Dramatic Monologue
(The Victorian Monologue)
Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess”
FERRARA
!
That’s my last Duchess painted on the
wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder,…
…
I gave commands
Some traits
● Influence of Romantic lyrical ‘I’ – focus on character’s
personality but not as self-expressive and Victorian novel – prose form in poetry (conversation, speech)
● First person: the dramatic ‘I’ (In the canonical monologues)
Powerful speakers: tone of impunity, condescension
● Speakers caught in their incapacities to understand the world;
untrustworthy speaker (Browning’s DMs)
● Irony – gap between what is said and what is meant;
something about the speaker (character traits) (apparently) hidden is revealed inadvertently to the reader later
● Similarities with Detective fiction; a puzzle
● A reading of the speaker’s psyche – “morbid cases of the
soul” (Browning)
● Reader poised between “sympathy and moral judgment”,
understanding and confusion
1853 Act for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults Upon Women and Children
1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act – the case of Caroline Norton
● Powerful dominant imagery - Women coerced into subjugation through psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical brutality
● Narratives of domestic (marital) abuse – raised to the level of terror
● Exposes the chink in the Victorian domestic ideal – paterfamilias controls family but never uses force ● Display of “male consciousness…within scenes of
Women’s Monologues
The Victoria Discussion Society, 1850s-60s, women speakers attacked in the press
● Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Amy Levy, Charlotte Mew, Augusta Weber
● Powerless women speaking to their social superiors (hostile auditors) or to no one: they may be attacking their auditors or asking them to sit up and listen
● Speaker realises that their words carry no value, they lose faith in the ability of communication (everything that is said falls on deaf ears)
● “Cultural limitations upon women’s voices”
● One of the things that women needed to master was language but using it to speak up was socially
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, “The
Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”
…
I am black, I am black;
And yet God made me, they say.
But if He did so, smiling back
He must have cast His work away
Under the feet of His white creatures,
With a look of scorn,-that the dusky features
Might be trodden again to clay.
…
White men, I leave you all curse-free
In my broken heart’s disdain!
Dramatic Monologue
● Drama, mono, logos – one speaker; A poetic form
– a genre
- Poetic tension - What is the speaker trying to
convey about him/herself; what is s/he actually conveying
- “A single person, who is patently not the poet,
utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical
moment…” (MH Abrams)
- We know of the auditors only from “the clues in
the discourse of the single speaker”
- The speaker’s temperament and character is
revealed
- Robert Browning – “My Last Duchess”,
The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
and did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
!8
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o’er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me—she
Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
!11
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight’s gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshiped me: surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
!12
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
!13
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria’s love: she guessed not how
!14
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!
“
Porphyria
’s lover”
!
●Clues - pre-meditated crime? Surprised by love, not social equals
●Speaker’s temperament – plotting? Loving? Mad? Justified?
●Person to object transformation: Speaker: object to agent of action; Porphyria: agent of action to object ●Active to passive roles
●Power and impotency: speaker: Impotent to powerful; Porphyria: powerful to impotent
●Tableaux Vivant (living picture) – what is the picture? “And all night long we’ve not stirred.”
“My Last Duchess”
●Ferrara; Character of the speaker? Wealth, position, ego
●Transformation from person to object and vice-versa: The Duchess transformed into a painting – “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall…” as if she is looking out of the painting
●Exercise of power: drawing the curtain, Neptune – taming a sea horse
●Tableaux Vivant – living picture
●Economics of marriage – gift of “nine-hundred-years-old name”
● DM form well-suited to give expression to
disturbing hidden strains — waiting to burst forth into
the public sphere — in Victorian familial and social life
● Poet does not lead reader to clear conclusions;
tries to make the dangerous hidden motives clear
through the device of verbal irony - words and sentences are understood by readers to carry meanings different from the words themselves when interpreted literally.
● Poet’s deep awareness about incongruities among
thoughts, statements and actions; awareness is
transferred to the readers through verbal irony; yet poet is non-judgemental (stating verbatim the speaker’s
statements or the thoughts)
● Powerful shock value - immense potential (of the
text, images) to provoke shock, fear, anger, disgust
