Slavish Poses: Elizabeth Barrett Browning And The .
Slavish Poses: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Aestheticsof AbolitionJohn MacNeill MillerVictorian Poetry, Volume 52, Number 4, Winter 2014, pp. 637-659 (Article)Published by West Virginia University PressDOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2014.0031For additional information about this articlehttps://muse.jhu.edu/article/581644Access provided by Allegheny College (22 Sep 2017 19:15 GMT)
Slavish Poses: Elizabeth BarrettBrowning and the Aesthetics ofAbolitionJOHN MACNEILL MILLERElizabeth Barrett Browning arrived late to the party. By the time her sonnet“Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave” appeared in Household Words in 1850, a slurryof similar poetic tributes to Powers’s sculpture had been published on both sidesof the Atlantic. Her decision to compose poetry on the Greek Slave, then, wasconventional in the strictest sense of the word: it shared both subject matterand conceptual preoccupations with a far larger body of work that is now moreor less forgotten. On an even broader level, however, her sonnet is built uponconventions, as it purposefully examines the political potential of conventionitself. Barrett Browning uses her verses to ruminate on Powers’s controversialmanipulation of classical ideals of femininity to ignite cultural controversy—inparticular, his canny deployment of a traditional female nude to arouse indignation about slavery and sexual double-standards. In its meditations on the artisticmeans to political ends, “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave” constitutes an aesthetictreatise in miniature, one that plays a central but mostly overlooked role in thedevelopment of Barrett Browning’s antislavery poetry.The second of three poems on American slavery that she published duringher lifetime, “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave” revisits conventional discourses aboutsexuality and Christianity that shape Barrett Browning’s earlier abolitionist work,“The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” The ideas advanced in the sonnet providea window onto the process by which Barrett Browning reworked the tropes ofrace, sex, and religion that appear in “The Runaway Slave” into the sophisticated,subversive aesthetic strategies of her final antislavery work, “A Curse for a Nation.” Close attention to the forms of conventionality running through BarrettBrowning’s three poems thus reveals the importance of both “Hiram Powers’Greek Slave” and the statue it memorializes to Barrett Browning’s formulation ofan aesthetic strategy that would allow her to denounce slavery from her complexcultural position as a white, British, woman poet in the mid-nineteenth century.637
638 / VICTORIAN POETRYThe difficulties of staking out her speaking position manifest themselvesmost clearly in the formal and ideological intricacies of the poems themselves. Asshe struggled to create political poems that could proselytize for an internationallydivisive cause, Barrett Browning also had to overcome conventional notions ofwhat constituted appropriate female poetic “subjects.” She had, in other words,to rework both the subject position of the white, British, female speaker and theidea of her proper subject matter. This reworking plays out in the tensions visible within the poems, where conventional discourses about female passivity andthe sanctity of motherhood tug against the political points the poems advance.The same tensions are visible in the body of scholarly work devoted to BarrettBrowning’s abolitionist poems, which tends to focus rather single-mindedly oneither the works’ radical commitments or their conservative conventions. A fullappreciation of these poems, however, requires attention to their extraordinaryability to turn apparently oppressive conventions to progressive sociopolitical ends.This ability evolves over the course of Barrett Browning’s oeuvre, so exploring it in detail involves tracing her changing commitments to convention acrossall three of her antislavery works. In her earliest abolitionist publication, “TheRunaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” Barrett Browning imposes a Marian Christiannarrative on a runaway slave’s story in order to locate a site of specifically feminineintervention into those earthly politics long supposed to be the exclusive sphereof men. The same tropological preoccupations reappear in “Hiram Powers’ GreekSlave,” where Barrett Browning theorizes the advantages of locating her abolitionistappeal not in the voice of a slave herself but instead in the persona of a conventionally “pure,” white, and thoroughly Victorian woman. Moving from theory topractice, Barrett Browning deploys the strategy she formulates in her sonnet in themulti-layered formal structure of her final abolitionist poem, “A Curse for a Nation.”Radical Revisions in “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”With its overtly political origins—it was Barrett Browning’s response to an invitation she received from abolitionists associated with the American antislaverygiftbook the Liberty Bell in 1845—“The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” began toreceive renewed interest from critics in the 1980s, as scholars turned to its “bluntand shocking” subject matter to render explicit the radical potential of BarrettBrowning’s poetry.1 “The Runaway Slave” is a dramatic monologue featuring anenslaved black woman as its eponymous speaker. Hunted down and cornered asthe poem opens, she tells the story of her rape and impregnation at the handsof a gang of slave owners. She ran away, she explains, after killing the resultingbaby; she now stands at Plymouth Rock, speaking defiantly to her pursuers inthe final moments before her capture.
MILLER / 639The divisive politics of the poem should be apparent; Barrett Browningherself expressed surprise that a poem so harsh and politically embittered couldbe published in the United States (WEBB, 1: 413). The poem’s polemical natureextends to the critical tradition that has grown up around it. Most scholarship on“The Runaway Slave” dwells almost exclusively on the more radical aspects of thework. So, for instance, because of the direct and resentful tone of “The RunawaySlave,” some critics have argued that the poem constitutes a turning point in BarrettBrowning’s poetics: not only does it feature a woman dramatically confronting heroppressors, but its composition coincides with the poet’s personal decision to fleepatriarchal power and become a runaway.2 The poem’s appearance in the LibertyBell, the organ of one of the more extreme abolitionist organizations active in theUnited States at mid-century, provides another lens through which to understandthose elements of the poem that overtly support radical emancipation.3While the majority of critics focus on these and other liberatory elementsof the work, a few have maintained that, whatever its origins or intentions, “TheRunaway Slave” is bound into a conservatism inextricable from its aestheticconventions. Sarah Brophy emphasizes the speaker’s appeal to the pilgrim fathers, which idealizes some patriarchal political structures in the very process ofcritiquing others.4 According to this suspicious reading, the poem falls victim toa trap that Karen Sánchez-Eppler has described as a feature of many “domesticand sentimental antislavery writings [which] are implicated in the very oppressions they seek to reform.”5 This risk would seem to be heightened by BarrettBrowning’s decision to use a black slave as the poem’s speaker. Although such adecision might constitute a kind of empowerment, it appears equally vulnerableto charges of interracial puppeteering.6The polarized politics scholars read into “The Runaway Slave” are more thanmere interpretive invention. Instead, they highlight certain tensions within thepoem itself. “The Runaway Slave” contains both radical and conservative elements,but as yet critics have mostly chosen to focus on one or the other rather thantracing the relationships between the apparently disparate positions embeddedwithin the poem.7 As a result, the work’s experiments with conventional tropesof womanhood and religion in the service of radical abolitionism have gone unremarked. These experiments foreground important connections between “TheRunaway Slave” and Barrett Browning’s later antislavery writings. “The RunawaySlave,” in this reading, constitutes only the earliest published example of BarrettBrowning’s evolving efforts to turn the energies of oppression into emancipatorychannels. More specifically, it inaugurates her attempts to mobilize conservativediscourses of bodily and social difference, especially with respect to motherhoodand spirituality, in the service of progressive social change. Her first exploratory
640 / VICTORIAN POETRYattempts in this ongoing process emerge in the shifting ideological revisionsdiscernible in “The Runaway Slave” itself.“The Runaway Slave” begins with a gesture towards tradition—but a gestureespecially interested in the black female speaker’s right and ability to engage thattradition. The poem opens as a sort of revisionary inheritance narrative with anunorthodox appeal to origins: the runaway slave stands at the very spot of themythical foundation of America, “on the mark beside the shore / Of the firstwhite pilgrim’s bended knee” (stanza 1, ll. 1–2).8 E. Warwick Slinn has rightlyseen the slave’s kneeling into this indentation “as an entry into a cultural anddiscursive matrix—literally as a point of origin and figuratively as a medium forstructural and structured mediation.” He also notes the admittedly distastefulpun on the Latin matrix, meaning a womb or a breeding female, with the femaleslave here occupying the horrifyingly literal position of “breeding the system thatenslaves her.”9 But this mark serves as a matrix in another, more straightforwardlysymbolic sense: it is the transformative cavity in the virgin continent that marksthe founding of the pilgrims’ lineage, where the flight of the pilgrims ends andtheir fatherhood begins, “[w]here exile turned to ancestor” (1.3). Even as thisvaginal indentation emphasizes the central place of women in the propagationof every patriarchal lineage, it suggests in that very fact an opportunity for femaleintervention in such traditions.The slave stages such an intervention in the stanzas that follow, where sheinsists that her own poetic lines descend more purely from the pilgrim fathers thanthe literal descendents who share their bloodlines. She thus plays on the notionof questionable descent and female intervention by suggesting the bastardizationof the pilgrim fathers’ line—even if that bastardization is more ideological thansexual. Whereas, on the pilgrims’ arrival, “God was thanked for liberty” (1.4),the descendants of the pilgrim fathers have gone wrong—the slave confesses tothe pilgrim spirits that she has just run “All night long from the whips of one /Who in your names works sin and woe” (1.13–14). This use of the pilgrim fathers’names by their descendants can be read as a twisted speech act, one that parallelsand perverts the pilgrims’ earlier act of blessing and the foundation of the land“in freedom’s [name]” (3.21). But it is worth taking literally as well, as an invocation of patronymics: the surnames of the slave owners and bounty hunters whochase the slave are the pilgrims’ familial names, names whose once meaningfulassociations with liberty have been perverted by their misapplication to “theirhunter sons” (30.204) “born of the Washington-race” (32.221) who now appear“in their ’stead” (30.204).The slave’s wresting of the authoritative power of the pilgrims’ surnamesnicely encapsulates the work’s broader desire to link forms of conventional
MILLER / 641authority with progressive possibility. Although the slave does call on the authorityrecognized by her male auditors, she never seeks their approval or consent; instead,she seizes upon their names and seeks to redefine them, using their originarypower to curse the very land they founded. She has sought out Plymouth Rock,she explains to them, and now kneels there “in your names, to curse this land / Yeblessed in freedom’s evermore” (3.20–21). This move is radical in the purest senseof the word: it is “relating to a root or to roots.”10 It casts off the contemporarystatus quo in search of a purer exemplar, in this case embodied by the lost meaningof the pilgrim fathers’ names. The slave’s act is also revolutionary; it involves the“recurrence . . . of a point or period of time” from which American society hasdeparted, the turn to a prior and higher authority that, Raymond Williams hasargued, has historically divided truly revolutionary movements from mere rebellions.11 A similar radical return occurs on a more formal level here, as a relativelyestablished convention—the poetic invocation of the pilgrim fathers in the nameof universal manumission—receives renewed political vigor when invoked by aneloquent runaway slave.12 Putting this political juxtaposition in the mouth of aslave speaker, then, radicalizes the aesthetic convention in the same way that theconvention itself strives to radicalize patriarchal tradition more generally.These sorts of revolutionary returns to roots make the poem hard to ploton any simplified political axis, as its very progressiveness relies on a conservativereturn to some older authority—a strategy that might account for some of thecritical difficulty with identifying its politics.13 The slave’s appropriation of thenames and lineage of the pilgrim fathers is a relatively clear example of a tropethat, because it smacks of a reactionary appeal to established authority, gets littlecritical attention. But even those moments of the poem that seem overtly emancipatory can suffer from this sort of simplification. Most critics who emphasizethe radical possibilities of “The Runaway Slave,” for example, turn away fromthe early appropriation of patriarchal lineage, focusing instead on the slave’sconfrontation with the “hunter sons” after she flees the plantation and the siteof her infanticide.14 Here, too, critics have misleadingly read the poem throughpolarizing political binaries that miss substantial textual complexity.In this confrontation, the slave voices her desire for retaliation and raisesa sudden exhortation to her fellow men and women in bondage: “From thesesands / Up to the mountains, lift your hands, / O slaves, and end what I begun!”(33.229–31). Despite all the critical attention it receives, this call to revolt is almostimmediately overwritten within the poem itself. It quickly yields to an appeal toanother originary belief system: Christianity. Instead of climaxing in violence,the runaway slave’s theodicy ends in a return to the Christian framework thatshe questions near the start of the poem. She observes that slaves, unlike Christ,
642 / VICTORIAN POETRYpossess “countless wounds that pay no debt” (34.238), a failure that, in a rathercomplicated conceit, signals a lack of divinity on the part of white slave holders:Our wounds are different. Your white menAre, after all, not gods indeed,Nor able to make Christs againDo good with bleeding. We who bleed(Stand off!) we help not in our loss!We are too heavy for our cross,And fall and crush you and your seed. (35.239–45)To a reader who equates violent revolution with social progress, these lines arestirring stuff, a powerful repudiation of any imposition of Christian symbolismonto slave bodies in favor of an image of slaves crushing out the evil line of theirowners. But to read these lines in such a manner is to relish an anarchic affect thatthe lines do not have, one that renders the end of the poem inexplicable. Why,after such a call to revolution, would the slave repent and leave her persecutors“curse-free” in the last stanza?Rather than reading stanza 35 as a continuation of the slave’s brief suggestion of a wider uprising, we should understand it for what it is: the key moment inthe re-imposition of Christian signification onto the slave’s story. After her call toarms (or, at least, to curses), the slave imagines the way American slavery has set upTwo kinds of men in adverse rows,Each loathing each; and all forgetThe seven wounds in Christ’s body fair,While He sees gaping everywhereOur countless wounds that pay no debt. (34.234–8)Her remembrance of what others have forgotten—the suffering of Christ to redeemmankind—prompts her to reassess her behavior and the suffering of slaves ingeneral. What many critics want to read as the slave’s rebellious salvo is actuallya lament: “[W]e help not in our loss! / We are too heavy for our cross, / Andfall and crush you and your seed” (35.243–45). This vision is one of actors whoare all too human on both sides: white men incapable of making Christs of theslaves they torture, and slaves whose fleshliness causes them to fall from theircrosses and thereby contribute to the cycle of violence and oppression rather thanconverting it, Christ-like, into a tale of universal ascension. The slave in BarrettBrowning’s poem narrowly avoids this fall back into secular, cyclical violence, asthe empyrean nature of her final perceptions reveals:
MILLER / 643I fall, I swoon! I look at the sky.The clouds are breaking on my brain.I am floated along, as if I should dieOf liberty’s exquisite pain. (36.246–49)The previously rebellious slave literally falls back into the passivity of a feminineswoon, one identified with assumption into the clouds of heaven at the momentof death. Politically, it appears that we are back where we started, trapped in anarrative that—despite a brief flirtation with violent rebellion—re-imposes conventional discourses of Christian passivity on the formerly subversive heroine. Butthis ending must be valued fairly within its specific location, as a move withinthe metaphorical register of the poem itself and as a precursor to Barrett Browning’s later works that use conventional feminine imagery to argue for abolition.The importance of this final return to a Christian framework lies within thecomplicated conceit that begins this last ideological about-face. The slave remarksthat “white men / Are, after all, not gods indeed, / Nor able to make Christs again/ Do good with bleeding” (35.239–41). This tactful metaphor, spelled out in plainlanguage, has very particular implications within the poem, implications that scholarship thus far has ignored. The failure of white men to make Christs is relevant tothe slave’s understanding of her own story because God makes His sons the sameway that men make theirs: by implanting them in women. Thus the white men’sfailure to make meaning out of their violent impregnation of the slave opens up anopportunity, a site in which the slave can leverage her own utter powerlessness asa slave and rape victim to transform her experience, reinvesting it with a reparativemeaning and significance borrowed from a Christian framework. Suddenly—bypassing, for now, the endless differences between “The Runaway Slave” and thegospels—the slave’s story sounds strikingly familiar. It is the story of the birth of achild to a woman by an unknown father not her lover, a child whose eventual murderis foretold as though it were preordained (“His little feet that never grew” [19.128])and whose death paradoxically restores a sort of wholeness to human existence. Atthe moment of her own death and implied assumption into heaven, the slave’s finalact—her Christian decision to leave the slave owners curse-free—is performed in thename of her own child, who becomes a purposefully ambiguous type of the Christchild in whose name she can swear a sanctified oath of forgiveness and redemption:In the name of the white child waiting for meIn the death-dark where we may kiss and agree,White men, I leave you all curse-freeIn my broken heart’s disdain! (36.250–53)
644 / VICTORIAN POETRYThis conclusion again revises the poem’s concerns with sites for femaleintervention, as the slave’s body, like the mark on which she kneels, becomesanother matrix through which the actions of men must pass, a necessary s
Slavish Poses: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Aesthetics of Abolition JOHN MACNEILL MILLER E lizabeth Barrett Browning arrived late to the party. By the time her sonnet “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave” appeared in Household Words in 1850, a slurry of similar poetic tributes to Powers’s sculpture had been published on both sides of the .
Elizabeth Barrett Browning(6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861) Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry was widely popular in both England and the United States during her lifetime. A collection of her last poems was published by her husband, Robert Browning, shortly after her death. b Early .
Robert Browning 3 Marriage Portraits of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. In 1845, Browning met the poet Elizabeth Barrett, six years his elder, who lived as a semi-invalid in her father's house in Wimpole Street, London. They began regularly corresponding and gradually a romance developed between them, leading to their marriage and
The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) by Frederic G. Kenyon The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) by Frederic G. Kenyon . poems, owe their value to the pure and earnest character, the strong love of truth and right, the enthusiasm on behalf of what is oppressed
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The Browning palace in Venice is the Valhalla of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. His grave is in the Poets’ Comer of Westminster Abbey, and hers under the white lilies of the Florence that she loved; but in this palace (which dates from 1679) are the memorials of their lives. In its splen dor it far eclipses those built by Sansovino.
"Sonnets from the Portuguese", to their place in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry. A reference is made to the love story between two poets: Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to support sonnets’ analysis. The object of the analysis is described in the introduction and the choice of
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sebuah standar akuntansi untuk lembaga keuangan syariah yang disebut accounting, auditing, and governance standard for Islamic institution. 3. Perkembangan Akuntansi di Indonesia (IAI) Ketika Indonesia merdeka, hanya ada satu orang akuntan pribumi, yaitu Prof. Dr. Abutari, sedangkan Prof. Soemardjo lulus pendidikan akuntan di
