The Burden of a Song: Victorian Women’s Poetics, Silence and Dissonance

Abstract

This dissertation has explored the ways in which women poets manipulate and expand the scope of women’s poetics. Looking at women poets’ development of poetics in relation to voice, sound and music helps us to understand how they dealt with the frustration of expression and limitations imposed on their gender. The burden of song is a metaphor for how women poets worked to articulate their voices within constraints of the period. I have argued that Elizabeth Barrett Browning (sometimes here rendered EBB in accordance with scholarly norms) establishes silence as a powerful poetic voice by transcending the ideas of the womanly gender to remain silent. Silence, for Barrett Browning, enunciates to establish women’s vocation as a poet, used both as form and expression. Like Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti attests to silence – by speaking with flowers – and she too complicates the gendered botanical language by challenging the conventional system. Her floral language communicates in compelling ways that require careful reading to grasp the fuller meaning in her poetry. George Eliot rethinks musicality, the polarity between harmony and dissonance fuses into union for poetics and poetical form. In doing so, my work adds to the recent scholarship on women’s poetry that acknowledges the ways that speech is not necessarily coterminous with meaning or power.