Aurora Leigh's Sonnets

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Recommended: Influences of Victorian literature

AURA REQUIMEN 12EAD “Texts reflect the values / perspectives of different times and contexts.” Texts are representations of the composers' responses to changing societal norms and values of their epoch. Conservative Victorian sensibilities are challenged in the poetic collection “Sonnets from the Portuguese – Aurora Leigh and Other Poems” (1845-46) [SFTP] by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. On a similar note, F. Scott Fitzgerald recreates the post-war moral scarcity and hedonism of the Jazz Age in his 1925 novel “The Great Gatsby” [TGG]. The comparative study of both texts and their relationship with the composers' historical and biological contexts expose their themes of love, romance, and religion through the retrospection of gender representation …show more content…

The composer incorporates several biblical allusions throughout the poems in conjunction with the synecdoches for hope and sex to further the relationship between Catholicism and love. In Sonnet XXII, for instance, the object correlative“to drop some golden orb” carries sexual connotations as a spiritual experience. The composer depicts sex as akin to purification or transcending heaven in the allusive metaphor “isolate pure spirits” to further accentuate the Victorian ideal of romantic love as a religious experience. These references coincide with hope as the primary theme and developing force in the sonnets through “silver” as an extended metaphor, manifesting as a “silver answer” in Sonnet I to illustrate the potential of Browning’s love and addressed as a “silver iterance” of the Beloved’s confession to the persona. Love, depicted as a sustaining and transformative force, impacts the composer’s growth shown in her direct, passionate tone in Sonnet XLIII. The anaphora of “I love thee” is a metaphor for her newfound confidence and explicit defiance of her society’s standards as a result of the change spurred by the spirituality of her romantic experiences. The composer, therefore, not only defines the influence of religion on the Victorian era but also portrays its standards as oppressive and challenges the norm through the

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