Thematic Paper: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Thematic Paper: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Introduction

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was frail since childhood and was taken with sickness often throughout her life, becoming an invalid in the years prior to her marriage. Along with the deaths of her mother and brother, this caused Browning to suffer from depression throughout those years. During this time she wrote a collection called simply “Poems” which were empathetic in the suffering of others and the world because of her own suffering. This paper will be discussing the literary writing of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. For the analysis we will be using some of the poems that she has wrote during her life (Browning, 2012).

Discussion and Analysis

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's works express “her concern for the liberal causes of her day”, which included women's rights and the cause of Italian nationalism (Bildir). These historical influences caused Browning's poetry to “contain some of her most forceful and beautiful lyrics” (Bildir). In Browning's “Poems before Congress”, the excerpt from “Napolean III” reads “But Italy, my Italy, Can it last, this gleam? Can she live and be strong, or is it another dream, like the rest we have dreamed so long?” Browning's “love and concern for her country” are shown in her possessive speech concerning Italy as well as her personification of it (Montwieler, 2005: 12). These poetic elements make Italy familiar and express Browning's devotion to it. “Should we see her arise? From the place where the wicked are overthrown, Italy, Italy -- loosed at length, From the tyrant's thrall” depicts Italy as a person, meant to arise and the wicked overthrown. The fight for Italian independence from “the tyrant”, Austria, is shown in Browning's “gradual building of emotion and spirit” in this piece (Everett).

In Elizabeth Browning's “Aurora Leigh”, she writes: “If I married him, I would not dare to call my soul my own, which so he had bought and paid for: every thought and every heart-beat down there in the bill”. This “celebrates in part female independence from domineering men” by acknowledging the self-disownment of a woman's soul when she marries. In Browning's “Lord Walter's Wife” she introduces a lively, independent woman who is able to make quick, witty replies to a man and see the reasons for behind his actions: “'If a man finds a woman too fair, he means simply adapted too much, To use unlawful and fatal. The praise! --shall I thank you for such?'”. In this she recognizes the stigmas of women, who at once are “too fair” and seen as temptresses, whose “use” would be “unlawful and fatal”. In the next line, the woman further questions the man's words: “'Too fair?--not unless you misuse us! And surely if, once in a while, you attain to it, straightaway you call us no longer too fair, but too vile” (Everett, 2002). This further addresses the fight against the subordination of women by men in proclaiming the misuse of women followed by the view of them changing from “too fair” to ...