The Deconstruction of Femininity in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point"

In his famous essay, “The Subjection of Women,” John Stuart Mill argues that the “nature of women is an eminently artificial thing – the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others” (128). Femininity is a result of social constructions and fixed roles; this is especially clear in most 19th century Victorian poetry and prose. While reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem, "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," for another course, thoughts about the construction and deconstruction of femininity came to mind. While the poem is often read as a response to and support of the anti-slavery movement of the time, it is also a response to female subjection. What differentiates this poem from other feminist works is the fact that it presents oppression in threefold: the speaker is not just repressed because she is female, but she is also a black slave. Hence, Barrett Browning offers a space for the discussion of femininity in terms of class, race, and sex. The most significant issue in terms of femininity, however, is the speaker’s role as a mother.

As mothers, women are seen as “bearers of value” (Irigaray 802). A mother’s role is to instill values into future generations; to do so, they must reinforce customary traditions, and in this case, white supremacy and patriarchal dominance, by raising their children to maintain social order. In fact, her responsibility “is to maintain the social order without intervening” (807). In other words, she is to raise her children to carry on the traditional customs of the culture. By ingraining these suppressing notions into their children, the mother is involved in continuing the cyclical process of unfair class order and treatment. The subjection of women is common during the time the poem was written, so the departure from this universal custom “quite naturally appears unnatural” (Mill 125). Nevertheless, the speaker in the poem is able to depart from this traditional concept of motherhood in the most radical way possible: infanticide. In this case, however, killing her child is not necessarily seen as “unnatural;” rather, it is an empowering act since it represents the destruction of fixed roles and female repression. The speaker’s violent act in killing the baby she had by her white master illustrates Barrett Browning’s attempt at deconstructing femininity. By strangling her baby, the speaker is expressing her frustration with her role as a female slave, and in this violent act, she is able to free herself from the constraints placed upon her by a world dominated by white males.

In many ways, the speaker’s story relates to the story of Lilith in Hebrew mythology. “Created not from Adam’s rib but, like him, from the dust, Lilith was Adam’s first wife,” according to “apocryphal Jewish lore. Because she considered herself his equal, she objected to lying beneath him, so that when he tried to force her submission, she became enraged” (Gilbert and Gubar 823). In a similar vain, the speaker in “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” becomes enraged at the thought of submissively continuing to live as a subordinate member of society. The similarities between Lilith and the speaker do not end at their refusal to carry on as lesser beings among society. Lilith “flew away to the edge of the Red Sea to reside with demons,” and “Threatened by God’s angelic emissaries, told that she must return or daily lose a hundred of her demon children to death, Lilith preferred punishment to patriarchal marriage” (823). She then “took revenge against both God and Adam by injuring babies” (823). Aside from the obvious connection of injuring and killing their babies, Lilith and the speaker in the poem both represent “the price women have been told they must pay for attempting to define themselves” (823). In both of these instances, the price involves killing their own children.

In “The Madwoman in the Attic,” critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar classify Lilith as the “monster-woman” since she is far removed from the “angel in the house” phenomenon. Although the speaker in the poem could certainly be classified as the “monster-woman” because she kills her child, she differs from Lilith in the sense that the killing of her own child does not bring her more suffering. I maintain that the speaker’s situation differs from that of women who do not experience oppression in several different contexts. Unlike the speaker, Lilith was not included in racial minority, nor was she a slave. Hence, when Gilbert and Gubar claim that the killing of their own children brings “more suffering” to women, it does not necessarily ring true for the speaker in “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” For the speaker, the killing of her child, to some degree, actually offers freedom.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning is able to deconstruct the concept of femininity in “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” by presenting a character who escapes perhaps the most oppressing notion of the female role: motherhood. In fact, she does so by killing her own baby, an act far removed from the traditional concept of the female. This deconstruction is made possible because the infanticide is performed by a woman who experiences the restraints of femininity in three ways: race, class, and of course, sex. Since her oppression is multiplied, this violent act is not deemed as demonic; instead, it is an empowering move aimed to escape the suppressing role of her life as a black female slave.



Works Cited
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” The Norton
Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age. 8th ed. Ed. Carol T. Christ and Catherine Robson. Vol. E. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 1085-92. Print.


Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. “The Madwoman in the Attic.” Rivkin and Ryan 812-26.

Irigaray, Luce. “Women on the Market.” Rivkin and Ryan 799-812.

Mill, John Stuart. “The Subjection of Women.” Victorian Prose: An Anthology. Ed. Rosemary J. Mundhenk and LuAnn McCracken Fletcher. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 121-31. Print.

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Print.