ABSTRACT
It is not difficult to find, from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century, poems of protest such as those by Letitia Landon, writing early in the century, and Amy Levy, writing towards the end, in which an overt sexual politics addresses the institutions and customs which burden women, including, in Levy’s case, the taboo against lesbianism. There is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s outburst against the trivial education which trains women for marriage in Aurora Leigh (1856), and which conditions them into acceptability ‘As long as they keep quiet by the fire/And never say “no” when the world says “ay” ’, a statement which perhaps adds another kind of complexity to Robert Browning’s ‘By the Fire-side’ (1855).3 There is Christina Rossetti’s passionate wish to be a ‘man’,4 and as one moves later into the century there are, if possible, fiercer expressions of protest in the work of poets such as Augusta Webster and Mathilde Blind. And yet the poems by Landon and Levy are as interesting for their differences as for their common theme. For Landon marriage is a terminal moment which requires the language of sacrifice and victim. For Levy, the end of marriage and the ‘law’ of God still leaves a patriarchy intact, for it is men who benefit from promiscuity, not women, and the narrow coercions of heterosexual pairing continue. Ironically, a world without marriage still goes ‘The way of God’ by perpetuating His patriarchal ways informally.
