-
"Half Poets" and "Whole Democrats": The Politics of Poetic Aggregation in Aurora Leigh
- Author(s):
- Amy Kahrmann Huseby (see profile)
- Date:
- 2018
- Group(s):
- CLCS Romantic and 19th-Century, GS Poetry and Poetics, LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English, TC Marxism, Literature, and Society, TC Women’s and Gender Studies
- Subject(s):
- English poetry, Nineteenth century, Versification, Politics and government, Women authors, Great Britain, Women's studies, Women--Sexual behavior, Socialism, Statistics
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- Democracy, Counting, Historical demography, Victorian poetry, Prosody, Politics, 19th-century British women writers, Women's gender, and sexuality studies
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M62J68414
- Abstract:
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh seeks to redress the divisive work of women’s democratic political representation by way of poetic form to ask whether women must always be regarded as partial citizens. Women are not counted as integral units—ones—politically or culturally. Barrett Browning connects women’s ability to produce writing and children to formulate a corrective political relationship between women’s being halves and pieces on the one hand and their capacity for generativity on the other. Constructing a parallel between Aurora’s poetic body and the body of a rape victim, Barrett Browning makes the point that for women being counted politically always involves a divided self. Refusing to understand citizenship as either the elimination of individuality or as the fusion of individuals into a mass, Barrett Browning uses poetic form to construct a political wholeness that is at once not satisfying, for it requires the acknowledgement of the inequities that women endure, and preferable to a totalizing democratic citizenship that boils all voices down to the tyrannical majority.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 5 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
Downloads
Item Name: 
huseby-poetic-aggregation-in-aurora-leigh.pdfDownload View in browser Activity: Downloads: 489
