Aurora Leigh Critics Flashcards
Form definition?
Form is how the text is structured eg: novel, poem etc
Genre definition?
A stylistic category in literary with particular conventions
Jauss - genre is a horizon of expectations
When was it published?
1856
What did she criticise Austen for?
Not talking about God, nature or the soul
What was the dominant form?
Novel was the dominant form by the 1850s. Novels were seen as the present and poems were seen as the past
What was George Eliot’s review?
Westminster Review January 1857
‘the first woman who has produced a work which exhibits all the peculiar powers without the negations of her sex’
Virginia Woolf’s criticism?
1932
When a poet uses a novelist’s preserves - ‘words have been made to strut and posture and take on an emphasis which makes them ridiculous’
The incongruence between the two forms?
John Nichol - Westminster Review October 1857
‘there is a certain incongruity between the natural variety and expansion of the one, and the concentration required in the other’
Is it autobiographical?
EBB letter to John Kenyon in March 1855
‘an autobiography of a poetess - not me’
How many similes are present in the narrative?
Over 250
What she wanted to write?
EBB letter to Mary Russell Mitford in December 1844
‘I want to write a poem of a new class’
The importance of form?
Author Hugh Clough in ‘Dryden and His Times’
‘a man’s way of saying things will very often tell you more about him than all the things he says to you’
What EBB’s intention was?
EBB letter to Robert Browning in February 1845
‘my chief intention now is the writing of a sort of novel-poem
Her use of classical allusions?
‘Homer’s heroes’ were cut down to size emphasises that power lies with the poet rather than the classical hero
Forms that the epic poem was associated with?
Associated with the hexameter in Latin and Greek and the blank verse in English, such as in Paradise Lost by John Milton
What allows Aurora Leigh to become ‘woman and artist’ inside the masculine tradition of the epic?
Susan Stanford Friedman sees elements of the lyric and novel, which were genres more accessible to women
Who is Lady Waldemar?
Gelpi - ‘the voice of Aurora’s own self-distrust’
The view that male pets were better ?
The contemporary poetic theory was that women had a sentimental style of poetry which was less important than the authoritative style of men
Criticism of the form of Aurora Leigh?
Sydney Dobell, who was an author of epic poems himself
He comments that the verse-novel ‘contains some of the finest poetry written in the century […] But it is no poem. No woman can write a poem.’
What makes the poem epic?
The structure and duration of the poem, spanning nine books, and her life from birth to marriage. Also the use of epic similes and catalogues
What results in narrative confusion?
According to Alison Case in her book Plotting Women, the coexistence of two incompatible plots - the retrospective female Kunstlerroman present in books 1-4 and the feminine love story from book 5 onwards, both of which have Aurora as the narrator, result in narrative confusion
What is Aurora’s obsession with words an example of?
‘the artistic narrative mastery that validates the Kunstlerroman’
Case
What is a Kunstlerroman?
A narrative about an artist’s growth to maturity
What is Case’s criticism of Aurora Leigh?
It’s juggling of narrative modes’ results in an ‘uneasy coexistence’
Challenge of the ‘uneasy coexistence’?
Women can have desires for both artistic fame and romantic love
Case also suggests that Aurora cannot admit her love for Romney until she has fully developed as an artist, as marriage in their youth would only hold them both back
EBB addresses how personal the story is?
‘I have put much of myself in it - I mean to say my soul, my thoughts, emotions, opinions; in other respects, there is not a personal line, of course’
How the poem relates to other texts?
Cora Kaplan - the poem is ‘an overlapping sequence of dialogues’ with other texts
A summation of the forms and genres of Aurora Leigh?
‘at once a veiled autobiography, a reluctant novel and an aspiring epic’
Herbert Tucker
Her use of combining genres?
Stone - she ‘does not merely mingle genres; she fuses them together to form a new whole’
EBB’s thoughts on the desires of the reader?
‘I am inclined to think we want new forms … as well as thoughts’
Letter to Robert Browning in March 1845
How does this relate to Barrett Browning’s other works?
Her 1844 poem ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’
This feminist work resists Victorian expectation of female passivity by engaging in a courtship with a man from a different class. Genre in AL pushes Victorian expectations
