Professional Documents
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Dramatic Monologue
Author(s): Melissa Valiska Gregory
Source: Victorian Poetry, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Winter, 2000), pp. 491-510
Published by: West Virginia University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40002497
Accessed: 04-05-2018 21:05 UTC
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Robert Browning and the Lure of
the Violent Lyric Voice: Domes-
tic Violence and the Dramatic
Monologue
MELISSA VALISKA GREGORY
491
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492 / VICTORIAN POETRY
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MELISSA VALISKA GREGORY 7 493
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494 / VICTORIAN POETRY
Women (1855), and Dramatis Personae (1864), but, of course, also struc-
ture Browning's longest and most important work, The Ring and the
Book, Throughout his career, Browning persistently portrays the dynam-
ics of the home as deeply painful for both men and women, and focuses
especially on the various forms of masculine violence occurring in the
struggle for sexual dominance between husbands and wives. His poetry
explores the psychology of domestic strife with an unrelenting fierceness,
luring his readers into intimate contact with speakers whose transgressive
sexual fantasies and disruptive familial behavior profoundly violated nine-
teenth-century domestic norms and immensely troubled his contempo-
raries.
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MELISSA VALISKA GREGORY / 495
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496 / VICTORIAN POETRY
his highly personal lyric outpourings echoes the structures of one of the
most intimate forms of violence. In short, Browning's monologues create
a dynamic of forced intimacy.
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that those poems which focus on
domestic conflict are both the most visceral and the most famous of
Browning's oeuvre, with "My Last Duchess" (1842) leading the race and
"Porphyria's Lover" (1842) coming in a close second. Not only did
Browning's fascination with sexual violence resonate in the Victorian
social scene, a culture in which the power dynamics of married life were
fiercely scrutinized and debated, but also, in so many of his dramatic
monologues, sexual violence becomes a particularly extreme version of
the longing to dominate and to define oneself through domination. Hence
those monologues which prominently feature wrecked or destroyed do-
mesticity (the psychic counterpart to Childe Roland's hostile landscape)
highlight the relation between social authority, rhetorical violence, and
sexual conflict: "See a word, how it severe th! / Oh, power of life and
death / In the tongue" (11. 89-91), exclaims the speaker of "A Lover's
Quarrel" (1855).
Of those many early monologues which conjoin lyric violence with
acts of domestic abuse, especially resonant are Browning's expressions of
masculine failure within the domestic sphere. The painful loss of tradi-
tional patriarchal power portrayed in "Andrea del Sarto" (1855) surfaces
persistently, as do representations of violently brutal masculine sexual
authority which fall well outside the boundaries of conventional male and
domestic power. Porphyria's lover is just one voice among a crowd of male
speakers who, in relating to their readers literal or imagined violence
toward the women they believe have failed them, unite rhetorical vio-
lence and sexual cruelty. In his explorations of the pleasures inherent in
domestic and sexual domination, Browning effectively transforms the
occasional allusions to domestic abuse that crop up in Victorian novels -
Mr. Dombey's momentary fantasy in Dickens' Dombey and Son (1846-
48), for example, of "beating all trace of beauty out of [Edith's] trium-
phant face with his bare hand" - -into a poetic form in which imagined
violence bears the same visceral impact as the real thing.16 The fanta-
sized murders of "The Laboratory" (1845) - "[A] mere lozenge [of poison]
to give, / And Pauline should have just thirty minutes to live! / But to
light a pastille, and Elise, with her head / And her breast and her arms
and her hands, should drop dead!" (11. 21-24)- possess a rhetorical force
equal to the literal murder described in "Porphyria's Lover."
Browning's lyric project leads him, then, into a sustained examina-
tion of sexual violence. Although occasionally love survives in the ruins,
as in the lead poem of Men and Women, that the expression of love even
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MELISSA VALISKA GREGORY / 497
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498 I VICTORIAN POETRY
Why one who can pour out his thoughts, fancies, stores of learning, and emo'
tions, with an eloquent and direct sincerity such as this, should, so often as Mr.
Browning has here done, prefer to rhyme the pleadings of a casuist, or the argu-
ments of a critic, or the ponderous discoursings of some obsolete schoolman . . .
is an enigma - The riches and the ability are there, but the employment and the
expression of them seem to us, on the whole, more perverse, personal, and in-
complete. (BCH, p. 157)
Perhaps most economical was Eliot's claim that although "we admire
[Browning's] power, we are not subdued by it."24
The widespread critical agitation at the prospect of being "subdued"
by Browning's rhetoric points to a specific cultural anxiety about the power
of his dominating lyric speakers to force their readers to identify with
deeply transgressive sexuality, an identification prominently absent in
the descriptions of marital conflict in other literary genres. Eliot's own
"Janet's Repentance," for instance, also features a husband who, in his
coarse physical abuse of Janet, echoes the masculine brutality displayed by
Porphyria's lover. But while Porphyria's lover forces his confession upon
his unsuspecting reader, Eliot's third-person descriptions of Dempster's
violence render it relatively oblique, not to mention decidedly unsympa-
thetic. Occurring only at night under the cover of darkness, Dempster's
abuse registers as no more than "a hideous blank of something unremem-
bered, something that must have made that dark bruise on [Janet's] shoul-
der."25 Janet's own descriptions of her beatings are marked by uncharac-
teristic pauses and gaps, signified by ellipses: "But he began to be angry
with me for little things and ... I don't want to accuse him ... but he
drank and got more and more unkind to me, and then very cruel, and
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MELISSA VALISKA GREGORY / 499
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500 / VICTORIAN POETRY
down like a hare . . . I'll make a fire under you, and smoke off the whole
pack of you . . . I'll sweep you up . . . I'll grind you to powder . . . small
powder" (p. 381) parallels Browning's "Shall we burn it up, tread that face
at once / Into tinder, / And so hinder / Sparks from kindling all the place
at once? / Or else kiss away one's soul on her?" (11. 53-57)- Browning's
monologue provides an uninterrupted connection between his audience
and a sexually transgressive speaker for whom violence and love yield
similar satisfactions, whereas Eliot's story firmly checks the reader's sym-
pathies. Lying on his deathbed, surrounded by members of the commu-
nity who judge him, Dempster's impotent final threats do not permit the
reader identification invited by Browning's rhetorically aggressive speaker.
The contrast between novelistic representations of domestic vio-
lence and Browning's poems thus helps to account for the persistent criti-
cal complaint that Browning's intense, first-person outpourings were in-
vasive, abnormal, and immoral. As G. Brimley suggested, it was not so
much that Browning chose to examine vice and violence (though his
subject matter certainly remained a problem for other critics), but, more
importantly, that he failed "to solve the moral problems" and questions
that he raised.28 As far as reviewers were concerned, the lyric "I" of
Browning's early work withheld an appropriately overt moral perspective.
With what proved a profoundly disturbing rhetorical intensity, Browning's
monologues lured their readers into intimate contact with sexual corrup-
tion and then left them there, trapped within the monologue's form.
We may well suppose that [Browning] wishes it to be read, and studied, and
conceived in instalments; . . . Four small volumes about a tragedy so rich in
picture and passion as this do not strike us as too much for any one. . . . A public
that has once tasted will not be satisfied to desist till it has drunk off all it can get
of the draught, and this little volume is certainly in itself by no means alarming,
offering as it does two separate pauses to the reader, and rising in fascination as it
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MELISSA VALISKA GREGORY / 501
travels round each separate wind of the spiral in which the narrative mounts
upwards towards a complete view of the tragedy on which it is based. 29
Such comments reveal the anxiety that the intense darkness of Browning's
raw material would prove disturbing, "alarm[ing]," or, even worse, com-
pletely overpowering. Browning's investigation of sexual violence in The
Ring and the Book threatened to be just as troubling as that of his earlier
work-
But aside from a few isolated objections that the poem's subject
matter was "low and mean, . . . vice pure, unadulterated, and unrelieved,"
the critical response to The Ring and the Book abruptly contrasts with
the reviews of Browning's earlier monologues.30 Despite its thematic simi-
larities to "Porphyria's Lover" or "My Last Duchess," Victorian reviewers
generally greeted the poem with effusive praise. The Ring and the Book
"as a whole, contains perhaps more of Mr. Browning's brilliant intellec-
tual flashes of many-coloured light than almost any of his hitherto pub-
lished works," enthused the Spectator (BCH, p. 291 ), while another deemed
it "deeply, intensely, human."31 R. W. Buchanan went so far as to com-
pare Browning to "a messenger from heaven, sent to teach the highest of
all lessons to rashly- judging men."32 Given both the poem's subject mat-
ter and its self-proclaimed emphasis on the lyric force of rhetorical testi-
mony - the very same rhetorical force to which critics previously objected -
its enthusiastic reception, which decidedly clashes with the reception of
Browning's earlier work, creates a striking dissonance not adequately at-
tended to by literary scholars. If The Ring and the Book's subject matter
continued to unsettle Browning's Victorian readers, what explains the
public praise of the poem?
I suggest that the surprising shift in Browning's public reception
depends upon the poem's courtroom setting, and the resulting transfor-
mation of rhetorical lyricism into testimony. On the one hand, Browning's
conversion of the dramatic monologues into courtroom testimony inten-
sifies his rhetorical force, but on the other hand, the idea of testimony
also accommodates the overtly moral perspective readers found lacking in
Browning's earlier work. Browning's trial model, in which lyric utterance
functions as legal declaration, inherently contains an ethical invitation
to judge his speakers; hence poetic lyricism demands a social response
extending beyond reader identification. When poetry is not only pure
self-expression but testimony, it moves away from a concern with the
"private or meditative intimacy of the sole self (Tucker, Browning's Be-
ginnings, p. 150) and toward a view of the self as integrally connected to
communal norms. As Alexander Welsh observes, The Ring and the Book
"elevates testimony over managed circumstantial evidence," suggesting
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502 I VICTORIAN POETRY
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MELISSA VALISKA GREGORY / 503
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504 I VICTORIAN POETRY
Up I sprang alive,
Light in me, light without me, everywhere
Change! A broad yellow sun-beam was let fall
From heaven to earth, - a sudden drawbridge lay,
Along which marched a myriad merry motes,
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MELISSA VALISKA GREGORY / 505
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506 / VICTORIAN POETRY
Beyond The Ring and the Book: Victorian Poetry and Domestic
Transgression
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MELISSA VALISKA GREGORY / 507
the bedroom of Meredith's Modern Love (1862), to "the little snakes that
eat at my heart" (11. 112) in Swinburne's "The Triumph of Time" (1866),
mid-century Victorian poets repeatedly use the lyric form to register sexual
violence and domestic destruction. Their use of intense lyric language
rivals the novel's claim to the representation of domestic psychology. The
sexual anguish and violence in Modern Love - "he went mad, / And raged
deep inward" (2.8-9) - follows the prominent staging of domestic vio-
lence in Browning's monologues as a means of achieving new insights
into both domesticity and poetry.
Hence the sexual violence of modern domestic life, a problem so
often alluded to in theater and novels but scrutinized only superficially,
lent itself to the struggle of Victorian poetry, as Victorian poets discov-
ered that poetic forms permitted a greater attention to - and expression
of - the inner psychology of sexual transgression. But it was Browning
who most successfully folded the theme of violent heterosexuality into
the project of Victorian poetry, suggesting that the plight of the lyric
voice mirrored the desperate violence of sexual domination. Further in-
vestigation into the relation between Browning's representation of rhe-
torical violence and sexual violence enriches both our historical under-
standing of the predicament of Victorian poetry, and, moreover, high-
lights a psychological dimension of Victorian domestic life sometimes
obscured by other literary genres and lines of modern historical research.
Notes
1 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), p. 49. That is not to say that issues of
domesticity and gender in poetry have been completely ignored. Indeed, over the
past two decades, literary scholars have increasingly attended to Browning's poetry as
a means of achieving a broader understanding of the intersection between Victorian
cultural problems and Victorian literary history, especially in terms of gender. The
number of recent essays devoted to The Ring and the Book's Pompilia, for example,
provides ample evidence of literary approaches which focus on Browning's awareness
of gender and domesticity as important social preoccupations. These essays often aim
to illustrate "the active participation of [poetic] texts in historical debate and social
change" (Susan Brown, "Pompilia: The Woman (in) Question," VP 34 [1996]: 31).
For two important studies of gender, Browning, and Victorian culture, see Nina
Auerbach, "Robert Browning's Last Word," VP 22 (1984): 161-173, and Mary Ellis
Gibson, "The Criminal Body in Victorian Britain: The Case of The Ring and the
Book," BIS 18 (1990): 73-93.
2 Richard D. Altick and James F. Loucks, II, Browning's Roman Murder Story: A
Reading of "The Ring and the Book" (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 1.
3 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry : Poetry, Poetics and Politics (New York: Routledge,
1993), p. 11.
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508 / VICTORIAN POETRY
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MELISSA VALISKA GREGORY 7 509
20 See Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1988), p. 532.
21 Herbert F. Tucker, Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure (Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1980), p. 191.
22 Review of M&W, Spectator (December 22, 1855): 1346-47, in BCH, p. 163.
23 Margaret Oliphant, review of M&W, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (February
1856): 135437, in BCH, p. 188; David Masson, review of M&W, British Quarterly
Review (January 1856): 151-180, in BCH, p. 180. This is a version of what a Dublin
University Magazine reviewer identified as "rough wild etching" (review of M&W
Dune 1856]: 667-681, BCH, p. 189). He further remarked that he would prefer
"more delicate pencilling, without losing bold reality" (p. 189).
24 George Eliot, review of M&W, Westminster Review (January 1856): 290-296, in
BCH, p. 177.
25 George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 333.
26 Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (London: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 421.
27 Amanda Anderson, Tainted Soub and Painted Faces; The Rhetoric of Fallenness in
Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993). "Nancy's latent purity," re-
marks Anderson along these lines, "is proven by the fact that she knows she cannot
be saved" (p. 90).
28 G. Brimley [with T.C.C.], review of M&W, Eraser's Magazine (January 1856): 105-
116,inBCH,pl68.
29 Review of The Ring and the Book [R&B], Spectator (December 12, 1868): 1464-
1466, in BCH, p. 288, emphasis added.
30 Review of R&B, Saturday Review (December 26, 1868): 832-834, in BCH, p. 298.
31 Richelieu [pseud.], review of R&B, Vanity Fair (November 28, 1868): 46-47, in
BCH, p. 285.
32 R. W. Buchanan, review of R&B, Athenaeum (March 20, 1869): 399-400, in BCH,
p. 296. That is not to say that Victorian critics naively demanded of Browning an
unsophisticated didacticism. Indeed, Moncure D. Conway commended Browning
for avoiding "moral monotony" (review of R&B, Atlantic Monthly [February 1869]:
256-259, in BCH, p. 313). Both Frederick Greenwood and Walter Bagehot re-
marked on the poem's moral subtlety: Greenwood, for instance, observed that only
the poem's most delicate aesthetic nuances revealed Browning's moral perspective -
"It is noticeable . . . that we have a generally better workmanship when the poet
speaks for those who are on the right side than when he speaks for those who are in
the wrong" (review of R&B, Cornhill Magazine [February 1869]: 249-256, in BCH,
p. 313) - while Bagehot praised Browning for refusing "to take sides" (review of
R&B, Tinsley's Magazine [January 1869]: 665-674, in BCH, p. 306).
33 Alexander Welsh, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence
in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992), p. 206.
34 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), p. 171.
35 Auerbach, for instance, argues that Browning kills his female speakers as a substitu-
tion for the aggression he bears his wife.
36 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den
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510 / VICTORIAN POETRY
Abbeele, eds. Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Theory and History of Lit-
erature 46 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 8.
37 William Walker, "Pompilia and Pompilia," VP 22 (1984): 47.
38 See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain.
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