ROBERT (1812-89) AND ELIZABETH (1806-61) BARRETT BROWNING 

              "Love Among the Ruins, a Florentine Affair"

 

Read the introduction to Barrett Browning in your Norton text or see the information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning and at http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/browning.htm.  Read the introduction to Robert Browning in your Norton text or see the information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Browning or at http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/index.html.  

 

            Read Robert Browning’s "My Last Duchess" (1985) in your Norton text or at http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/duchess/duchess.html.  How does this poem illustrate the conventions of the dramatic monologue (a speaker who addresses some "felt presence," the psychological penetration of character revealed through the speaker’s own words, dramatic presentation and content, dramatic irony)?  Who was the Duke of Ferrara?  (See http://webexhibits.org/feast/context/alfonso.html)?   What do you learn about the in Browning’s poem as this powerful Renaissance figure talks about his latest duchess?  List in the margins of your text the personality and character traits of the Duke that you discern.  What is the occasion for his monologue; to whom is he speaking?  What has happened to the Duchess?  What are her character traits that you infer?  Read "Fra Lippo Lippi” at http://faculty.stonehill.edu/geverett/rb/rb.htm.  Who was Fra Lippo Lippi?  (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Lippi.)  Who is the "felt presence" in this poem? What are the "Dickensian" tags that help identify Fra Lippo Lippi as a personality?  What is so unusual about this Florentine artist whose specialty is rendering such exquisitely poignant religious works?  Browning states his poetic aesthetic and voices the "function of art" in this poem--characterize Robert Browning’s poetic aesthetic.   Read "Love Among the Ruins" at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173019 .  Browning is concerned in this poem with the passage of time and thus constructs the poem in such a way as to integrate both past and present in order to make us cognizant of time's relativity.  How does this idea work through out the poem? 

 

Read Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 22 and 43 from Sonnets from the Portuguese, located at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/36.html.   Skim the information about the struggle for Italian independence at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Independence_wars  and at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austro-Sardinian_War.   Read Barrett Browning’s poem “Mother and Poet” also at the website above.   Read Barrett Browning’s “To George Sand: A Desire,” “To George Sand: A Recognition,” and “Grief,” found at http://members.aol.com/ericblomqu/brownine.htm.                

 

 

 

            The stuff of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's life would make a wonderful novel or play—indeed it has, many times!  The Barretts of Wimpole Street or Flush by Woolf portray an extraordinary love story and two immensely interesting people:

            Born six years before Robert in 1806, Elizabeth Barrett was originally destined to live a life very different from Robert’s see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning.  A prodigy, she was composing verse before most would go to nursery school, epics as a teenager, becoming a published and critically acclaimed poet by 20!  Barrett received an extraordinary education for a woman, studying Greek and mathematics, the apple of her father's eye . . . but such an imposing and impositioning eye it was.  Mr. Barrett was the typical Victorian patriarch, dominating of all his 11 children, none of whom he would allow to marry willingly, particularly his beloved and extraordinary prodigy Elizabeth!

            At 15, Elizabeth suffered a nervous collapse, the treatment for which included heavy doses of morphine, plunging Barrett into gloom, depression, dependency, and  an invalid state.  For 5 years she retired to her boudoir, raring seeing anyone but her family, her father encouraging her isolation.  In the years thereafter, her family and her little dog Flush were her principal companions.  The deaths of her beloved brother and her mother further increased her isolation and aggravated her ill health.

            Then in 1845, at age 39, long feted, famous, and virtually incapacitated, Elizabeth Barrett’s life dramatically changed forever.  A fan letter arrived from a buoyant young poet Robert Browning (see Browning link at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Browning and http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/browning.htm). Browning’s upbringing has been very different; encouraged by his parents but not smothered, he became an exuberant and very positive individual.  At first, a friendship developed through letters; then these two intellectual and spiritual soul-mates at last met and fell profoundly in love.  Mr. Barrett, not unexpectedly, forbade marriage, saying that it would kill Elizabeth.  To prove to herself that she had the stamina to leave her boudoir, she rode with Flush and her maid to the park . . . and shortly thereafter she and Robert eloped or, as the case may be, escaped! 

            They eventually settled in Florence (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence%2C_Italy), across the River Arno

near the Ponte Veccio, in a house that they called Casa Guidi, soon a center of intellectual stimulation and

activity for the artistic and political elite of Europe.  Barrett Browning thrived; her friendships with Stowe, Fuller,

Sand and other women writers and intellectuals allowed to blossom in a rapturous setting (note the anxiety of

artistic identify of 19th-century women.

            At 40 Barrett Browning gave birth to a son, Pen, whom both she and Robert unabashedly adored. 

Robert kept himself removed from those current events  that became Elizabeth’s passion.  She was ever more

engrossed in the political and social happenings of their day—working and writing for such social issues as

Italian independence, abolition of slavery and improved conditions of working classes (The Cry of

the Children), and feminism.  The bane at times of Robert and always Elizabeth's delight, Casa Guidi

became a Mecca for liberal politics and ideas of the age.  Elizabeth's popularity was immense (Sonnets from

 the Portuguese) and her influence widely felt.  Emily Dickinson wrote her "Conversion of the Mind" after reading for the first time the poetry of "that foreign lady"!  Barrett Browning’s magnum opus, Aurura Leigh, a 19th-century kuntzlerroman.  The “poetic novel” tells the story of a woman poet who dedicates her life to first to poetry . . . and then her poetry and life to the man she loves, Romney, a reformer and Victorian absolutists—the typical Victorian compromise necessary for adjusting in this failed and fallen world, from Barrett Browning’s point of view.

            Robert Browning, would have been fascinated in Aurora’s story from another point of view (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Browning).  Always more interested in the psychological than the outward details of any story,  Browning would have taken up the story at the point Barrett Browning ended it—what  Aurora's compromise would have done to her spirit (psychological perspective) and how she would have been perceived by those around her (point of view).  Of all of the Victorians, Browning has been the most influential on the 20th-century writers.  His experimentation in multiple-focus points of view ("The Ring and the Book") which looks at the murder of a young wife from a number of different centers of intelligence) and his experimentation in stream of consciousness narrative make him one of the most important Victorian poets.  Likewise, his grotesque rhymes, unusual diction and syntax, psychological delving into character, and his fascination with the grotesque—all illustrate his kinship with modern writers such as  T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, Virginia Woolf, or James Joyce. 

            Browning is in many ways a man of extreme paradoxes:

1) Middle class and conservative in manner yet possessed of intellectual ideas and tolerant attitudes;

2) Properly Victorian in his own life yet deeply passionate in his poetic life;

3) Outwardly unassuming and eminently normal, energetic, bright, yet fascinated with

the abnormal and the grotesque (A literary friend once said of him, "I like Browning; he isn't

at all like a damned literary man");

4) Liberal in political views, hated slavery, embraced other liberal ideas, yet Browning

harbored qualities of the Philistine, was utterly intolerant of Elizabeth’s friend George Sand and her crew, as well as the spiritualists and Italian freedom fighters that Elizabeth filled the house with.

            His early poetry was charged with obscurity and "barbarism" as the critics characterized it.  His work was also criticism for its over-concern with the odd, unusual and grotesque—"Grotesque for grotesqueness sake," as some said.  He tried writing for the  theatre for awhile, and though never successful as a playwright, refined his fascination for the “mask” as a dominant motif in his poetry—but from a very different perspective than 18th-century interest in this theme.  He developed the objective/dramatic presentation of character, which evolved into the genre at which he most excels, the dramatic monologue.  Browning is unquestionably a "master" of character development, second only to Shakespeare.

            Browning is likewise wonderfully complex: his realistic aesthetic is laced with an appreciation of the ideal (he was an admirer of Shelley), but as one critic states, his “idealism” is the "quality of aspiration . . . mixed with earthiness, even worldliness."  Browning is one of Frost's "swingers of birches," climbing branches toward heaven but anxious to bend them back again to earth, lest he travel too far into his idealism. 

            Browning is also interested in the idea of "success through failure" (“Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea Del Sarto”) and the character we develop in lieu of a happy ending. His work is also characterized by its energetic optimism; of all the Romantics, Shelley holds the greatest influence over Browning, in particular his "doctrine of imperfection," wherein lies all hope for humankind, according to Browning—the striving for perfection.  All of these traits are set within the framework of Browning's love for the "holes and corners" of history—which, when explored, tell us something about the inner workings of ourselves as well as those grotesque characters that he resurrects from history.