts EBB as more of a lover and collaborator at times than as his

subordinate. The restrictive form of dominant violent masculinity portrayed in his dramatic

monologues seems quite different than Browning’s ideas of gender performativity we see in the

letters during the Brownings’ courtship. One way in which to get a glimpse of this more flexible

Browning is through his later poems published after the letters and his collaboration and

relationship with EBB. Some of his poems from Men and Women, published during the same

time as EBB’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, offer a slightly different view of Browning’s ideas

than seen in the dramatic monologues. However, I assert that it is not an altogether different set

of ideas, but rather a softer, more romanticized version of the same male privilege and

domination. To explain this more, I will be turning to “Any Wife to Any Husband” and “By the

Fireside.”

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 In both “Any Wife to any Husband,” and “By the Fireside,” there is one recurring theme

of gender and power relations connected to images of assimilation. As described by the poems,

any power granted to the woman is only done so through the merging of her body with the man.

Furthermore, these moments of assimilation are seen through both the male and female

perspective, though all attributed to Browning. In “Any Wife to any Husband,” the reader has the

unique perspective of viewing Browning’s thoughts on gender roles and power from the

perspective of a female speaker. So, the poem reveals Browning’s thoughts on a female’s role

within a heterosexual marriage because he situates himself as the wife speaking to her husband.

Throughout the poem, Browning establishes a hierarchy of power that excuses men from

unfaithful behavior while painting women as willingly submissive and steadfast in their

devotion. By having the female speaker say, “And yet thou art the nobler of us two / What dare I

dream of, that thou canst not do, / Outstripping my ten small steps with one stride?” (19.1-3).

Here, Browning notes the obvious imbalance of power between men and women, writing that

men are “nobler” than women, or of higher quality, and admitting that men envelope women’s

effort by the mobility they are able to achieve with less effort. However, though men are

supposedly “nobler,” Browning shows the differences in men and women’s faithfulness by

describing how if the husband were to die first, the wife would be “…free to take and light [her]

lamp, and go / Into [his] tomb, and shut the door and sit, seeing [his] face…” (17. 3-5). Here,

women are portrayed as faithful and steadfast through the end of life, while men are permitted to

seek new company. Again from the wife’s perspective, Browning writes:

Love so, then, if thou wilt! Give all thou canst

Away to the new faces—disentranced,

(Say it and think it) obdurate no more:

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 Re-issue looks and words from the old mint,

Pass them afresh, no matter whose the print

Image and superscription once they bore (15.1-6)

Here, the “new faces” refers to new women or new love interests, and the recycled words from

the “old mint” refers to pre-scripted affections once belonging to the wife. The woman, though

she laments what is happening, knows she is powerless to stop it. The narrator also admits, “I

have but to be by thee, and thy hand / Will never let mine go, nor heart withstand / The beating

of my heart to reach its place” (2.7-9). The male’s presence is active and dominant here,

controlling the woman’s hand and heart to be joined with his, but not equal to it. The only

equality shown in the poem comes later, as the husband and wife’s “inmost beings met and

mixed,” (9.2), providing agency and status to the woman through the man.

Yet, “By the Fireside” is written from Browning’s own, male perspective, it reveals the

same opinion that a woman’s power and/or agency is only built through her assimilation with a

man. Browning questions, “Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too, / Whom else could I dare look

backward for?” (21.2-3). Though he acknowledges a power gap due to the fact he must look

“backward” to find her instead of looking beside him, the images of assimilation are already

present as he refers to her heart and eyes as his own. He then goes on to describe the process of

their souls meeting and mixing as he writes:

My own, see where the years conduct!

At first, ‘twas something our two souls

Should mix as mists do; each is sucked

In each now: on, the new stream rolls,

Whatever rocks obstruct. (26.1-5)

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The process of fusion described in this stanza seems slightly different than the one in the

previous poem. Where the man and woman’s assimilation is actively caused by the man in the

previous poem, the event described here seems more balanced as “each is sucked in each now,”

with the man and woman’s essence dependent upon the other. Yet, this vision of equality is

unsettled later in the poem when a version of equality is seemingly met. Browning writes:

Hither we walked then, side by side,

Arm in arm and cheek to cheek,

And still I questioned or replied,

While my heart, convulsed to really speak,

Lay choking in its pride. (33.1-5)

Though this might finally seem like a moment of balanced power by the initial phrases “arm in

arm” and “cheek to cheek,” I propose that the addition of the word “still” signals a turn that

makes the bottom portion of the stanza more sinister. While this poem could be read as

Browning taking pride in his proximity to EBB, “still,” seems to refer back to Browning’s prior

feelings of superiority expressed in the beginning of the poem before EBB gained status through

the meshing of their persons. Browning singles out his heart from the fusion, unable to “speak”

because his heart “lay choking in its pride.” In other words, in one of the last images of the poem

where it seems that the man and woman have reached a balance of power, the man is left feeling

prideful as if he is better than the situation he created for himself, though unable to admit it.

Furthermore, the violent language used like “convulsed” and “choking” convey a real threat to

the male’s agency as he is rendered unable to speak. The image of unity we begin with in the

beginning of the excerpt gradually creates a loss of control for the male speaker—a loss heart

finds hard to accept.

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 So, while the images of fusion and equality present a stark contrast from the images of

violent female subordination in the monologues, Browning still creates themes of male privilege

and male domination. With this being said, it leaves the question of how to understand

Browning’s different expressions of male authority and collaboration across the letters and his

poetry. It does seem that Browning’s most extreme portrayals of male domination presented in

the dramatic monologues published before his correspondence with EBB get softened and

romanticized by the collaboration between the Brownings’ and the growth of their relationship.

However, there is still clearly more of a willingness to step out of roles of power on Browning’s

part in the letters during their courtship than in the poems that resulted from that courtship. This

could, in part, be attributed to the tendency to fall back into more prescriptive roles of marriage

for the Victorian era as the time of their courtship closes and their life together begins. Where the

roles of courtship might be more fluid and open to the performativity seen in the letters, the

demands of marriage seem to have caused the Brownings to slip back into more traditional

gender roles, not only evident by Browning’s poetry, but EBB’s as well.

EBB and Active Agency

Unlike Browning’s poetry which uses dramatic monologue to work within Victorian

gendered ideals by attributing deviant desire to a fictional speaker, EBB’s sonnet sequence

Sonnets from the Portuguese can be read as challenging her gendered restrictions by allowing for

the articulation of her sexual desires more symbolically, most often through the use of figurative

language and metaphor, most often in reference to her body and Browning’s body. While

Browning uses dramatic monologue to explore the psychological nature of love, EBB relies

heavily on metaphor to express both her sexual desire and perceptions of herself in relation to

Browning. In this sense, EBB is an interesting figure in poetry because she was a female poet

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writing heavily amatory sonnets during a time period in which women were highly scrutinized

and judged for their romantic and sexual desires. Though the sonnets reveal her desires, they also

provide commentary on women’s constant struggle for power. So, desire proves to be a

confusing component of love as the longing expressed within her poetry seems to both support

and challenge those gender roles throughout the progression of the sonnet sequence.

Sonnets from the Portuguese, the sonnet sequence I have chosen to focus on, are semi-

autobiographical in the sense that they document EBB’s feelings toward Browning. Lois

Untermeyer shows that these poems are not Portuguese originals, but, rather, embody a title

given to them, in part, in order to distract from the “…unimpeded confessions of an impassioned

heart” (Untermeyer xxiv). With how revealing the poems are in terms of desire and self-

perception, however, it is easy to understand why EBB would be so hesitant to publish them

during the Victorian era. According to Untermeyer, a Browning scholar who anthologized a

collection of their love poems, EBB “..held [Browning] by the shoulder to prevent his turning to

look at her, and at the same time pushed [the sonnets] into the pocket of his coat” (xxiii). As the

myth continues, she then insisted that he tear them to pieces if they did not please him

(Untermeyer xxiii). The poems, after all, were composed before their marriage, so, to the

Victorian public, they show the desires of an un-wed, Victorian woman, and to Browning, they

revealed her thoughts in the language of poetry that the two of them shared together. Writing in

opposition to the ideal Victorian woman described in Deborah Gorham’s The Victorian Girl and

the Feminine Ideal, EBB’s erotic images “…sacrifice the maidenly modesty so essential to

femininity” (Gorham 53) in the Victorian period. However, EBB clearly uses her writing,

especially throughout Sonnets from the Portuguese, as a method of understanding newfound

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desire, recognizing her restraints as a woman, and actively resisting male domination within her

relationship.

I have chosen to focus my analysis on Sonnets from the Portuguese not only because they

help to tell the story of the Brownings’ relationship, but also because they show a natural

progression in theme that maps how EBB is thinking through shifting power dynamics and

societal expectations and the varied forms of agency women might stake out under Victorian

ideals of gendered power. Because of the male-dominated system that naturalized female

subordination in heterosexual relationships, EBB’s journey to acquiring more active agency may

not look like an exertion of power at first glance. Rather, it is important to see how EBB

negotiated agency in a patriarchal system designed to render her powerless by actively choosing

to perform her inferior position to negotiate more control in her relationship and over her body

and pleasure, both sexually and romantically. I agree with Margaret Homans’s essay “The

Powers of Powerlessness: The Courtships of Elizabeth Barrett and Queen Victoria” (1994),

claims that “Barrett [could] construct [her] own version of female [authority] only by means of

the ideology of female submission (245).” This means she was forced to work within the system

by performing her subjected position as a means of autonomy because that strategy was a

possible way for women to create more agency for themselves within the confines of a structure

stacked against them. Homans continues, “…Barrett [exerts] active agency in posing as inferior

and [acts] out an ideological script prepared beyond [her] control (245). In choosing to perform

her submissive role in the relationship (both by constantly referring to Browning’s authority as a

male writer as seen in the letters and through the development of her sexual identity as seen in

the sonnets analyzed below), she is able to negotiate upward mobility in her relationship to a

position that seems more equitable though it may never have been.

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 As I have previously discussed, the idea of gender complementariness that seemingly

works to given women a place of “power” as a complement to men actually just creates hidden

opportunities for subordination, naturalizing male dominance over women. I argue that EBB

recognizes this subordination and chooses to address it directly throughout Sonnets from the

Portuguese. However, her response to her blatant lack of power is not to try to take it by force.

Instead, Sonnets from the Portuguese show a progression from a struggle for agency and

questions of inadequacy to upward mobility through chosen subservience and performed

femininity that produced a subtle rise in capacity made possible because of her social status. The

beginning sonnets show EBB wrestling with questions of the self and the relationship between

her and Browning’s bodies. Then, there is a shift. The middle sonnets I selected focus more on

transformation (or, “transfiguration”, as she writes) that shows her beginning to close the gaps of

power and to test the boundaries of what is moral/accepted in terms of societal expectations. She

questions what embodied experiences and aspects of her body have changed/will still change,

and what aspects remain the same as she enters into not only a romantic, but sexual partnership.

Next, there is a shift in thinking as we get closer to the end of the sonnets where, through erotic

metaphor and the language of sex and desire, her thinking seems to change from considering

Browning as someone better to recognizing Browning’s naturalized power over her and the

revelation of her choice to consciously allow for him to continue to exert that power in an act of

willing subservience. Finally, the last couple of sonnets show her reaching that place of

perceived equality and taking comfort in the give-and-take relationship she ends up sharing with

Browning.

“Sonnet 3” established the clear divide between Browning and EBB—differences with

EBB acknowledges. She writes, “Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart! / Unlike our uses and

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our destinies” (1-2). This is one of the first instances of EBB referring to Browning as

“princely,” or using other royal language to describe the gap in power between Browning and

herself. Additionally, she refers to their “uses” and “destinies” being different, calling back

Ruskin and Ellis’ references to both separate spheres and gender complementariness. She goes

on to both acknowledge the watchful eyes of society and degrade her own image in relation to

them, writing “With gages from a hundred brighter eyes / Than tear even can make mine, to play

thy part / Of chief musician” (7-8). This sonnet is also one of the first instances in which EBB

creates metaphors for herself conveying her body as lesser than in both relation to Browning and

others as well. Writing that others still have brighter eyes than she does, even through the

glistening of her tears, indicates the effort she puts forth into elevating her appearance for

Browning, her “chief musician,” while she views herself as just “A poor, tired, wandering singer,

singing through / The dark…” (9-10). This image of wandering in the dark as a poor singer, in

juxtaposition to Browning’s position of “chief musician,” shows power she feels he has over her,

only to be balanced in the afterlife when “…Death must dig the level where these agree” (14). In

fact, this imagery of EBB shrouded in darkness calls back the flower metaphor from her letters in

which she describes all aspects of herself, aside from her poetry, as a root, fit for the dark

ground. These images of nature and darkness are prevalent throughout the sonnet sequence,

indicating both the separation she feels from the world above ground (or into the public sphere)

from the shut doors of her sickroom. This establishes a pattern of using the language of disability

and blindness to describe feelings of isolation, further creating more noticeable gaps in the power

balance between EBB and Browning through her self-abnegation and separation from him.

“Sonnet 6” continues to work through these themes of unbalanced power. EBB writes,

“Yet I feel that I shall stand / Henceforward in thy shadow” (1-2) in reference to Browning,

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again using language to create not only a visual of unbalanced power as Browning takes the lead

position while EBB imagines herself behind, but also another image of EBB covered in darkness

and “shadow.” However, though she acknowledges this difference is there, she goes on to

recognize the pathway out of seclusion her relationship with Browning has afforded, writing,

“…Nevermore / Alone upon the threshold of my door / Of individual life, I shall command / The

uses of my soul, nor lift my hand” (2-5). In referring to the “door of individual life,” she

recognizes the separation between not only the personal and public sphere, but also the

individual separation she has endured between the enclosed space of her sickroom and the rest of

the domestic space within the home. To further explain the function of the sickroom, Amanda

Caleb writes that “the sickroom is a space that separates the invalid from the healthy space of the

house and defines the invalid body as other” (1). So, if “the door of individual life,” she is

referring to is the door of the sickroom in her father’s house, she recognizes her choice to blend

her life and experiences with her illness with Browning.

This language of illness and separation is further expressed in the following lines where

she refers to the “uses of her soul” in juxtaposition to the functions of her body. In creating a

distinction between the “uses of her soul” and “the lifting of her hand,” she calls forth our

understanding of bodyminds once more. I agree with Margaret Price’s assertion that, “In short,

the claim that identity emerges interactionally is incomplete if one overlooks the fact that not

everyone can access interactions equally” (4). So, in this instance, EBB articulates what she

considers to be her new identity by considering the functions of her bodymind in relation to

Browning. It is important to consider how her physical and mental interactions might differ, but

ultimately work together to create an emerging power and control evident by the use of the verb

“command.”

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 Finally, the language towards the end of the sonnet seeks to begin to close the gaps

between herself and Browning established in previous sonnets and lines. Though she recognizes

the separation of spheres once again by saying, “The widest land / Doom takes to part us” (8-9),

referring to the distance between and limited access to Browning in the public sphere, she goes

on to discuss a blending of power that is created between their two bodies as lovers. She

continues from the last line, saying, “The widest land / Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in

mine / With pulses that beat double” (8-10). Additionally, she discusses this doubling further by

writing, “What I do / And what I dream include thee, as the wine / Must taste of its own grapes”

(10-12) and “[God] hears that name of thine, / And sees within my eyes the tears of two” (13-

14). This repeated discussion of fusion between herself and Browning make up the first instances

in which the reader can see a bridge begin to form between the Brownings’ different worlds

(public versus private sphere) and a lessening of the gap in power. The language of embodiment

used (“pulses that beat double” and “within my eyes the tears of two”) also speak to the new

embodied experiences EBB has begun to experience through Browning, either in terms of actual

physical touch between the two or in terms of EBB’s experiences in seeing the world differently

through Browning’s lived experiences he shares with her. However, this lessening in the gaps of

power between EBB and Browning only provides EBB “power” through the assimilation of her

bodymind with Browning’s, further revealing the depts of male privilege and naturalized female

subordination. Within the patriarchal system in which EBB is trapped, the only way for women

to rise is through men. So, by writing about the ways in which their bodies join in a heterosexual

union, she does gain more agency, but only through her acceptance of her role in relation to

Browning. To further explain this phenomenon, Claire Jarvis explains a term she coins

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“exquisite masochism.” Where masochism is traditionally understood by its relationship to

sadism, exquisite masochism, according to Jarvis, is

…entirely separate from sadism and…organized into scenes with carefully

ordered roles and accouterments. [These] scenes feature sexual relationships that

develop through ongoing negotiations that involve partners’ persistent

reexamination of their sexual and romantic connections. (11)

As EBB evaluates and negotiates the role of her body in reference to Browning and his body, it

is not the case that she suddenly gains power from her disempowered state. Rather, she uses sex

and these descriptions of bodily assimilation as a platform to negotiate the bodily connections

between herself and Browning, actively claiming more agency through those connections.

Then, from this concentration on separation, assimilation, and embodiment, there is a

more dramatic shift than the subtle blending that appears in the last few lines of “Sonnet 6.” The

middle sonnets I selected focus more on transformation—or, “transfiguration,” as EBB words it

in “Sonnet 10”—that shows her beginning to close the gaps of power and start to test the

boundaries of what is deemed moral or what is more widely accepted in terms of perceived

normalcy and Victorian expectations. In the following sonnets, EBB questions what embodied

experiences and aspects of her body have changed or will still change as well as which aspects

have remained constant.

“Sonnet 7” opens with what seems to be a summary of the changes that have taken place

thus far in EBB’s mind regarding new experiences with the outside world as she writes:

The face of all the world is changed, I think,

Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul

Move still, oh, still beside me, as they stole

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 Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink

Of obvious death, where I, who thought to sink

Was caught up into love, and taught the whole

Of life in a new rhythm. (1-7)

By writing “the face of all the world is changed,” she personifies the solely domestic space she

has been accustomed to by noting a change in the expression of its visage, again reminding

readers of her circumstances being a particular embodied experience unique to her position in

society and in conjunction with her illness. As she discusses the boundary between life and

death, the new realm of life she is “caught up into” creates an image of rising into a new sphere

that mirrors a kind of new body “of life in a new rhythm.” Since previously her discussions of

“rhythm” and “beating” have referred to the heartbeats of both herself and Browning, this new

space of life situated higher than the “outer brink of death” evoke a feeling of learning a new

space and new functions of the body within that space in which she has been able to access a

portion of male privilege by choosing to perform her submissive role and gain more access

through the fusion of their bodies.

She continues discussing the boundaries of space, by writing how Browning stands

“Betwixt [her] and the dreadful outer brink of obvious death,” a reference to the isolation she

experienced within the sickroom and the danger she faced of succumbing to death, both literally

and figuratively, due to her illness and the obstacle it created between her and the liveliness of

the public sphere, until Browning’s presence in her life “taught her the whole of life in new

rhythm,” or prompted her take a new perspective. Here, the verb “taught” shows an important

distinction between the prior understanding that Browning saved EBB, a completely dominant

and active role on Browning’s part and what I propose should be the new understanding of their

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relationship; though Browning may have taught EBB new things and exposed her to different

perspectives, those new discoveries were not forced upon her throughout no action of her own.

Instead, EBB chooses to learn and accept those new insights as a “new rhythm,” assuming an

active role in the transformation that occurs.

The same theme of transformation is prevalent throughout “Sonnet 9” and “Sonnet 10” as

well. For example, in “Sonnet 9,” the reader can see EBB struggling to weigh the way of life she

had always known against her awakening desire. She begins by questioning:

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? (1-6)

Her questions of “Can it be right?” seem to be a question of Victorian notions of morality, and

given this sonnet’s position before later erotic imagery, seems to specifically be a question about

purity. Furthermore, she wrestles again with fears of inadequacy by emphasizing “tears as salt as

mine,” as if salt is somehow a tainted substance that comprises her tears more than others. Later

in the sonnet, she goes on to say, “Oh my fears, / That this can scarce be right! / We are not

peers, / So to be lovers” (6-8). She again questions morality and hints back to the uneven balance

of power between herself and Browning, questioning how they could be considered “lovers”

when they aren’t even “peers,” or individuals from the same world on the same level. This helps

readers to understand how any active expression of power on EBB’s part must be exacted

through her relationship with Browning because the structure of gender complementariness

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prevents real equity in heteronormative relationships because of the women’s naturalized

subordination.

However, she still makes reference to her lack of agency in comparison to him and the

questions in morality that uneven balance presents, and she concludes, “I will not soil thy purple

with my dust. / Nor breathe my poison on thy Venice-glass, / Nor give thee any love—which

were unjust” (11-13). This is the first of several instances in the sonnet sequence that EBB refers

to Browning’s “purple,” a color that calls images to the mind of wealth, royalty, and high status.

Yet, she juxtaposes that image of Browning with her self-image of “dust,” a metaphor that has

several implications. First, “dust” can be seen as something that contaminates clean or pure

spaces. This again refers to EBB’s battle between the purity expected of Victorian women and

the sexual awakening Sonnets of the Portuguese describes. Furthermore, the image of dust also

calls back EBB’s recurring metaphor from the letters that compares her poetry to the petals of a

flower and the rest of her to the root. “Dust” is reminiscent of those underground images, part of

the earth and the darkness. Yet, the theme of transformation this sonnet is a part of further

suggests my earlier assertion that EBB’s feelings of inadequacy described by the flower

metaphor do not take into account the “earth’s/ground’s/root’s/dust’s” role as the foundation for

the growth of new life, something that is taking place beyond the surface of what EBB is

describing.

“Sonnet 10” continues these metaphors of transformation as EBB writes:

I stand transfigured, glorified aright,

With conscience of the new rays that proceed

Out of my face toward thine. There’s nothing low

In love when love the lowest: meanest creatures

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 Who love God, God accepts while loving so.

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. (7-14)

First of all, in choosing the term “transfigured” instead of “transformed,” EBB describes a deeper

change in which she feels not only altered into something new, but something better, or higher in

beauty and spirituality than if she had chosen the latter term. This image of exaltation is further

created by EBB’s mention of also feeling “glorified,” a complete shift from the language of

inferiority she has been using to describe herself thus far. This shift continues as EBB describes

“the new rays that proceed out of [her] face toward [Browning’s].” This brings to mind a new

image regarding the shifting power balance between herself and Browning. Because EBB is so

well-versed in using flowers, in particular, as metaphor, the idea of sunflowers is called to mind

from this line. In nature, sunflowers naturally face the direction of the sun, and, when they are

unable to find the sun, they face each other. So, in this metaphor as EBB describes her awareness

of the “rays” coming from her face, she is, at the very least, finally level with Browning (as if

they were sunflowers, facing each other), if not above him (with herself being situated as the

sun). This shift is important because it is the first instance in which EBB has created an image of

power between herself and Browning where she is not situated lower than him. To conclude this

change in perspective, she describes the “inferior features of what she is” in comparison to the

elevated features of what she is able to “feel,” showing “How that great work of love enhances

Nature’s,” or how the idea of earned equality within a Victorian heterosexual union enhances the

nature of what existed before in herself. In other words, in a situation that has continuously

worked to disempower her and oppress her body, it is through the newfound agency that she

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fought to claim over the course of ten sonnets (not simply through Browning’s love) that she

finds transfiguration.

Next, after this gradual shift from EBB considering herself lower than Browning to

working through the revelation that she is not, EBB further develops her autonomy through the

use of erotic metaphor and language of sex and desire. Because women’s power in the Victorian

era takes a different shape than what men’s blatant power looks like, I argue that what might

seem like sexual submission in the following sonnets is actually an expression of EBB’s power

to use her position to actively perform her expected roles a way of negotiating agency within her

union. This commentary takes place first through the shift in how EBB discusses her body.

Whereas before she refers to the perceived limitations of her body and the effects of the illness

on it, the following sonnets show EBB begin to refer to her body in terms of sex and pleasure,

which begins with her drawing the distinction between what she wants physically and mentally.

This is a dangerous split because of the bodymind’s innate connection.

For example, “Sonnet 14” begins with EBB expressing the desire for a union built on

love itself and not love of the physical. In “Sonnet 14,” EBB writes, “If thou must love me, let it

be for nought / Except for love’s sake only” (1-2). To begin, the Victorians were renowned for

believing marriage and the creation of a family to be the true sign of success. Gorham writes,

“While romantic love had ideological power, middle-class values also decreed that marriage be

seen as an economic arrangement as well as an affair of the emotions…marriage was…their only

acceptable destiny” (Gorham 53). Therefore, marrying for love’s sake alone was a difficult task

in a world where there was so much pressure to move up in the social ranks. Additionally, Tosh

shows us that “sexual activity enhanced masculine status, but the complete transition to manhood

depended on marriage” (Tosh 108). Though the idea of marrying someone for reasons other than

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simply being in love was completely acceptable for men, even if only to complete that transition

into a gentlemanly station, EBB works through her fears and desires in this sonnet regarding

emotional intimacy by asking that Browning love her for a reason not dependent on what it could

do for status nor dependent on the function or features of her body. In doing so, she works to

create a foundation of emotional intimacy before plunging into the physical intimacy provided

by the body in subsequent sonnets. For example, In “Sonnet 16,” she writes:

Because thou art more noble and like a king,

Thou canst prevail against my fears and fling

Thy purple round me, till my heart shall grow

Too close against thine heart henceforth to know

How it shook when alone. Why conquering

May prove as lordly and complete a thing

In lifting upward, as in crushing low!

And as a vanquished soldier yields his sword

To one who lifts him from the bloody earth,

Even so, Beloved, I at last record,

Here ends my strife. (2-12)

This is the third instance in which EBB refers to Browning’s “purple,” or his kingly or royal

presence that creates a sense of service in the relationship. Also, by writing “till my heart shall

grow / too close against thine heart henceforth to know / How it shook when alone” (4-5), she

evokes the language of bodily entanglement present within the first sonnets, only now leading

into more sexual language. Though it may seem projection to assume that her word choice is

revealing her sensuality and tenderness, in Victorian society, subtle references could go a long

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way. Yet, the erotic metaphors are not enough on their own to show EBB’s claim to power.

Instead, it is what the erotic images allow readers to see taking place, a sexual inversion that

Mermin shows us can:

…arise from the clashing of apparently incompatible roles…Traditionally in

English love poetry the man loves and speaks, the woman is beloved and silent.

Insofar as we perceive her [EBB] the lover, we are made uneasy both by seeing a

woman in that role and by the implications about the beloved: the man seems to

be put in the woman's place. (352)

In a story like the Brownings’ that has been so built on the idea of gender complementariness—

that male and female must be different in order to complete the other, thereby naturalizing the

subservience of the woman—seeing a female writer (a being doubly oppressed by male-

dominated spaces) expressing not only sexual desire but power through sexual experiences, can

be jarring. Yet, past this feeling of surprise are the moments we can really see EBB’s unique

shapes of agency emerge.

For instance, later in “Sonnet 16,” the terms “conquering” and “vanquished,” work

together to indicate a sense of EBB being overcome or taken control of by Browning in a sexual

nature, though the last three lines of the poem prove EBB’s active role in this vanquishing. She

writes, “If thou invite me forth, / I rise above abasement at the word. / Make thy love larger to

enlarge my worth” (12-14). First of all, it is important to note Leighton’s claim that EBB’s work

is some of the first in which Victorian readers hear about a woman’s sexual desire from a female

voice, an act considered immodest, and, therefore, unfeminine. Furthermore, Dorothy Mermin’s

criticism shows how this could be doubly troubling for a Victorian audience, because “Insofar as

we perceive her as the lover, we are made uneasy both by seeing a woman in that role and by the

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implications about the beloved” (Mermin 351). In saying that she rises above “abasement” or

humiliation, EBB is acknowledging the discomfort readers might have from this admission of

desire and strategically setting herself above it before the last line ultimately expresses the

summary of her desire: “Make thy love larger to enlarge my worth” (14). This line, though also a

literal plea of love continued from the hopes of “Sonnet 14” is also a precursor of the phallic

imagery present in “Sonnet 22,” creating an image of erection by asking “Make thy love larger”

(14). However, it is the second half of that line where EBB’s power really emerges. For example,

Melissa Buron’s criticism shows that a woman’s place in Victorian society was completely

dependent upon that of a man, as “Respectable women in Victorian England were either

identified by marriage or by spinsterhood…their identity depended on the presence or absence of

a man” (Buron). At first glance it might seem like EBB’s words, “Make they love larger to

enlarge my worth” (14), demonstrates that in her desire to be with him, she fails to push against

the notion that a man is “noble and like a king” (2), therefore admitting her worth comes from

him. However, if this moment is interpreted as a sexual one, the “enlargement of her worth” can

be seen as a new opportunity for her to execute her feminine power through sex, an opportunity

only provided by the “enlargement” of his own love. Though she is able to exact more agency as

a result of her submissive performance through sex, it is still evident that her only real power is

coming from the ways in which she is gaining power through his presence. Yet, that choice is an

active role on EBB’s part, not passive as the typical savior-narrative has led readers to believe.

She continues to foster this sense of performative submissiveness in “Sonnet 18” when

she writes about giving him a piece of herself. She writes, “I never gave a lock of hair away / To

a man, dearest, except this to thee” (1-2). While presenting a lock of hair to a lover can be seen

as a sign of affection, it is also an act of submission that could be a synecdoche for sex, an act

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which also requires her to “give” parts of her body to him. She urges Browning to “Take it” (5),

as her “day of youth” (5) is over, and she assures him he will have the justification of finding it

“pure” (12-13), all choices in wording that allude to chastity. This performance of feminine

purity calls back strategies for performing one’s subjected position for more agency in the

relationship as also described in Joan Riviere’s “Womanliness as Masquerade” (1929). Riviere

writes that the aim of performed womanliness is “…not merely to secure reassurance by evoking

friendly feelings towards her in the man; it [is] chiefly to make sure of safety by masquerading as

guiltless and innocent” (306). Since chastity is considered a feminine ideal in Victorian society,

EBB’s assurances of purity is another way in which she performs that ideal as a way to gain

more agency with Browning.

However, if these examples of her desire have been more subtle, the examples in “Sonnet

22” are forthright. She writes:

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,

Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,

Until the lengthening wings break into fire

At either curved point, -- what bitter wrong

Can the earth do to us, that we should not long

Be here contented? (1-6)

In these lines, EBB seems to be yearning for the kind of love that is measured by equality, a love

that she works toward throughout the sonnet sequence. She describes the kind of setting in which

their souls are face-to-face, upright, and “strong,” desire that should be almost impossible to

obtain in a society that places women’s values in terms of men. However, when we look at these

lines in terms of sex and sexual desire, we are able to see how she is revising fantasies of

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submissiveness by expressing desire for a more active role in sex. She chooses words such as

“erect,” lengthening,” and “curved” to describe a mutual longing, but the images erecting power

and entangled in the images of sexual erection, indicating that we, as readers, cannot follow EBB

to one place without venturing through the other. This plane of sex becomes the first space that

does “permit / A place to stand and love in for a day, / With darkness and the death-hour

rounding it” (13-14). So, though the familiar darkness EBB has written herself in numerous

times before surrounds her, it finally isn’t permitted to enter the plane of sex that affords her

freedom “to stand and love.”

Finally, the budding sexual imagery via metaphors of nature comes to a quite literal

release in “Sonnet 29.” She invites Browning to “Rustle thy boughs and set thy trunk all bare, /

And let these bands of greenery which insphere thee / Drop heavily down,--burst, shattered,

everywhere!” (9-11). This language of orgasm (“burst, shattered, everywhere”) not only does its

part to bring closure to the building sexual tension throughout the sonnets thus far, but also does

its part to illustrate the power and freedom EBB has found. In a system of gender

complementariness where male power is active and female power is meant to supplement male

power, this ending image of EBB actively inviting Browning into orgasm is a reversal of power

as EBB, as opposed to Browning, is in a more dominant role because of the relationship of her

body to his and what it causes to occur. So, a sonnet that begins with “I think of thee” (1), ends

with, “I do not think of thee—I am too near thee” (14). In other words, where there used to be a

widening power gap, EBB now views herself so near to Browning, a feminine extension of his

male privilege, that there seems to be a balance of power now where it used to be unbalanced.

Therefore, while EBB does not gain power on her own because of a patriarchal system which

makes that practically impossible, there is something to be said for how EBB realizes the

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obvious imbalance of power between herself and Browning in the beginning of the sonnet

sequence and seeks to close that gap. By making a conscious choice and actively exacting her

bodymind to perform her submissive role as a woman, largely through sexual imagery, she is

able to gain more agency and create more mobility for herself within their union.

Overall, while the Brownings’ letters showed a relationship more willing to move in and

out of stereotypical gender roles during the course of their courtship, the Brownings’ poetry

shows a settling back into those stereotypical roles for different reasons. Browning’s poetry

shows his perceptions of male privilege and domination made commonplace by gender

complementariness and its effect on Victorian heterosexual marriages; EBB’s poetry, on the

other hand, shows her accepting stereotypical female roles within a heterosexual union for the

purpose of more agency and mobility within that union. This analysis is quite different from the

imagined pasts and savior narratives that have been adopted in regards to the Brownings, and a

further analysis of the issues surrounding this aspect of the couple’s cultural afterlife occurs in

the following coda.

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 CODA

As I briefly mentioned in the opening and closing chapters of this thesis, the Brownings’

love story has quite the cultural afterlife. A simple Google search for “The Brownings’ Love

Story” will pull up articles from various places such as The Atlantic, “ThoughtCo.com,” and

“History.com” detailing the romance of two Victorian poets who found love in each other. The

article in The Atlantic refers to the Brownings as “one of literary history’s most beloved power

couples (Smith n.p.). In fact, according to Baylor’s website, the Armstrong Browning library

located at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, houses the world’s largest collection of material on

Browning and EBB, including their original letters and manuscripts, books from their library,

music and portraits based off of their work, secondary criticism, and may editions of their poetry.

Yet, the library does not only serve as a study hall, museum, or place for research and

instruction. It is also a popular venue for weddings and bridal portraits, and reservations are

usually needed several months in advance. The most popular site for weddings and portraits is

the McLean Foyer of Meditation, a large foyer with “marble columns, black walnut paneling,

and three cathedral windows. Its focal point is the Cloister of the Clasped Hands, an area that has

become known as the most romantic spot on the Baylor campus,” (Baylor n.p.) because of

Harriet Hosmer’s cast of the Brownings’ hands kept there. Though decorations are permitted in

the foyer, no decorations are permitted in the Cloister of the Clasped Hands in order to preserve

it. While some couples choose the venue solely based on architecture, it the Brownings’ story

that keeps many paying the $2,500 booking fee for their big day.

However, as this thesis has shown, “power” within this “power couple” was not equal,

and their highly romanticized union was rooted in Victorian patriarchal Victorian ideals that

required ongoing negotiations of power to ultimately establish. One of the main goals of this

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thesis has been to dismantle the problematic heterosexual savior narratives constructed around

the Brownings’ relationship and to show the active role EBB had in creating a different life for

herself. In so many of the stories told about the Brownings, EBB is depicted as a helpless

woman, limited by her disability, society’s expectations for women, and the rules of her

tyrannical father, creating the illusion that EBB was a type of “damsel in distress,” lying in her

bed waiting for Browning to come save her. One of the most concrete examples of this is Rudolf

Besier’s play-turned-movie The Barretts of Wimpole Street, that dramatizes EBB’s experiences

living with her illness inside a house in which she and her siblings were forbidden to fall in love.

The very beginning of the play addresses her illness and the problematic, fictionalized

perceptions of it when the doctor tells her, “Hm—yes. It's this increasingly low vitality of yours

that worries me. No life in you—none” (Besier 18). This first image of EBB containing “no life”

is juxtaposed by EBB’s dialogue after meeting Browning. She says:

My life had reached its lowest ebb. I was worn out, and hope was dead. Then you

came…Robert, do you know what you have done for me? I have laughed when

Dr. Chambers said that I had healed myself by wanting to live. He was right! Oh,

he was right! But he little knew what lay behind his words! I wanted to live—

eagerly, desperately, passionately—and only because life meant you—you—and

the sight of your face, and the sound of your voice, and the touch of your hand.

Oh, and so much more than that! Because of you the air once more was sweet to

breathe, and all the world was good and green again. (Besier)

In this interpretation, Browning is portrayed as not only EBB’s savior, but her cure and the

reason she “healed herself by wanting to live.” However, these curative mindsets are extremely

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problematic and are part of the reason why this savior narrative is able to persist. In discussing

these curative temporalities, Alison Kafer writes:

Futurity has often been framed in curative terms, a time frame that casts disabled

people as out of time, or as obstacles to the arc of progress. In [a] disabled state,

[people] are not part of the dominant narratives of progress, but once

rehabilitated, normalized, and hopefully cured, [they] play a starring role: the sign

of progress, the proof of development, the triumph over the mind or body. (29)

In Besier’s play, EBB is written as “an obstacle to her own arc of progress” (Kafer 29).

However, the audience is supposed to believe that, through Browning, she suddenly gains the

ability to initiate her cure and step into her starring role as one half of this literary power couple,

healed by sheer will and heterosexual love. Furthermore, this is another example in which she

seems to gain agency only through association with Browning, which later turns into

assimilation. Whereas the Brownings’ poetry shows this fusion as metaphorical, Besier’s play

takes it to a literal extreme. As Browning takes EBB’s hands in Act III, he says:

No listen. Give me your hands. I’ve more life than is good for one man—it

seethes and races in me. Up to now I’ve spent a little of all that surplus energy in

creating imaginary men and women. But there’s still so much that I’ve no use for

but to give! Mayn’t I give it to you? Don’t you feel new life tingling and prickling

up your fingers and arms right into your heart and brain? (Besier)

Here, the audience it meant to believe in a literal transfer of power or energy that travels from

Browning’s body into EBB, curing her and providing her with enough strength to rise from her

bed at the end of the scene, a feat only shown on stage as a result of Browning and his effects on

EBB (Besier 68). This scene shows how in these fictionalized accounts of the Brownings,

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disability enters as a magnifying principle that shows the believed functions of bodies under

ideas of a one-flesh doctrine and gender complementariness. Kafer writes, “We need to imagine

crip futures because disabled people are continually being written out of the future, rendered as

the sign of the future no one wants” (42). Besier’s play, which I am referencing here as just one

of many problematic imagined pasts, quite literally writes EBB out of the Brownings' imagined

future because he uses Browning to “cure” or eliminate her disability. This incredibly vital

component of her identity that shaped so many of her embodied experiences as both a person and

writer is erased in favor of a inaccurate “happily ever after” in which Browning’s male

domination is excused because it is part of the way in which he offers her salvation.

With as troubling as the idea of this curative narrative is, these imagined narratives have

the capacity to get even darker. In Besier’s play, EBB’s disability gets imagined as eliminated,

but, if that particular future is not imagined, EBB herself is then eliminated. For example, in

Anthony Burgess’s short story “1889 and the Devil’s Mode,” the narrator meets a guilt-ridden

Browning in a bar where Browning confesses to murdering EBB as an act of mercy. Browning’s

character asks the narrator to imagine a hypothetical situation in which, “A woman is dying in

extreme distress. Her pain is considerable. Her husband is distraught by her agony and wishes

that it be no further prolonged. He smothers her with a pillow. His motive is totally merciful”

(Burgess 94). The narrator compares this act to the events of one of Browning’s earliest dramatic

monologues, "Porphyria’s Lover." Yet, Browning insists that the motives are different because

Porphyria’s lover murdered her “to ensure that her declared love for him cannot change,”

(Burgess 94) while killing EBB was an act “…performed in horror. But it had to be performed”

(Burgess 95). Browning’s character’s insistence that EBB’s murder was an event that must have

occurred is heavily rooted in his desire to control the outcomes of the future. In “The Case for

86
Conserving Disability,” Garland-Thomson shows how “people with disabilities and disability in

general—present the difficult challenge for modern subjects not only to live in the moment but

also to engage in a relationship not based on the promise of a future” (Garland-Thomson 353).

These imagined narratives in which disability is eliminated not only dictate the type of future the

writers deem appropriate, but also seek to re-write history to fit that dictation as well. In

addressing the ideas behind “mercy killing,” Garland-Thomson writes:

Because empathy depends upon the experiences and imagination of the

empathizer in regarding another person, prejudices, limited understandings, and

narrow experience can lead one person to project oversimplified or inaccurate

assessments of life quality or suffering onto another person…This is exactly the

logic of so-called mercy killing; it is an inability to tolerate or even witness in

others what we fear we cannot endure in our own lives. (350)

It is because of Browning’s character’s inability to truly empathize with EBB’s embodied

experiences that he chooses to kill her; he can’t bear to see her condition and imagine a future in

which her experience is his, so he eliminates it. Yet, Browning’s inability to understand EBB’s

experience recognizes the flaws in the moments of claimed fusion or assimilation between

Browning and EBB as one flesh. Since it is clear that Browning’s character cannot empathize

with EBB or understand her experiences, this ignorance produces a fear of the unknown that

causes him to create a future that he can control.

Having begun to dismantle the savior narratives and highly dramatized pasts of the

Brownings, it is my hope that this project can teach us a couple of things. First of all, we should

not buy into these fictionalized salvific ableist heterosexual narratives that require re-writing the

past and controlling the future. Instead, the hope is that we can see the ways in which Garland-

87
Thomson shows that “rather than dictating a diminished future, disability opens a truly

unpredictable, even unimaginable one (350) so that we can embrace the ways in which disability

benefits society instead of thinking of disability as a deficit (341). It is not that EBB was a great

poet in spite of her disability, that EBB’s unique experiences somehow canceled out her

disability, or EBB was successful because of her disability. Rather, one of the goals of this

project has been to influence readers to accept EBB’s disability and the numerous ways it

affected her embodied experiences as a woman and a writer within her relationship to Browning.

In conjunction to that, I hope this thesis exposed not only the problems these fictionalized

narratives have created in terms of understanding disability, but gender and power as well. It is

not the case that Browning rescued or saved EBB as the story is usually told; it is much more

complicated that than. EBB’s poems clearly show an ongoing struggle against Browning’s male

privilege, but they also show an active effort for agency and mobility. Finally, the last goal of

this project was to analyze the ways in which Browning and EBB slipped in and out of

stereotypical gender roles and to theorize why there seemed to be more flexibility within those

roles during their courtship (as evidenced by the letters) in comparison to their marriage (as

evidenced by EBB’s sonnets and Browning’s poetry from Men and Women). Though it does

seem that Browning and EBB fell into more traditionally-accepted Victorian roles after their

marriage, EBB orchestrated those moments of performing stereotypical femininity as a manner

of gaining autonomy within a union and society that made that exceptionally hard to do. In

conclusion, though the Brownings’ love story is still clearly impactful, we should take caution of

the narratives that have been created around the Brownings’ love story and recognize the multi-

faceted ideas surrounding gender, power, and disability prevalent throughout.

88
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