The Four Lenses Used On Sonnets

Literary Review: The Four Lenses Used on Sonnets

The Gender Lens: As Feminist

Criticism of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet XXII can be broken into a handful of categories: feminism, religion, Greek scholarship, and physicality. Much criticism is focused on how Barrett Browning pirated the sonnet tradition to use for her own feminist agenda. These sources are primarily interested with her in relation to the sonnet tradition, and there is debate whether Sonnets from the Portuguese is autobiographical or not. Other critics use her religious background as a lens rather than her gender, explaining how she saw her role as a “poet-prophet.” Charles LaPorte especially explains how she sometimes stood against the religious sentiment of her day,

This is especially valuable to explain the explicit religious allusions in Sonnet XXII. According to Dieleman, Barrett Browning’s background in the Congregationalist Church shaped how she saw her writing as a spiritual exercise. In fact, in another article titled “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Religious Poetics,” Dieleman argues that Barrett Browning saw herself as a poet-prophet, which often led her to political activism in her writings. Barrett Browning practiced writing religious hymns, then transitioned to epic poems more influenced by the biblically-based, yet emotionally-presented sermon style of her preacher, James Stratten. Later in her career, Barrett Browning transitioned to writing poetry that was not explicitly religious, yet still influenced by her religious

By using the word “room,” she was referring to the room in her father’s house she wrote in, as well as the “lyrical room” of the sonnet and the space between the lovers. In the sonnet tradition, a sonnet was such a compact form that it only had space for one lover “alone with his thoughts.” However, Barrett Browning used prepositions, enjambment, and deictics to make room for both lovers to have an equal dialogue.

In “‘Our Deep, Dear Silence,’” Rhian Williams offers an interesting explanation of the physicality of silence in Sonnets from the Portuguese. According to Williams, the repeated references to silence anticipated the marriage of the Brownings at the end of the sequence. In contrast with the cultural expectation that women were silenced in marriage, Barrett Browning anticipated an egalitarian silent space between the lovers. Like other critics, Williams explains that Barrett Browning made room in her sonnets for marriage, a concept that is not usually found in the sonnet