Aurora Leigh

As Book 4 enumerates the details of Marian’s journey from dispossessed child to hard-working seamstress and glowing bride-to-be, Aurora’s descriptions of the conversation betray frequent hints of her own socially motivated biases and condescension, for she often describes Marian as either a child or even as a wild and uncultured animal of the forest: hardly a respectful characterization. Likewise, her questions to Marian about the veracity of Romney’s feelings of love inject an element of skepticism into the exchange, as though she herself cannot truly believe that a genuine basis for a relationship exists between her cousin and the lower-class seamstress whom he took it upon himself to help in the course of his social work. Given that Barrett Browning has already proclaimed herself and Aurora to be essentially one and the same, it can therefore be assumed that she retains a sharp degree of self-awareness, for her willingness to paint Aurora in a less flattering light indicates her ability to turn her considerable powers of criticism upon her own privileged status within English society.

Even as Barrett Browning uses Marian’s lower-class origin as a foil to Aurora’s own social situation, the poet also establishes a stylistic link between the lovelorn and dispossessed Marian and the Romantic fondness for images of ruination. This dynamic is emphasized when Romney appears to her “as July suns to ruins” (Line 81). The Romantic Movement’s fixation upon this theme is further reinforced by the writings of William Gilpin in his Observations on the River Wye, for he states, “Is there a greater ornament of landscape, than the ruins of a castle?” Likewise, literal ruins were being discovered all across the world in the 19th century, a pattern that spurred an interest in the classical world and fueled the cultural appropriation of its art, literature, architecture, and landscape design. Indeed, both the British Museum and John Soane Museum in London are replete with pilfered collections of relics from older societies and distant realms. Within this cultural context, it can be argued that by discovering and rediscovering Marian Earle, Aurora herself is cast in the role of the archaeologist, who, unlike the 19th century’s famous landscape gardeners, unearths rather than creates.  

It is important to note that both the register and style of imagery change markedly in Book 4 as compared to the classical allusions of Books 1-3. For example, the image of the poor “oozing” into the church “[i]n a slow dark stream, like blood” (Line 554) paints England’s lower classes in a deliberately repulsive light, and the deeply visceral imagery borders on the fantastical in its attempt to portray the presence of lower-class individuals as an unwanted invasion into the “pure” setting of the church, which implicitly represents all that is considered to be good and right by the more conservative elements of society. Thus, in order to address considerations of Social Justice in 19th-Century England, Barrett Browning chooses to portray the division between the classes present in the church in terms of heaven and hell; the stylistic choice implies that poverty itself is a kind of hell to which the lower classes are condemned. In this way, Barrett Browning does not shrink from creating an unflattering representation of the lower classes, for the poem states, “‘twas as if you had stirred up hell / To heave its lowest dreg-fiends uppermost / In fiery swirls of slime” (Lines 588-90). Whether readers choose to interpret Barrett Browning’s descriptions as evidence of her own inherent bias against the lower classes or as her attempt to highlight society’s biases against those who are less fortunate, it is clear that the poet uses all the poetic experience at her fingertips to bend the trappings of conventional “light versus dark” imagery to her unique purposes.  

During the time in which Barrett Browning was writing Aurora Leigh, the social unrest afflicting Britain’s traditional class division was thoroughly entrenched in the public consciousness, and this sentiment is apparent in the poem itself, which states, “Be sorry for the unlicensed class, the poor, / Reduced to think the best good fortune means / That others, simply, should be kind to them” (Lines 55-57). The “ripple of women’s talk” (Line 610) that Aurora overhears essentially accepts the existence of this social discord, though Aurora finds the whole scenario (a literal and symbolic non-marriage between the classes) to be “nightmarish” (Line 598). At the end of Book 4, the Leighs muse on the fate of Marian, and the church itself becomes the stage for this ongoing class struggle, a tragic play in which Romney is cast as the tragic hero who fails in his philanthropic attempts to bring greater equality to British society.