Aurora Leigh's radical youth: derridean parergon and the narrative frame in "A Vision of Poets".

With the publication of Aurora Leigh in 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning not only offered readers a poetic work that rivaled Wordsworth's The Prelude in innovation of form and content but also identified this work as the pinnacle of her career. In the dedication to her cousin John Kenyon, she describes it as "the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered." (1) Following her lead, critics since the 1970s have often either discounted her shorter and earlier poetry or considered it merely as a foundation for the greater work to come. Much recent criticism maintains this view of Aurora Leigh as the height of Barrett Browning's career as well as the corresponding view that her earlier work is less "mature." In Steve Dillon's consideration of her tropic use of crying, singing, and breathing, for example, he claims to follow the lead of Linda M. Lewis, Dorothy Mermin, and Marjorie Stone in arguing for an "apprentice to master" story of Barrett Browning's career. (2)

Published in Poems of 1844, "A Vision of Poets" seems to hold a secure position within this critical narrative of progression because it anticipates Aurora Leigh's concern with the relationship of a female poet to the male poetic lineage. Lewis, while only briefly mentioning "A Vision of Poets," connects it to other poems of 1844 that affirm "the gospel of Suffering and the gospel of Work," representing the second stage of Barrett Browning's religious quest; Aurora Leigh embodies the final stage in which the poet preaches the gospel of "divine love and divine truth" (p. 13). Mermin characterizes Barrett Browning's progression in feminist terms and compares "A Vision of Poets" both to the earlier "A Vision of Fame" and "The Poet's Vow" and to the later works that concern the poetical position of women. Its "conclusions are unstated but obvious," she claims; "women can be poets, and women's lives can be their theme," which prompts us to think of the later novel-poem in which this conclusion becomes explicit (Mermin, pp. 87-88, 115). Stone gives credence to Harold Bloom's six phases of poetic progress as paradigmatic even as she critiques his patriarchal model, and she places "A Vision of Poets" at the turn to Barrett Browning's "later phases of 'poetic incarnation,'" which culminate in the mastery of Aurora Leigh (pp. 93, 154). Additionally, Helen Cooper asserts that "A Vision of Poets" begins to reconfigure the classical relationship between the male poet and his female muse, an effort that "is consummated in Aurora Leigh." (3) Finally, Dillon does not consider "A Vision of Poets," perhaps because its "breath[ing] back" the music of God's blessing works against his argument that breath is a later representation of poetic voice for Barrett Browning, following her early use of the cry and the song. (4)

Rather than continue the conversation about progression and the full scope of Barrett Browning's work, this study examines one complication of its trajectory. It follows Linda Shires' argument that certain female poets of the nineteenth-century, including Barrett Browning, were critiquing the male tradition and experimenting with form as early as the 1830s. (5) "A Vision of Poets" presents a female poet who is more adversarial toward her male predecessors than has been recognized, positioning this poem as itself adversarial within Barrett Browning's oeuvre. While "A Vision of Poets" considers women's potential for poetry in the vein of Aurora Leigh, it does not wage the same battle to open the male tradition to the female poet. In the relationship between these two works, published twelve years apart, the later poem qualifies and tempers the earlier, more radical feminist position, problematizing any critical impulse to identify Barrett Browning's maturation as a steady progression toward feminist self-autonomy. The subversiveness of "A Vision of Poets" stems from its narrative of the death of the male poetic tradition and the survival of the independent female voice; independence is tempered in Aurora Leigh, which focuses on the birth of a matrilineal poetic tradition that incorporates a blending of voices, including those of fathers and lovers. While Barrett Browning claims in her Preface to Poems of 1844 that she intended to portray the "necessary relations of genius to suffering" in "A Vision of Poets," the poem itself suggests that those relations are significantly different for the female than for the male. (6) It does not validate the female poet and her vocation by identifying her affinity for suffering, as Mermin argues, because not only are the female figures in the poem protected from suffering, but they are also in control of the male experience and discourse. The poem validates the female poet instead by directing her to a path marked by self-empowerment rather than self-sacrifice, by political engagement rather than transcendence.

Barrett Browning creates discursive control for the female figures in part through her strikingly different technical and structural choices for "A Vision of Poets" than those for Aurora Leigh. In the most extended analysis of "A Vision of Poets" prior to this one, Stone argues that Barrett Browning's conclusion serves as a structural method for asserting her "absent presence," signifying both her canonical marginalization and her forceful poetic ambition and power (p. 92). Yet Barrett Browning's framing device asserts more than Stone suggests; her framing of the male epiphanic and apocalyptic visions with an epigraph and a conclusion effects discontinuity between the transcendent experience and claims of the male and their scrutiny by the female speaker. In this way, Barrett Browning removes the female from the framed narrative's ethical demands and limits. She positions apocalyptic upheaval within human history and the temporal world rather than as the signifier of a release from history and temporality. If the representation of apocalypse often includes a symbolic silencing of the female voice to gain universal transcendence or to make language transparent, as Steven Goldsmith argues, then Barrett Browning's construction of it as a site for political conflict--particularly a gendered conflict--revises its dominant tropic purpose. (7) This poem furthers a feminist ethos over and against the Christian belief and suffering of the male figure, whose sanctification and privilege are then undermined by the speaker's control over his vision and his legacy. Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of Kantian theories of the parergon in The Truth in Painting facilitates a consideration of how Barrett Browning uses the frame of "A Vision of Poets" to differentiate clearly its ethic from the self-abnegation advocated by the apocalyptic vision of the framed narrative. While the poem's frame is not inviolable, those places of continuity between the interior and the exterior expose a lack in the male narrative rather than underscore a repetition of the male experience. In Derrida's words, parergon have an "internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon," which is then "constitutive of the very unity of the ergon";s in Barrett Browning's poem, that riveting of the frame to the framed work is both secured and loosened as the female speaker affirms her own clear sense of self removed from the male.

At the outset of "A Vision of Poets," Barrett Browning seems to displace difference through her use of an unnamed speaker whose existence is revealed as an 'T' only near the end of the poem. After the epigraph, the poem opens with third-person point of view--"A poet could not sleep aright, / For his soul kept up too much light/Under his eyelids for the night"--and we assume that this voice is omniscient. No evidence within the next 720 lines challenges that assumption. We follow this poet in his nocturnal journey as he meets a lady-guide who judges the worthiness of poets; learns a lesson of suffering through his drinking from the pools of World's use, World's love, and World's cruelty, as well as an unnamed pool; and offers himself at an altar to serve God through a sacrificial existence. Because we are privy to the seemingly omniscient third-person point of view, we are distanced from these characters and understand ourselves as observers. Female readers are especially impeded from identifying with the model of self-sacrifice embodied by this distinctly male poet. Yet two visions are present within the poem: the male poet's vision, which is recorded in third-person point of view and begins after the ...