THE FEMALE VOICE IN THE VICTORIAN POETRY: REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN
In this paper I am going to analyse,
in a general sense, the female voice in some Victorian works and the use of
women as subjects in Victorian Art. Moreover, to carry out a good analysis and
to understand the way women were treated in the Victorian period, I am going to
introduce a general analysis of the role that women had in the Victorian poetry
as voices, in some poetical works, and as writers. Firstly, I have mentioned
the different representations that women have suffered as subjects in the
Victorian Art. Secondly, I have exhibited the role women have displayed
analysing five authors and some of their works, to understand that the female
figure or her voice is often represented or repressed in a way that reduces her
to a fixed meaning, or in a way that praise her rights. Finally, I want to end
up explaining the paper that women have played in the society of the 19th
century, the way they lived and the way they fought to improve their social and
political situation.
To start with the enumeration of the
different representations that women have suffered as subjects in the Victorian
Time, I want to make clear that, generally, women have been represented in a
lot of different ways. For that reason, the way we can enumerate the different
representations of women is too vast and too subjective and I have decided to
use the list that we can find in the Victorian web.
“Women as subject in Victorian Art- representations of
women”. 25/12/2006. The Victorian Web. Inc. 21/12/2007
http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/arts2.html
According to the Victorian web, the
different representations of women can be grouped in five groups.
The first group talks about the female
power. It is where we can see women represented as goddesses, heroines,
powerful monsters and the famous femme fatale. One example of a woman
represented as a goddess is the painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti called Astarte Syriaca (1), which is the representation of the
Roman goddess Venus as a powerful, sensual woman. In other works, women are
represented as heroines, playing the role of Diana, the Greek goddess, or
Judith, the Biblical figure. In the representation of powerful monsters, the
Victorian web emphasizes the representation of vampires, mermaids, sirens and
harpies. I can stress, for example, the paintings of mermaids and sirens of the
famous painter John William Waterhouse, and the paintings of Medusa (2), the Greek monster, which has been
represented during time in all the periods, underlining the Classical Period
and the Victorian Time. To end up with the representation of the female power,
I have to dedicate some lines to the representation of the femme fatale. In the
“Women as subject in Victorian Art- representations of
women”. 25/12/2006. The Victorian Web. Inc. 21/12/2007
http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/arts2.html
The second group deals with the
representation of women as victims. The themes of women destroyed by
love, by tragic lovers, is also typical of this period. The Pre-Raphaelites and
most of the Victorians represented the woman as a victim of a tragic love, as a
sexual frustration, or they represented a punishment of the female. One example
is the lyric Marianna by Lord
Tennyson, where the disconsolate heroine waits in vain for her lover (I will
analyse this work later). Other subject is the representation of the fallen
woman (women who had given in to seduction, living a life in sin). For example,
in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting Found (3)
we can see a fallen woman who resist the man. A question that has been studied
for several years and that is studied nowadays is if when we see a
representation of a fallen woman, it is really the representation of a fallen
woman or it is the representation of Ophelia, the Shakespeare’s female
character of Hamlet. One example of that representation could be seen in the
painting Ophelia
(4) by the British artist Sir
John Everett Millais. In addition, most Victorian authors have represented
women as martyrs, women in chains or as slaves. Some examples are The Greek Slave (5) by Hiram Powers, Orpheus and Eurydice
(6) by George Frederick Watts
and St Eulalia (7) by John William Waterhouse. Moreover,
women have been represented as victims of their own condition of female
subjects, and as victims of her situation in society (without election, opportunities
and aims in life).
“Women as subject in Victorian Art- representations of
women”. 25/12/2006. The Victorian Web. Inc. 21/12/2007
http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/arts2.html
The third group is called in the
Victorian Web “Objects of Desire”. In that selection, the sleeping
beauty myth has a lot of popularity. One example is the painting by Edward
Burne-Jones Sleeping
Beauty (8). Moreover,
another theme which is repeated in a lot of cases is the representation of the
Lady of Shalott (Lord Tennyson’s poem), as we can see in the painting by Arthur Hughes (9) with this name, the various by John William Waterhouse (10) or the own interpretation made by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (11) that was published in Tennyson’s Poems in 1857.
One thing that has surprised me is
the horror of the nude. Normally, we see a lot of nudes portraits and pictures
in other periods and cultures, but during the Victorian Period, the nudes are
rather few than a lot. According to the Victorian Web, the horror of the nude
did not come from a cult of chastity; it seemed to have been part of the enormous
façade of the 19th century, with its code of respectability. They
distinguish between two kinds of nudes: one due to the classical tradition when
goddesses and heroes were represented nudes, and the second due to an exotic
representation.
“Women as subject in Victorian Art- representations of
women”. 25/12/2006. The Victorian Web. Inc. 21/12/2007
http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/arts2.html
The fourth group is the
representation of women as the Ideal. If we analysed Dante Gabriel
Rossetti’s work, we can see that he had an Ideal of woman and it changed during
his career. Firstly, the representation he made of women was a stereotype: a
blond, slender, round-armed, straight-nosed, white-skinned… It could be seen in
The Girlhood of Mary (12). Then, he moved beyond the unreachable saintly figure of Mary
to convert the features of his sister to his favourite ideal type. But after
that, he met Elisabeth Eleanor Siddall, in whom he met his Ideal. As a result,
Rossetti’s Ideal took on different forms: sinful woman, with complete
fantasies, victimized woman…in conclusion, the femme fatale. Otherwise, the
role of a woman in her house, supporting her husband, was too current in the
Victorian Time. It is showed in the painting I have mentioned before, The Girlhood of Mary, where we see the
first Ideal woman of Rossetti and also a woman learning the task of embroidery
(which can be the physical and the psychical ideal of that period, a woman
looking for her husband, her house and her children).
“Women as subject in Victorian Art- representations of
women”. 25/12/2006. The Victorian Web. Inc. 21/12/2007
http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/arts2.html
The fifth group, and the last one,
is called in the Victorian web “Miscellaneous”. In this group I have
found the representations of women as servants, Governesses, workers and
artists. In one hand, it is necessary for a woman to belong to a family with a
high economical level to be an artist, and only the higher-class women had the
education to be a Governess. On the other hand, needlework and teaching were
seen as “natural” professions for women, and so would have been appropriate for
those from the middle- and upper- classes. Furthermore, seamstress and dressmaker
were employments for the women who had enough money to pay to learn the trade.
And the women of lower classes had to work as servants or in a factory. These
differentiations were introduced in the Victorian Art, too. In 1840s, the
figure of a seamstress appeared in the work of Charles Kingsley Alton Locke and Cheap Clothes and Nasty.
Similarly, a lot of works tried to fight to improve the labour situation, and
to get better the situation of women in the labour field (for example, The Condition of the Working Class in
“Women as subject in Victorian Art- representations of
women”. 25/12/2006. The Victorian Web. Inc. 21/12/2007
http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/arts2.html
To sum up with the first part of my
paper, I have to add a few lines about the Pre-Raphaelite women. The
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (also known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of
English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848 by John Everett Millais,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. The group's intention was to
reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach
first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo.
They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in
particular had been a corrupting influence on academic teaching of art.
"Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 8 Dec
2007, 18:52 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 7 Jan 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pre-Raphaelite_Brotherhood&oldid=176611969>
The Pre-Raphaelite artists used
women as their primary subject (as victims, old maids, prostitutes, etc.). These
artists hated to see their ideal creatures so degraded and they raised them to
the higher state they deserved. Some Pre-Raphaelite women were Elisabeth Eleanor
Siddall (ideal woman of Dante Gabriel Rossetti), Georgia Burne-Jones, Jane
Morris, etc.
“Women as subject in Victorian Art- representations of
women”. 25/12/2006. The Victorian Web. Inc. 21/12/2007
http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/arts2.html
Starting with the second part of my
paper, I must explain that I have tried to exhibit the role women have
displayed analysing five authors and some of their works. First, I want to
analyse the male authors and some of their works, to continue with the analysis
of women authors and some of their main works. The male figures that are
analysed in this part are Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lord
Alfred Tennyson. To introduce the ideas of these authors, I have to emphasize
that, in a general sense, the male speakers use their narrative voices to
suppress the female point of view and to enforce the patriarchal domination,
putting words in the female’s mouth, assigning a meaning to them or imposing
their views on them. Due to that, women are reduced to a fixed meaning.
Talking about Robert Browning,
I have selected two of his poems, called My Last Duchess
and Porphyria’s Lover.
My Last Duchess is a great
example of the dramatic monologue. It first appeared in
Analysing the poem, it start with
the word “that’s”, which involves a
conversational style: Browning treats to involve the readers in the situation,
in order to understand it; the monologue the speaker is making to the silent
listener is also a monologue for the readers. The first sentence put us in
situation, because the speaker explains us that he is going to talk about his
last wife pointing to a painting of her in the wall (“That’s my last duchess painted on the wall”). Then, the speaker
explains us how the painting was made: he expresses that Fra Pandolf (a monk)
made it. The sentence (“looking as if she
were alive”) shows us that the Duchess is dead, and that the picture is put
in the wall to contemplate her. Another important sentence in the beginning of
the poem is when the Duke betrays himself as a selfish and jealous person (“strangers like you this pictured
countenance,/that depth and passion of its earnest glance,/but to myself they
turned since none puts by/ the curtain drawn for you”). In that point of
the poem the reader understands that the Duke is a jealous person who seems to
have murdered his wife because he is the only one who can contemplate her
beauty. In that sense, the Duke explains that the painting only can be seen
when he wants to and nobody has the power to display it, and there is not any
need to say that thing because the painting stands on the house of the Duke and
for that reason, he is the owner of it and nobody can enter without his
consent. I understand that the Duke murdered his wife in an action of jealousy
and once she is dead he has absolute control over her, he thought he should be
the only person at whom she can smile directly, and she is an art object in the
Duke’s collection of paintings and statues. Another sentence that has this
meaning is when the Duke says (“much the
same smile? This grew; I gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped together”).
In my opinion, the Duke is saying that he gave commands to somebody to stop the
smiles of his wife, so, to kill her as the solution of his jealousy.
Afterwards, the Duke draws back the curtain and asks to the listener about his
lord’s daughter, because the listener is a courier who is arranging for the
Duke his second marriage, and in that point, he demonstrates his male
chauvinism and egocentrism again when he calls the girl as his object (“at starting is my object”). Finally,
the Duke hints his intentions by looking a second piece of art, a sculpture of
Neptune (“Notice
Porphyria’s Lover is another
example of dramatic monologue which appeared in 1836 as “Porphylia”. Then, it was republished in Dramatic Lyrics in 1842 under the name of “Madhouse Cells”, and it received its actual name in 1863. The poem
describes a man who kills her beautiful lover because she loves him. It is a
sixty-line poem consisting of one long stanza, written in a conversational
style, but with a maintained rhyme (ABABB) and a strictly meter. The speaker, a
man who is in a cottage, sees her lover, Porphyria, coming in out a storm and
proceeding to make a fire. The girl takes off the wet clothes and calls her
lover, but she does not receive any answer (lines 14-15 “she sat down by my side/ And call'd
To conclude with these two poems, I
must say that both poems describe a possessive speaker, a male chauvinist
character who locates women in an inferior level. We do not hear the female
voice in these poems, we suppose what the women think because the male speakers
tell us it. The male’s objection of a female is taken to an extreme, and the
result is fatal for the women. The male speaker possesses the female character
as an object, and he strangles her in both cases because of the sense of
domination over the woman. Robert Browning is, from my point of view, criticizing
the idea of domination over women, he is illustrating that nobody can posses
other person and anybody who tries to posses something that does not belong to him
acts against it and destroys it, because the sense of superiority and
domination is too difficult to control. The author is contradicting the idea of
inferiority of women using a “part-real” story and an imaginary story in his
poetry, so these poems depict the women as victims in a society that take them
as inferiors.
The following author I want to
stress is Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his works Jenny
and The Blessed Damozel.
Jenny is a long poem (400 lines) written
in 1869 and published in
The Blessed Damozel is a 151
lines poem first published in 1846, and it is a painting of the same author
(1871). In that sense, we have a double approach, the text and the image. In
the painting, the poet appears and he is visualising a dream of her blessed
damozel in heaven, where we can see the clear difference between life and death
(he is alive, because he is separate of heaven, and she is dead because she is
in heaven). The poem, which I am going to analyse, presents a damozel (a poetic
version of a damsel, a young unmarried lady) who is observing her lover from
heaven. The two lovers are separated by the death of the damozel and she is
praying God to enter to the paradise only with her lover and not alone. There are
two narrative voices in the poem, which are the voices of the two characters,
the damozel and the lover. She is described as a damsel, a young unmarried
lady, with yellow hair, as a Madonna (ideal woman). It assumes the purity and
the innocence she has (lines 7-12: “Her
robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,/ No wrought flowers did adorn,/ But a white
rose of Mary's gift/ On the neck meetly worn;/ And her hair, lying down her
back,/ Was yellow like ripe corn”). Moreover, she loves him a lot although
for her in heaven one day counts as ten years, and the way she looks at him is
the same that it was when she was on earth, despite the fact that time passes on
earth but not in heaven (lines 18-19: “her day/
Had counted as ten years”). On the other hand, her lover is thinking about
her and he describes her voice like a birds’ song, and he says he can heard her
voice. The young lady tries to justify that they should be together saying that
they are two, two prayers with the same aim, and she tells us how the relations
are between other lovers in heaven. Finally, we know she is at the outer gates
of heaven because she accepts her situation and she understands that she must
wait until his lover’s death (lines 140-141-142: “She gazed, and listen'd, and then said,/ Less sad of speech than
mild,--/ 'All this is when he comes.'”; lines 148-149: “And then she cast her arms along/ The golden
barriers”). The lovers admit their situation and at the end of the poem he
declares she is crying, as he could heard her voice and her tears, as if he
knows she is suffering due to his absence: (lines 150-151: “And laid her face between her hands,/ And
wept. (I heard her tears.)”). In that poem, Dante Gabriel Rossetti expresses
his Christian belief: she is in heaven with the angels, with Christ the Lord,
with the Mother Mary and with Dove (the Holy Spirit), and their love must also
be accepted by God. Consequently, and following what some critics have decided,
the poem is considerate as an optimistic love poem, because the lovers stand
for hope and they accept to pray for their reunion in heaven.
If we compare these two poems we can
assure that both are presented from a male’s point of view. Jenny is related by a man, and we do not
hear any feminine voice. The Blessed
Damozel is recounted from the man’s view, too, because the lady only tells
us what she sees in heaven and her requests to God. The women are a desire
object and all their feelings are supposed by the man’s voice. Rossetti’s
speaker imagines the woman saying what he wants to hear, although in the last
poem we can hear a little of the female’s voice, but it is not enough to assert
that the woman is a complete character and the main idea we have of her is by
the male’s speech. Moreover, the love story of the second poem is a classical
story, where the woman needs her lover even when she is dead, but I ask if it
is the real life, because I think that it is not, even in that time (what can
be called “idealize love story”). In addition, the author provides an unreal
communication between the male and the female figure in both poems. In the
first one, there is no real communication between them. Jenny is asleep and the
only speaker is the man who assumes what the lady is thinking, and even though
the speaker does not control the woman by putting words in her mouth, he
imposes his views on her. In the second
poem, the young lady has her own voice but it is insufficient in comparison
with the man’s voice, and he supposes things without any real prove (when he
says he is hearing her tears, for example). As a conclusion, in spite of these
assumptions, Rossetti’s work is not against the female figure. In Jenny, Rossetti is trying to dispute
about the role of the prostitutes in the Victorian society, asking if Jenny and
the prostitutes are the bad influence for the society or if it is the society
which influences badly these women. In the second one, the author is
representing an idealized love, where the woman is the most damaged figure but
it is a God’s decision (because she is dead in the heaven). In my opinion, the
two women of these poems represent women as victims due to they are victims of
their own life: Jenny is a prostitute, so she is a victim of her social
position (her job), and The Blessed
Damozel represents the woman as a victim of a tragic love.
Now I have selected another author, Lord
Alfred Tennyson, and two of his major works: Mariana
and The Lady of Shalott.
Mariana is a poem of seven twelve-line
stanzas that uses the iambic tetrameter and the rhyme ABAB CDCD EFEF. It was
published in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical,
in 1830. The poem talks about a lady who is isolated of the world. Tennyson
describes the lady and her complicate mental condition using the landscape, her
house: (“With blackest moss the
flower-plots/ Were thickly crusted, one and all:/ The rusted nails fell from
the knots/ That held the pear to the gable-wall”; lines 61-64: “All day within the dreamy house,/ The doors
upon their hinges creak'd;/ The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse/ Behind
the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,/ Or from the crevice peer'd about”). The
author describes an old house, too dreary, dark and sad, and that description
can be used to describe the lady’s character. The author is addressing the issue
of an individual and her lack of connection with society. She laments in all
the stanzas that her life is dreary and her loneliness encourages her to wish
her death: “She said, 'I am aweary,
aweary,/ I would that I were dead!”, (according to the Victorian Web, it is
a typical characteristic of the Victorian Time). Moreover, she is depressed and the reader
knows it, but I cannot give a correct interpretation of why she is depressed
and what the meaning of the poem is. Probably she has lost her lover or she is
waiting for a lover who never comes (as Shakespeare’s Mariana poem), and for that reason she is isolated from the world
and that situation is killing her, and maybe Tennyson tries to show the
situation of subordination that women suffered in that time and he encourages
them to face their fear with that poem. Despite that interpretation, which is
my own vision of the poem, the Wikipedia encyclopedia offers two
interpretations of the poems, one that supports that the poem is an allegory of
Tennyson’s early life, and the second that assumes that the poem is an allusion
of Tennyson’s father mental illness.
"Mariana." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 9 Jan 2008, . Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc. 9 Jan 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mariana&oldid=183146557
The lady of Shalott is a poem with two versions: one
published in 1833, of twenty stanzas, and the other on 1842 of nineteen
stanzas. The poem talks about a young lady who is trapped in a tower by a
curse: she cannot go outside the tower, and what is worse, she cannot look
outside the tower. She only has a mirror where she sees some things from the
outside world: the river, the road, red cloaks, damsels and knights, etc. The
young lady is weaving all the time but one day she notices the knight Lancelot
and she falls in love with him. The young woman decides to face her fear and
she looks outside to see Lancelot, and she abandons the tower. Luckily, she
finds a boat in the river, where she writes her name, and she decides to go to
Camelot. But the curse was real and she must die. At the end, Lancelot sees the
lady dead in the boat. That poem exemplifies the tragic love; a woman forgoes
everything for love.
An interesting thing which implies
that poem is the visual repercussion it has. There are a lot of paintings that
follow the topic of The Lady of Shalott, and it was one of the most important
topics in the Victorian Time, mainly in the Pre-Raphaelite authors because of
its eroticized medieval setting and tragic subject, popular themes in the
Pre-Raphaelite art. According to Elisabeth Nelson, the Lady of Shalott inspired many Pre-Raphaelite artists because of
its tragic subject and the treatment of the role of the artist. For the male
artists, the lady is represented as an object of desire, depicting her as an
idealized woman: pure, beautiful, mysterious, unattainable, embowered,
spiritual and dedicated to her tasks. Some examples are the works of Sidney
Harold Meteyard, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. For the female
artists, the lady is defined by her position, in relation to her surroundings
and her situation of imprisonment, or in relation to her status in society.
Some examples are the works of Elizabeth Sidall, Florence Rutland and Inez Warry.
What is clear is that each author makes his own representation, for example,
some of them paint the lady in the tower, in front of the mirror, others paint
the lady in her boat, or her death, etc.
Erin Frauenhofer '09, English 151. “Men vs women: illustrating “The Lady of
Shalott””.
Extracted from: Nelson,
Moreover, some critics, whom I agree
with, have stated that that poem, as many other poems, shows the role of the Victorian
women. The lady is inside her “home”, and she cannot look outside, the external
world. It could be a parallelism of the women’s situation: their place is the
house and they are not able to look further because they have not any
possibility of changing the society, and any decision to take. The
responsibility of the lady lies in her acceptance of her passive role in life,
as the Victorian women, and her death is the consequence of being in the place
reserved to men. William Holman Hunt, creator of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, assumes that “the poem epitomized the failure of a human soul
towards its accepted responsibility… in her isolation, she is charge to see
life with a mind supreme and elevated in judgement”.
“The Lady of Shalott: Pre-Raphaelite attitudes toward
women in society”. Meg Mariotti '05.5,
English/History of Art 151, Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetes, and Decadents,
http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/prb/mariotti12.html
Comparing the two poems, I can
affirm that this critic approach can be applied to Mariana. In both poems we can see a woman isolated of the world,
with any opportunity to change their situation. Both ladies should assume their
passive role and the no-acceptance implies a fatal ending: when the lady of
Shallot gets away from the tower, she goes from one way of captivity (the
tower) to another (her death). Similarly,
the poem starts with a description of the landscape where she is imprisoned (as
in Mariana), and in both cases the
landscape is a way to express the women’s situation: the isle of Shallot is
isolated and silent, as Mariana’s house (that reveals their situation of
isolation). In the second poem, the author does not mention what the lady looks
like, what she thinks or why she is cursed. We only hear her voice twice: when
she looks out of the window and when she realises that the curse was real (and in
Mariana we really hear her voice in
two different phrases, too). What differs from one poem to the other is that
the lady of Shallot faces her fear, not Mariana, despite the fact that she is a
victim of her situation and there is nothing she can do to change it. In my
opinion, what Tennyson has showed in these two poems is the embowered women,
the female victim of her situation, her society and her condition of woman, and
regarding The Lady of Shalott, it is
the representation of the woman as an object of desire (the idealized woman who
is surely desired by all men).
Now it is the turn of the female
authors, who are Christina Rossetti and Elisabeth Barret Browning. During the
Victorian Time a new kind of woman appears as a generous creature, capable,
modest, something franker than a Frenchwoman, more to be trusted than an
Italian, as brave as an American but more refined, faithful, with innate
dignity and purity of her nature. There were a lot of discussions of women’s
political and social rights and they extended themselves into a wide range of possibilities
in different fields (as artists, workers, politics, critics, etc).
“The Victorian Age: Topic 2: Text and Contents”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
2003-2008. W.W. Norton and Company. 20 Dec 2007 http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/topic_2/linton.htm
The first female author I have
selected is Christina Rossetti and two of her works: Song and Monna Innominata.
Song is a short individual poem written
in 1862. It is the speech of a dead lady to her lover. The female speaker
claims to her lover that she must not be unhappy and sad because of her death,
because she is happy. She does not want the devotional ritual that people make
when a dear person dies (to sing sad songs, to offer roses, to plant
cypresses). The lady assumes her death and she knows she maybe will be happy in
heaven, and her lover maybe could be happy on earth. So, it is as if the lady
says: “I know that the normal things are to pay tribute to the dead person, to
be sad; but I am different, I am happy in heaven and I want for my lover to be
happy, too. Darling, you do not need to be sad, because in a future time you
will forget me, and in my case, I probably will forget you”.
Christina Rossetti provides a female
view in front of other Victorian works that make women into objects as The Lady of Shalott or Mariana. Moreover, it is as if the author
faces her brother’s poem The Blessed
Damozel, where the lady needs her lover to be happy after her death. In Song, the lady is able to be happy in
heaven on her owns. She feels no pain; there are not fears for the lady. Further
on, the lady expresses indifference towards her lover when she says (lines 7-8:
“And if thou wilt, remember,/ And if thou
wilt, forget”), which is not typical of the love poems. Despite the fact
that we do not have any clues about her age or if really the speaker is a
woman, the way the speaker talks and the way the speaker thinks and acts is
what make us think that it is a woman. Basically, the author of the poem
rejected the traditional male role as the speaker and uses a female voice to
tell to the readers her poem and to offer her view about love. Christina
Rossetti offers a different perspective which we have not seen in other poems.
For example, in The Lady of Shalott,
the woman is an object of desire submitted to a curse; in Jenny, the lady is an object of desire again and there is any
female voice; in Mariana the lady is
subordinated to a lover who never comes; in The
Blessed Damozel the damsel needs her lover to be happy in heaven (again the
subordination of women to men); in My
last Duchess the man has all control over her; and in Porphyria’s lover we do not hear the female voice, too, and she is
dominated by the male. For those things, I can assure that we are in front of a
new kind of poetry, the female poetry, where the female figure acts in the
poems, she has narrative voice and she is not dependent of a man, she is free.
In Song, Rossetti stands for the
freedom of women who do not need a man to be happy and to triumph in life, they
are equal than the men and they have the same rights than them, as well as they
have voice and no-men can talk instead of them or can think by them. Song is not the typical love poem, where
the lady suffers for his knight; it is a love poem where the author treats to
express her view in favour of the equality of women, where the female voice reconfigures
the poetic tradition.
Monna Innominata is a composition of sonnets written
in 1881 and published in Poems in
1890 that shows a lady talking to her lover. At the beginning, the lady claims
her love with the man, but as long as the poem improves its content, the lady
assumes her role of being a free woman and decides to take the spiritual love,
the love that merges herself with God.
For example, in the first sonnet we see the scene of the lady waiting
for her lover (“O love, my world is you”).
After, she talks about the first day they met, which she cannot remember, and
the beautiful things he transmits to her, but then she states that she loved
him at first, but now she gives preference to the spiritual love, with God in
heaven. For that reason, death is a good option and she is not afraid of it.
She suggests that her lover is free as she is free, too; and he can look for
another girl (“If there be any one can
take my place/ And make you happy whom I grieve to grieve,/ Think not that I
can grudge it, but believe/ I do commend you to that nobler grace”). So,
she is declaring that she prefers to die and to have a spiritual love with God
in heaven where she is going to be happy eternally than their love on earth,
she choose to forgo the pleasures of the earthly love for her faith. Moreover,
the author states the idea of love and death, as she has done in other poems
like Song. On the other hand, in the
prelude of the poem Christina Rossetti states that she wants to give voice to
the female figures that had been silenced during time, the heroic ladies of the
world, the main characters of many poems and writings that had not voice in the
past. We can see that in the fragment of this prelude: “The heroines of world-wide fame were preceded by a bevy of unnamed
ladies 'donne innominate' sung by a school of less conspicuous poets; and in
that land and that period which gave simultaneous birth to Catholics, to
Albigenses, and to Troubadours, one can imagine many a lady as sharing her
lover's poetic aptitude, while the barrier between them might be one held
sacred by both, yet not such as to render mutual love incompatible with mutual
honour. "Had such a lady spoken for herself, the portrait left us might
have appeared more tender, if less dignified, than any drawn even by a devoted
friend ...”. As well as she gives importance to what the main purpose of
the poem is, she underlines Dante and Petrarch, and their heroines Beatrice and
Laura.
Ian Lancashire for the Department of English,
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1754.html
At the beginning of each stanza,
which is a complete sonnet, the author adds a short sentence or phrase from the
writings of Dante and Petrarch, and it has been seen as the result of her
admiration to these personalities or as a way to emphasize the importance of
the female voice in her poem in contrast with their works. In my opinion, the Women “Innominate” are the unnamed ladies
with no voice, and Rossetti wants to give real voice to Beatrice and Laura, the
female characters of Dante and Petrarch, and she wants to express that the female
figures have voice on its own as well as the male figures have it. It is like
Christina Rossetti says: “it’s time to give to the historical muses the voice
they deserve”. Although there are a lot of studies about the relations of Dante
and Petrarch and their writings to the poem, and despite the fact that the poem
has a literary-historical complexity due to the references to Dante, Petrarch,
Keats and other writers, I have only read the poem in the topic of the female
voice and the role of the woman in the poem. In that sense, the author
strengthens that the female figure is not a silent object, she has voice, her own
conscience and her own right and she takes her own decisions without asking to
her lover. She is a woman who choose the spiritual salvation and who argues
that her lover can have other beloved because her decision is well-rationalised
and she is sure of it. The fact that the lady chooses the spiritual “love”
reflects also the deep religious beliefs of the author, because the composition
is plenty of biblical references as the River Jordan, or Esther, a biblical
character. Moreover, if we compare this
female character with other female characters of the time, as the cursed lady
of The Lady of Shalott, the dependent
lady of The Blessed Damozel or the
prostitute with no voice of Jenny,
Christina Rossetti’s character is free, rational, and she handles her own life
and her own decisions.
Comparing these two poems, I can
assure that Rossetti expresses some kind of reminiscences of devotion and the
self-sacrifice of the woman who understands that her lover needs another woman
to be happy. I both poems the author represents an independent woman, virtuous
and self-confident, who decides what she wants to be, what she wants to do
without any troubles with her lover, and who only needs the spiritual love that
God gives her on earth and in heaven. The women are not objects of desire,
there are voices that claim their rights and their freedom. As we have seen in
the analysis of Song, Christina
Rossetti offers a different perspective which we have not seen in other poems.
For example, in The Lady of Shalott,
the woman is an object of desire submitted to a curse; in Jenny, the lady is an object of desire (a prostitute) with no
voice; in Mariana the lady is
subordinated to a lover who never comes; in The
Blessed Damozel the damsel is dependent of her lover to be happy, even in
heaven; in My last Duchess the man
has all control over her; and in Porphyria’s
lover we do not hear the female voice, too, and she is dominated by the
male. In these poems, all women are victims of their condition of woman due to
the inequalities of their society. So, in my opinion, Christina Rossetti
creates a new poetry that emphasizes the female voice and fights against the
male domination not only in poetry, but also in literature and in the whole
society, too.
The following female author I have
analysed is Elisabeth Barret Browning and her “novel in verse” Aurora
Leigh.
Aurora Leigh is called “novel-poem” due to its
extension, the way the author relates the acts and actions, the complete story
it presents and its blank verse. This poem (1856) presents the autobiography of
Aurora Leigh who tells us the story of her life through nine books. This poem,
which is a long poem, is considered one of the most powerful poems in its
meaning, because it reflects much of the author’s feelings in different fields.
Summarising the poem, it presents
Aurora, a female poet, who relates her autobiography for her better self. She
tells us that she “have written much in
prose and verse/ For others' uses, will write now for mine,–/ Will write my
story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,/ Who keeps it in a drawer
and looks at it/ Long after he has ceased to love you, just/ To hold together
what he was and is”.
First Book: It presents
Second Book: He is twenty years old, and she is
woman and artist, but incomplete. Her cousin proposes marriage to her but she
declines, because her artistic career is not compatible with her woman-wife role,
and because Romney believes that women do not have the capacity of being
artists. Her aunt gets upset because of her denial due to the fact that she was
educated as a good lady and a responsible wife and she tries to teach it to
Third Book:
Fourth Book:
Fifth Book: At the beginning,
Sixth Book:
Seventh Book: Marian continues her narration: she
was taken as a maid but she was fired due to her pregnancy.
Eighth Book: They are in
Ninth Book:
Aurora Leigh is
supposed to be a autobiographical poem, because at the beginning of it we read:
“Of writing many books there is no end;/
And I who have written much in prose and verse/ For others' uses, will write
now for mine,–/ Will write my story for my better self, / As when you paint
your portrait for a friend,/ Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it/ Long
after he has ceased to love you, just/ To hold together what he was and is”.
What is not clear is if the poem is the part-real story of Elisabeth Barret
Browning, or an invention used to show her ideals. Analysing her biography, we
notice that Browning’s mother died when she was twenty-two years old.
Wayne Huang '97 (English 168 Sec. 2, 1996). “Problems of Autobiography and Fictional
Autobiography in Aurora Leigh”. The Victorian Web. Inc. 4 Jan 2008
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/huangal.html
What is really important of that
poem in our analysis of the female voice and the women’s role in Victorian Time
is that Aurora Leigh is one of the
better expressions of feminism in the Victorian poetry. It is a clear
representation of the women’s role and a statement of intent: a declaration
against the oppression and the inequality that women suffered during the
Victorian Time. Elisabeth Barret Browning uses Aurora to defend her ideals in
this field: she is an independent woman, intelligent, educated in very
different fields, who rejects the “normal” female role in that time: the woman
must stay at home, looking after her husband and her children, she cannot be an
artist and she cannot enjoy her world as a free person.
First of all, I want to emphasize
that the author shows some different representations of women. In the First
Book, she describes the different incarnations of women in literature by male
writers:
“Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy,
witch, and sprite,–
A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful
Fate,
A loving Psyche who loses sight of
Love,
A still Medusa, with mild milky brows
All curdled and all clothed upon with
snakes
Whose slime falls fast as sweat will;
or, anon,
Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with
swords
Where the Babe sucked; or,
Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk
and blinked,
And, shuddering, wriggled down to the
unclean;
Or, my own mother, leaving her last
smile
In her last kiss, upon the baby-mouth”
Elisabeth Barret Browning. Aurora Leigh.
Elisabeth Barret Browning’s female
figure is not a ghost, not an angel or a Medusa; she is the culmination of all
these representations, the complete women, who is able to score a hit in her
life, who can obtain whatever she wants to. This fighter woman teaches us the
power that a woman has, and she showed to the Victorian society, and to their
readers, that the power of a pen is stronger than any other weapon. I have
selected some passages of the poem where the author, through the speaker, takes
a stand in the Woman Question:
SECOND BOOK:
-“Men and women make the world as
head and heart make human life” (Romney)
-“If your sex is weak for art, it is
strong for life and duty” (Romney to
-“You misconceive the question like a
man, who sees a woman as the complement of his sex merely. You forget too much
that every creature, female and male, stands single in responsible act and
thought, in birth and death” (Aurora to Romney)
-“This boy is generous and prepared
to carry out his kindest word and thought to you”/ “I instruct you how to eat,
drink, stand or sit, even lie” (
FOURTH BOOK:
-“If marriage be a contract,
contracting parties should be equal” (
-“How arrogant men are. Who try to
take a wife up in the way they put down a subscription-cheque? / I suppose we
women should remember what we are” (
FIFTH BOOK:
-“We women are too apt to look to
one, which proves a certain impotence in art” (
-“Must I work in vain, without the
approbation of a man? It cannot be, it shall not be” (
-“My ballads prospered, but the
ballad’s race is rapid for a poet who bear weights of thought and golden image”
(
SEVENTH BOOK:
-“The world’s male chivalry has
perished out, but women are knights-errant to the last- and if Cervantes had
been greater hill, he had made his Don a Donna” (
EIGHTH BOOK:
-“If he cannot work with us (women),
he will work over us. Does he want a man, much less a woman?” (
-“Let us be content, in work, to do
the thing we can, and not presume to fret because it’s little” (
“A woman cannot do the thing she
ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science,
but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must
prove what she can do before she does it, -a prate of woman’s right- of woman’s
mission, woman’s function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side)
cry, poor souls, they are very reasonable vexed! They cannot hear each other
speak” (
-“By speaking we prove only we can
speak: which he, the man here, never doubted. What he doubts, is whether we can
do the thing with decent grace, we’ve not yet done at all” (
NINTH BOOK:
-“Male poets are preferable, tiring
less and teaching more” (Lady Waldemar)
-“I, Aurora, fell from mine: I would
not be a woman like the rest, a simple woman who believes in love, and owns the
right of love because she loves, and, hearing she’s beloved, is satisfied with
what contents God: I must analyse, confront, and question; just as if a fly”
(Aurora).
Elisabeth Barret Browning. Aurora Leigh.
As we can understand reading this
long poem, Elisabeth Barret Browning uses the fictional characters to show her
own feelings and thoughts. Aurora Leigh
is a declaration of her author in the sense of the Woman Question: she urges to
fight the situation women suffered, and she demands to the women to finish with
their unequal situation, and using her poetry, she tries to make aware of this
situation to help to the women to fight it, to change the society and the
social mind. In Aurora Leigh, the
author represents different kinds of women: Aurora’s aunt is the “ideal” woman
in society, the “perfect” lady; Marian is the lower-class woman who decides to
start her life in her own way (the first step in this fight) and Aurora is the
incarnation of the fighter woman, who depends only on herself, who faces up to
the society and who breaks the rules. As Aurora states in the poem: “I would not be a woman like the rest,
a simple woman who believes in love, and owns the right of love because she
loves, and, hearing she’s beloved, is satisfied with what contents God: I must
analyse, confront, and question; just as if a fly” (Ninth Book).
"Women in the Victorian
era." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 10 Jan 2008, 17:58 UTC. Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc. 10 Jan 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Women_in_the_Victorian_era&oldid=184778646.
Changes started during the 19th
century, when in 1873 the Custody of
Infants Act extended access to children to all women in the event of
separation or divorce. In 1878, after an amendment to the Matrimonial Causes Act, women could secure a separation on the
grounds of cruelty and claim custody of their children. An important change was
caused by an amendment to the Married
Women's Property Act in 1884 that made a woman no longer a property of a
men but an independent and separate person. Another improvement in that sense
was made through the Guardianship of
Infants Act in 1886, when women could be made the sole guardian of their
children if their husband died.
"Women in the Victorian era." Wikipedia, The
Free Encyclopedia. 10 Jan 2008, 17:58 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 10 Jan
2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Women_in_the_Victorian_era&oldid=184778646
In conclusion, the Victorian Era was
a period of inequalities between women and men, but also the period when important
changes started in this field. We have seen that, using poetry, and art in
general, people have fight the inequalities of their society. Thought the
analysis of the main poems in that époque, we can understand the women’s role
in that Era, and also the female voice which was projected, or invented, in
some cases. Using the male authors I have analysed we can understand the female
role in poetry and the lack of voice that women had, despite the fact that
these male poets represented women as victims of the society in general
(because of a tragic love, of death, of her status…).
As a summary, Robert Browning talks
about a woman in My last Duchess but
we do not hear her voice, and what is show is that the man has all control over
her, and in Porphyria’s lover we do
not hear the female voice, too, and she is dominated by the male. Dante Gabriel
Rossetti represents in Jenny a
prostitute, the lady is an object of desire again and there is any female voice
and The Blessed Damozel shows that
the damsel needs her lover to be happy in heaven (again the subordination of
women to men). Additionally, Lord Alfred Tennyson uses The Lady of Shalott to represent a woman as an object of desire
submitted to a curse, and, in Mariana,
the lady is subordinated to a lover who never comes. On the other hand, the
female writers represent another kind of woman. Christina Rossetti, in her poem
Song, stands for an independent woman
who do not need a man to triumph in life, equal than the men and with the same
rights; and Monna Innominata is a
poem where we can see the power of a female voice. Finally, Elisabeth Barret
Browning represents a fighter, a woman who knows what she want and who tries to
reach their aims without any men’s help. I think that it is a declaration of
the women’s rights but using a poetical form.
In my opinion, this analysis is a
great way to study an era, but using poetry. And what is greater is the fact
that some poets used their poetry to show their inclinations in order to
improve what they thought that was unequal in society. Despite the fact that
women belonged to different social classes, and each had its own organisation
(higher-class women were presumably happy with their situation); what is clear
is that it was not equal for all the people, and as an irregularity, it must be
changed.
REFERENCES:
(1)- Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Astarte Syriaca. 1877. Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagen:Astarte_Syriaca.jpg
(2)- Fernand Khnopff. Medusa. 1900. The Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/khnopff/sculpture/3.html
(3)- Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Found. 1853/1859. The Victorian Web.
http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/dgr/paintings/11.html
(4)- Sir John
Everett Millais. Ophelia. 1852. Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Millais_-_Ophelia.jpg
(5)- Hiram Powers. The Greek Slave.
1851. The Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/sculpture/usa/powers2.html
(6)- George Frederick Watts. Orpheus
and Eurydice. 1817-1904. The Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/watts/paintings/1.html
(7)- John William Waterhouse. St
Eulalia. 1885. The Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/jww/paintings/eulalia.html
(8)- Edward
Burne-Jones. Sleeping beauty.
1870-1890. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty
(9)- Arthur Hughes. The Lady of Shalott.
1873. The Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/hughes/paintings/7.html
(10)- John William Waterhouse. The Lady
of Shallot. 1888. The Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/jww/paintings/shalott2.html
(11)- Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Lady
of Shalott. 1857. Published in Lord Tennyson’s Poems (London: E. Moxon, 1857). The Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/dgr/8.html
(12)- Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The
Girlhood of Mary. 1848-1849. The Artchive. http://www.artchive.com/artchive/R/rossetti/rossetti_girlhood.jpg.html
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
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http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1754.html
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Inc. 4 Jan 2008
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/huangal.html
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