Affecting authenticity: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern 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.

What disturbed many original reviewers of Modern Love was the subject matter of the poem: the marriage is clearly in decline; the husband, convinced that his wife is having an affair, seeks solace in another woman; the husband and wife unsuccessfully attempt a sexual reconciliation; after the husband encounters the wife with her lover, they reveal their respective liaisons to each other, and the sequence ends with the wife's suicide. In its often bitter and brutal examination of the end of love, Meredith's poem challenged the assumptions of its original readers. Recent critics have been more accepting of the subject matter of the poem, but have generally sought to anchor it in Meredith's own personal experience (his wife left him for another man, and Meredith composed the poem shortly after her death in 1861). The "story" of Modern Love is deliberately murky, and many modern editions publish prose summaries of the sonnets to assist the reader in following the narrative. It does Meredith's work a disservice, however, to call it "a kind of novel in verse" (as do several anthologies), which obscures the complex ways in which his sequence negotiates between the sonnet tradition and the novel.

Meredith always called the fifty poems that make up the Modern Love series "sonnets," although they bear little resemblance to any of the sonnet forms legitimated by Victorian critics. Consisting of sixteen lines rhymed in four abba quatrains, the Modern Love sonnets at least visually acknowledge both Tennyson's In Memoriam and the Petrarchan sonnet tradition. Yet the syntax and sense of the poems belie the filiation of the rhyme scheme, as Meredith revises the amatory sonnet tradition, expanding the scope of lyric toward narrative. By eschewing a first-person pronoun, Meredith makes clear in the first sonnet that he is creating a new form entirely: