ABSTRACT
Face to face' is both common locution in the nineteenth century and a resonant echo of the Pauline text. Precisely in its combination of banality and profundity the wish to see face to face suggests primal wishes, primal experiences. Dolores Rosenblum's study of the female face in Aurora Leigh takes up an aspect of the 'woman's figure' that Kaplan pointed to in the poem. Two-thirds of the way through her verse novel on the growth of a poet, Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes a recognition scene between her heroine and a woman presumed dead. Aurora's recognition of this beloved face and her subsequent recovery of the living woman mark a crucial stage in her development, confirming her parallel achievements of self-integration and commitment to her poetic vocation. In demoting seraphic vision, Elizabeth Barrett Browning – like both Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti – seems to reject the Romantic visionary mode, stressing instead the humanized inter-subjective vision 'face to face'.
