3 - The Search for an Emotional Home

Summary

In the last chapter I explored some of EBB's key religious poems from the 1830s and 1840s as a means of starting to consider her protagonists’ search for the security of a home through spiritual belief. Whilst EBB was always cautious about institutionalized religion – the year before she died, for example, she wrote to her friend Eliza Ogilvy that ‘We want a blast of free air through the churches, & a sweeping away of traditional forms’ (Ogilvy 169) – she nevertheless maintained a strong spiritual commitment throughout her life and saw the role of the poet, at least in part, to be dedicated to the revelation of God's truth. In poems such as The Seraphim and A Drama of Exile, therefore, she depicts faith in Christ as offering the hope of ultimate salvation even if the protagonists of the poems are in outcast or alienated positions or, as with the speaker of ‘Human Life's Mystery’, implicitly questioning of God's existence.

As Glennis Stephenson has suggested, however, EBB's poems often ‘challenge the idea that God's love alone can provide happiness.’ In this chapter, then, I turn to consider the search of EBB's speakers for a home or place of security in the temporal world through human love and emotional engagement. EBB returned repeatedly to consideration of what love meant and how a meaningful relationship between individuals could be established and maintained, although the complexities of this consideration have often been misread or elided through the mythologizing process which transformed EBB herself into the protagonist of one of literary history's most famous romances. The narrative of her clandestine marriage to Robert Browning and their fleeing the draconian rule of her father to start a new life, both personal and professional, in Italy has been rehearsed time and again – most famously in Rudolph Besier's 1931 play, The Barretts of Wimpole Street and the subsequent 1934 film. Moreover, this narrative has often tended to reduce EBB to the roles of oppressed daughter and ‘rescued’ wife, and her powerful poetry to a single line from Sonnets from the Portuguese: ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’ (Sonnet 43, l.1).