When translations of Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels were published in England in the mid-1880s by Henry Vizetelly, they were greeted with outrage, even though the most graphic passages had been expurgated. A typical comment, appearing in an anonymous article written for The Western Morning News and soon reprinted in a pamphlet by the National Vigilance Association, charged that:

[t]he other day the unmarried heroine of a novel was described as having been the reader of the whole of Zola's works, and young ladies in a drawing room will not hesitate in these latter days to talk of realism and naturalism with reference to the latest prurient pages of the seeker after degraded aspects of life . . . . Fathers and mothers in this latter day have become more tolerant of what shall be introduced into their homes than the judge at the old Bailey as to what may be sold in the streets. (381-82)

The pamphlet proceeded to warn parents that unless they took care, "greater evils will befall than any which can arise" from mere political or social conditions.

Twenty-five years before, in 1861, William Makepeace Thackeray had anticipated English outrage over Zola and the National Vigilance Association's concern with public morals when he refused to publish Elizabeth Barrett Browning's ballad "Lord Walter's Wife" in the Cornhill Magazine. His apology sounds dismayed--and somewhat disingenuous:

one of the best wives, mothers, women in the world writes some verses which I feel would be objected to by many of our readers . . . . In your poem, you know, there is an account of unlawful passion felt by a man for a woman, and though you write pure doctrine, and real modesty, and pure ethics, I am sure our readers would make an outcry, and so I have not published this poem. (Barrett Browning, Letters II 444, qtd. Cooper 77)

Like Zola's censors, Thackeray saw in literary realism a threat to contemporary middle-class morals and manners, especially the morals and manners of women.

The moral and monetary bankruptcies described in Thackeray's own novels must have crossed Barrett Browning's mind; however, she readily agreed that books could indeed influence their readers. Her response to his letter was swirl and sharp:

I am deeply convinced that the corruption of our society requires not shut doors and windows, but light and air: and that it is-exactly because pure and prosperous women choose to ignore vice, that miserable women suffer wrong by it everywhere. (Letters II 445, qtd. Cooper 77)

In Barrett Browning's view, then, vice and injustice resulted at least in part from female innocence, a state closely allied to ignorance, to which the censorship of books by and for women contributed. She believed that contemporary female education, morals, and behavior must change if vice and injustice were to be diminished, and she wanted her own poetry to educate women about their roles, duties, rights, and wrongs. Barrett Browning's last five years were devoted largely to writing about two issues: political enfranchisement in Italy and the United States, treated most fully in Poems Before Congress (1860), and the social position of women, the subject of her most powerful Last Po.eros, published in 1862, the year after her death,[1] The ballads in Last Poems. hybrid combinations of romantic subjectivity with objective observations about contemporary social problems, are far more innovative and complex than they are usually taken to be. Barrett Browning's models, of course, did not include Zola, whose works began to appear ten years after her death, but they did include the novelists Zola himself had read: de Stael, George Sand, Balzac. Barrett Browning had read them with great pleasure, knowing her father would disapprove.[2]

Although vice is a constant theme in European and American literature during the Victorian period, ideologies which attempt to deal with evil and the literary forms representing it differ widely. We should remember with Linda Shires that the

instability of any ideology in the period and the even more radical instability of Victorian representations must count as defining characteristics of the age. In fact, Victorian representations are noted for simultaneously venting various ideological positions, airing multiple points of view, letting them comment on each other, and closing off, with affairs left largely as they stood in the beginning. They are also known for their formal accommodation of various points of view and for the invention or hybridization of generic forms. . . which promote multiple perspectives. (185)

Shires's comment about the connection between conflicting ideologies and hybrid literary forms applies in particular to the late works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It also suggests a productive way of looking at realism in general, not as a monolithic movement but as an anti-romantic mode prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which allowed for different speculations about the nature of evil.

Zola spoke for many of his contemporaries when he proposed in "The Experimental Novel" that literary realism tries

to show the mechanism of the useful or the harmful; we disengage the determinism of human and social phenomena so that we may one day control and direct these phenomena. In a word, we work with the whole age at that great task which is the conquest of nature. the unleashing of man's power. (181)

Like Zola, Barrett Browning would refuse to ignore "the common, ugly, human dust" (Aurora Leigh 6.163); however, her goal-was different from Zola's as stated in his manifesto. She advocated the regulation of"man's power" but the "unleashing" of woman's. As attempts to expand the boundaries of women's reading, writing, thinking, and behavior, Barrett Browning's late poems about contemporary reality belong to a realistic tradition in women's writing, in particular to the subgenres of Bildungsroman (including the Kunstlerroman) and domestic realism. Her major work, Aurora Leigh, has been considered the first feminist Kunstlerroman.

According to Rita Felski, the Bildungsroman is central to women's fiction. It occupies the uneasy ground between closed empiricist narratives and the subjectivity of the typical modernist text. Similarly, Vineta Colby has shown that although literary realists such as George Eliot and George Sand have been recognized within canonical genres, the works of their contemporaries Catherine Gore, Maria Edgeworth, Mrs: Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Charlotte Yonge, and Harriet Martineau are not adequately accounted for unless they, too, are placed within the general field of realistic fiction. The genre of domestic realism is related to, if distinct from, mainstream realism as defined in the twentieth century. Domestic realism is the genre of nineteenth-century novels written mainly for and by middle-class women about the realities of daily life for women of their own class and the working classes. Barrett Browning's late narrative poems resonate simultaneously with the Bildungsroman, the Kunstlerroman, and domestic realism.

Despite the fact that Last Poems celebrate the subjectivity of their central characters, thematically Barrett Browning's late poems also resemble novels of domestic realism by Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, and George Sand. They also anticipate the work of Emilia Pardo Bazan in Spain and Kate Chopin in the United States. Widely separated historically and geographically, such novels are seldom considered together, much less together with poetry, as a continuous tradition. But the works by Barrett Browning which I am here considering defy our expectations. They do fit into the tradition defined by such novels, and, unlike most canonical Victorian poetry, their perspective on contemporary life is empiricist. Barrett Browning's late poems also defy our expectations about literary realism, which has been defined so as to exclude not only poetry of any kind but also "women's novels," stories about women trapped in the drudgery of kitchens and alleyways, or confined in boudoirs and drawing rooms.[3]

Insofar as they conform to the principles of literary realism, Barrett Browning's late works, including Aurora Leigh and the ballads she wrote during her last years, take part in a vexed relationship between literary realism and feminism as a cultural and political movement. There has always been an ambiguity in the works of writers who claim to embrace literary realism, a conflict between witnessing and recording objective reality and the didacticism implicit in representations of ugly "truth" to a reading public. Laura Marcus's recent analysis of critical literature concerning the relationship between feminism and literary realism emphasizes the principle that even though realism has historically been the dominant mode within the feminist canon, its apparent contentment with empirical surfaces and its ambivalence about its own implied didacticism are often perceived as flaws. Marcus thinks that historical feminism requires a broad aesthetic which would allow for "non-empiricist philosophical realism" (15). By presenting themselves as subjective but clear-eyed perceptions of contemporary social problems, Barrett Browning's realistic poems negotiate the inherent conflict in literary realism more successfully than many prose narratives, and the forms she developed for poetry about contemporary reality anticipate a "broader aesthetic" than the aesthetic which seems to structure so many twentieth-century feminist prose narratives. Barrett Browning's realism has largely gone unrecognized; as a result, some of her most complex and interesting poems are largely unread.

Aurora Leigh contains the most straightforward account of Barrett Browning's theory of realism. Significantly, it was published in 1856, the same year as Madame Bovary, a novel often credited with initiating the realist movement. In Aurora Leigh, the heroine's development as a woman and as an artist shoves how Barrett Browning's own poetic theory and practice evolved from romanticism to realism. It suggests that, like the poet's heroines, the poet herself will deploy realism in works intended to convey a feminist message.

As a demonstration of realism, which Aurora decides must generate the proper subject matter for poetry, the poem's subplot concerns the harrowing childhood, hard labor, and sexual betrayal of Marion Erie, a young woman who becomes the heroine's companion. The main plot narrates the life of the poet Aurora herself. Orphaned at the age of thirteen, Aurora is taken from her birthplace in Italy to live with a rigid spinster aunt in England. She is subjected to a typical narrow female education: needlework and the other feminine arts, a smattering of algebra, geography, and languages, and a large dose "of books on womanhood" that demonstrate to women their

Potential faculty in everything
Of abdicating power in it. (1.441--42)

At the outset, Aurora's cousin Romney Leigh provides Aurora with some contact with the outside world, but when he trivializes her poetry just before he proposes marriage, she relinquishes any claim on him and, in effect, gives up her only significant human connection: Romney has demonstrated beyond doubt that he thinks women are incapable of an independent life. With some poetic justice, Romney then gives himself over to a disastrous life of social reform, one which includes his failed attempt to transcend class barriers by turning the family estate into a working class commune and, as a sign that he rejects the notion of social class, by proposing marriage to Marion Erie, whom he does not love.

Meanwhile, Aurora learns to make her own way as a successful poet. After separate baptisms of fire, the two cousins learn to give each other both love and freedom. The work of each takes on new value in the life of the other: "We may stand side by side," says Aurora,

Contemplating the people in the rough,
Yet each so follow a vocation, his
And mine. (6.200-4)

The layering of plots ties Aurora Leigh to the genres of domestic realism, autobiographical realism, and slum naturalism, which was to become a dominant mode later in the century.

However, Aurora Leigh is not only a poem about contemporary "reality"; iris also a poem about change. Marian changes, and so does Romney. Aurora's life is at the center of the poem, and as she gains life experience, her theory of poetry becomes more relevant and profound. The child Aurora had wanted to write poetry because, like the Romantic poets she has taken as models, she believes that poets "are the only speakers of essential truth" (1.859). As Aurora matures, she moderates such artistic idealism, and her work takes on an existential coloration. The first stage in this process will be to address her own interiority, "Disordered with all Adam in the blood. . . even its very tumors, warts, and wens. . . organised by, and implying life" (3. 341--43). However, in order to support herself, Aurora must also write ballads about everyday life. She experiences a painful ambivalence about such writings because they exhibit weaknesses in her poetry--reliance on traditional poetic forms, indulgence in outworn romantic subjectivity, and repetition of feminine cliches on the subject of love and marriage: "I'll have no traffic with the personal thought / In art's pure temple" (5.61-62), she declares, upon realizing that her philosophical poems remain unread while her popular works are praised.

Like Barrett Browning's own "genre violations,"[4] Aurora's work eventually becomes a hybrid poetry of self-awareness, truth-telling, and the materials of daily domestic life which interest her reading public. This realist and feminist poetic is articulated most fully in book 5 of Aurora Leigh. Poems should confront the poet's own time and place--a realist dictum practiced by continental writers later in the century (Bieder 217), and if the poet is a woman, she should write about the realities of women's lives. Aurora Leigh holds that for poets,

Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne's--this live, throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,

Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles. (6.202-7)

To "flinch from modern varnish" and to dwell upon the epic past "Is fatal--foolish too" (5.208, 210). Ironically, by insisting on contemporary relevance, the masculinist realism of mid-century opened the back door to the woman's world, the domestic interior. Aurora Leigh walks boldly through.

Aurora also finds that new poetic subject matter demands new poetic forms. For instance, why should a play have five acts? "And why not fifteen? why not ten? or seven?" (6.230):

What form is best for poems? Let me think
Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit,
As sovran nature does, to make the form. (5.223-25)

Contemporary art is most effective if the form can somehow reflect both the interior reality of the artist and the empirical world in which the artist lives. To do so, it must turn inward:

Inward evermore
To outward--so in life and so in art,
Which still is life. (5.227-29)

As Aurora Leigh herself implies, form presents special problems in a novel poem, or in any poem presenting realistic subject matter. Although Dickens is the only English Victorian writer whom Mikhail Bakhtin mentions in Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin's generic analysis of the novel provides a useful perspective on Aurora Leigh. Bakhtin asserts that the novel is uniquely adapted to represent "live, throbbing" contemporary reality by allowing multiple voices to speak; by contrast, he argues, poetry has traditionally conveyed the poet's own unitary point of view:

The language of the poetic genre is a unitary and singular Ptolemaic world outside of which nothing else exists and nothing else is needed. The concept of many worlds of language. . . is organically denied to poetic style. (Bakhtin 286)

Bakhtin defines the novel as one among many literary forms which allow for multiple voices within the text and which decenter the authorial perspective, engaging the reader in the making of meaning.[5] In Bakhtin's terms, the great challenge for poetry is to fulfill the task of the novel in spite of poetry's compression and the regulation imposed by meter and rhyme. Aurora Leigh consists of interwoven first-person narratives, primarily Aurora's, Marion's, and Romney's. This form allows for multiple points of view and precludes much of the narrative intervention which, in a non-novelistic poem, would carry too much authorial weight.

After form and content, the third aspect of Aurora Leigh's/Barrett Browning's literary theory, clearly expressed in the passages about content and form, is an insistence that literature must be an assertion of freedom. In insisting upon literature which is meaningful for the general reader, representative of the drawing room as well as the battlefield, formally innovative, and morally free, Barrett Browning attempts to extend the boundaries of poetry for women writers and readers. As a poet, Barrett Browning complained about the lack of literary grandmothers. However, as the feminist and poet who wrote Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning's development mirrors Aurora's. She gradually allied herself to the strong tradition established over fifty years earlier by novelist and theorist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose works she had discovered as a child in her father's library. This tradition was maintained in her own day by women who fought for the civil rights of prostitutes, advocates of higher education for women, and activists who worked to protect the economic rights of children and poor women.

Barrett Browning's literary practice, especially in several poems written during the last years of her life and included in Last Poems (1862), fits itself into the generous theoretical space staked out in her novel poem. It conforms to that theory even more consistently than Aurora Leigh itself. Predictably, perhaps, the political urgency of Barrett Browning's late poems is anticipated in several isolated earlier works. "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," written in 1846 in response to a request for the Anti-Slavery Bazaar in Boston, presents the graphic and powerful dramatic monologue of a woman who has escaped from her masters after they have killed her lover and raped her. In making her escape, she kills her baby because his white features remind her of her masters and entitle him to a position within their ranks.[6] This poem, like many of Robert Browning's monologues, emphasizes the speaker's extreme psychological distress. Similarly, "A Song for the Ragged Schools of London" was a charitable enterprise, published in 1854 with Browning's "The Twins" in a pamphlet to raise money for one of A bet Barrett's charities.[7] Like "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," this lyric makes its appeal to women readers, who are urged by the speaker to look directly at the harsh lives of poor children, to consider the social consequences of child abuse and neglect, and to dedicate their hearts and minds and money to the care of the children on London's streets, however wicked or sordid they may seem.

The later poems with which I am concerned here are closer to literary realism in form, subject, and attitude; they are more subtle and more numerous. The realistic poems of Barrett Browning's last years concern vice, especially the kind of masculine vice which takes women by surprise. They are written with less narrative intervention than "A Song for the Ragged Schools" but less dramatic distance than "The Runaway Slave." Their intentions are less overtly didactic. Among these late poems are "Void in Law," "Bianca among the Nightingales," and "Where's Agnes?"--dramatic monologues about seduction and betrayal. The first two monologues are spoken by women brought to the brink of despair by their seducers, the third by a man whose "white rose" is not "dead in the grave" but "dead that other way, / Corrupted and lost" at the hands of a rival.

"Lord Walter's Wife," the most complex and demanding of these late poems, is a dramatic dialogue between a would-be seducer and the woman who beats him at his own game. It begins abruptly as the man tries to end a casual conversation with the woman and she asks him why he is leaving. '"Because I fear you . . . because you are far too fair,'" he begins. She replies that too much beauty is no more undesirable than "'too much sun.'" Their badinage becomes progressively more confrontational. He values his friendship with Walter, he says; "'You smell a rose through a fence,'" she retorts; "'If two should smell it, what matter?'" He declares that he has promised his love to another; she responds:

'Love's always free, I am told.
Will you vow to be safe from the headache on Tuesday,
and think it will hold?'

She has an innocent daughter, he objects; Dora is too young to notice anything, she says. Finally, Lord Walter's friend angrily rises to leave:

'Why, now you are no longer fair!
Why, now, you are no longer fatal,
but ugly and hateful, I swear!'

Now that she has pushed her husband's friend to his limit, she "laugh[s] out her scorn" at hypocrites who bring their vices "'so near / That we smell them'" but then presumptuously comment on the physical attributes of respectable women.

'Too fair?--not unless you misuse us!
and surely if, once in a while,
You attain to it, straightway you call us
no longer too fair, but too vile.'

The husband's friend has placed the wife on the horns of a dilemma. Under ordinary circumstances, if she is to protect herself from his insults, she must alert Lord Walter to his friend's improper behavior and thus risk damaging an important friendship. If she does not protect herself from his insults, she herself is morally compromised. Relying solely on her own wits, at the last moment she gains the upper hand:

'Have I hurt you indeed? We are quits then.
Nay, friend of my Walter, be mine!
Come, Dora . . . and help me to ask him to dine.'

Perhaps all that she wished at the beginning of the conversation had been to invite him to dine with her. The details of this curious poem, as well as its place beside the dramatic monologues Barrett Browning wrote in 1861 about women who are the victims of male vice and hypocrisy, strongly suggest that the heroine's intention is honorable, that she wishes merely to even the odds in a game of wits with a dishonorable man. Whatever her intentions may be, Lord Walter's wife represents Barrett Browning's theory that poetic heroes, both men and women, should embody some degree of passion and heroic heat in their everyday life "betwixt the mirrors" of contemporary drawing rooms.

At the heart of this poem lies a disturbing ambiguity. We think that Lord Walter's wife intends to flirt with her husband's best friend only in order to punish him for past indiscretions, but we cannot be certain. Is she like Aurora Leigh in asserting herself against illegitimate male power, or, like Lady Waldemar, is she exploiting male weakness? The necessity for the reader to reach a conclusion based only on the conversation between the two characters, without narrative confirmation, must have made the reading of the poem at least as puzzling for Victorian readers as it is for us. This reaction would at least partly explain Thackeray's feeling that such works would undermine family values. This formally inconclusive ending is a part of Barrett Browning's poetic realism. There is always some ambiguity in truthful representations of sexual conflict, a subject which a prose novelist may analyze at great length and in great detail; by contrast, the ballad form demands compression. Barrett Browning is able to achieve compression by omitting narrative commentary, thus inviting the reader to interpret and reinterpret the dialogue. In some ways, the poem is her finest achievement. By the time she wrote it, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose poetic energy and effects had so often resulted from torrents of words, had finally learned to deploy the compression of poetic language with great subtlety, to make a point without obvious didacticism.

Margaret Forster suggests that Thackeray rejected "Lord Walter's Wife" because he thought that his readership could not tolerate a poem which "was an attack on the 'double standard' by which men could flirt and were thought amusing, and women flirt only to be condemned as wanton" ("Preface" 298). I suggest that, in addition, he found the poetic form so confusing and its message so ambiguous that he could not envision any paterfamilias reading it aloud in the parlor after dinner. We cannot read Thackeray's mind, but we can know that Barrett Browning certainly continued to her dying day along a course she had set for herself early in life. She violated the boundaries which had been set around women's poetry and developed hybrid poetic forms in order to tell the truth as she saw it. Although she has been granted a high position within women's literature and feminist discourse, her late works have yet to be fully understood as innovative texts within the movement of literary realism.

1 Sandra Gilbert convincingly argues that these two concerns mirrored and supported each other, even much earlier in Barrett Browning's career.

2 The beloved spaniel Flush was one bond between Barrett Browning and Mary Russell Mitford, who presented the pet to her invalid friend; another was their shared pleasure in reading French novels, their own surreptitious and mild way to "epater le bourgeoisie." Margaret Forster's 1988 biography describes Barrett Browning's reading in some detail.

3 Barrett Browning's work, especially Aurora Leigh, exemplifies the "autobiographical realism" which seems to be at the core of women's fiction, from its beginnings through the twentieth century, and which, according to Rita Felski, "possesses few of the features of the nineteenth century novel" (82). In this respect, too, Barrett Browning's late feminist project defies our expectations in respect to the novel.

4 I borrow the term from Maryellen Bieder's discussion of the work of late-nineteenth-century Spanish writer Concepcion Gimeno de Flaquer. Gimeno, like Barrett Browning, attempted to merge the genres of "women's literature" and realism. Barrett Browning at times succeeded brilliantly but, in Bieder's view, Gimeno was not successful.

5 Bakhtin's assessment of poetry seems to some readers negative and narrow, but, in fact, his definition of the novel is inclusive and flexible enough to include such works as Byron's Don Juan and Pushkin's Eugenii Onegin. I suspect that Bakhtin had read neither of the Brownings.

6 Since Barrett Browning's family background was Jamaican, she had in mind Jamaican laws governing slavery. Until the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, Jamaican children born to slave mothers were often considered free if they had white fathers.

7 "The Twins" is a short dramatic ballad in which Martin Luther delivers a lecture on the meaning of Christian charity to a rich abbott who has denied charity to a pitiful beggar.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Discourse in the Novel: The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259--422.

Barrett >Browning, Elizabeth. Aurora Leigh. Ed. Margaret Reynolds. Athens: U of Ohio P, 1992.

-----. The Poetical Works. Ed. Ruth M Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

-----. Letters. Vol. II. Ed. Frederic G. Kenyon. New York: Macmillan, 1897.

Becker, George J., ed. Documents of Modern Realism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963.

Bieder, Maryellen. "'El escalpelo anatomico en mane femina': The Realist Novel and the Woman Writer." Letras Peninsulares 5 (Fall 1992): 209-25.

Colby, Vineta. Yesterday's Women: Domestic Realism in the English Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974.

Cooper, Helen. "Working into Light: Elizabeth Barrett Browning." Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets. Ed. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979. 65-81.

Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989.

Forster, Margaret. The Life and Loves of a Poet: Elizabeth Barrett Browning. New York: St. Martin's, 1988.

-----. "Preface." "Poems Selected from Last Poems." Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988. 298.

Gilbert, Sandra. "From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett's Risorgimento." PMLA 99 (1984): 194-209.

Marcus, Laura. "Feminist Aesthetics and the New Realism." New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts. Ed. Isobel Armstrong. New York: Routledge, 1992. 11-25.

National Vigilance Association. "Pernicious Literature." Becker 350-82.

Shires, Linda M., ed. Afterword. Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History, and the Politics of Gender. New York: Routledge, 1992. 184-90.

Zola, Emile. "On the Experimental Novel." Becker 161-96.


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