Author talk:Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Deleting EBB's "Feminism"

two-line description of EBB under author confers feminism upon EBB. However, Wikipedia has this to say about EBB's feminist principles: Throughout the majority of the 20th Century, literary criticism of Barrett Browning's poetry remained sparse until her poems were discovered by the Feminist movement. She described herself as being inclined to reject several women's rights principles, suggesting in letters to Mary Russell Mitford and her husband that she believed that there was an inferiority of intellect in women. However, feminist critics have used Deconstructionist theories of Jaques Derrida and others to explain the importance of Barrett Browning's voice to the feminist movement. Leighton writes that because she participates in the literary world, where voice and diction are dominated by popular accession to perceived masculine superiority, she "is defined only in mysterious opposition to everything that distinguishes the male subject who writes..."

Seems to me that it is wishful thinking on our part that is trying desperately to make the square peg that is EBB fit into the round hole that is feminism. Why are we discounting Elizabeth Barrett Browning's own voice and supplanting it with Derrida's? Isn't it against the very principles of feminism to force women to fit into preconceived notions and define them in some way that they are not? EBB was a physically frail religious woman devoted to her husband, child, and her poetic craft. As a great poet and thinker in her own right, is not this fact alone enough to warrant our respect and admiration? We should not be slapping labels we like on her just because we like the label, like her, and therefore want her to fit that label.

This rather long-winded explanation hopefully accounts for why I deleted that part of the description. Dan Quigley (talk) 17:49, 26 March 2010 (UTC)