Telling it slant: Promethean, Whig, and dissenting politics in Elizabeth Barrett's poetry of the 1830s.

Since the 1970s and the start of the process of recovering Elizabeth Barrett Browning from the "servants' quarters" of the "mansion" of Literature where, in Virginia Woolf's famous description, the poet "bangs the crockery around and eats vast handfuls of peas on the point of a knife," (1) critics have reconsidered EBB and her works from a number of illuminating and persuasive critical positions. Indeed, we are now coming to recognize EBB as important for our understanding of areas as diverse as the experiences of the nineteenth-century woman writer, developments in Romantic and Victorian poetic aesthetics, and the construction of the nineteenth-century vates figure. "How shall we re-read thee? Let me count the ways."

One area of inquiry which has been receiving increased critical attention of late is EBB's insightful, challenging, and sometimes controversial engagement with nineteenth-century European politics. (2) Her later works--Casa Guidi Windows (1851), Aurora Leigh (1856), and Poems before Congress (1861)--have been a key focus of this inquiry, but as I have argued elsewhere (Avery and Stott, pp. 33-64), EBB was politically engaged from a very early age. Like her father and her eldest brother, she was a fervent supporter of the Whigs, the party of opposition whose political philosophy had at its heart a fundamental concern with the legal, civil, and religious rights of the individual--rights for which EBB herself would spend most of her life fighting. Certainly it is possible to read her earliest writings in this context. The Battle of Marathon (1820), for example, deals explicitly with the emergence of the notion of democracy and political egalitarianism, while An Essay on Mind (1826) and the first poems which EBB published in The New Monthly Magazine and The Globe and Traveller show the poet interrogating the contemporary Greek war of independence against Turkey. (3) It is hardly surprising, then, that EBB's mother would accuse her daughter--in striking contrast to the mythologized image of the sickly poet--of suffering from "the infection of politics." (4)

In this essay, I want to explore how, in her writings of the 1830s, EBB built upon her earlier political interests and to suggest how the poetry published in her key volumes of that decade--Prometheus Bound, and Miscellaneous Poems (1833) and The Seraphim, and Other Poems (1838)--forms an important bridge between her politically inspired verse of the 1820s and the far more overt and combative engagement with contemporary politics in her poetry of the 1840s and 1850s. This is not to suggest, however, that all of her writings can be slotted into some simple, developmental trajectory whereby she becomes increasingly explicit in her treatment of politics throughout her career. Indeed, it is specifically in the 1830s that such an argument would break down. For here, rather than pushing the overt political engagements of the 1820s further, EBB appears to withdraw somewhat from direct commentary upon political issues in her poetry and turns instead to large mythic narratives, landscape poetry, and religious verse. And yet if we read the 1830s poetry alongside EBB's diary, correspondence, and other documentation, it is possible, I argue here, to view it as reflecting, at least covertly, upon some of the key political concerns of the period and as examining those power structures and systems of control that EBB would continue to interrogate throughout her career. As I suggest, then, it is during the 1830s that EBB, the poet who would become renowned for her political outspokenness in subsequent decades, engages in that artistic and rhetorical practice which Emily Dickinson would later describe as "[t]ell[ing] all the truth" but "tell[ing] it slant." (5)

By the opening of the 1830s, the Barrett family was in many ways becoming increasingly insecure. The death of EBB's mother in 1828 had left the family irrevocably shaken, and by 1830 it was becoming apparent that the family fortunes were under threat as the plantations in Jamaica from which the Barrett family money derived began to lose profits rapidly following a drop in sugar prices. The subsequent sale of EBB's beloved childhood home, Hope End, after the mortgage was foreclosed, saw the family leaving Herefordshire for Sidmouth and, according to Dorothy Mermin, EBB's life entering a period "best described in terms of negatives and privations," where she could escape "only into inner space, not into the wider world" (pp. 45-46).

Mermin's reading here, however, is somewhat problematic since it denies both the fact that EBB enjoyed much of her new life in Sidmouth--she was particularly attracted to the sea, for example, which greatly influenced her landscape poetry of the 1830s--and the fact that during these years she still maintained a very keen interest in social and political events occurring in the "wider world." In January 1832, for example, she published a poem in the Times entitled "The Pestilence," which traces the spread of the current cholera epidemic and its socio-economic consequences from India across Europe to England, while her correspondence and diary entries from this period are full of examples of her deploying key national and international events as analogies for her own life experiences in that collapsing together of the personal and the political so common in her writings. At the time of les Trois Glorieuses upheaval in Paris in July 1830, for instance, an insurrection leading to the overthrow of Charles X and promise of greater liberties for the working classes, EBB wrote to her mentor Hugh Stuart Boyd that the imminent arrival at Hope End of her friend, Miss Cliff, would mean "the poney cannot be quite as disengaged as usual--nor I, quite as much at liberty. [But] I shall use my liberty, when I get it, better than the French people are likely to do theirs" (BC, 2:249). And on September 8, 1831, the day of William IV's coronation, when her brother Edward (Bro) was about to leave on a shooting trip, EBB wrote: "Poor Bro & the King! How it does rain!--Was it a fine day on the last coronation? If it were, I wish Fate had changed the days. Never mind! Our patriotic monarch has sunshine within; which the 'other sceptered thing' could not have had." (6)

Writing with typical Whiggish criticism of George IV and support for the new monarch, EBB here reinforces that interest in kingship which was both part of her fascination with leadership in general and a constituent part of the Whig anxiety concerning structures of arbitrary power. That this issue was at the forefront of EBB's political thinking during this period is further evidenced by her work on an eight-stanza poem simply entitled "Kings," which was published in the- Times on May 31, 1831 and which has been all but ignored by criticism to date. In this poem, EBB documents her sense of the atrocities conducted by a number of kings of England from William the Conqueror onwards, noting assassinations, battles, material greed, and abuse of the people in this "mourning land" (l. 34), before concluding that the only true monarch is Christ: "Others may wear a jewelled thing / But HE--he is a KING" (ll. 47-48). Upon completing the poem, EBB observed to Boyd that "I never wrote anything half so historical in all my life" (BC, 2:310), and yet the concerns here with the abuse of power and the possibilities of redemptive religion were nonetheless to become major strands in much of her poetic writing throughout the 1830s as a whole, from the title work of her 1833 volume onwards.

Prometheus Bound, and Miscellaneous Poems (1833) was the last of EBB's volumes to be published anonymously and followed an intense period of reading and translating of the major classical Greek authors to the extent that Boyd believed that "few men had done as much" (Diary, p. 231). EBB was particularly drawn to AEschylus, whom she called "the divinest of all the divine Greek souls" (BC, 10:111), and it was a translation of his version of the Prometheus myth--"the Ur-myth of the romantic age," as Linda M. Lewis describes it (7)--which EBB then used to head up her first collection of the thirties. The work, based upon Frederick Heinrich Bothe's 1805 edition, Aeschyli Dramata quae Supersunt (Diary, p. 223n1), was completed in just two weeks in February 1832, with EBB often translating more than a hundred lines a day (Diary, p. 214). Certainly it was an apt text for the poet to choose, given her concerns with leadership, political opposition, and the structures of power. For AEschylus' text records the fate of the archetypal rebel who steals fire--"the ferule-treasured secret fount," as EBB translates it (l. 100) (8)--from the heavens to give it to humankind, and who is then horrifically punished ...