The Liberal Self: Wordsworth and Barrett Browning

Abstract

Chapter 2 addresses liberal philosophy’s defining commitment to the right of the individual subject to self-determination and explores poetry’s capacity to trace and to trouble the boundaries of the liberal self. It reads Wordsworth and Barrett Browning as two poets who share a Lockean inheritance and whose work enacts a transition from the absolutism of the Romantic liberal project to the more measured freedoms of nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism, which adheres to a doctrine of freedom subject to divine law and human community. Focusing on Wordsworth’s philosophical epic, The Excursion, and Barrett Browning’s künstlerroman, Aurora Leigh, it considers poetry’s participation in the Lockean practice of reflective self-making. It begins with The Excursion, considering the Solitary, the Wanderer and the Pastor, as three models of selfhood that are tested against different kinds of physical and social space. It goes on to read Aurora Leigh in light of Barrett Browning’s admiration for The Excursion and as a poem that likewise rejects the egotism of absolute liberty in favour of a free self that exists in social relation.

I really believe I am disinterested ! At least I feel as if I moved and breathed not for myself!

—Elizabeth Barrett, “Glimpses into my own life and literary character” ¹

The Excursion is to the Wordsworthian what it can never be to the disinterested lover of poetry, — a satisfactory work.

—Matthew Arnold , Preface to The Poems of Wordsworth ²