Mother-Want in Victorian Women’s Writing
An interpretation of eros in Book One of Aurora Leigh.
“I felt a mother-want about the world, / And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb.”
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book One.
Victorian literature emerged during Queen Victoria’s reign over England from 1837 to 1901. The literary movement developed from English Romanticism, hailing a new era of written production. Like its predecessor, Victorianism concerned itself with expressions of class, individualism, and nature, but with the additional concerns of the developing industrial society’s impact upon humanity. For Victorian writers, the novel became the primary mode of expression in which they negotiated their concerns and criticisms of public and private lives. Of particularly interest is the Victorian reception of classical mythology. Like several generations of writers, Victorians too used mythology as allegory for their concerns. In 1962, James Kissane wrote that “Victorian interest in mythology was a humanistic…emphasis” (6). The moderation of myth reception in Victorian writing, Kissane suggests is a “reaction against the fanaticism” of early nineteenth-century reception. But mythology remained “looked upon as a stage in man’s intellectual development” (11). Earlier authors such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Lord Byron engaged myth in their respective poetics works successfully. While Kissane’s article only focuses on male reception of myth, using John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and John Addington Symonds as examples, the female reception of myth remains important to understanding Victorianism.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 verse novel Aurora Leigh follows the life of the titular protagonist as she attempts to become an author. In Book One, Verse Two, Aurora proclaims that she “felt a mother-want about the world” (40). There are two ways to understand this “mother-want.” Aurora could mean that she wishes the best for the world and that she intends to care for it through her art. Or, rather, she could mean that she desires to find a mother for herself in the world. This second interpretation of mother-want recalls Sigmund Freud’s womb fantasy: the idea that all persons desire to return to the safest state of being, which was in the womb (300). Through negotiated family romance, the child in its growth realizes that the mother and father are not ideals but flawed beings. In search for ideal replacements, the child longs for the “happy, vanished days” that can never return (300). Though much of Freud’s psychoanalysis investigates the male psyche, it is applicable to the female.[1] Daughters, too, search for their flawed or absent mothers in other women in hopes of replicating that first maternal space.
Suzanne Juhasz writes that “recognition of the mother by way of writing is often what enables many adult daughters to make art” (157). Thus, it is the mother-daughter relationship that compels daughters to write. Through writing, daughters recognize “the separate subjectivity of the mother [that] helps to bring a daughter’s own identity into being” (Juhasz 157). Without the mother-daughter relationship then, however fraught it may be, the daughter is unable to write and thus cannot situate herself within an inherited literary tradition. Juhasz proposes that writing becomes a space in which the daughter can negotiate the mother-daughter relationship. Her assessment of the daughter’s perception of and engagement with the mother-daughter relationship is particularly enthralling when I apply it to Aurora Leigh’s negotiations of motherhood. While Juhasz assesses real-life mother-daughter dynamics, I instead take an abstract approach to her theory. Like the real-life women writers that Juhasz assesses, Aurora Leigh too, despite her fictional existence, engages in “daughter writing” (158). I propose that Aurora’s mother-want is a manifestation of familial eros that allows Aurora to negotiate her role as both mother and daughter to herself. In desiring to become the mother archetype, Aurora positions herself as both a “poet and muse” thus removing the subjectivity of her own mother from her development (Zonana 241). My analysis is situated in book one of Aurora Leigh as it is where Aurora most explicitly discusses her mother.[2] I explore this implication of familial eros through three common themes in Victorian women’s writings: love, trauma, and death
Eros, broadly interpreted in its original romantic-sexual implications, is the desire to “face the beloved and yet not be destroyed” (Carson 62).[3] In the case of Aurora Leigh, eros is a desiring subject (daughter) projecting its desires on to an object (mother). Aurora, at the beginning of the first book, is a young woman without experience of the world. She was raised solely by her father as her mother passed in her infancy.[4] Despite her mother’s absence, it is clear that Aurora loves her. Familial eros is Aurora’s first experience with love. In stanza two of book one, thirty-six lines are dedicated to discussing her mother and love. By associating her mother with love, Aurora creates a maternal, saint-like image of her mother that taught her about the ways of maternal love as I will soon demonstrate. Love, too, is then associated with religious language: “Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play…Love’s Divine / Which burns and hurts not, —not a single bloom,— / Become aware and unafraid of Love” (55, 57-59). Familial eros, unlike romantic eros, is not inclined to provoke fear. As a desire associated with birth and creation, fear is displaced in favor of familiarity. It is sensible then that Aurora does not fear love, because maternal love, being her first love, did no such thing to call upon fear. The association of eros, however, with death lingers in Aurora’s manifestation of mother-want, creating a trauma-bond expressed through her cautionary approach to other kinds of eros.[5]
The trauma of Aurora’s mother’s death lingers in the love that she expresses for the passed woman. Aurora’s mother died from childbirth: “The mother’s rapture slew her” (35). Associating childbirth with a rapture implies a holy experience, but a fatal one in which the mother cannot survive. Aurora implies that should her mother have lived longer, she might not have felt a “mother-want about the world” (40).[6] Thus, her mother’s premature death sets upon her an innate desire for mothering. Laura J. Faulk writes that “Aurora Leigh confronts the problems of maternity itself and the absent mother…from a female point of view” (42). This female- and daughter-writing of motherhood positions it as not the ideal state of existence for women, as Victorian men might have suggested, but rather as a nuanced, ever-evolving role that leaves the daughter in a prolonged state of eros when the mother’s presence becomes absent. Aurora compares herself in her search for a mother figure to a “bleating lamb” and an “unmothered little child” (41, 95). She has an idealized, perhaps romanticized, vision of mothers as a consequence of her own mother’s absence:
Not overjoyous, truly. Women know
The way to rear children up (to be just),
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words,
Which things are corals to cut life upon,
Although such trifles: children learn by such (47-54)
Whether or not Aurora remembers her mother is contested. Being four years old at the time of her passing, it is a possibility, but the idea remains unsupported by textual evidence. Therefore, the above passage implies that Aurora created a myth of motherhood which guided her perception of her own mother. The trauma of Aurora’s mother-loss is the birth of mother-want. Aurora goes on to say that “mothers have God’s license to be missed” (64). Tellingly, is her mother that she continuously associates with godlike imagery, implying that the mother is holier than the father who is not licensed by God to be missed. Aurora’s mother, through the godlike imagery, is associated with Mary, the Mother of Jesus. Out of her grief, Aurora creates a myth of her mother. As Anne Carson writes of eros, “its action is to reach, and the reach of desire involves every lover in an activity of the imagination” (63). Aurora is reaching for her mother through mythmaking, but unable to grasp her because of the separation between life and death.
Acts of imagination, or in my assessment mythmaking, “sometimes turn upon enhancing the beloved, sometimes upon reconceiving the lover” (69). Aurora’s mother is romanticized, made saintlike, while at the same time Aurora works to revision herself not as a daughter not as a creator. Thus, she displaces her mother from the position of subject to the position of object, and assumes the mother role herself through the creation of her written works. It is notable, too that Aurora herself notes, “the works of women are symbolical” (456). The continual use of mythic imagery throughout book one of Aurora Leigh indicates that Elizabeth Barrett Browning agreed. Aurora calls upon several female mythic figures later in book one to express the way eros is at times fatal for women:
A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,
A Loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,
A still Medusa with mild milky brows (155-7)
…
Our Lady of Passion, stabbed with swords
Where the Babe sucked (160-1)
The “dauntless Muse” who met a “dreadful Fate” is her mother (155). By making her mother a Muse, Aurora mythologizes her once again, reaching but unable to grasp her. She goes on to write explicitly her mother in this segment, “my own mother, leaving her last smile / In her last kiss upon the baby-mouth” (164-5). Here, Aurora is the subject of the desiring mother-want while her mother the object upon which she projects her desire. She imagines that her mother kissed her as her last act of life, an image that recalls the “kiss of death” motif originating from Christian mythos.[7] If Aurora sees herself as a harbinger of death, it is not clear. What is clear is the association between mother-want, eros, and death. Anne Carson points to the triangulation of eros in her 1986 collection of essays Eros the Bittersweet: “lover, beloved, and that which comes between them” (16). In Aurora Leigh, this triangulation of eros is twofold. First, there is the triangulation between mother-want (a specific manifestation of familial eros), eros (desire in its whole form), and death (mother-loss). Secondly, there is the triangulation between lover (Aurora), beloved (mother), and that which comes between them (death/mother-loss). The two triangulations at play in book one of the novel work to position Aurora as negotiating eros. As a daughter, she is a desiring subject in want of a mother, mythologizing her to create an object. However, she likewise desires to become a creator; to author her own works. To do so would remove her mother from the position of the desired object and replace her with the self-fulfillment found in written creation.
By the end of the novel, Aurora does not return to the womb; the familial eros for which she reaches is lost. She cannot reclaim the mother-want she so desired at the beginning of the novel because, despite stepping into the role of mother, it does not replace that original maternal bond she sought. The ending of the novel thematically echoes the beginning; Aurora writes in book one that she will “write now for mine, / Will write my story for my better self” (3-4). Her better self, it seems, is one in which the pain of familial eros is no longer the threshold by which she measures her own subjectivity as a creator. She has by the end of the novel become her own muse, but an “earthly not a heavenly muse” (Zonana 243). She does not romanticize herself as she did her mother. The removal of this romanticization then removes eros from the triangulation originally at play in book one. Without the triangulation, eros cannot persist. Thus, resolution is reached but eros is lost.
Another way to read Aurora Leigh is to examine it as a female epic. Like the Odyssey and Paradise Lost, katabasis is at work in Aurora Leigh. It is through the experience of mother-want, of familial eros, that Aurora undergoes a katabasis and only reaches anabasis through her acknowledgement in book nine that writing, not her love interest, completes her. Indeed, authors such as Virginia V. Steinmetz and Sarah Annes Brown recognize Aurora Leigh as a Victorian epic. Steinmetz writes that “the evidence for mother-want as a primary motive of Aurora's odyssey is abundant in the maternal images related to her in Aurora Leigh. The early death of Aurora's mother sends Elizabeth Barrett Browning's heroine on a search for substitutes” (353). The journey from mother-want to seemingly acceptance of mother-loss indicates a change in character—a katabasis in which the role of daughter and mother are most important to ensuring its manifestation. Without the mother’s death, Aurora would not have gone on a katabasis, nor would she have negotiated, and eventually solidified, her position as a creator. Aurora seems to foreshadow her own katabasis in book one as she reflects on the inseparable entanglements between life and death: “The incoherencies of change and death / Are represented fully, mixed and merged, / In the smooth fair mystery of perpetual Life” (171-3). Without life, there is no death. Without the daughter, there is no mother.
Despite the loss Aurora experiences, and her later acceptance of it, the mother nonetheless remains a figure of negotiation in Aurora’s life. Though readers have no idea how Aurora might come to feel about her mother after the end of the novel, we do know that eros is ever-changing. It does, by way of metaphor, turn the wheel. Aurora becomes the mother-figure, but she may later step back into the role of the daughter. The desire familial eros provokes may return to her. A full study of eros, and particularly of familial eros, throughout Aurora Leigh would lead to exceptional dialogue about Aurora’s mother-want. What greater Muse is there for Aurora other than desire?
Works Cited
Brown, Sarah Annes. “Paradise Lost and Aurora Leigh.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 37, no. 4, 1997, pp. 723-740.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. “Aurora Leigh.” The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory. Edited by Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle, Broadview Press, 1999, pp. 82-134.
Carson, Anne. “Ruse.” Eros the Bittersweet, Princeton UP, 1986, pp. 12-17.
Carson, Anne. “What Does the Lover Want from Love?” Eros the Bittersweet, Princeton UP, 1986, pp. 62-69.
Faulk, Laura J. “Destructive Maternity in ‘Aurora Leigh.’” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 41, no. 1, 2013, pp. 41-54.
Freud, Sigmund. “Family Romances.” The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay, W. W. Norton & Company, 1989, pp. 297-300.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Ego and the Id.” The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay, W. W. Norton & Company, 1989, pp. 631-637.
Juhasz, Suzanne. “Towards Recognition: Writing and the Daughter-Mother Relationship.” American Imago, vol. 57, no. 2, 2000, pp. 157-183.
Steinmetz, Virginia V. “Images of ‘Mother-Want’ in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh.” Victorian Poetry, vol 21, no. 4, 1983, pp. 351-367.
Zonana, Joyce. “The Embodied Muse: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Feminist Poetics.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 8, no. 2, 1989, pp. 240-262.
[1] I decline to use here Carl Jung’s Electra Complex because it is not the competition between mother and daughter that I believe to be present in Aurora’s relationship with her mother as she understands it. Instead, I wish to call attention to manifestations of eros as a kind of desire to return to the womb—to the first expression of (familial) eros in one’s life.
[2] A full analysis of familial eros throughout the entirety of Aurora Leigh is something I would like to demonstrate in a longer paper.
[3] Eros is, of course, wholly more complicated and multi-layered than this single line. The concept originated in Ancient Greece to explain sexual and romantic desire, though it can manifest in other ways as well as demonstrated Anne Carson, and Sigmund Freud. Freud identifies eros as a universal desire in his development of psychoanalysis. See works cited for further reading.
[4] “My mother was a Florentine, / Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me / When I was scarcely four years old” (29-31).
[5] Here, I think of Aurora’s initial rejection of her cousin Romney Leigh’s romantic advances in book one.
[6] “If her kiss / Had a left a longer weight upon my lips / It might have steadied the uneasy breath / And reconciled and fraternised my soul” (35-38).
[7] Matthew 26:48, Holy Bible, New International Version: “Now the betrayer [Judas] had arranged a signal with them: ‘The one I kiss is the man [Jesus]; arrest him.’”