• The Female Enthusiast Revived: Poetic Lineage in Aurora Leigh
• Rachael Isom (bio)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) is a long poem, even by Victorian standards, and it generated no shortage of critiques in the review periodicals of 1857. One of the most popular targets was EBB’s heroine, whom reactionary critics deemed unfeminine and unfeeling.¹ Interestingly, one of Aurora’s detractors makes these claims by employing a term that, in the decades leading up to Aurora Leigh’s publication, had been strongly linked with both femininity and powerful feeling. Anonymous Blackwood’s reviewer William Edmondstoune Aytoun pronounces of Aurora and her cousin, Romney Leigh: “Both are enthusiasts, and both are intolerably dogmatic.”² Aytoun’s critique relies on readers’ familiarity with “enthusiasts” and “enthusiasm”—terms with complex, layered meanings and a long history of social stigma in British culture. Since Aytoun also calls Aurora and Romney “dogmatic,” readers may have recalled enthusiasm’s links to unorthodox faith expressions delegitimized as overly emotional; however, Victorian readers could also have remembered the phenomenon of improvisation popularized around the turn of the century with Germaine de Staël’s Corinne (1807) and the poetess culture that emerged in Staël’s wake. In each of these contexts, women who claimed inspired genius were often called “enthusiasts”: a composite identity steeped in the diverse powers of religious and poetic inspiration but also laden with the controversies surrounding both. Of course, these controversies were often gendered, and it is no accident that enthusiasm became ubiquitous in nineteenth-century women’s writing as a way to address obstacles to women’s vocational poethood. It may come as a surprise, then, that the word “enthusiast” never appears in the object of Aytoun’s 1857 critique: EBB’s Aurora Leigh.

As Aytoun and his Victorian readers well knew, to call someone an enthusiast was to conjure a longstanding specter of religious unorthodoxy, political radicalism, and poetic emotionalism; moreover, they recognized that this specter was profoundly gendered. In the eighteenth century, one of the primary targets had been John Wesley’s Methodism, opponents of which used the sect’s disproportionately female constituency to discredit it as too passionate. As a result, even male ministers like George Whitefield were figured as “unmanly” [End Page 269] because of their feminine sensibilities and presumed sexual appeal to throngs of female followers.³ Decades later, reactionary British presses used a similar approach to delegitimize radical politics at home and across the channel. Satirists in the 1790s ridiculed abolitionists and French revolutionaries as blind enthusiasts worshipping a foreign, feminized idea of Liberty.⁴ Despite these religious and political controversies, however, male Romantics lost no zeal for enthusiasm as a touchstone of their poetics. William Wordsworth coopted it as an emotional, “spontaneous overflow,” and Percy Bysshe Shelley revered it as a mark of the true legislatorpoet. In order to make these claims, though, Wordsworth and Shelley secularized and masculinized enthusiast identity, and women writers of the early nineteenth century had to contend for its reclamation.⁵ In this struggle, Staël’s Corinne became a standard-bearer—though admittedly a problematic one—for writers like Mary Shelley, who foregrounds philosophical and religious enthusiast characters in Valperga (1823), as well as the lesser-known Maria Jane Jewsbury, who raises feminine enthusiasm to a titular concern in her 1830 novella The History of an Enthusiast.⁶ This proliferation of female enthusiast figures in the literature of the 1820s and 1830s acknowledged the eighteenth century’s productive conflation of religious and literary inspiration and made these discussions central to Romantic poetess culture. By channeling enthusiasm’s strong feeling into tragic romance plots, poets like Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon further secularized and popularized the female enthusiast figure but also encouraged readers to take her less seriously.⁷ In these early decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, feminine enthusiasm had begun to lose the religious authority of the prophetess even as she gained a broader platform.

Victorian heirs of this discourse thus confronted a tangled legacy surrounding women’s claims to the controversial power that enthusiasm had come to represent; evolving religious attitudes further complicated the female enthusiast’s standing in the social consciousness...

• 复兴的女性发烧友：极光里的诗意世系
• 雷切尔·伊索姆（生物）

Ë莉莎勃朗宁的极光利（1856）是一首长诗，甚至维多利亚时代的标准，它产生的批评不乏在1857年的一个最流行的目标是EBB的女主角，就是反动的评论家认为unfeminine和绝情的审查期刊。¹有趣的是，Aurora的批评者之一提出了这样的主张，即在Aurora Leigh出版前的几十年中，女性气质和强烈的感觉都紧密相关。匿名Blackwood的评论者William Edmondstoune Aytoun宣告Aurora和她的堂兄Romney Leigh：“两者都是发烧友，而且都是令人无法忍受的教条。” ^2个艾图恩的批评依赖于读者对“热情主义者”和“热情主义者”的熟悉，这两个术语具有复杂，层次化的含义，并且在英国文化中有着悠久的社会烙印。由于艾图恩（Aytoun）也称奥罗拉（Aurora）和罗姆尼（Romney）为“教条主义”，读者可能回想起热情与非正统信仰表达之间的联系，这些信仰表达被过分贬低为过度情绪化；但是，维多利亚时代的读者也可能还记得在Germanine deStaël的科琳娜（Corinne）于本世纪初流行的即兴创作现象（1807年）以及在Staël之后兴起的诗人文化。在上述每种情况下，声称受到天才启发的女性通常被称为“热情主义者”：一种综合的身份，浸入了宗教和诗歌灵感的多种力量中，但也充满了围绕两者的争议。当然，这些争议往往是性别问题，在19世纪的女性写作中，热情成为解决女性职业诗人障碍的一种方式，这种热情无处不在并非偶然。那么，“热情”一词从未出现在艾图恩（Aytoun）1857年的批评对象：EBB的奥罗拉·利（Aurora Leigh）中，这可能令人感到惊讶。

正如艾敦（Aytoun）和他的维多利亚时代读者所熟知的那样，称呼某人为狂热者会让人联想到长期以来对宗教非正统，政治激进主义和诗意情感主义的幽灵。此外，他们认识到这种幽灵具有深远的性别意义。在18世纪，主要目标之一是约翰·卫斯理（John Wesley）的卫理公会（Methodism），反对派则利用该派不成比例的女性选民来夸大该派的热情。结果，甚至像乔治·怀特菲尔德（George Whitefield）这样的男性大臣也被认为是“非男子气概”的[结束第269页]，因为他们具有女性化的敏感性，并且被认为对女性追随者群体具有性吸引力。³几十年后，反动的英国媒体采用了类似的方法来使国内和整个渠道的激进政治合法化。1790年代的讽刺作家嘲笑废奴主义者和法国革命者，因为他们盲目地崇拜外国的女性化自由观。⁴尽管有这些宗教和政治争议，但男性浪漫主义者并没有因为热情而成为他们诗意的试金石。威廉·华兹华斯（William Wordsworth）将其视为情感上的“自发溢出”，珀西·比希·雪莱（Percy Bysshe Shelley）则将其视为真正的立法者诗人的标志。为了提出这些主张，华兹华斯和雪莱世俗化和男性化了狂热者的身份，十九世纪初期的女作家不得不为它的开垦而奋斗。⁵在这场斗争中，斯塔尔的科琳娜（Corinne）成为了标准人物，尽管这是一个有问题的人物，但对于玛丽·雪莱（Mary Shelley）和瓦尔帕加（1823）的哲学和宗教狂热人物等作家，以及鲜为人知的玛丽亚·简·耶斯伯里（Maria Jane Jewsbury）来说，她在1830年的中篇小说“热心的历史”中对女性的热情引起了极大的关注。⁶1820年代和1830年代文学中女性发烧友形象的激增承认了18世纪宗教和文学灵感的富有成效的融合，并使这些讨论成为浪漫主义诗人文化的中心。Felicia Hemans和Letitia Elizabeth Landon等诗人通过将热情的强烈情感融入悲剧的浪漫情节中，进一步世俗化并推广了女性发烧友形象，但同时也鼓励读者对她的态度不那么重视。⁷因此，在19世纪初期的几十年中，女性的热情开始失去了先知的宗教权威，即使她获得了更广阔的平台。

维多利亚时代的这种话语继承人面临着缠结的遗产，这些遗产围绕着妇女对热情代表的有争议权力的主张。不断变化的宗教态度使女性爱好者在社会意识中的地位更加复杂。