ABSTRACT
In Aurora Leigh (1857), Elizabeth Barrett Browning identifies the needle as a symbol of the drudgery and worthlessness of a middle-class woman’s domestic existence. As a standard accomplishment and ubiquitous activity for the proper middleclass woman, needlework restrains Aurora’s independence and literary creativity, tying her physically to the material world of prosaic womanhood. This opposition between the needle and the pen was a familiar device used by women authors throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it contributed to an image of female authorship in which woman’s conventional roles and responsibilities were represented as constraints on creativity.2 Elizabeth Gaskell, for instance, warned an aspiring young writer of the difficulties of pursuing a literary career, noting the ease with which the writer could neglect the ‘thousand little bits of work, which no sempstress ever does so well as the wife or mother who knows how the comfort of those she loves depends on little peculiarities’.3 Charlotte Brontë noted a similar
conflict 12 years before Jane Eyre was published: ‘I have endeavoured not only to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil, but to feel deeply interested in them. I don’t always succeed, for sometimes when I’m teaching or sewing, I would rather be reading or writing’.4 Barrett Browning also invokes this tradition in her semiautobiographical representation of Aurora when her stultifying feminine education and the monotony forced upon her slow down the poem and lead Aurora into the rather clumsy rhetorical digression introduced with the unpoetic ‘By the way’. For Aurora, needlework’s incompatibility with poetry appears fundamental. Even taking needlework as the subject of poetry proves disruptive as the reader is also forced to slow down over the spondaic repetition in the description of women as they ‘sew, sew’. Writing about needlework, then, seems almost as tedious for her as sewing itself. In Aurora’s experience, needlework is oppressive and uninspiring. From this perspective, even the little efforts the handy needlewoman makes to add to the comfort of her domestic sphere become markers of her degradation and subordination. The obliging wife, like the cursed stool or serviceable cushion, becomes an object to be despised and disregarded.
