Refiguring the Sage: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Pluralistic Vision in Aurora Leigh

Abstract

Through her engagement with the philosophical, religious, and political debates of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB) participates in the sage’s work of writing to create a more thoughtful and ethical society. This thesis analyzes the ways in which EBB’s Aurora Leigh (1856) portrays the poet and thus the sage not as the proponent of a single philosophy but as one who adopts many different forms of knowing. To conceptualize EBB’s revision of Victorian sage discourse, I adapt and amplify Wayne C. Booth’s theory of modal pluralism by drawing also from the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Balachandra Rajan, and John Ruskin. I argue that EBB presents the sage’s “double vision” as a pluralistic synaesthesia that gathers together various perceptual, emotional, and intellectual faculties (5.184). Accordingly, I consider also the consequences of this pluralistic vision, particularly in terms of the generous disposition and the unrealizable fullness it enjoins.