Author: Browne, Mary Anne (1812-44)
Title: Mont Blanc; and Other Poems.
Date: 1827
Descriptive and Critical Essay
Mary Anne Browne’s poetic debut, Mont Blanc and Other Poems, is a volume whose exceptional style and quality was recognized by critics of the time and again more recently. To the modern critical eye, Browne’s poetry is inherently feminist. The themes of this volume revolve around women’s roles in the world as well as female role models who offer inspirational influence. The volume itself is dedicated to Princess Augusta Sophia and many of the poems within the volume are dedicated to family members and to powerful fictitious women. A note on the title page tells the reader that Browne was only in her “fifteenth year” when she wrote Mont Blanc, though critics noted that “There is a great deal of taste, talent, and feeling in these pages; —wonderful when we consider the age of the fair writer….” Browne’s poetry effectively uses creative devices common to Romanticism as she offers her observations of Nature, including religious, literary, and mythological references that advertise her academic credentials to her readers. Browne further supplements her credibility to her readers by including opening quotations for some of her poems authored by famous male authors such as Lord Byron.
In the preface to Mont Blanc and Other Poems, “A friend of the Authoress” by the name of Isleworth describes feeling overwhelmed by the act of writing that preface, just as “a [jack]daw that undertakes to introduce a nightingale.” I admit to finding myself in a similar position as I approach writing an analysis of the works of a young Mary Ann Browne that both does justice to her work and influences others to discover Browne and her contemporaries and appreciate them for the pioneers of poetry and feminism that they are. The two predominant themes of Browne’s writing are Nature and Women. Using these two broad themes, Browne creates specific instances, situating the reader in defined times and spaces and then using her authorial platform to address social issues such as women’s roles, family dynamics, and religion. It is evident that Browne creates a sort of tug-of-war concerning women’s agency. In “Mont Blanc,” Browne creates an environment in which the sublime is distinctly masculine and where the feminine attributes of nature are presented as submissive and easily influenced. These powerful, masculine Nature poems are contrasted by poems such as “On Reading an Assertion,” “Impromptu,” and “From a Wife to Her Husband in Adversity,” all of which demonstrate a feminine influence and power. However, perhaps to encourage her poetry’s publication, Browne includes a caveat in these poems that keeps women in an inferior role. The following analysis surveys the themes of Mary Ann Browne’s first volume, focusing on her use of the sublime and devices common to Romantic era women poets.
Browne opens “Mont Blanc” with a quote by Byron: “Around his waist are forests braced, / And an avalanche in his hand . . . It was the cooling hour, just when the rounded / Red sun sinks down behind the azure hill.” Invoking Byron’s masterful poetic craftsmanship helps Browne improve her image as an educated young woman even as the quote helps to set the scene for her poetry. Through a modern feminist lens, it would be easy to say, unflatteringly, that Browne is sacrificing something by borrowing words from a male contemporary. However, if one looks at the context in which Browne is writing, a male dominated sphere of poetry, choosing to open with Byron’s quote acts as a sort of preemptive safety net and possibly ensures that she will get more readers. A critic for The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle praises Browne for her “grand, and Byronian style,” so it is possible that the inclusion of Byron’s quote was to create an explicit connection between the two poets to encourage the readers to contemplate the resemblance.
The most notable features of Browne’s “Mont Blanc” (as well as her other works associated with Nature) is her command of the sublime. In “Mont Blanc” specifically, Browne dictates that the atmosphere of the sublime in Nature is masculine. She begins,
“Monarch of the mountains! in thy cloudy robe,
Thou sit’st secure upon thy craggy throne,
Seeming to lord it over half the globe,
As if the world beneath were all thine own: —
Encircled with thy pure, thine icy zone,
Thou lift’st towards heaven thy proud majestic breast;
Above this nether world thou stand’st alone,
And seem’st to dare the sun to touch thy vest;” (3).
This otherworldly Monarch which Browne personifies is established as sublime when she assures the reader that “No human eye can search its mighty source— / No human thought its origin can trace—“ (4). In the following stanzas, Browne adds to the cast of characters in this natural environment using thinly veiled Greek mythological references. Here, Browne differs stylistically from many other, mostly earler, female Romantic poets by not choosing to capitalize characters such as nature, the sun, and the moon. Browne’s describes the sunset behind Mont Blanc in terms of Apollo as “he reaches the horizon’s verge” and “his daily race” in his chariot and “his flaming steeds their course no longer urge” (5). The next stanza describes the moon, or the goddess Artemis, as she takes to the sky. Though Apollo charges through the sky in a chariot setting light to the world, Artemis needs to be coaxed by “some enchanter” until she “slow rises in her bright array / As, in obedience to the wizard word” (5). Artemis is described as a protective mother as “She came to chase the awful dark away, / And smile the night into a sweeter softer day” (5). However, her power is limited and “short is her reign” as a storm “wraps in darkness thy [Mont Blanc] stupendous height” and “It seems to seize the moon and hurl her struggling back” (6). Browne notes that Nature is “rous’d by the electric shock” and “Sends forth her groans to swell the dreadful choir” suggesting that the mountain, Mont Blanc is somehow a silent onlooker to the storm while the feminine nature responds to the abuse of the storm vocally.
After the storm, the moon “resumes her silver dream, / And pours upon the earth a shower of bliss, / And nature meets her soft, her reconciling kiss”, adopting her motherly role again to comfort feminine nature (7). Another defining trait of Browne’s Mont Blanc is its, or rather his, longevity. After the moon and nature comfort each other, Browne comments “Amidst these changes, thou hast stood unchanged; / And haply shalt for many a coming age” (7). Browne implicitly suggests that the powerful, overwhelming male influence she portrays here in nature in fact encompasses and characterizes all spaces and that it is essentially permanent. In following stanzas, Browne emphasizes this unchangeable power by giving Mont Blanc the titles of “Lord of power and might” and “King of thousand hills” (8). In the final line of the twelfth stanza, Browne states that the power of the mountain becomes active and exercises its power on inferior nature when “Upon the scene beneath, the av’lanche totters down” (9). Browne’s image of Mont Blanc exacting physical destruction on the hills that lie below embody the aggression inherent in masculinity and echo Percy Bysshe Shelley’s approach in his own “Mont Blanc” of 1816.
Directly following “Mont Blanc” is Browne’s “On Reading an Assertion,” which opens with an anonymous quote which reads “That woman was devoid of sense, and that she never did any good without it was to lead to evil.” Browne’s first stanza immediately attacks the issue,
“Oh, why say that Woman is faithless and light,
And that wisdom alone to thy sex is confined;
That her heart is as false as her beauty is bright,
And her loveliness lies in her face—not her mind?” (11).
The poem proceeds to address the misogyny by highlighting the roles of women as “The Friend or the Sister, the Daughter or the Wife,” reminding the reader that “’twas Woman first lull’d thee to rest” and “thou slept’st thy first sleep on a Woman’s fond breast / And thy first infant accents were caught from her tongue” (11). These lines demonstrate that a mother, embodied by the figure of the Woman, is both a source of comfort and a teacher, a promoter of progress and a guide. We see this idea in the third stanza,
“She guided thy steps in thy infantine years—
She anxiously watch’d where thy careless feet stray’d—
She hush’d all thy wailing—she dried all thy tears—
And delighted she saw thy young genius display’d” (12).
In the fifth stanza, we see similarities between Browne and Romantic poets such as Charlotte Smith in the connection between women and nature. Romantic women poets typically share the common image or theme of women manipulating nature by means of the distinctly feminine skill of weaving. In the final line of the fifth stanza, Browne says that Woman “Still weaves of its flowrets a rich diadem” (12). As if needing to further convince the presumably male reader of the Woman’s significance she reminds him “’Tis Woman supports and consoles man’s decline” (12), a fact with which Browne’s female readers would of course be abundantly aware. In the eighth stanza, Browne seems to want to strike a compromise with the reader by saying,
“She will freely confess she is weaker than thee;
But her weakness should move not thine anger, but love:
Oh, thou should’st remember those moments, when she
Hath cheer’d thee, and seem’d like a form from above” (13).
Although this assertion seems to offer a hopeful conclusion to the debate presented by Browne, the following stanza seems to retract her former opinion completely and to redirect her efforts to supplementing the ego of the male reader. In the previous stanza, she tries to make Woman’s supposed “weaknesses” seem like misunderstood and therefore insufficiently appreciated benefits. Then Browne assures the male reader,
“To thee for instruction and strength she must cling,
For she does not pretend to be wise as thou art;
Her impulses flow from affection’s warm spring,
Her feelings are not from the head, but the heart” (13).
This tug-of-war concerning Browne’s exposure of female agency is evident in nearly all of her poems about women. Browne seems determined to make a point that in reality women utilize their agency well and adopt the position of role models for young women such as herself. However, as she demonstrates in “On Reading an Assertion,” she seems nevertheless to have a nagging, anxious caution that manifests itself in a disclaimer or assurance of sorts to male readers that masculinity is somehow still superior, like the atmosphere presented in “Mont Blanc.” One might surmise that such an implicit admission is a deliberate stratagem intended to ensure acceptance among a mixed and still heavily masculinist general audience — an audience that in fact included many bourgeois women. Perhaps worrying that a too-active, too-obvious commitment to feminist principles might have undone her hope for the financial rewards that came with broad public popularity, Browne seems to have opted, especially in this very early collection, to keep that feminist impulse muted and relatively covert.
Prepared by Nina Hjermstad, University of Nebraska, April 2018.
© Nina Hjermstad, 2018.