Affecting authenticity: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2002 by Houston, Natalie M

Sonnet XXIII also refers to a letter written by Robert:

Is it indeed so? If I lay here dead,

Would'st thou miss any life in losing mine?

I marvelled, my Beloved, when I read

Thy thought so in the letter. (1-2, 5-6)

The close intensity of their conversation and correspondence is highlighted by Barrett Browning's frequent use of ellipses and rhetorical questions. Despite the many literary allusions in her series, the overall effect of her language is colloquial, another hallmark of authentic expression. Language and details from everyday life also contribute to the authenticity effect of the Sonnets: "Yes, call me by my pet-name! let me hear / The name I used to run at, when a child" (XXXIII.1-2). As readers of the Browning correspondence note, some of the Sonnets do refer to events that actually did happen, described in fairly simple language, compared with the elaborate metaphors used to describe the poet's love and her beloved: I never gave a lock of hair away

To a man, Dearest, except this to thee,

Which now upon my fingers thoughtfully

I ring out to the full brown length and say

"Take it."(XVIII.1-5)

Such moments mark this sequence as explicitly and deliberately Victorian. Barrett Browning brings together the highly ritualized conventions of Victorian courtship-"First time he kissed me, he but only kissed / The fingers of this hand wherewith I write" (XXXVIII.1-2)-with the conventions of the amatory sonnet sequence and reworks the form into a narrative of modern courtship and satisfied romance. Not the plaintive or boastful lover typical in Renaissance sonnets, Barrett Browning's speaker in Sonnets from the Portuguese insists "Say over again, and yet once over again, / That thou dost love me" (XXI.1-2). This series of sonnets instantiates the physical nearness and reality of that satisfied love, rather than the distant longing of the courtly tradition. The Sonnets from the Portuguese satisfied the existing assumptions about the truthfulness and intensity of the sonnet form while at the same time historically framing the question of how to write about modern (Victorian) love.

For most critics, whether in the Victorian period or more recently, Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese and George Meredith's Modern Love seem like polar opposites. If the Sonnets' reception was eventually overwhelming, Modern Love's was underwhelming: faulted for its obscurity, its formal innovations, and especially for its subject matter, Meredith's sonnet sequence attracted significant critical appreciation only near the turn of the century. Sonnets from the Portuguese presents lyric moments of intensity belonging to a narrative of true-life domestic romance, and Modern Love tells the story of a marriage's dissolution. Barrett Browning's sonnets were read as documents of her own life; Meredith's sequence presents a narrative, sometimes in the third person, about four characters carefully separated from himself. If (to greatly condense 150 years of criticism) the Sonnets from the Portuguese can be read as a celebration of authentic love, then Modern Love can be read as a painfully authentic dissection of the end of love. Although their thematic material, formal structures, and tone are very different, reading these two works together can help us understand what was at stake in the Victorian construction of authenticity and its relation to the sonnet form.