The anti-socialist agenda of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1855) has received scant attention by scholars. The notable exceptions have been Cora Kaplan's comparative reading against Charles Kingsley's Christian Socialist novel, Alton Locke (1850), Deirdre David's look at EBB's intellectual conservatism, and Linda Lewis's study of the political aspects of EBB's spiritualism – a surprisingly small body of scholarship considering the centrality of the verse-novel's anti-socialist message. Perhaps others have suspected that such a study could produce only obvious results, but it is my contention that EBB's relationship with socialism is much more complicated than it might appear on the surface. Although EBB takes aim at several prominent socialists, including Cabet, Comte, Blanc, and Proudhon, ‘the principal target for attack … is … Charles Fourier’. In fact, Aurora Leigh calls on Fourier by name on five different occasions (II: 483, III: 584, V: 784, VIII: 483, IX: 896), mentions his most prominent disciple, Victor Considerant (III: 585), and references Fourier's plan for a utopian community (the phalanstery) eight times (III: 108, IV: 756, V: 652, V: 784, V: 1003, VI: 210, VIII: 888, VIII: 961). But if the name of Charles Fourier is made to stand-in for the larger socialist project in Aurora Leigh, it begs the question: why Fourier in particular?

In this study I seek to locate some of the mediated affects that ‘stick’ to ‘Fourier’ in Aurora Leigh. Although affect is often considered synonymous with individual emotions, here, affect describes those pre-emergent forces, or inten- sities, that circulate through the body politic as well as the individual body. Affects are described as pre-emergent in that affects circulate beneath more structured forces, like language, ideology and emotions. Affects are understood as intensities because affects motivate those structured forces without necessarily directing them. Affective forces operate at various levels, some at the broad level of cultural possibility, what Raymond Williams discussed as a ‘structure of feeling’, others at the level of the nuclear family, and others, still, at the level of the embodied Subject.