Aurora Leigh

After Book 4 describes the downtrodden underclass in great detail, Book 5 opens with an elevated appeal to the Divine as Aurora affirms that doing good works is a method to gain redemption in the eyes of God. This Christian-facing segment of the poem is intended to boost the overall mood and resurrect the morale of the protagonists after the testament of human tragedy that precedes it in Book 4. As the poetic reminiscences of Book 5 grow ever more philosophical, Aurora subverts traditionally pastoral images in order to depict a faltering Britain; her style deliberately utilizes positive images and gives them a negative turn. Once more, Aurora employs Portraits and the Picturesque to create a verbal portrait of her time, “a book of surface-pictures […] a pewter age” (Line 159). In this self-reflexive section of the poem, Barrett Browning instructs her readers to interpret her work as “living art,” and seeks to vivify and comfort her contemporaries, arguing, “We’ll muse for comfort that, last century, / On this same tragic stage on which we have failed, / A wigless Hamlet would have failed the same” (Lines 246-49).

Another significant scene of the poem occurs when Aurora visits Lord Howe and learns of Romney’s current social work endeavors and his plans to marry Lady Waldemar. When Aurora herself is presented with the prospect of becoming romantically involved with an eligible lord, she takes the opportunity to refuse outright and proclaim the world of poetry and art to be her only true love. In this moment, Barrett Browning seizes the opportunity to inject a new rubric by which to measure Female Identity and Value in the Victorian Era, for Aurora, as the poet’s philosophical mouthpiece, is loudly declaring the love and pursuit of art alone to be a worthy endeavor—even if Aurora’s strident tone betrays an element of regret, given her earlier lamentations over lacking a true love of her own. Juxtaposed with Romney’s apparent wedding plans, the scene escalates the romantic tension that has been slowly and distantly growing between the two rather ephemeral protagonists since the beginning of the poem.

Ultimately, while the primary details of Book 5 prove to be far less immediate and cinematic than the previous book’s blow-by-blow accounts of Marian’s hard life and the ill-fated wedding, this section of the poem is designed to shift the overall focus to more philosophical matters. Its pages examine and transubstantiate the worldly issues with which the entire piece concerns itself, using art and an appeal to the spiritual to invite readers to contemplate higher matters that transcend mere earthly concerns. For example, the blood that oozes so vividly in Book 4 is redeemed by Aurora’s art in Book 5, for she states, “Each prophet-poet’s book must show man’s blood! / If life-blood’s fertilizing, I wrung mine / On every lead of this” (Lines 354-56). The party at Lord Howe’s plunges the poem from the redemptive realm of art back into the earthly, where Lady Waldemar talks pettily, with “women’s spite” (Line 1043). Book 5, then, both starts and ends with a departure, the first an escape from worldly concern through art and spirituality, the second an escape from loneliness through Aurora’s journey to France and eventually onward to Italy.