Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T02:12:07.506Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“OUR DEEP, DEAR SILENCE”: MARRIAGE AND LYRICISM IN THE SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2009

Rhian Williams
Rhian Williams*
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Sonnet XLI of Elizabeth Barrett Browning'sSonnets from the Portuguese is candid about its ambition to write love poetry that will last:

      — Oh, to shoot
      My soul's full meaning into future years, —
      That they should lend it utterance, and salute
      Love that endures, with Life that disappears! – (Barrett Browning 397)
This is a rare moment in the sequence of hope enunciated. Although littered with apparently unfettered exclamations of the newly loved and newly loving – “I seemed not one | For such man's love!” (XXXII), “Beloved, I only love thee!” (IX) – the rhetorical mode of the Sonnets from the Portuguese also feels reticent, provisional, even transient: “This said, ‘I am thine’ – and so, its ink has paled | With lying at my heart that beats too fast” (XXVIII). Yet the sequence's desire for endurance may be reconciled with its frequent return to moments of erasure – “My letters! – all dead paper, . . . mute and white! –” (XXVIII) – by attending to the generative effects of silence in this most ambivalent of sonnet performances. Indeed, the sequence appears to fall in with Daniel Barenboim's logic, which would dictate that if ensuing years are to produce, as the sonnet anticipates, “utterance” – to form sound – the sonnet itself must provide the pre-silence. If silence is the pulse of “Love that endures” (passing over from life to love), then the Sonnets from the Portuguese become, perhaps, an exercise in learning, in Derrida's terms, “how to be silent.” Despite such elevated investment, however, silence clearly troubles our reading of this sonnet sequence; not only does it threaten to undermine the efficacy of a sequence celebrated for the enunciation of love, but it also gestures at a broader Victorian discourse in which silence and “woman-love,” as sonnet XIII names it, are more frequently brought together as an effect of systemized suppression. But, I suggest that these sonnets are, in fact, pushing us to reconsider how we read silence; perhaps surprisingly, this is revealed by paying attention to the sequence's careful anticipation of marriage. Indeed, establishing a conjugal perspective on these poems reveals a radical dynamic in which silencing, in fact, gives way to finding, as Derrida asks, “how to say something.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 85 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Armstrong, Isobel. The Radical Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London: Routledge, 1993.Google Scholar
Avery, Simon, and Stott, Rebecca. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. London: Longman, 2003.Google Scholar
Barenboim, Daniel. “In the Beginning was Sound.” Reith Lecture 2006 at Cadogan Hall, London: 22 paragraphs. 6 June 2006. <http://bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2006/lecture1.shtml>..>Google Scholar
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. Ed. Robert, John, Bolton, Glorney, and Bolton Holloway, Julia. London: Penguin, 1995.Google Scholar
Billone, Amy. “‘In Silence Like to Death’: Elizabeth Barrett's Sonnet Turn.” Victorian Poetry 39.4 (Winter 2001): 533–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–1769. 4 vols. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.Google Scholar
David, Deirdre. Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. “How to Avoid Speaking.” Translated by Ken, Frieden. Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Budick, Sanford and Iser, Wolfgang. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. 3–70.Google Scholar
Forster, Margaret. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. London: Vintage Lives, 1988.Google Scholar
Gauthier, Xavière. “Existe-t-il une écriture de femme?” Trans. Marilyn, A. August. New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Ed. Marks, Elaine and Courtivron, Isabelle de. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1981. 161–64.Google Scholar
Griffiths, Eric. The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.Google Scholar
Hayter, Alethea. Mrs Browning: A Poet's Work and its Setting. London: Faber and Faber, 1962.Google Scholar
Jackson, Virginia. and Prins, Yopie. “Lyrical Studies.” Victorian Literature and Culture 27.2 (1999): 521–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keats, John. The Poems of John Keats. Ed. Allott, Miriam. London: Longman, 1970.Google Scholar
Kelley, Philip. and Lewis, Scott, eds. The Brownings' Correspondence. 16 vols. Winfield: Wedgestone, 1984.Google Scholar
Leighton, Angela. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Brighton: Harvester, 1986.Google Scholar
Lootens, Tricia. Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996.Google Scholar
Mason, Emma. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mermin, Dorothy. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.Google Scholar
Michie, Helena. “Under Victorian Skins: The Bodies Beneath.” A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture. Ed. Tucker, Herbert F.. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999: 407–24.Google Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. “What is Poetry?” (1833). Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Vol. 1: Autobiography and Literary Essays. Ed Robson, John M. and Stillinger, Jack. Toronto: U of Toronto P; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 343–53.Google Scholar
O'Gorman, Francis. “The Politics of Love in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese.” The English Review 13 (February 2003): 28–30.Google Scholar
Olsen, Tillie. Silences. London: Virago, 1980.Google Scholar
Phelan, Joseph. The Nineteenth Century Sonnet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.Google Scholar
Picker, John M. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho. Virginia: U of Virginia P, 1999CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Phyllis. Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.Google Scholar
Rossetti, Christina. Poems and Prose. Ed. Marsh, Jan. London: Everyman, 1994.Google Scholar
Rowlinson, Matthew. “Lyric.” A Companion to Victorian Poetry. Ed. Cronin, Richard, Chapman, Alison, and Harrison, Antony H.. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 59–77.Google Scholar
Smith, Charlotte. Elegiac Sonnets. The Works of Charlotte Smith Vol. 14. Ed. Labbe, Jacqueline M.. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007.Google Scholar
Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley: U of California P,1990.Google Scholar
Sturge Moore, T., and Sturge Moore, D. C., eds. Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field. London: John Murray, 1933.Google Scholar
Tennyson, Alfred. The Poems of Tennyson. Ed. Ricks, Christopher. 2nd ed. 3 vols. Harlow: Longman, 1987.Google Scholar
Vanden Bossche, Chris R. “Moving Out: Adolescence.” A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture. Ed. Tucker, Herbert F.. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 82–96.Google Scholar