Role of women in victorian era:

Comparison between

Elizabeth Barret Browning

and

Robert Browning

1-. Elizabeth Barrett Browning Biography:

Elizabeth spent her youth at Hope End near Great Malvern, England. The Barrett family had amassed a considerable fortune from the Jamaican sugar plantations inherited by her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, who was born there. The Barretts had been associated with Jamaica for generations. As a boy he emigrated to England with his brother and sister (she is the subject of the painting "Pinkie" in the Huntington Museum). He and his wife, Mary Graham-Clarke, were parents of twelve children (Elizabeth was the eldest). Elizabeth was educated at home and attended lessons with her brother's tutor and was thus well-educated for a girl of that time.

In her early teens, Barrett contracted a lung complaint, possibly tuberculosis, although the exact nature of her illness has been the subject of speculation. She was subsequently regarded as an invalid by her family. The first poem we have a record of is from the age of six or eight (the manuscript is in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; the date is in question because the 2 in the date 1812 is written over something else that is scratched out). A long Homeric poem titled "The Battle of Marathon" was published when she was fourteen, her father underwriting its cost. In 1826 she published her first collection of poems, "An Essay on Mind and Other Poems." Its publication drew the attention of a blind scholar of the Greek language, Hugh Stuart Boyd, and another Greek scholar, Uvedale Price, with both of whom she maintained a scholarly correspondence. At Boyd's suggestion, she translated Aeschylus's "Prometheus Bound" (published in 1833; retranslated in 1850).

The abolition of slavery, a cause which she supported (see her work The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point (1849)), considerably reduced Mr. Barrett's means. He with his family first to Sidmouth and afterwards to London. After the move to London, she continued to write, contributing to various periodicals "The Romaunt of Margaret", "The Romaunt of the Page", "The Poet's Vow", and other pieces, and corresponded with literary figures of the time, including Mary Russell Mitford. In 1838 appeared The Seraphim and Other Poems.

The death of her brother, Edward, who drowned in a sailing accident at Torquay in 1840, had a serious effect on her already fragile health; and for several years she rarely left her bedroom. Eventually, however, she regained strength, and meanwhile her fame was growing. The publication in 1843 of "The Cry of the Children" gave it a great impulse, and about the same time she contributed some critical papers in prose to Richard Henry Horne's A New Spirit of the Age. In 1844 she published two volumes of Poems, which included "A Drama of Exile", "Vision of Poets", and "Lady Geraldine's Courtship".

In 1845 she met her future husband, Robert Browning, who had written to her after the publication of her Poems. Their courtship and marriage, owing to her delicate health and the extraordinary objections made by Mr. Barrett to the marriage of any of his children, were carried out secretly. After a private marriage at St Marylebone Parish Church, she accompanied her husband to the Italian Peninsula, which became her home almost continuously until her death.

The union proved a happy one. In her new circumstances Elizabeth's strength greatly increased. At the age of 43 she gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, called "Pen". The Brownings settled in Florence, and there she wrote Casa Guidi Windows (1851) under the inspiration of the Tuscan struggle for liberty, with which she and her husband were in sympathy. In Florence she became close friend of British-born poets Isabella Blagden and Theodosia Trollope Garrow.

The verse-novel Aurora Leigh, her most ambitious, and perhaps the most popular of her longer poems, appeared in 1856. It is the story of a woman writer making her way in life, balancing work and love.

Among Browning's best known lyrics is Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) - the 'Portuguese' being her husband's petname for dark-haired Elizabeth. The title also refers to the series of sonnets of the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luis de Camões; in all these poems she used rhyme schemes typical of the Portuguese sonnets. In 1860 she issued a small volume of political poems titled Poems before Congress. Her health underwent a change for the worse; she gradually lost strength, and died on June 29, 1861. She is buried in the English Cemetery, Florence.

Based on notes taken from wikipedia and cswnet

2-. Robert Browning Biography:

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell,^[1] a suburb of London, England, on May 7, 1812, the first son of Robert and Sarah Anna Browning. His father was a man of both fine intellect and character, who worked as a well-paid clerk for the Bank of England. Robert's father amassed a library of around 6,000 books, many of them obscure and arcane. Thus, Robert was raised in a household of significant literary resources. His mother, with whom he was ardently bonded, was a devout Nonconformist. He had a younger sister, also gifted, who became the companion in her brother's later years. As a family unit they lived simply, and his father encouraged his interest in literature and the Arts.

In childhood, he was distinguished by love of poetry and natural history. By twelve, he had written a book of poetry, which he destroyed when no publisher could be found. After being at one or two private schools, and showing an insuperable dislike of school life, he was educated by a tutor.

Browning was a rapid learner and by the age of fourteen was fluent in French, Greek, Italian and Latin as well as his native English. He became a great admirer of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley. Following the precedent of Shelley, Browning became an atheist and vegetarian, both of which he later shed. At age sixteen, he attended University College, London, but left after his first year. His mother’s staunch evangelical faith circumscribed the pursuit of his reading at either Oxford or Cambridge, then both only available to members of the Church of England. Through his mother he inherited musical talent and he composed arrangements of various songs.

In 1845, Browning met Elizabeth Barrett, who lived in her father's house in Wimpole Street. Gradually a significant romance developed between them, leading to their secret marriage in 1846. (The marriage was initially secret because Elizabeth's father disapproved of marriage for any of his children.) From the time of their marriage, the Brownings lived in Italy, first in Pisa, and then, within a year, finding an apartment in Florence which they called Casa Guidi (now a museum to their memory). Their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, nicknamed "Penini" or "Pen", was born in 1849. In these years Browning was fascinated by and learned hugely from the art and atmosphere of Italy. He would, in later life, say that 'Italy was my university'.

Browning's poetry was known to the cognoscenti from fairly early on in his life, but he remained relatively obscure as a poet till his middle age. (In the middle of the century, Tennyson was much better known.) In Florence he worked on the poems that eventually comprised his two-volume Men and Women, for which he is now well known; in 1855, however, when these were published, they made little impact. It was only after his wife's death, in 1861, when he returned to England and became part of the London literary scene, that his reputation started to take off. In 1868, after five years work, he completed and published the long blank-verse poem The Ring and the Book, and finally achieved really significant recognition. Based on a convoluted murder-case from 1690s Rome, the poem is composed of twelve volumes, essentially comprising ten lengthy dramatic poems narrated by the various characters in the story showing their individual take on events as they transpire, bookended by an introduction and conclusion by Browning himself. Extraordinarily long even by Browning's own standards (over twenty thousand lines), The Ring and the Book was the poet's most ambitious project and has been hailed as a tour de force of dramatic poetry. Published separately in four volumes from November 1868 through to February 1869, the poem was a huge success both commercially and critically, and finally brought Browning the renown he had sought and deserved for nearly thirty years of work.

In the remaining years of his life, as well as traveling extensively and frequenting London literary society again, Browning managed to publish no less than fifteen new volumes. None of these later works gained the popularity of The Ring and the Book, and they are largely unread today. However, Browning's later work has been undergoing a major critical re-evaluation in recent years, and much of it remains of interest for its poetic quality and psychological insight. After a series of long poems published in the early 1870s, of which Fifine at the Fair and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country were the best-received, Browning again turned to shorter poems. The volume Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper included a spiteful attack against Browning's critics, especially the later Poet Laureate Alfred Austin.

According to some reports Browning became romantically involved with Lady Ashburton in the 1870s, but did not re-marry. In 1878, he returned to Italy for the first time in the seventeen years since Elizabeth's death, and returned there on several occasions.

The Browning Society was formed for the appreciation of his works in 1881.

In 1887, Browning produced the major work of his later years, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance In Their Day. It finally presented the poet speaking in his own voice, engaging in a series of dialogues with long-forgotten figures of literary, artistic, and philosophic history. Once more, the Victorian public was baffled by this, and Browning returned to the short, concise lyric for his last volume, Asolando (1889).

He died at his son's home Ca' Rezzonico in Venice on 12 December 1889, the same day Asolando was published, and was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey; his grave now lies immediately adjacent to that of Alfred Tennyson.

Based on notes taken form wikipedia and cswnet

3-. Role of women in victorian era

Two hundred years ago, the barriers of the Victorian class system rigidly defined the role of a woman. Divided into four distinct classes, Nobility and Gentry, Middle Class, "Upper" Working Class, and "Lower" Working class, these women each had their own specific standards and roles. They were expected to adhere to these standards alone, and it was considered a high offense to adopt to the standards of another.

The highest class was the Nobility and Gentry, who inherited their land, titles, and wealth. To the outsider, it might seem as if women of this class did very little--but their work was very important and sometimes very hard, as they were expected to manage the home and the household. As Etty Raverat, who was a young women in the late 1800s, said, "Ladies were ladies in those days; they did not do things themselves, they told others what to do and how to do it" (Harrison and Ford, 226).

However, this lifestyle left ample time for leisure. Social parties and balls were held often. Dancing was a favorite pastime among most upper-class women and men. An evening party often would end with a few sets among the four or five couples present. Unmarried women spent a great deal of time with other unmarried women. However, once a woman was married her role was considered manager of the household, and she had much less time than before to walk and talk with former friends.

Though the life of an upper class woman might seem easier and more secure than that of a lower class woman, it was not always so. Land, titles, and money were inherited by the closest male relative--typically the older son, but if there was no older son then it would go to a more distant relation. Only the small amount of money set aside as a woman’s marriage dowry went to an unmarried woman after the death of her father. As a result, many mothers and daughters were left extremely poor after the death of their husband and father (Mitchell, 107).

The next-highest class was the middle class. Women of this class were much like women of the upper class, though their lands were not so extensive nor their way of life so grand as that of the aristocracy and landed gentry. People of the middle class associated with their peers and sometimes with those in the upper class. Women of the middle class depended heavily on marrying "up" into the upper classes, therefore gaining social prestige as well as a great deal more worldly goods.

The middle class itself was a much broader area of people than the upper class. It included everyone between the working classes and the lower gentry. It depended mostly not on how much money one had, but on how this money was obtained (Mitchell, 20). Because of this, the singular roles of middle class women varied greatly from family to family. Some unmarried women might have a place in the family shop, while others might live very much as a genteel woman would, with little work and much leisure.

The third class was the "Upper" working class. This included any who were employed in jobs that took skill or thought, as opposed to physical labor. Women of the "Upper" working class often found positions in shops, as bookkeepers, or teachers. The unique women in this class were the former upper class women, who had fallen into poverty through the death of a father or some other tragedy. A great many of these women became governesses, relaying their own high-class tutoring to upper class children. This position was a deplorable one, as the governess was found a worthy scapegoat in the eyes of everyone, from the master and mistress to the house-maid (Allingham, 1).

The fourth and last of these classes was the "Lower" working class. This included the desperately poor, typically single women of the Victorian Era. Most women were pronounced "able-bodied" under the New Poor Act and sent to work alongside "Lower" working class men in the factories and other places offering jobs of taxing physical labor. Poor women, like men, were expected to work hard to support themselves (Levine-Clark, p. 1).

Another popular employment for "Lower" working class women was domestic service. Even the lowliest middle class family had at least one or two servants, and several had many more than that. Domestic service, though not as physically draining or demoralizing as factory work, had its own hardships. The life of a domestic servant was very lonely, while factory workers were allowed to socialize as they performed their tasks. Domestic servants worked seven days a week, twelve hours at least each day, while factory workers worked only six days and ten hours (Landow, p. 1).

Because of the restraint placed upon them, most women welcomed the suffrage movement when it came at the end of the Victorian period. Women of today may not realize how much they benefit from living in a time where such a class system no longer exists. The rigid division between classes in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries defined a woman’s role, giving her no other alternative than what was placed before her. Modern women are fortunate that they are not subject to such restraints and that they may chose whatever occupation they would like.

3.1- Elizabeth Barrett Browning: thinking about the role of women in victorian era (relating in to her poems,specially to Aurora Leigh)

Elizabeth Barret Browning does not conceal her feminist views in Aurora Leigh. The heroine, Aurora, constantly demonstrates her knowledge of art and literature, asserts her independence and speaks her opinions. In one sarcastic passage, Browning (with Aurora's voice) criticizes the conventional role of women:

The works of women are symbolical.
We sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you're weary — or a stool
To tumble over and vex you..."curse that stool!"
Or else, at best, a cushion where you lean
And sleep, and dream of something we are not,
But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!
This hurts most, this...that, after all, we are paid
The worth of our work, perhaps (15).

Amidst a novel-poem filled with such passages as this, the theme of a female leading character who saves a man does not seem out of context. Aurora Leigh, like many other Victorian novels, revolves around a central female character who marries her beloved man in the end of the novel and by so doing saves him from a life that would otherwise be meaningless and desolate.

Romney Leigh finds Aurora at the end of the novel, the perfect example of a man in need of salvation:

To be blind, turned out of nature, muleted as a man,
Refused the daily largesse of the sun
To humble creatures! When the feaver's heat
Dropped from me, as the flame did from my house.
And left me ruined like it, stripped of all
The hues and shapes of aspectable life,
A mere bare blind stone in the blaze of the day,
A man, upon the outside of the earth
As dark as ten feet under, in the grave (838).

Despite the seeming hopelessness of Romney's plight, after hearing that Aurora loved him, his outlook on life immediately brightened, his blind eyes became "majestic" and he dreamed of a "perfect noon" or future.

He stood a moment with erected brows,
In silence, as a creature might, who gazed:
Stood calm, and fed his blind, majestic eyes
Upon the thought of a perfect noon (351).

The salvation of a discouraged, ruined, or crippled man by the female heroine appears in several Victorian novels written by women. In each case, the author has feminist tendencies, and thus the theme does not seem out of place. For example, in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Jane's return to Thornfield to marry Rochester saves him from a future of solitude and despair. When Jane first sees Rochester, she notices in him "a change: that looked desperate and brooding — that reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe" (Bronte, 379). However, when Rochester learns that Jane still loves him, and will stay with him despite his blindness and his injuries, he becomes a changed man:

I thank my Maker that in the midst of judgment He has remembered mercy. I humbly entreat my redeemer to give me strength to henceforth lead a purer life than I have done hitherto." Then he stretched his hand out to be led. I took that dear hand, held it a moment to my lips, then let it pass round my shoulder...I served both for his prop and guide. We entered the wood and wended homeward (395).

Under Jane's care and guidance, Rochester plans a better, purer, and happier life and, indeed, fulfills his dreams and lives happily with his new wife, his child and his increasingly restored vision.

Aurora Leigh flees from an existence which proscribes separate spheres for each gender. The ambivalence that Aurora feels towards women is evident from the beginning of the book. Barbara Gelpi points to the lack of attractive female characters in the novel besides Aurora. Mothers are cold, self-centered, and destructive. Marian Erle's own mother is beaten by her father, and Marian, in turn, is beaten by her mother. According to David, "the principal object of Aurora's contempt is less the male cultural authority which denigrates woman's mind, than it is male inability to feel" (129). However strongly one may feel that Aurora Leigh is a feminist text, questions of class undercut feminist views concerning the woman artist in a commercial market. Both Aurora and Lady Waldemar support themselves. Lady Waldemar has her own fortune while Aurora earns her living through her writing, but neither one could be said to represent the great majority of the Victorian women. Marian herself is objectified in the discussions between Lady Waldemar, Aurora, and Romney, where each takes care of (or disposes of) Marian Erle according to their needs (Houston).

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's own resentment toward men burns a hole through the fabric of her harmonious poetics (which advocate marriage). Before she married Robert Browning and had not yet replaced her invalid "reveries" with "experiences" of the world outside the sickroom, she wrote to her husband-to-be that she found herself "under signal disadvantages...in a manner...a blind poet" (Kintner I.41). Even Robert, her confidante, undercut her literary tastes by sneering at George Sand's Consuelo : "I shall tell you frankly that it strikes me as precisely what in conventional language...is styled a woman's book" (I.62). In their correspondence, Barrett "finally confessed to her obsession for novels as if it were a weakness as culpable as her opium addiction. Robert cuttingly did not repond to her enthusiasm for the genre" (Holloway 126). As Julia Bolton Holloway demonstrates, Barrett Browning displaced her "blindness" onto Romney Leigh. Holloway describes the personal myth of male blindness as a "Victorian revenge fantasy" of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's:

Both Romney Leigh and John Milton had failed to value women as their intellectual equals. Milton before his blindness had visited Florence and at Bellosguardo has looked through Galileo's telescope. He included that scene in the epic Paradise Lost. Elizabeth wrote of Bellosguardo in Aurora Leigh, having blind Romney come there. Milton had compared his blindness to that of Oedipus, who, when sighted, was blind to truth, when blind, saw truth. Elizabeth Barrett Browning read Greek tragedies with blind Hugh Boyd in Malvern. She was capable in the poem of gathering up all these vengeful strands of Jane Eyre 's Rochester; of Hugh Boyd's Oedipus; of Milton's Galileo; and of fashioning from them all a blind and chastened Romney Leigh glimpsing the City of God from Bellosguardo, acknowledging at last his scholarly Aurora as prophet and as poet. (131)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning also wrote a letter to Mrs. Anna Jameson, in which she explained Romney's blindness herself; she wanted Romney to watch his house burn (it had been set afire by the people he established in a phalanstery as a charitable experiment) before he lost his vision.

The only injury received by Romney in the fire was from a blow and from the emotion produced by the circumstances of the fire. Not only did he not lose his eyes in the fire, but he describes the ruin of his house as no blind man could. He was standing there, a spectator. Afterwards he had a fever, and the eyes, the visual nerve, perished, showing no external stain — perished as Milton's did...For it was necessary, I thought, to the bringing-out of my thought, that Romney should be mulcted in his natural sight. (Kintner II.246)

Hence the discontinuities in Barrett Browning's aesthetic theory, which championed marriage as an analogue of God's love for humanity, quietly disrupt her fictional autobiography. The humbled Romney is blinded when he reunites with Aurora. The narrative thus achieves Barrett Browning's goal of "meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age and speaking the truth as I conceive it plainly" (Kintner I.15) — perhaps more completely than is immediately apparent.

3.2- Robert Browning: thinking about the role of women in victorian era (relating it to some of his poems)

The central problem in Browning's love poetry is invariably one of communication between the sexes. The intangible influences which encourage or destroy intimacy between men and women elicit all his skill in psychological analysis; for love exists in and through human intuitions. Reference has already been made to the poet's belief that destined lovers recognize each other on first sight. But these moments of full and perfect communion are precarious; and, save for the most exceptional cases, the initial harmony does not survive social pressures or the importunities of individual temperament. It is rare in Browning's work to find such a poem as By the Fire-Side, in which the lovers have so come to exist in each other that one of them can say:

When, if I think but deep enough,
   You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme;
And you, too, find without rebuff
   Response your soul seeks many a time
Piercing its fine flesh-stuff.

More commonly the good moment passes, as in Two in the Campagna, where we watch it slip away despite the lovers' longing to prolong their felicity; or The Last Ride Together, in which the speaker strives desperately to eternalize his fleeting togetherness with the woman he loves.

Ideal love is for Browning the consummation of an intuitive process by which the lovers transcend the barriers of their separate individualities and achieve spiritual union. Whenever this happens, there results the most exquisite and productive form of communication possible between human beings. The very possibility of a love like this excites the heroine of The Flight of the Duchess to say:

If any two creatures grew into one,
They would do more than the world has done:
Though each apart were never so weak,
Ye vainly through the world should seek[101/102]
For the knowledge and the might
Which in such union grew their right...

Browning's men and women, then, are always seeking to pierce the barrier which, in his favorite metaphor, separates two isolated souls reaching towards each other. The lover of In a Gondola pleads with his mistress:

Do, break down the partition-wall
'Twixt us, the daylight world beholds
Curtained in dusk and splendid folds!
What's left but--all of me to take?

And in By the Fire-Side Browning, speaking for once in his own person, describes the loss of personal identity under love's mysterious spell:

If two lives join, there is oft a scar,
   They are one and one, with a shadowy third;
One near one is too far.

A moment after, and hands unseen
   Were hanging night around us fast;
But we knew that a bar was broken between
   Life and life: we were mixed at last
In spite of the mortal screen.

As one would expect from what has already been said, Browning holds that undue reliance on the intellect with its ulterior motivations makes for failure in affairs of the heart. The feminine nature is wiser than the masculine in its instinctive response to emotional impulse. In a number of poems love is destroyed through the man's determination to establish his mental superiority over the woman. This is the theme of Mesmerism, for example, as well as of A Woman's Last Word in which the woman soliloquizes:

What so false as truth is,
     False to thee?
Where the serpent's tooth is
     Shun the tree-[102/103]

Since in the poet's thinking the intellectual faculties are self-corrupting and prone to infection by the uses of the world, another group of poems, written from the female point of view, lays blame for the man's infidelity on the temptations held out by society. Examples in this vein are Any Wife to Any Husband, and the group of highly sophisticated lyrics, James Lee's Wife. The comparatively earIy Cristina departs from the usual pattern of Browning's love poems after he had come to know Elizabeth Barrett. For here it is the woman who is found wanting to the moment of recognition when "mine and her souls rushed together":

Oh, observe! Of course, next moment,
   The world's honours, in derision,
Trampled out the light for ever:
   Never fear but there's provision
Of the devil's to quench knowledge
   Lest we walk the earth in rapture!
--Making those who catch God's secret
Just so much more prize their capture!

Browning's conviction that the passionate intensity of romantic love is incompatible with conventionalized social morality leads him to glorify the one at the expense of the other. That perennial theme, the world well lost for love, is so appealing that Victorian readers in their sentimentality were apparently willing to overlook its frequent anti-social corollary in Browning's poetry, where the decision to give all for love more often than not involves some course of action at variance with established codes of conduct. Too extreme, perhaps, is the example of Porphyria's Lover where the demented narrator has committed murder and in this way made the final choice for a mistress

Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
   From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me for ever.[103/104]

In The Flight of the Duchess, however, we are compelled to sympathize with the duchess in her flight from the staidly formalistic home of her husband to join the gypsies; and the prevaricating speaker in Too Late seems most manly when he reconstructs the lost opportunity to take his beloved away from her husband, by force if necessary. In a Gondola presents a more fatal but equally persuasive picture of adultery as the solution to loveless marriage. And the inescapable implication of Respectability is that the illicit affair there described has gained its intensity and seriousness from being carried on outside the pale of social conventions:

Dear, had the world in its caprice
   Deigned to proclaim "I know you both,
"Have recognized your plighted troth,
"Am sponsor for you: live in peace!"
How many precious months and years
   Of youth had passed, that speed so fast,
   Before we found it out at last,
The world, and what it fears?

How much of priceless life were spent
   With men that every virtue decks,
   And women models of their sex,
Society's true ornament,--
Ere we dared wander, nights like this,
Thro'wind and rain, and watch the Seine,
   And feel the Boulevard break again
To warmth and light and bliss?

I know! the world proscribes not love;
   Allows my finger to caress
   Your lips'contour and downiness,
Provided it supply a glove.
The world's good word!--

In a Balcony and The Glove present in unequivocal terms the conflict between the wisdom of the intuitions and the usages of society. The theme of In a Balcony is conveyed in Norbert's reference to the "instincts of the heart that teach [104/105] the head." The Queen, a marble figure of authority, comes, through passion for her minister of state, to recognize the hollowness of worldly power. Of the reality of love, on the contrary, she learns:

'T is as different from dreams,
From the mind's cold calm estimate of bliss,
As these stone statues from the flesh and blood.

Meanwhile, Constance, the Queen's protegée, who resembles the speaker in Respectability in her fear of the world's callous incomprehension, would prefer that her liaison with Norbert remain clandestine. In effect, she is matching wits against society out of a desire to secure her lover to herself. When Norbert wants to make an open declaration of their attachment, she replies:

A year of this compression's ecstasy
All goes for nothing! You would give this up
For the old way, the open way, the world's,
His way who beats, and his who sells his wife!
What tempts you?-their notorious happiness
Makes you ashamed of ours?

In the end Constance prevails on Norbert to make his request in a manner so ambiguous that the Queen misunderstands his intention and believes that her own love is returned. Only when Constance's subterfuges have ruined her hopes does she learn the error of playing the world's game in the world's way. Then finally she lets her heart speak out without restraint. She is willing to sacrifice her happiness to Norbert's career, but at the same time she will stop treating love as though it were a marketable commodity:

I know the thriftier way
Of giving-haply,'t is the wiser way.
Meaning to give a treasure, I might dole
Coin after coin out (each, as that were all,
With a new largess still at each despair)
And force you keep in sight the deed, preserve [105/106]
Exhaustless till the end my part and yours,
My giving and your taking; both our joys
Dying together. Is it the wiser way?
I choose the simpler; I give all at once.
Know what you have to trust to, trade upon!
Use it, abuse it,--anything but think
Hereafter, "Had I known she loved me so,
And what my means, I might have thriven with it."
This is your means. I give you all myself,

The social satire in The Glove results from a seeming paradox in the lady's behavior. Her motive for casting the glove into the lion-pit seems purely capricious; and the reader's first inclination is to side with King Francis' court in its condemnation of the lady and approval of De Lorge when he flings the glove back in her face after its retrieval. On reconsideration, however, we perceive that our initial judgment was conditioned by a code of etiquette, rather than by any real concern for the heroine's situation. By trifling with convention in an apparently irresponsible way, she has shown up the ingrained conventionality of her admirer whose bravery, like his subsequent rudeness, was displayed not for the lady's sake, but solely to win popular approval. The dénouement reveals the poet's meaning. The lady, followed by the youth who alone comprehends her action, departs from the artificial life of the court, while De Lorge remains to marry a lady-in-waiting and to see her become the king's mistress, while he is relegated to the position of glove-bearer.

If, for Browning, true love necessitates total disregard of the ways of the world, then it follows that self-interest is love's greatest enemy. A long succession of poems, concerned with individuals for whom the voice of society drowns out that of passion, dramatizes, on the negative side, the poet's sense that no worldly gain is ever achieved without spiritual loss. The disillusioned lover of Dis Aliter Visum; or, Le Byron de nos Jours recalls in bitterness of heart how he let opportunity slip through his fingers from cynical disbelief that the good moment could be prolonged: [106/107]

She might take me as I take her.
   Perfect the hour would pass, alas!
Climb high, love high, what matter? Still,
   Feet, feelings, must descend the hill:
An hour's perfection can't recur.

So, instead, he has elected the tamer consolation of a career:

What? All I am, was, and might be,
   All, books taught, art brought, life's whole strife,
Painful results since precious, just
   Were fitly exchanged, in wise disgust,
For two checks freshened by youth and sea?

But the moment, once gone past, does not return; and in the resolution we learn that each has made a wretched marriage, he with a young ballet-dancer, she with a too-old whistplayer. Artistic ambition is the force which keeps the lovers of Youth and Art apart; but through their failure to perceive the all-important connection between art and life, the former has betrayed them to triviality. The girl, who would surpass Grisi, is now queen at bals-paré; and the sculptor, aspiring to replace Gibson, has had to be content with the dubious distinction of membership in the Royal Academy.

Browning's most provocative examination of failure in love as the penalty of faint-hearted conformity to social conventions occurs in The Statue and the Bust. The duke first beheld the lady on the day of her wedding to another man, and at once their souls "rushed together." Neither is restrained by moral scruples; yet they postpone the consummation of their love. Each is content with the daily encounter when the duke rides under the window where his beloved sits like another Lady of Shalott, but more remote from reality in her too-patient waiting. So the passing of time and the inconsequential demands of everyday existence imperceptibly dull the edge of resolve, although the lovers continue to delude themselves with the belief that such steadfastness as theirs must eventually be rewarded. Meanwhile, it is better not to provoke a scandal: [107/108]

And still, as love's brief morning wore,
With a gentle start, half smile, half sigh,
They found love not as it seemed before.

They thought it would work infallibly,
But not in despite of heaven and earth:
The rose would blow when the storm passed by.

Meantime they could profit in winter's dearth
By store of fruits that supplant the rose:
The world and its ways have a certain worth:

And to press a point while these oppose
Were a simple policy; better wait:
We lose no friends and we gain no foes.

When it is too late, they awaken to the realization that they have wasted their lives in make-believe:

And both perceived they had dreamed a dream;

Which hovered as dreams do, still above:
But who can take a dream for a truth?
Oh, hide our eyes from the next remove!

In the end the lovers call in art to eternalize their devotion; but the statue and the bust mock rather than glorify the impulse which brings them into being. Fixed in their apartness, they are as futile and as static as the couple they commemorate. Art has been made a substitute for, not a confirmation of life. That there might be no mistaking his meaning, Browning attached a coda to the poem. In Hamlet's phrase, "The readiness is all." Virtue is not in the goal, but in the passionate intensity of striving:

Do your best, whether winning or losing it,

If you choose to play!-- is my principle.
Let a man contend to the uttermost
For his life's set prize, be it what it will!

The counter our lovers staked was lost
As surely as if it were lawful coin:
And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost [108/109]
Is -- the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.

4-. References:

1-. Themes in Aurora Leigh at http://www.victorianweb.org/. online. December 27^th. 2007

2-.Lesch,Katherine (English 168, 1996) “The Victorian Woman's Revenge Fantasy” at www.victorianweb.org . online. December 27^th 2007

3-. www.poetryfoundation.org . Online. December 29th 2007

4-. Women in Victorian England at http://www.tripod.lycos.com online. January 3^rd 2008

5-. E. D. H. Johnson, Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres, Princeton University. “Authority and The Rebellious Heart “ at www.victorianweb.org .online.january 3^rd 2008

6-.Elizabeth Barrett Browning Biography at www.cswnet.com/erin. online. january 4th 2008

7-.Burnett, John. "What Kind of Staff Would a Victorian Household Have?" at www.victorianweb.org . Online. January 4 ^th 2008

8-.Wojtczak, Helena. "The ‘Lower’ Working Class". "Women of the Aristocracy and Gentry in Victorian Hastings." "Domestic Servants." "The ‘Upper’ Working Class". Women of Hastings and St. Leanords: An Illustrated Historical Miscellany. Online. January 4 ^th 2008.

9-. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning” at http://es.wikipedia.org .Online. January 4 ^th 2008

10-. “Robert Browning” at http://es.wikipedia.org. Online. Jnuary 4 ^th 2008