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Gender, Genre, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue

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Gender, Genre, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2008 Gender, Genre, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue Kasey Bass Baker University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Baker, Kasey Bass, "Gender, Genre, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2008. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/326 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Kasey Bass Baker entitled "Gender, Genre, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. David F. Goslee, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Allen Dunn, Nancy Moore Goslee, Cheryl Brown Travis Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a thesis written by Kasey Bass Baker entitled “Gender, Genre, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue.” I have examined the final electronic copy of this thesis for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. David F. Goslee, Major Professor ___________________________ We have read this thesis and recommend its acceptance: Allen Dunn ____________________ Nancy Moore Goslee ____________________ Cheryl Brown Travis ____________________ Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School ______________________________ (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) Gender, Genre, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee Kasey Bass Baker May 2008 ii Copyright © 2008 by Kasey Bass Baker All rights reserved. iii Dedication I would like to dedicate this dissertation to David, with whom I have already had so many adventures, and to the memory of my grandparents, Bennett and Minnie Bass, who always told me that my possibilities were limitless. iv Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful for the guidance and mentorship of my dissertation committee, Dr. David Goslee, Dr. Nancy Moore Goslee, Dr. Allen Dunn, and Dr. Cheryl Brown Travis. My work with you in courses and in reading groups and through research assistantships, editorial assistantships, and teaching appointments has challenged me and helped me to grow as a researcher, writer, and teacher. I would especially like to thank Dr. David Goslee, the chair of my committee, with whom I have talked about many of these ideas since my first semester at the University of Tennessee. Thank you for sharing your time with me so generously. I am also grateful for fellowships from the University of Tennessee that lessened my teaching duties and that allowed me to research at the British Library and at Eton College Library. I would like to thank Dr. Joseph Dupras, who led my first serious scholarly work in the genre of the dramatic monologue, as well as those who talked with me about this project at the conferences where I presented much of this material in earlier forms. Finally, I would like to thank members of my family— Megan and Kevin Bass, Sara and Dean Bass, Fran and Dub Winkles, and Dana and Carl Baker—for their constant encouragement throughout this process. I am most grateful to David for his friendship and his unwavering support. v Abstract Gender, Genre, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue describes how female and male poets used the dramatic monologue to create a dialogue about gender and subjectivity. I first chart the evolution of the dramatic monologue by explaining changing Victorian literary critical values as evident in the use of the terms subjective and objective. As opposed to earlier literary interest in objectivity, later Victorian poets use the monologue to experiment with new subject positions, valuing individual perspectives most. I trace this pattern in the way Victorian poets across the period use the developing monologue to create often simultaneous and overlapping conversations about subjectivity. In the first conversation, poets such as Levy, Mew, and “Michael Field” (Bradley and Cooper) use the Magdalen figure to create a powerful subject position through the fusion of the sexualized and objectified female body and the embodiment of divine female power. In the second conversation, poets feature the prostitute as the ultimate example of an other consumed in an intimate, yet impersonal, relationship in order to explore whether individuals can achieve critical distance, the ability to observe and judge objectively, or whether observation requires a violent mastering of the other, turning the other into an object. Such poems include Dante Gabriel Rossetti‟s Jenny, Webster‟s A Castaway, and Browning‟s Fifine at the Fair. In the third conversation, Christina Rossetti and Mary Coleridge, among others like Hopkins, Swinburne, and “Field,” all experiment with the poetic genre to probe the very paradox at the core of this project—the abject position made subjectively powerful. In the fourth conversation, turn-of-the-century poets like Levy and Kendall create individual speakers with multiple vi subjectivities, and poets like Webster embrace similar multiplicity through allusive techniques that provide positions of power. vii Table of Contents Introduction: Literary Networks and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue ......................... 1 “See yourself in my soul!”: The Crisis of the 1870s .................................................... 19 “Living had failed and dead had failed / And indeed I was alone”: Finding Agency in Abjection ....................................................................................................................... 24 “Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!”: Polyphony, Intertextuality, and Multiple Subjectivities ........................................................................................... 27 Chapter One: Epistemologies of Poetic Observation: Subjectivity and Objectivity in Victorian Literary Criticism .............................................................................................. 30 Chapter Two: “Proud Mary‟s Gone Mad”: Magdalen and the Monologue ...................... 66 Blake‟s “Maries”: Inherited Traditions of the Magdalen Figure .................................. 73 From the Ball to the “Hideous Masquerade” ................................................................ 94 Chapter Three: Contrasubjectivity and the Crisis of the 1870s ...................................... 109 “It makes a goblin of the sun”: Jenny and the Construction of Contrasubjectivity .... 115 “[T]he woman‟s superfluity”: Contrasubjective Response in A Castaway ................ 130 “[W]e put forth hand and pluck / At what seems somehow like reality—a soul”: Metonymy, Contrasubjectivity, and Fifine at the Fair ............................................... 140 Chapter Four: Abject Subjectivity and Generic Experimentation .................................. 153 “Pulse for pulse, breath for breath”: Christina Rossetti and the Abject Sublime ....... 158 “Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!”: Boundaries and Thresholds in Mary Coleridge‟s Poetry ......................................................................................... 176 Chapter Five: Literary Intersubjectivity and Polyvocality.............................................. 206 “So he”: Echoes of Robert Browning‟s “Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island” in Augusta Webster‟s “Circe” .................................................................. 215 “When once we‟re enthroned, you shall never dethrone us— / The poets, the sages, the seers of the land!”: The Agôn in the Poetry of May Kendall and Amy Levy ............ 226 Conclusion: Literary Networks and Poetic Inheritance .................................................. 239 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 244 Appendices ...................................................................................................................... 267 Vita .................................................................................................................................. 273 viii Table of Figures Fig. 1: Hierarchical Structure of the Internet .................................................................... 14 Fig. 2: Overlapping Conversations ................................................................................... 17 Fig. 3: Interconnected Nodes ............................................................................................ 18 Fig. 4: Blake‟s The Entombment, Number 143................................................................
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