Sacred and Legendary Artists: Anna Jameson and Barrett Browning in the Hagiography of Pompilia

Surely, poor Pompilia is prettily done," pleaded Robert Browning, concluding a letter to his proofreader, Julia Wedgwood. ¹ The remark makes a strange digression, for Browning devotes the rest of his commentary to justifying the darkness, the bulk, and the realism of The Ring and the Book, of which he goes so far as to claim at one point: "I think this is the world as it is" (Curle, p. 152). Yet if it now seems curious that at a critical moment, Browning would defer to a purely aesthetic defense of his poetry, it is certainly more curious that in the century following the poem's publication, critics so often engaged in this same defense, insisting that it is precisely the pretty figure of Pompilia which balances and redeems this most dark, uncompromising of poems. ² The Athenaeum, which before 1868 had ravaged Browning's poetry, now dotingly proclaimed Pompilia "perfect every way," and claimed that it is her figure that made The Ring and the Book "beyond all parallel the supremest poetical achievement of our time" (pp. 399-400). Only in the last few years have scholars seriously questioned this conception of the poem.

This essay is written to address the contrivance of Pompilia's status as the center and redemptress of The Ring and the Book. I wish to show that The Athenaeum's sympathetic and perhaps naive reading, which prevailed for well over a century and continues to influence us, is less an historical accident or misreading of the text than it is the calculated effect of Pompilia's use of the generic features of virgin martyr hagiography, the "histories" of virgin saints. My examination of Browning's generic method uncovers some of Browning's intellectual debt to his friend Anna Jameson, whose researches into hagiography have been undervalued by Victorianists. It also advances our understanding of Browning's perspective on sacred texts and sacred histories, including the Bible. And finally, it deepens our understanding of his complex literary relationship to his wife Elizabeth. Modern scholarship, like Victorian scholarship, often responds to the generic weight of Pompilia without analyzing the cultural power of its specifically literary elements. ³ Yet Pompilia is designed to reveal the manner in which literature, and in particular sacred literature, uses its aesthetic and generic properties to become experience, "the world as it is."

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That Pompilia's history resembles a story from the Book of Saints, or that Pompilia is a saintly heroine, is not, of course, news. The "other half Rome" announces it in Book 3 (111-112), Caponsacchi insists on it in Book 6 (1880-1883), Pope Innocent accepts it in Book 10 (1002-04), and in his final ravings, even Guido imagines it in Book 11 (2424-2425). ⁴ Such consensus in a poem notorious for its conflicting testimonies helps explain why Browning's early suggestion that "the woman that he slaughtered was a saint, / Martyr and miracle!" (1.207-208) met with such uniform approbation in years following the poem's publication, uncontested through most of the twentieth century because it was so successfully maintained in the nineteenth.

Even as little as two decades ago, Kay Austen could argue without irony that Pompilia essentially was a hagiographic text. "As his central character in the struggle between virtue and vice for the souls of men and women," affirmed Austen, "he [Browning] creates Pompilia, a Christian saint" (p. 290). Yet what might it mean for a mid-Victorian poet like Browning to "create" "a Christian saint" who will redeem the souls of his readers? Austen's celebration ignores that a disjunction could exist between the generic and historical terms of her story (Pompilia of Pompilia does not equal Pompilia the historical woman), and she plainly misses that Browning exploits this disjunction as an element of his poetry. Yet Austen's perspective remains essential to a legitimate historical critique of Pompilia...