Mesmerism and Agency in the Courtship of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning

It has not passed unnoticed that the courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett coincides with Barrett's ambivalent fascination for mesmerism. But what has not been explicated is the interrelationship between mesmeric agency, the courtship correspondence, and Barrett's autobiographical Sonnets from the Portuguese. Daniel Karlin has suggestively described Barrett's representation of her suitor as an erotic mesmerist, to Browning's discomfort, but Karlin assumes the familiar stereotype of mesmeric power as an unproblematic operation of a dominant male practitioner upon a passive female patient. This essay critiques such an assumption, and suggests that a revised model of mesmeric influence helps elucidate not only Barrett's representation of the courtship in the letters and the Sonnets, but literary influence as well. If Barrett depicts herself in the thrall of a mesmeric agency, then how do we read what is interpreted by feminist critics as her revolutionary active subject position in the Sonnets, which has been taken as the transformation of Victorian women's poetry?

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In search of self: Navigating subjectivity amidst conflicts in Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park (2012)

k ta ◽

10.9744/kata.23.1.21-27 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

pp. 21-27

Author(s):

Azalea Ayu Dewinta Fitriani ◽

Isti Siti Saleha Gandana ◽

Nia Nafisah

Keyword(s):

Personal Growth ◽

Subject Position ◽

Growing Up ◽

Dynamic Nature ◽

Subject Positions ◽

Active Subject

Entrance into adulthood has often been seen as a phase marked by self-exploration, instability, and struggles to overcome tensions and conflicts. Eleanor & Park (2012) is a novel that explores issues of growing up and tells the story of how the two main characters go through the struggles of their adolescent lives. This study analyzes how Eleanor and Park construct and navigate their subjectivities amidst the various conflicts they face. It does so by, first, identifying and classifying the conflicts the characters encounter and then locating their provisional subject positions that draw on how they react to and deal with the conflicts. While the study confirms the dynamic nature of subject positions, both Eleanor and Park tend to bring to the fore their active subject position in dealing with the conflicts. Moreover, their subject positions further indicate that Eleanor and Park are empowered agents who are capable of deliberating thoughts and actions consciously. In navigating their subjectivities, both characters, in the end, are able to achieve personal growth and empowerment.

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Lady Mary Wroth : The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture ◽

10.5117/9789463721431_ch06 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Gary Waller

Keyword(s):

Male Subject ◽

Subject Position ◽

Dominant Male ◽

Literary Works ◽

Lady Mary Wroth ◽

Cultural Forces ◽

Male Discourse ◽

Poetry Collection

Mary Wroth’s major literary works, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and the poetry collection Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, are distinctively Baroque: Wroth repeatedly, obsessively, demonstrates a fascination with multiple narratives, the blurring of fiction and history, and eruptions of magical or miraculous interventions. She establishes the contours of a female Baroque subject, who has to absorb and attempt to transcend enculturation by the dominant male discourse. What happens when a woman enters the predominantly male discursive poetical playground of Petrarchism? Could a woman envisage anything more than her own fragmentation? Would hers be the ‘same’ anguish as that articulated on behalf of the dominant male subject position? What cultural forces speak through her in addition to those she attempts to control?

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Strategic Self-Centering and the Female Narrator: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese

Browning Institute Studies ◽

10.1017/s0092472500002686 ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 17 ◽

pp. 75-91

Author(s):

Sarah Paul

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

The Past ◽

Idealized Model ◽

Radical Nature ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Active Subject ◽

Female Voices ◽

Sonnets From The Portuguese ◽

Passive Object

As the first love sonnet sequence written by a woman in English, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese challenged the conventions of amatory poetry when it was published in 1850. The genre, which had always required its female inhabitants to maintain an aloof and icy silence, was not accustomed to female voices. Certainly a speaker like the narrator of Barrett Browning's sonnets, loudly proclaiming her right to adopt postures of adoration and unworthiness toward a male love object, had never before disturbed its rarefied spaces. The radical nature of the work, however, seems to have been lost on its nineteenth-century audience. Victorian readers saw nothing shocking or immodest about the sonnets and actually admired them a great deal, particularly because they seemed, oddly enough, to uphold an idealized model of devout and reticent femininity. Hall Caine called them “essentially feminine in their hyper-refinement, in their intense tremulous spirituality” (310–11), while Eric Robertson wrote that “no woman's heart indeed was ever laid barer to us, but no heart could have laid itself bare more purely” (281). Twelve years later Edmund Gosse spoke of the cycle's “noble dignity,” “stainless harmony,” and “high ethical level of distinguished utterance” (11, 21). Neither these nor any other nineteenth- or early twentieth-century critic saw anything revolutionary in the sequence. Only in the past dozen years have feminist critics re-evaluating Sonnets from the Portuguese discovered within its self-deprecating stanzas an “enterprise of heroinism” asserting a woman's “right” to be the active subject of both poetry and feeling rather than their passive object.

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Perception, Feeling and Thought of Love, and Early Married Life in "Sonnets from the Portuguese"

Lexicon ◽

10.22146/lexicon.v1i3.42079 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 1 (3) ◽

Author(s):

Ainul Karomah

Keyword(s):

Deep Understanding ◽

Life Time ◽

Literary Work ◽

Robert Browning ◽

Primary Data ◽

Married Life ◽

Sonnets From The Portuguese ◽

Research Show

The objectives of this research are to discover Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s perception, feelings, and thoughts of love and to observe her early married life with her husband as depicted in her Sonnets from the Portuguese. The expressive theory is used to find the perception, feeling, and thought of the author depicted in it. The primary data or the main object of the research is the literary work itself.The results of this research show that the perceptions of love are the products ofElizabeth’s expressive act in conceiving the love itself with deep understanding which involves the realization of position and respect of her lover and herself. However, her ideas of love are defeated by her emotion of love. Moreover, she is encouraged by the power of love to make consideration in her life to choose her own course of life that she surrenders her life to her lover by agreeing to marry Robert Browning which shows her greatest expressive act of love. Thus, love has given her the opportunity to gain happiness in her life time.

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“Some Interchange of Grace”: “Saul” and Sonnets From the Portuguese

Browning Institute Studies ◽

10.1017/s0092472500001826 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 15 ◽

pp. 55-68 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Mary Rose Sullivan

Keyword(s):

Robert Browning ◽

Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽

Men And Women ◽

Shared Experiences ◽

Sonnets From The Portuguese ◽

The Way

That Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning had an influence on each other's poetry is difficult to doubt but more difficult to prove; their similar backgrounds and shared experiences, and a reticence in both to discuss their working habits, generally make attempts to fix possible influences between them problematic at best. Two periods of their shared lives, however, do provide an unusually clear record of the way each affected and was affected by the other's writings: the first, from their introduction in January 1845 until their marriage in September 1846, during which time Browning completed the last two numbers of his Bells and Pomegranates series and Elizabeth Barrett wrote her Sonnets from the Portuguese, and the second in 1855, when Browning published Men and Women. Their courtship letters show that they considered themselves engaged in a unique poetic as well as personal partnership, and their poetry of this time, together with Browning's 1855 volume, reveals that their creative interaction was more extensive than even they realized. Of particular note is the way that Browning's first version of “Saul” helped to shape the theme and imagery of Sonnets from the Portuguese, which in turn influenced his later conclusion to “Saul.”

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