True Life In Elizabeth Browning's Aurora Leigh
In Elizabeth Browning’s novel Aurora Leigh, while it becomes an endeavor for Aurora to defy what modern society considers normal for women, her hopes are repressed by her aunt and cousin as they insist she take on the role of a proper “angel in the house”. Though her own family makes an effort to stifle her aspirations toward poetic eminence, it’s Aurora’s perspective on what it means to live out the “true life” that keeps her pushing toward her objective of life as a great poet stuck within a generation living in the past. Aurora’s view of the true life is to engage and “represent the age” through poetry that holds it’s own uniqueness, rather than look back to the past that has long come and is now gone. (202). Aurora holds on to the dissimilar
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She truly considers those who do not find grandeur in their time to be distrustful in their operations as they fail to follow what the true life really is. This distrust comes from Aurora’s firm belief that in order to experience the true life and be a successful poet one needs to be enveloped in modern society. In her words it is unlikely that one will be successful if they do not find the allure in their time and continue to look toward the past with “wrong thinking…and wrong thoughts make more poems”. These people will not only fail to find the true life, but their aspirations towards poetry will also diminish. The correlation is made by Aurora that wrong thinking equates to viewing modern time as unheroic and lacking in epic nature. The result is not being able to write appropriate poetry that is reflective of the era, as if this destitute thinking will bear a reflection on the style and content written by the authors leading to false assumptions and inaccurate information put into their works. In Aurora’s eyes it is not possible to be a successful poet if one fails to find unique style that their time has to offer. Aurora feels that society has been long influenced on the concept that their era holds little in itself that may be deemed worth writing about as “the critics say the epics have died out”. Society naturally
She truly considers those who do not find grandeur in their time to be distrustful in their operations as they fail to follow what the true life really is. This distrust comes from Aurora’s firm belief that in order to experience the true life and be a successful poet one needs to be enveloped in modern society. In her words it is unlikely that one will be successful if they do not find the allure in their time and continue to look toward the past with “wrong thinking…and wrong thoughts make more poems”. These people will not only fail to find the true life, but their aspirations towards poetry will also diminish. The correlation is made by Aurora that wrong thinking equates to viewing modern time as unheroic and lacking in epic nature. The result is not being able to write appropriate poetry that is reflective of the era, as if this destitute thinking will bear a reflection on the style and content written by the authors leading to false assumptions and inaccurate information put into their works. In Aurora’s eyes it is not possible to be a successful poet if one fails to find unique style that their time has to offer. Aurora feels that society has been long influenced on the concept that their era holds little in itself that may be deemed worth writing about as “the critics say the epics have died out”. Society naturally