Religion in the Victorian Period  

Second collective paper: "RELIGION IN THE VICTORIAN PERIOD"

Elizabeth Barret Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on March 6, 1806 at Coxhoe Hall in County Durham, England. She was the oldest of twelve children to Mary Graham Clarke Moulton-Barrett and Edward Barrett Moulton. She was christened in Kelloe church, where a plaque describes her as 'a great poetess, a noble woman, a devoted wife'. She maintained a life long interest in metaphysics and religion. Her family attended services at the nearest Dissenting chapel, and Mr. Barrett was active in Bible and Missionary societies.[i] [ii]

Elizabeth has been characterized with a fragile health, an illness tied her to a wheelchair at a young age. In spite of her ill health and addiction, she was a brilliant student, who could read complicated texts in their original languages when she was as young as ten. She read the entire Old Testament in Hebrew, as well as Dante's Inferno, and passages from Paradise Lost and other historic works.[iii]

Her ability to read Hebrew mentioned before entailed her many criticism. Horne is one who would question Elizabeth and would suggest that “with her ability to write in Hebrew, Barrett Browning’s own identity/name becomes dangerously close to that of a “dark” Jew herself.” Although EBB was aware of the fact that being seen as a woman possessing Hebrew knowledge was a risky aspect for the Victorian public, in fact she displayed this knowledge in her writing career. Thus using the knowledge of figures of Jewishness, EBB “reconstructed the terms upon which Christian women poets were identified, combining both intellectual and theological authority with certain qualities more consistent with Victorian representation of Christian womanhood.”[iv]

Her literary success drew the attention of poet Robert Browning, who actually would later become her husband. As Elizabeth, Robert Browing had been interested in religion all his life, they were both Christian believers and thus they influence each other. As an example, critics discover clear evidence of the influence of Elizabeth Browning’s devout Christian faith on Christmas Eve and Easter Day from Robert Browning.[v]

Her intellectual fascination with the classics and metaphysics was balanced by a religious obsession which she later described as "not the deep persuasion of the mild Christian but the wild visions of an enthusiast." According to Glenn Everett, the connotations of the former word “enthusiast” here could be referring the Methodism. Methodism is a religious movement, founded by Charles and John Wesley and by George Whitefield, which originated as a “reaction against the apathy and the emphasis on logic and reason that characterized the Anglican Church in the early eighteenth century”.[vi]

Her influence and preference for the Greek Christian poets draw us to one of her main attitude towards religion and real poetry: "We want the touch of Christ's hand upon our literature," she says, “as it touched other dead things; we want the sense of the saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets, that it may cry though them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest. Something of a yearning after this may be seen among the Greek Christian poets, something which would have been much with a stronger faculty.” She yearns for a sense of poetry which is loosing its way, she wants the poetry to be sanctified and made holy. It was a time when the intimate relation between God and poetry was dying and the sacredness of poetry was disappearing. [vii]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning thus represents the emotional and sensible part of this frame of Victorian poets. She was highly fond of Greek classic literature and her originality resides in her contribution of a female poetry point of view to the Victorian Age and most importantly, concerning this paper, a Christian view. These three factors combine an interesting perspective: religious vision from a woman’s point of view. Elizabeth Barrett Browning combined the spiritual realm with the world of nature: In the seventh book of Aurora Leigh (1856), her heroine thus asserts that

“natural things

And spiritual, --who separates those two

In art, in morals, or the social drift

Tears up the bond of nature and brings death" (AL. XLI, 20-23)[viii]

  According to Browning, the human spirit could not survive without the natural world, for

" The natural's impossible, -- no form,
No motion: without sensuous, spiritual
Is inappreciable, -- no beauty or power:
And in this twofold sphere the twofold man
(For still the artist is intensely a man)
Holds firmly by the natural, to reach
The spiritual beyond it, -- fixes still
The type with mortal vision, to pierce through,
With eyes immortal, to the antetype
Some call the ideal, better called the real,
And certainly to be called so presently” (AL. XLI, 31-11) [ix]

Expressed in simpler words, Browning's verse describes the mutual complementation of both the human spirit and the nature, one cannot stand alone without another. Thus the dynamic interaction of nature and the human spirit “fixed the type with mortal vision,". And since nature "pierce through... with eyes immortal” then God resides in the nature, a powerful nature that complements the human spirit. The belief of the coexistence of the spirituality and the nature is neither atheist nor traditional Christian. EBB just adds a spirituality face to the nature one and the result is that “this twofold sphere”.[x]

The Victorian Web. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. <http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/ebbio.html>