"Cut Off from the Green Reconciling Earth": Patriarchal Preservation and Ecological Subjectivity in Aurora Leigh

Abstract: In Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse-novel Aurora Leigh (1856), experiences of patriarchal control cut the central women "off from the green reconciling earth" (line 1.242), while these women also find liberatory potential in dissolving boundaries between the human and non-human natural world. My reading challenges assumptions about what an ecofeminist engagement with nature looks like in the nineteenth century, arguing that rather than raising women above other species or separating them from nature to grant them agency, EBB's verse-novel presents the material self as interconnected with nature in moments of women's liberation and survival. The titular Aurora resists her aunt's domestication and a forced marriage to her cousin Romney Leigh by reclaiming the terms of her growth and attempting, though ultimately failing, to return to the ecological subjectivity of her childhood, free of hierarchical social constructs. Marian Erle, who is portrayed as a domesticated bird preserved for masculine hunting, similarly reclaims her unevolved, animal state, but she refuses to remain in the narrative, thereby eluding classed immorality and disconnecting from the gendered binaries that have dictated her life. EBB thus demonstrates the capacity for feminist resistance in alignment with undomesticated, wild nature while placing limits on this potential within the confines of narrative. By reimagining the gender-nature link as a potential site of feminist resistance, EBB questions how wildness can coexist and intermingle with human social structures.