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What kind of poetry can promote meaningful social change? Can women write such poetry? These are two of the questions Elizabeth Barrett Browning grappled with in her 1857 novel-poem Aurora Leigh. Romney Leigh is the voice of dissent in the poem. Early in the text, he informs Aurora that women are "weak for art" and only fitted for "life and duty."1 According to Romney, this is a result of women's inability to generalize from individual cases of oppression to the larger social problems that cause that oppression:
The human race
To you means, such a child, or such a man,
You saw one morning waiting in the cold,
Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up
A few such cases, and, when strong, sometimes
Will write of factories and of slaves, as if
Your father were a negro, and your son
A spinner in the mills. (2.189-196)
Romney's accusation is drawn from actual debates over women's capabilities taking place in the Victorian press. 2 However, the examples he gives in the passage above are tailored specifically to fit Barrett Browning's own body of work. Just as Aurora proves Romney wrong about woman's capacity to create significant art, Barrett Browning in her own poetry demonstrates the importance of tempering generalization on social problems with the kind of individual approach that Romney deplored. In her anti-slavery poem "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" (one of the poems she was likely referencing in the passage above) and in Marian Erle's story of white urban poverty in Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning employs the popular motif of infanticide in order to write tales of domestic suffering that attack the general hypocrisy and oppression surrounding single motherhood while not losing sight of the important differences that set the runaway slave and Marian Erle apart from one another.
The infanticidal plot of "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" has inspired many articles. Scholars have written about the poem's relation to Barrett Browning's life and family history, its rhetorical connections to the Garrisonian abolitionist circle, its representations of infanticide, its textual history, and its thematic links to Toni Morrison's novel Beloved.3 However, the important connections between the infanticide represented in this poem and Marian Erle's story in Aurora Leigh have yet to be fully...