sonnets from the portuguese by elizabeth barrett browning

In order to maintain some privacy, Browning disguised the title in hopes people would believe they were translations from foreign sonnets.

Originally, she did not plan to publish the collection due to their extremely personal content, but changed her mind after Robert Browning insisted, saying they were perhaps the best sequence of English-written sonnets since Shakespeare’s time. As the relationship progressed Barrett Browning was able to overcome her anxieties, and eventually, they took a more accepting and passionate tone. In the earlier sonnets she expresses her doubt and fear about beginning a relationship with Browning. The content and tone of the sonnets change as her relationship with Browning relationship progressed. It is a collection of forty-four love sonnets written for her, then, future husband Robert Browning. Thus, identical passages from Sonnets of the Portuguese can either be read as Barrett Browning’s revolutionary reworking of the sonnet form or as her passive acceptance of her role as a Victorian woman, depending on the reader’s frame of reference.Sonnets from the Portuguese was written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning between 18 and was published in 1850. However, this essay notes that Barrett Browning’s subversive manipulation of traditional Petrarchan metaphor also corresponds to the literal situation of Victorian women. Barrett Browning retains her active nature through describing her own body as unattractive and maimed by illness, characteristics that forestall the dissection of her body in metaphorical language. For example, Petrarch relegates Laura to passivity through discussing her body in parts, composing elaborate metaphors about one single beautiful attribute at a time. In her own sonnets, Barrett Browning manipulates these same conventions in order to prevent a similar objectification from happening to her. A close examination of Petrarch’s Rime sparse, the origin of the sonnet form, reveals the author’s use of poetic conventions to elevate his own subjectivity at the expense of objectifying and silencing the Laura of his poems.

This essay offers an explanation for the tendency of Sonnets from the Portuguese to polarize readers into camps that are either entirely positive or negative: the conflict between literal and metaphorical meaning exemplified by the text. Marianne Van Remoortel, University of Ghent

Sonnets from the portuguese by elizabeth barrett browning