CAPITULO II MARCO TEÓRICO
2.2 Marco 1 Teórico
2.2.2 Conceptual Clima Organizacional
Having grown up in a family with strong ties to evangelicalism, EBB was perhaps an unlikely convert to spiritualism.47 However, the new movement entranced EBB, which she
indicated to spiritualist Lady Elgin: “Did I not observe, when I was leaving you, that we were
passing out of the sphere of the spirits? No such thing! The buzz of the spiritual world was in my ears in London too, and even here one may listen to it” (BC 7 January 1853). Certainly, as
Marjorie Stone puts it, “A spirit of questioning and religious revisionism in her poetry” never made EBB a “conventional Christian believer” (9). By the 1850s, EBB’s personal faith had shifted from the strict orthodoxy of her upbringing to one where she recognized, according to
Linda M. Lewis, “only Christ’s authority, only his laws, and only his divine example of love” (107). While EBB’s interest in the “spirit-question” seems to point to the poet moving towards a less Christ-centered theology, she told her friend Isa Blagden that “I certainly would’nt set about building a system of theology out of [the spirits’] oracles—God forbid” (BC 3 March 1853).48 Yet, the foregoing quotation from the 1853 letter to Lady Elgin draws attention to EBB’s description that “The buzz of the spiritual world was in my ears,” just one among numerous
references to theo-acoustics in her correspondence (BC 7 January 1853). A decade earlier, EBB
47As I noted in my Introduction, I use “EBB” rather than the author’s full name for this chapter. In fact, she often
signed manuscripts and letters “EBB” and expressed pleasure that this name remained unchanged by her marriage.
48When discussing EBB as a “poet-preacher,” Karen Dieleman argues that, “It is the narrative and expository
impulse that prevails instead…the urge to testify to the Word more than to contemplate the symbol” (36). She points
criticized the novelist Jane Austen for being “essentially unpoetical” and, by extension,
irreligious because she failed to represent the divine in her fiction: “Jane Austen is one-sided— and her side is the inferior & darkest side. God, Nature, the Soul…what does she say, or suggest
of these? what proof does she give of consciousness of these? … In her works we do not discern even ‘the trees’ … much less, the voice of God stirring them” (BC 1 June 1843). As the poet would write later that same year, she believed in feeling religious experience in both body and
spirit: “Is it not true that the soul is as actually, as your best seedling geranium? that our hold upon the spiritual world, & the prophesy of a spiritual futurity within us, are as actually, as any impression coming to us by the senses?” (BC 22 July 1843). My examination of the poet in Aurora Leigh (1856) therefore depends on this foundational premise that EBB was deeply interested in the practice of listening, which she presents as central to not only religious practice
but also to a female poet’s ability to develop her own professional identity in the literary
marketplace.
Working within the ongoing debate surrounding the nineteenth-century poetess, EBB depicts Aurora as ultimately defining her profession within a religious framework, i.e. as a vocation, that looks to Jesus Christ as the ideal poet. In the nineteenth-century literary
marketplace, the poetess drew on the popular notion that the female poet was a spiritual figure, who enforced conservative, domestic values, in order to sell her poetry. Yet, EBB defined herself as a professional writer; she wanted the same freedom as a male poet to explore contemporary,
controversial topics through poetry. Just as EBB objected to “being offered up to the public” as a
type of literary celebrity, i.e. the poetess, her protagonist resists being defined as a commodity for private or public consumption —both as an artist and a woman (BC 10 July 1856).49 As part
49 At the same time, EBB was aware of the growing cult of celebrity that surrounded nineteenth-century writers. As
of her vocational journey, EBB emphasizes Aurora’s need to attune her ears to God’s voice even as she must suffer the sheer volume of voices in the material world: other characters’ religious views, Lady Waldemar’s cruel witticisms, literary critics’ demands, and audience’s mixed
responses to her poetry. In fact, EBB consistently depicts the dangers of listening to others
before God, which she highlights in her repeated use of snake imagery to allude to the serpent’s
aural deception in the Garden of Eden. Like Adam and Eve, who suffered consequences for their attempt “to be as gods,” the protagonist and her future husband Romney learn the painful
spiritual cost and isolation that come with idolizing professional identity or human-made systems (King James Version, Genesis 3:5). With the verse novel’s ending, EBB underscores the spiritual nature of calling by having both characters simultaneously confess their need for Jesus Christ and their need for each other, thus depicting marriage as another type of religious calling within nineteenth-century life.
The Poetess in the Literary Marketplace
Mid-Victorian reviewers of Aurora Leigh labeled both the real EBB and the fictional
Aurora Leigh as “poetesses,” placing them in a sub-category within the literary profession. By the mid-Victorian period, writers like G.H. Lewes were advocating for the professionalization of
writers: “literature should be a profession, not a trade. It should be a profession, just lucrative
enough to furnish a decent subsistence to its members, but in no way lucrative enough to tempt
speculators” (qtd. in Salmon 12). Even though Lewes’ observation would seem to undercut the spiritual aims of writers, Richard Salmon points out that “the relationship between the Romantic
while refusing to pander to audience expectations, Barrett Browning still used the general public image of her private life, the hegemonic discourse of domesticity, to gain and keep the readership…She did so…because she understood well a readership which prized moral seriousness and distance in an increasing fame culture” (334-335).
figure of creative genius and the worldly Victorian professional does not afford a neat historical
antinomy” (10). Whereas Lewes emphasizes how professional writers defined themselves in relation to monetary compensation, poets had long drawn on the “idea of a spiritual ministry of the poet” as a response to the “materialism” of the Enlightenment (Salmon 9). In this way,
Victorian poets stressed the importance of “authors to endure, and accrue value, beyond the transient present” (Salmon 6). Consequently, these writers also needed to consider how they
were to remain relevant in a historical moment that was mired in problems related to industrialization, poverty, and religious doubt. Although Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough were debating the appropriate subject matter for poetry in the modern age, the poetess was still restricted by her expected role to write “a little lyric of pathos and sentiment”
(McSweeney ix-x; Tasker 25).50 Female poets also had to work against widespread assumptions
that ladies did not work for pay and that their poetry was a feminine “accomplishment” like
sketching and piano playing. Thus, male critics, poets, and publishers often perpetuated the idea that the female poet did not need to be ambitious in pursuing serious subject matter or
professional success; rather, she should focus her efforts on poetry that expressed women’s
feelings and spiritual uplift. Drawing from female precursors like the Sapphic poetess and the medieval woman troubadour, earlier nineteenth-century poetesses therefore often wrote lyric
verse that depicted women as suffering subjects “inthe wake of betrayal, loss, and rejection”
(Peterson; Cooper 19). Although poet Felicia Hemans wrote before the Victorian period, she had
to negotiate her personal desire to produce “more noble and complete work” with the need to
50While Arnold found the modern period too “unpoetical” for poetry, Clough believed that if poetry were to “gain
the ear of multitudes” it needed to deal with “the actual, palpable things with which our every-day life is concerned”
(qtd. in McSweeney ix-x). Certainly, critics reacted to EBB’s treatment of modern social problems in Aurora Leigh with the same type of reticence that Arnold expressed. As W.E. Aytoun remarked, “All poetical characters, all poetical situations, must be idealized…poets in all ages [have] shrunk from the task of chronicling contemporaneous deeds,” until “time has done its consecratingoffice” (416).
support her children (qtd. in Sweet). To earn a living then, Hemans styled herself as the
sentimental poetess and, therefore, is still associated with those conventions even though critics have more recently argued that she actually criticizes domestic values (Sweet). As Tricia A. Lootens has suggested, the nineteenth-century poetess was a type of performance where these
female writers “do not pretend to speak even with the voices of ‘women,’ much less individuals. Rather, they step forth to ‘sing’ as Woman, enacting naturalized art performed as if flowing
through them, most often without great effort and at points almost without volition” (Lootens 4). By putting her own heart on display, the female poetess was therefore associated with “intense
personal emotion and feeling rather than will or reason” (Blair 103). Kirstie Blair has
demonstrated that “the exploitation of the heart and its status as a commodity was enhanced by its use as a marketing tool, a recurrent image in popular art and artefacts” (116). As one
contemporary critic observed, “The domain of poetry is wide; [the poetess’] power over the human heart immense” (Stodart 387). Thus, publishers and female poets enabled a conflation of the female writer’s private life and public art which continued through the mid-Victorian period (Peterson). Therefore, nineteenth-century female poets did not often engage in the debate surrounding the professionalization of literature, largely because they struggled to define and evaluate their own success in the growing literary marketplace.51
EBB, therefore, would not have necessarily viewed the label “poetess” positively, as it only highlighted the minority status of women writers “with respect to the dominant discourse on the literary profession” (Salmon 174). Certainly, the reviews of Aurora Leigh speak to the reality that while the male poet had already been defined as filling a professional role, the poetess was
still considered as filling a domestic role. In the Saturday Review, one reviewer described the
verse novel’s characters and narrative as “unreal” but also found that the description of a
“professed poetess” would only be of “professional interest” to other authors (776-778, emphasis
mine). Yet the critic did offer one praise to EBB by affirming that “Mrs. Browning may claim at
least an equal rank with any poetess who has appeared in England” (Saturday Review 778). The North British Review balked at any depiction of a female poet, observing that “the development of [Aurora’s] powers as a poetess is elaborately depicted; but as Mrs. Browning is herself almost the only modern example of such development, the story is uninteresting from its very
singularity” (454, emphasis mine). Even in George Eliot’s highly complimentary review of
Aurora Leigh in the Westminster Review, the future novelist categorized EBB as a poetess rather
than a female poet: “It is difficult to point to a woman of genius who is not either too little
feminine, or too exclusively so. But in this, her longest and greatest poem, Mrs. Browning has shown herself all the greater poet because she is intensely a poetess” (306, emphasis mine).
Yet, as Beverly Taylor has argued, although EBB may have initially worked in the poetess tradition as embodied by earlier nineteenth-century writers like Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, she soon created her own “female poetics of engagement through which she represented women’s perspectives and experiences while entering public debates using language and images reviewers often deplored as unfeminine” (2).52 Given Aurora Leigh’s portrayal, then, of a female poet paving her own way in the literary marketplace, it makes sense that critics and readers identified the verse novel as addressing the Woman Question.Yet, EBB expressed
52 As Taylor argues further, “Whereas [Felicia] Hemans made her political interests conform on the surface to
society’s expectations for ladies, EBB over time declined to write what her age understood to be lady’s verse, aggressively revising poetesses’ subjects and perspectives, their tropes, language, and poetic plots, to declare herself a woman poet rather than a poetess” (4).
surprise that others saw the Woman Question as such a prominent issue in her work, telling her
sister Arabella that, “The intention of the poem everywhere is to raise the spiritual above the
natural; this is carried out in everything,” (BC 4 October 1856). 53 By having Aurora only refer to herself as a “poet” rather than a “poetess” in the verse novel, EBB thus asks her audience to understand the heroine’s professional development as much like her own—as a writer who initially established herself as a poetess by writing on feminine-appropriate subject matter but who wanted to distinguish herself as a female poet by attending to modern concerns and offering social commentary.54 Much like EBB herself, her female protagonist embodies the tension between the Romantic and Victorian models of authorship in the way she seeks spiritual fulfillment as well as necessary monetary payment to support herself. EBB
Early in her career, EBB declared that writing poetry was a professional practice. To
Richard Hengist Horne, EBB wrote, “I have worked at poetry—it has not been with me reverie, .. but art. As the physician & lawyer work at their several professions, so have I, & so do I, apply to mine—& this I say, only to put by any charge of carelessness which may rise up to the verge of your lips or thoughts” (BC 20 June 1844). By defining herself in relation to the established professions of medicine and law, EBB asks her reader to view the emerging profession of writer
53 In a letter to Julia Martin, EBB wrote, “Did you see in the list of lectures to be delivered by Gerald Massey,
(advertised in the Athenæum) one on ‘Aurora Leigh& the woman’s question.’? I did not fancy that this poem would be so identified as it has been, with that question, which was only a collateral object with my intentions in writing”
(BC 14 May 1858).
54In fact, a relatively minor character Lord Howe uses the term “poetess” once, which is the label’s only usage in
the entire narrative (V. 833). On the other hand, the term “poet” appears 85 times in Aurora Leigh. When examining this narrativethrough the lens of professional identity and vocation, then, critics have drawn from the poet’s life and
the verse novel itself to demonstrate how EBB was seeking to present the female poet in a different light. As argued by Meg Tasker, Linda Peterson, SueAnn Schatz, and Anne D. Wallace, depictions of work figure so prominently in the verse novel because EBB understood all too well that professional writing involved commitment and practice. In these ways, EBB is tearing down the “iconic” image of the inspired, spontaneous Romantic poetess to reconstruct
as one that demands ethics and hard work. Certainly, as Salmon points out, the female poet
presents herself as the embodiment of “middle-class professionalism” (Salmon 191). After all, EBB had immense respect for “Men & women of letters,” stating that “I would rather be the least among them, than ‘dwell in the courts of princes’” (BC 28 April 1845). As a rising poet in the literary marketplace, she recognized that her proficiency in the craft of writing was still evolving:
“I have written those poems as well as I could—and I hope to write others better. I have not reached my own ideal, —& I cannot expect to have satisfied other people’s expectation” (BC 10 September 1844). Over a decade later, EBB once again emphasized that writing was indeed
“laborious work, (for much hard working, & hard thinking have gone to it)” (BC 29 December
1856). At the same time, she still recognized that “there is a class…unworthy of literature—& I do not mean to deny it. Only I maintain that literature is a noble profession, & that (with all its
temptations) a noble man may hold it nobly” (BC 3 September 1844). While EBB does not
elaborate what these “temptations” might be, she does give some hint in a later letter to Robert Browning: “People who write…by profession… shall I say?...never should do it…or what will
become of them when most of their strength retires into their head & heart, (as is the case with
some of us & may be the case with all) & when they have to write a poem twelve times over”
(BC 17 February 1845). Here EBB seems to allude to the hack writer who “writes to live” or those “who mistake their vocation in poetry” (BC 26 July 1842; 1 March 1846). She would go on
to explain to Browning that, “If I were netting a purse I might be thinking of something else &
drop my stitches, — or even if I were writing verses to please a popular taste, I might be careless in it. But the pursuit of an Ideal acknowledged by the mind, will draw & concentrate the powers of the mind—and Art, you know, is a jealous god & demands the whole man…or woman” (BC
profession (BC 17 February 1845). Due to her religious convictions, EBB read professional
ethics through the lens of Jesus Christ’s earthly ministry. According to her letters, EBB held that Jesus Christ was both “the High Priest of our profession” and the “Head” of the “universal church” (BC 19 March 1844; 8-10 January 1854).In this way, Jesus Christ bridged any perceived disparity between her professional endeavors and religious faith; he modeled vocation not in his
sacrifice alone but also in his “radical model of love” (Lewis 82). Ultimately, this female poet defined herself as a professional who was also doing, as Lewis articulates, “the work of God”
(BC 15 March 1846; Lewis 71).
In fact, EBB believed that critics and readers often placed limits on the scope or nature of
a poet’s literary output, thereby undermining the writer’s divine call. Part of these concerns may have stemmed from EBB’s belief that years as an invalid “recluse” limited her poetic practice
(BC 20 March 1845). She would tell Browning, “Why if I live on & yet do not escape from this