Liberalism in Love: Barrett Browning, Browning and Meredith

Abstract

Marriage, understood by liberalism as a private relationship that freely subjects itself to the obligations of public, institutional law, is the focus of Chapter 4, which considers how Victorian poetry about married love negotiates individual freedom and equality within the contractual framework of married life. It takes as its context debates surrounding the “Woman Question”, famously exemplified in Chapter 2 of Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), and it considers how Victorian poets frequently seek to transform the vexed power politics of the love lyric into a space where Mill’s ideal of liberal marriage can find realization. The chapter focuses on two collections: Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862), arguing that the conjugal poetics of the two sonnet sequences expresses a love tempered by the measure of matrimonial law.

I cannot tell you, you cannot be aware of the full extent of his excellence and goodness: but I measure it at its height and depth, and am sensible to it with an increasing gratitude.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Henrietta Barrett, 31 March 1847 ¹

What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them—so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of development—I will not attempt to describe.

—John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women ²