Woman's Construction and Acknowledgement of Herself

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's developing feminist and cultural doctrine that possessing several distinctive attributes: a well-known character is a professional woman writer who also occupies the role of caretaker in the home. While fulfilling the role of the ideal Victorian woman, in "The Angel in the House," the domestic professional author also subverts Victorian expectations of women by asserting her right to confront them immediately. Domestic professional texts offer paradigms of the woman/writer whose chosen vocation is that of social critic, a model intended to replace the Victorian ideal of a woman literally by it.
Barrett Browning's viewpoint of literature, demonstrated in the text and form of Aurora Leigh, most definitively envisions a feminine strength and morality that address society's desires, lengthening the domestic ethics into the public sphere.
Barrett Browning also emphasizes the power of writing as a means of discovering "truth" and as a woman's edifice and acknowledgment of herself. Aurora's growth as a writer and a woman results from her relationships with Romney Leigh and Marian Ere. Thus, since a central thematic principle is that a woman breaks free from cultural conventions to cultivate the power that can transform society, Barrett Browning's principle of art encompasses the personal and the political, of which Aurora and Romney's marriage is the ultimate symbol; the "New Jerusalem" they expect at the end of this epic verse-novel emphasizes the need to work toward a just society. Importantly, while Barrett Browning supports the construction of a fair society, she does so by a cherished Victorian ideal, that of the Angel in the House that she believes in both women and society. For Barrett Browning, society will benefit much more from the professional woman than from the woman who has no creative medium other than her domestic duties.
Aurora's mother is already dead. Further, Aurora's study of her mother's likeness conjures up not an idealized version of the woman but shows the layers of complexity that women truly are. Images range from "abhorrent" to "beautiful, “from Muses and Fates, Psyche and Medusa, to Our Lady of Passion and Lamia: All of these female images, including Aurora's mother, are women of power, specifically women whose power the patriarchal order wants to limit or destroy. In their place, the Angel in the House is instituted to control female power and influence. From the outset of her poem, Barrett Browning seems to suggest that the Angel in the House is an ideal and only that. Furthermore, it is not necessarily an ideal that should be pursued. Why, after all, seek a difficult model of a woman when real women contain within them "the burning lava of a song / The fully veined, heaving, double-breasted Age".
Aurora Leigh met with great success, despite some critics' miss giving even reviewers who found major fault with Barrett Browning's subject matter or style almost unanimously praised some portion of the poem. For example, W. E. Ayton, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, complained that the story was one "which no admirer of Mrs. Browning's genius ought in prudence to defend. In our opinion it is fantastic, unnatural, exaggerated; and all the worse, because it professes to be a tale of our times." Yet, he ends his review thusly: "Still, with all its faults, this is a stunning poem; strong in energy, rich in thought, abundant in beauty; and it more than sustains that high reputation, which by her previous efforts, Mrs. Browning has so honorably won. Aurora Leigh continued to be reprinted and influential through the end of the century, as did Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House.
However, with one major difference. While Barrett Browning made corrections but
no major revisions to her poem before her death in 1861, Patmore continually revised his, finally settling on the last revision in 1886.
Barrett Browning shows the mere idealization of women in favor of exemplifying a complex individual who might improve society. Through Aurora's maturation process, both as a writer and a woman, Barrett Browning suggests a "real-life" role model, a woman who can successfully combine the professional and domestic spheres. In light of nineteenth-century attitudes towards women, for Barrett Browning to imply that women belonged in the professional as well as the domestic sphere required a layered, sophisticated argument.
Accordingly, throughout this article I quote several long passages of Barrett Browning's verse-novel; many of her ideas are complicated and deserve citation in full because, as Margaret Reynolds points out, "There is little chance of economical quotation as clauses accumulate and argument opens into allegory."
Barrett Browning's expectation of the predicted reaction from attentive reviewers has reflected in Aurora and Romney's early discordant relationship: Romney is the critic of the woman poet's attempt to remake literature and society. But Barrett Browning makes it clear through their evolving association that it is not so much a confrontational situation as it is a sustaining, nurturing one. From the start, Romney is influential in bringing out the fight in Aurora. While all others around her whisper among themselves. Romney confronts her with sudden anger: "You wish to die and leave the world. Aurora responds by looking "into his face defyingly. Men and women, Barrett Browning believes, should not be combative for Confrontation's sake, but engage in communication that debates and challenges.
Aurora now can fully commit herself to her work as a social poet, to which the writing of Aurora Leigh will attest, while Romney, blinded in a fire attempting to achieve social idealism by force, understands that his life must vigorously involve the loving of another, not the cold embracing of a social ideal: His previous figurative blindness is now replaced by literal blindness, Romney now "sees" clearly, as does Aurora, that life must be a balance of individualizing and generalizing.