Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” is a poem about a female slave’s life. The narrator goes through many hardships including the death of her love, being raped, and ending in killing her white baby. Through the narrator Barrett Browning displays some of the psychological struggles that slaves might endure. Melissa Schaub writes in her article that one of her students believed that Browning wrote down exactly what she was thinking. Schaub continues to write, “This reaction on the student’s part can only come from Barrett Browning having succeeded in creating a sense of passionate immediacy about the emotional experiences of the character” (Schaub 6). This quotation displays the amount of emotion that Barrett Browning puts into this poem. This emotion can be used to look into the psychological aspects of the narrator’s life. The hardships that this narrator experiences create psychological strains regarding love, motherhood, and overall hatred. Barrett Browning lays white lives and black lives side by side in order to challenge both God and society by bringing to light issues regarding race in Victorian time.
At the beginning of this poem Barrett Browning writes about the narrator’s love. She is constantly thinking about her love and in the twelfth stanza even sings his name, “My various notes, —the same, the same! / I sang it low, that the slave-girls near / Might never guess, from aught they could hear, / It was only a name—a name” (Barrett 119). What makes this quotation so important, is the importance that the narrator puts on something as simple as her love’s name. Therefore, this scene shows the reader how much she loved him and how she always thought of him. Stanza nine and ten the narrator describes the emotion that was shared between her and her love, “And tender and full was the look he gave— / Could a slave look so at another slave? — / I look at the sky and the sea. / And from that hour our spirits grew / As free as if unsold, unbought:” (Barrett 118). Because of their love they both finally feel free, even though they are not. This feeling is the first psychological struggle that Browning presents in this poem. The struggle of these two slaves feeling free, which is a dangerous feeling because in the end they are not free, and that becomes apparent when her love is murdered.
When the narrator’s love gets murdered her psychological strain continues, and she also begins to challenge society. The turn in this poem is when he gets murdered by white men, in the fourteenth stanza, “We were black, we were black, / We had no claim to love and bliss, / What marvel if each went to wrack? / They wrung my cold hands out of his, / They dragged him—where? I crawled to touch / His blood’s mark in the dust… not much, / Ye pilgrim-souls, though plain as this!” (Barrett 119). This is the turn in the poem because this is the time when the whole mood shifts. Before this there was hope in love, but now that he is killed the hope has died with him. At this point, the freedom that they both felt has gone away, and the narrator now knows that they were never actually free. This stanza also begins with “We were black” repeated two times. This phrase is the narrator challenging society and is letting the reader know that the reason her love was murdered is because he was black, as she is black. The death of the narrator’s love is the point in the poem that the reader can see her freedom being ripped from her, which reminds her that she was never free since she is black, which leads to her challenging society.
The narrator’s psychological strains result in her questioning and challenging God. In the thirteenth stanza the narrator talks to God, “We were two to love, and two to pray: / Yes, two, O God, who cried to Thee, / Though nothing didst Thou say! / Coldly Thou sat’st behind the sun: / And now I cry who am but one, / Though wilt not speak to-day” (Barrett 119). In these lines the reader can see how the narrator’s psychological struggles have resulted in her challenging God. This challenge comes from the narrator feeling abandoned by God, because she felt she had found freedom through her love, just to get that freedom pulled out from under her when he was murdered. She is telling God that both her and her love were praying to Him, but he did not listen to them, so she is doubting if there is any point in her praying to him. If God did not listen to two prayers, why would he listen to her single prayer? This moment in the poem, after the death of her love leads her to believe that God has abandoned her and her dead love, which is ultimately why she challenges him.
After the narrator’s love gets murdered the white men who murdered him rape her. Following her being raped, she has a child. This child is white, and this is where the next psychological struggle begins. The narrator describes how her white baby makes her feel in the twenty-first stanza, “Why, in that single glance I had / Of my child’s face… I tell you all, / I saw a look that made me mad! / The master’s look, that used to fall / On my soul like his lash… or worse!” (Barrett 120). This quotation is showing how the emotional and psychological trauma that the narrator has gone through, directly effects how she feels about her child. Not only does the baby look like the white men who raped her, but it is also a reminder of her love that they murdered, along with a reminder that she is not free, and that God has abandoned her. Because of these intense emotions she kills her baby, “I twisted it round in my shawl. / And he moaned and trembled from foot to head, / He shivered from head to foot: / Till after a time, he lay instead / Too suddenly still and mute” (Barrett 121). This brutal scene takes place right after she describes how her baby resembles her white masters. The placement of this quotation shows the readers that this act was purely out of anger towards society and white men. Emotionally the narrator was dealing with so much, that her emotions seemed to take over resulting in her murdering her baby. Sarah H. Ficke writes in her article, “Crafting Social Criticism: Infanticide in ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point’ and ‘Aurora Leigh.’” about the complex emotions that the narrator feels towards the child,
Instead of being able to love her baby completely, the mother loves the baby’s soul but feels aversion and fear towards its body, so much so that she “dared not sing” in its presence, looking upon its face… This sets up a central conflict that is unique in infanticidal literature: a conflict between the mother’s feelings about the child’s body and the child’s soul. (10)
This quotation is addressing the fact that the narrator did not necessarily kill her child out of hate for its soul, but instead hate for its body. Which ultimately leads the narrator to go through a deep regret and sadness after she kills her child.
Not long after the narrator kills her child, she faces yet another psychological strain, that being, regret and anger towards society. Sarah Brophy writes about Barrett Browning’s purpose in writing this poem in her article, “Here, Barrett Browning concentrates on representing the outraged “voice” of a black female slave, and the strength of the slave’s critique of racist and patriarchal oppression depends on its affective impact” (Brophy 4). This quotation is showing the voice that Barrett Browning has given this narrator, and in this section of the poem that voice is angry. In the thirty-second stanza the narrator addresses her anger towards society, “I am not mad: I am black. / I see you staring in my face— / I know you are staring, shrinking back, / Ye are born of the Washington race, / And this land is the free America., / And this mark on my wrist—(I prove what I say) / Ropes tied me up here to the flogging-place” (Barrett 123). The first line in this quotation claims that she is not mad, but she finishes it by saying that she is black, which is then putting together mad and black as one. Meaning that because she is black in this society that automatically means that she is also mad because she is put into a situation in which she has to be mad because it is so unfair. In this quotation the narrator also brings into conversation the issue of freedom, and the fact that America is the land of freedom, yet she has physical marks the show that she is not free and never will be free.
Alongside this anger the narrator also feels regret at this point in the poem, regarding the death of her child. This regret becomes most apparent in the final stanza. The narrator brings to light her regret in her final thoughts of the poem, “I am floated along, as if I should die / Of liberty’s exquisite pain. / In the name of the white child waiting for me / In the death-dark where we may kiss and agree, / White men, I leave you all curse-free / In my broken heart’s disdain” (Barrett 123). This is the final psychological struggle that the narrator displays in this poem. After all of the love and anger she ends with feeling a deep regret for killing her child. These changes in emotions make sense because she goes through so many unfair and traumatizing hardships that has ultimately led her through these emotions and lead her to making rash decisions which she ultimately regrets. The regret does not only retain to the child’s death, but she also seems to simply regret that society has altered her life and decisions so much. What makes this apparent is the line about “liberty’s exquisite pain”. This line is saying that because of society, she has been caused all of this pain and loss, and she regrets that her life and emotions have been so altered by society. Tricia Lootens writes in her article, “Read in terms of psychological realism, this portion of “Runaway Slave” cracks open the dramatic monologue, potentially involving the reader in what may well be an endless cycle of traumatized narrative compulsion” (Lootens14). This quotation is addressing the repeating cycle that the narrator is caught in because she is a slave. Being in this cycle is something that she regrets, because she wishes society had not bound her to this cycle.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” goes through the hardships of a female slave’s life. Both psychological issues and physical issues due to hardship and death that she had to ender. Through these challenges Barrett Browning brings to light both issues of God and issues of society in regard to slavery and freedom.
Work Cited
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” The Norton Anthology
English Literature, general editor, Stephen Greenblatt, vol. E, 10th ed., Norton, 2018, pp.
116-23.
Brophy, Sarah. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning's ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point’ and the
Politics of Interpretation.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 36, no. 3, 1998, pp. 273–288. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/40002430.
FICKE, SARAH H. “Crafting Social Criticism: Infanticide in ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's
Point’ and ‘Aurora Leigh.’” Victorian Poetry, vol. 51, no. 2, 2013, pp. 249–267. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/43592652.
Lootens, Tricia. “Publishing and Reading ‘Our EBB’: Editorial Pedagogy, Contemporary
Culture, and ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point.’” Victorian Poetry, vol. 44, no. 4,
2006, pp. 487506. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40002701.
SCHAUB, MELISSA. “The Margins of the Dramatic Monologue: Teaching Elizabeth Barrett
Browning's ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point.’” Victorian Poetry, vol. 49, no. 4,
2011, pp. 557–568. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23079672.
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