Critics have cited the writing of Rossetti in Goblin Market to create an ‘aesthetics of overflow’. Now aside from its obvious appeal in sensory and even erotic terms, this ‘aesthetics’ may also feature in the work of Elizabeth B Browning in the sense that her art explores ‘expressivity and the problematic representation of authentic communication between the sexes.
This expressivity manifests itself through the kinetic energy of the poem, Lord Walter’s Wife, where the voice of the wife unleshed temporarily from the tenure of marriage and guarded friendship expresses an imperative to speak in a direct and unbounded manner. She reclaims and deconstructs imprisioning narratives of subjugation and hypocricy, replacing them with a register that is both refreshing and intellectually subversive.
When she mimics the false humility of the earlier Duke in her husband’s famous poem:
‘Even had you skill in speech- ( Which I have not)’
with
‘I have a poor word in my head..’
we recognise the ‘echo’ of another poem. Thsi echo serves to intensify as well as modify our earlier reading of the initial poem.
Hence, mimicry highlights the emptiness and masquerade of communcation, particularly between the sexes. We know articulacy to be a weapon and here Elizabeth BB usurps the original voice of the murderous and acquisitive Duke and redeploys the voice through the ironic knowingness of the ‘uncurtained’ or unveiled ‘wife’ of Lord Walter.
When, at the concluison of the EBB poem, the wife asks her daughter to persuade the sulky friend to dine with the family again( and thus retrun from the transgressive space that is the arbour, the ‘yew tree’ and return to the security of the Victorian Domestic hearth. But the keen irony of the invitation to return and the expected collusion of the child who is female, reveals the way in which EBB saw the evolution of female enfranchisement: there is a very real sense of triumph and pleasure on the speaker’s part at the end of the poem. This directly recalls the deadly casualness of the Duke at the end of My Last Duchess where the Duke dismisses the original ‘last ‘ Duches in favour of more ‘dead’ artefacts!