Infanticide as Self-de-facement: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point"

Yana Rowland

doi:10.33919/esnbu.24.2.1

Authors

Yana Rowland Plovdiv University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.24.2.1

Keywords:

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, infanticide, self-de-facement, narrative, responsibility

Abstract

Based on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point (1847), and trusting, at the same time, existential phenomenology and deconstruction, this paper aims at investigating a guilty individual’s impulse for self-authorization (and self-narration). It discusses infant mortality, motherhood, and suffering, in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s oeuvre abounds. Despite the unceasing critical interest in the poet’s abolitionist leanings, the ontological uniqueness of The Runaway Slave is yet to be explored, having been dominated so far by militantly politicized researches on women’s rights, the religious incongruities of Victorian culture, and the wavering solidarity that nineteenth-century England demonstrated for nations struggling under foreign despotism and illiterate self-government. Infanticide could be perceived as an act of self-de-facement, rather than of self-declaration. Considering muteness against the voicedness of the Face, this paper reveals the travail of a Self’s inevitable sacrificial exposure to an Other, and by extension, the foundational role of alterity in authorial intentionality.

Author Biography

Yana Rowland, Plovdiv University

Yana Rowland is Associate Professor of English literature at the English Department of Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. She holds an MA in English & Russian (2000) and a doctoral degree (2006) in English Literature. Her monographs, The Treatment of the Themes of Mortality in the Poetry of the Brontë Sisters (Plovdiv University Press, 2006), and Movable Thresholds: On Victorian Poetry and Beyond in Nineteen Glimpses (Plovdiv University Press, 2014), reflect her research interests in the area of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English poetry. Yana Rowland teaches core and elective BA & MA modules in English which include English Literature of the Victorian Age, Modernism and Postmodernism, English-Language Children’s Literature, Literary Anthropology, and Stylistics of the English Language. Since 2015 Yana Rowland has published on Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

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