Theory and Interpretation of Narrative James Phelan And

Theory and In TerpreTaTIon of narraTIve James phelan and peTer J. rabInowITz, serIes edITors

a r r a TI v e m e a n s , N l y r IC e n d s

Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century British Long Poem

Monique R. Morgan

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morgan, Monique R., 1974– Narrative means, lyric ends : temporality in the nineteenth-century British long poem / Monique R. Morgan. p. cm.—(Theory and interpretation of narrative) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1111-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8142-9208-2 (cd-rom) 1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Narrative poetry—19th century— History and criticism. 3. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850. Prelude. 4. Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788–1824. Don Juan. 5. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 1806–1861. Aurora Leigh. 6. Browning, Robert, 1812–1889. Ring and the book. I. Title. II. Series: Theory and interpretation of narrative series. PR585.N26M67 2009 823.'030908—dc22 2009024593

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9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For my parents, whose love and support know no end

C o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Narrative, Lyric, and Time 1

Chapter 1: The Labyrinthine Plots and Lyric Stasis of Don Juan 23 Labyrinthine Plots 26 Chance versus Choice 32 Ironically Fulfilled Declarations 42 Proliferating Similes 46 Authorial Ennui, Lyric Stasis, and Hopeless Cycles 52 Larger Structures of Plot and the Consequences of Don Juan’s Lyricism 61

Chapter 2: Plot Anticipation and Lyric Association in The Prelude 70 Prospective Reading 74 A Model of Prospective Reading: The River 78 Temporal Blurring and Lyrical Effects 83 The Narrator’s Temporal Relationship to Events 94 The Prelude’s Structural Similarities to Other Texts 104 Changes in the 1850 Prelude 108 The Narrative Value of Personification 114 viii ~ C o n t e n t s

chapter 3: Juxtaposed fragments of genres In aurora leigh 120 Aurora’s Changing Narrative Perspective 122 A Present-Tense Intrusion 127 Past-Tense Confusions 132 Implications for Epistolary and Retrospective Forms 135 “Unlike Similitudes” 139 Productive Fragmentation 149

chapter 4: temporaL hybrIdIty In the dramatIc monoLogue and The ring anD The Book 155 The Dramatic Monologue’s Rhetorical Relation to Lyric and Narrative 156 The Temporal Structure of Dramatic Monologues 160 Arcangeli 173 Caponsacchi 178 Pompilia 183 Larger Structures in The Ring and the Book 188 Epic Repetition 192 Alliteration as Characterization 194

postscrIpt: LegacIes and Lapses of LyrIc narratIve 200

Works Cited 215 Index 225 A C knowledgmen T s

This project began as my dissertation, and I am deeply indebted to my advisors, colleagues, and friends at Stanford University who contributed so much to the improvement of this project. My dissertation commit- tee—Robert Polhemus, Herbert Lindenberger, and Robert Kaufman— were wonderful advocates, teachers, editors, and critics during all stages of my work. Denise Gigante and Jay Fliegelman generously read parts of the project and provided invaluable advice, as did the members of the Nineteenth-Century Dissertation Group: Crisi Benford, Dawn Cole- man, Hilary Edwards, Christy McBride, Patty Roylance, Jessica Straley, and Robin Valenza. Conversations with Barbara Gelpi, Roland Greene, Melissa Mohr, Franco Moretti, Stephen Orgel, Ramon Saldivar, Carolyn Sale, Jennifer Summit, and Alex Woloch sharpened my ideas, provided wonderful rhetorical advice, and pointed me to valuable works and resources. I am grateful to Stanford, the Mellon Foundation, and Mrs. Carolyn Killefer for their generous financial support, without which the dissertation would not have been possible. McGill University has provided immense intellectual, financial, and practical support. My colleagues in the Department of English, including

ix ~ A C knowledgments

Maggie Kilgour, Tom Mole, Derek Nystrom, Ned Schantz, and Tabitha Sparks, have offered much useful advice and encouragement. Thanks to the Faculty of Arts and the Arts Undergraduate Society for a grant that allowed me to hire undergraduate research assistants, and to Rachael Dempsey, who so efficiently gathered resources and investigated questions to supplement this project. I am indebted to the department and the university for granting me a semester of course relief in 2004, and a sabbatical in 2008. The manuscript benefited from the thoughtful responses of my fellow panelists and the audience members at various conferences. Part of chapter 1 was presented at the 2006 conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, and parts of chapters 2 and 3 at the 2001 and 2002 conferences for the Society for the Study of Narra- tive Literature. Elements of chapter 2 were also presented at the 2001 Dickens Project Winter Conference, and an abridged version of chapter 4 was read at the 2003 Modern Language Association conference. I am especially indebted to Alison Case, Heather Dubrow, Gary Dyer, John Jordan, David Richter, and Herbert Tucker for their suggestions, questions, and encouragement. Part of chapter 2 appeared as “Narrative Means to Lyric Ends in Wordsworth’s Prelude” in Narrative 16.3 (October 2008): 298–330. I am grateful to the publisher for permission to reprint it here. I owe a tremendous debt to the manuscript’s three readers for The Ohio State University Press: James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and Hilary Schor. Their spirited engagement with the text helped me hone my arguments, streamline the prose, and feel once more the joys of the poems I discuss. Sandy Crooms’s kindness, support, and guidance through the editorial process are also deeply appreciated. I thank Nikhila for talking me through so many of my early ideas, and for being a wonderful friend and enthusiastic supporter. This book would not have been possible without Jesse, who encouraged me through all its phases and was an exemplar of engaged reading and scholarly diligence. Finally, I thank my parents for a lifetime of love and for their unfailing confidence in me. I n T r o d UCTI o n narratIve, LyrIc, and tIme

In an 1844 letter to Mary Russell Mitford, Elizabeth Barrett Browning expressed her goals for the poem that would eventually become Aurora Leigh:

People care for a story—there’s the truth! And I who care so much for stories, am not to find fault with them. And now tell me,—where is the obstacle to making as interesting a story of a poem as of a prose work . . . Conversations & events, why may they not be given as rapidly & passionately & lucidly in verse as in prose . . . I want to write a poem of a new class, in a measure—a Don Juan, without the mockery & impurity, . . . under one aspect,—& having unity, as a work of art,—& admitting of as much philosophical dreaming & digression (which is in fact a characteristic of the age) as I like to use.1

1. Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 30 December 1844, The Let- ters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836–1854, vol. 3, eds. Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan (Waco, Tex.: Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, 1983), 49.

1 ~ I n t r o d u C t I o n

Barrett Browning’s aspirations raise a number of important questions (besides the conundrum of what, exactly, would be left of Byron’s Don Juan if one were to excise the “mockery & impurity”). How can a poet satisfy the public in an age that craves both “a story” and “dreaming & digression”? Can a poem achieve artistic unity when its purposes are so multiple and divergent, and through what new aesthetic forms is that unity imposed? What poetic elements are retained in poems that imitate narrative prose? How important is rapidity when telling a story, and why, in the nineteenth century, is poetry more associated with the meandering and the atemporal? This book attempts to answer such questions by examining the varied and complex interplay between two seemingly antithetical modes, lyric and narrative, in four canonical long poems of nineteenth-century British literature: William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Lord Byron’s Don Juan, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book. These four poems are representative of a general trend of generic experimentation with lyric and narrative in nineteenth-century poetry, and demonstrate the range of possibilities in such experiments. I argue that each of these texts uses narrative techniques to create lyrical effects, effects that manipulate readers’ experience of time and shape their intellectual, emotional, and ethical responses. I approach the primary texts through the dual perspectives of narratology and poetic theory, two fields that rarely come into contact, yet can reinforce, complement, and critique each other. Although contemporary narrative theory has expanded the range of texts it considers, poetry remains underrepresented and the novel remains the dominant source of examples and case studies. By taking the less common approach of understanding poetry through narratology, I hope to achieve several goals. The first two chapters find strong, unusual structuring devices within two Romantic poems that have often been described as amor- phous and accretive—The Prelude and Don Juan. The final two chapters address Victorian poetry from a context that emphasizes its innovation, its creation of new forms to create new rhetorical effects. More generally, the four poems central to the project serve as case studies of the boundaries and interactions between broad modes and among specific genres, changing our aesthetic and ideological assumptions about lyric and narrative. The analysis of these poems’ underlying structures also expands the domain of narrative theory, and qualifies some generalizations that often are based too exclusively on the realist novel. Finally, by connecting specific uses of local poetic features (especially simile, personification, and alliteration) to larger narrative strategies, this book n A r r At I v e , ly r IC , A n d t I m e ~ demonstrates that form at the micro and macro levels can mirror, supplement, or otherwise reinforce each other.2 Although lyric and narrative forms abound throughout English literature, the nineteenth century is an especially rich period for the study of these modes because of the confluence of two literary-historical trends: the increasing prestige of lyric poetry, and the increasing popularity of the novel. In the Romantic and Victorian periods, writers as varied as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Mill value poetry for the emotional intensity usually associated with lyric, and view narrative as contingent and subservient. Despite the critical devaluation of narrative, poets, to a greater or lesser extent, incorporate narrative elements. In part, they were responding to the increasing popularity of a new narrative form— the novel. At the beginning of the century, the most popular poems and the most popular novels had similar sales figures. But while the market for poetry remained relatively unchanged, the sales of novels exploded as the century progressed. The combination of lyric’s critical prestige and narrative’s popular appeal produced, as the nineteenth century progressed, a heightened sense of the tension between lyric and narrative, and varied and complex strategies for reconciling the two modes. To date, most studies of nineteenth-century poetry which address lyric versus narrative have argued that Victorian poets introduce narrative or dramatic elements to make poetry more objective, as a reaction against the seemingly exces- sive lyric subjectivity of Romanticism.3 I take a different approach. This study focuses on the temporal, logical, and figurative aspects of lyric and narrative, aspects that more vividly highlight the tension between the two modes. Whereas narrative requires temporal progression and

2. I thus hope to overcome the sense of opposition between two types of formalist analysis (one focused on large-scale structure, the other on local style) described by Cath- erine Gallagher in “Formalism and Time,” Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (March 2000): 229–31. Gallagher suggests that both approaches are flawed, in that “both versions of form may be said to arrest narrative flow, one by generalizing an enduring pattern toward which the moments contribute and the other by freezing a moment for analysis.” Gallagher, 231. I hope that my emphasis on dynamic reader interactions over time will partly mitigate such shortcomings. 3. For instance, one of the major premises of Carol T. Christ’s study is that “the Vic- torians and the Modernists find the prominence which they feel that Romanticism gives to the poet’s subjectivity burdensome and restrictive.” Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 2. Isobel Armstrong agrees that the Victorians strived to create a poetic form that is, at the same time, “not only the subject’s utterance but the object of analysis and critique.” Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Poli- tics (New York: Routledge, 1993), 12. Armstrong differs from Christ, however, in viewing the Romantics as engaged in the same struggle to make poetry less subjective, although to a lesser degree. Ibid., 6. ~ I n t r o d u C t I o n

sequentiality, lyric is a suspended moment that stops the time of narrative and focuses instead on the “now” of composition and reception. Within this moment of suspended time, the poet can give free play to thought and emotion, associating ideas and images that would not be linked by the chains of cause and effect that typically govern narrative. The lyric poet can also make use of this freedom from temporal progression to linger on the formal and figurative aspects of language, thus calling attention to it as language. In contrast, the interests of narrative cannot afford to dwell indefinitely on the formal beauties of its language: instead, a narrative must make clear what is happening in the story, thus requiring a more straightforward use of language. By concentrating on time’s progression versus timelessness, strict causality versus imaginative association, and the strategic uses of figurative language, I bring into focus the fundamental differences between narrative and lyric, and trace the historical progression of their productive tension in the nineteenth century. Early in the century, the two modes were still largely separate: Don Juan is primarily narrative, The Prelude is primarily lyrical. In mid-century, the Brownings both attempt to reconcile and balance the two modes in a long poem. Despite their varied structures, these four poems each use narrative methods to achieve lyrical effects: narrative is a means to attain lyric ends. U

Western literary theory has a long tradition of distinguishing lyric and narrative, beginning with Aristotle’s influential division of genres. Aris- totle discusses several criteria for dividing poetry, including the media of representation, the objects represented, and the manner of representation.4 The three possible manners of representation are “(a) by narrating (either (i) becoming another [person], as Homer does, or (ii) remaining the same person and not changing), or (b) by representing everyone as in action and activity.”5 From this springs the long lasting division of poetry into narrative, lyric, and drama. In dramatic literature, the characters are directly represented “as in action and activity,” and are themselves the source of their speech, without the poet as a visible mediator between the characters and the audience. In lyric, Aristotle’s (a, ii) category, the focus is entirely on the poet, who speaks in his own voice—he “remains the same person.” Narrative occupies an intermediate position, because

4. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 2–3. 5. Ibid., 3. n A r r At I v e , ly r IC , A n d t I m e ~ the characters speak, but only through the poet who temporarily adopts their voices and “becom[es] another person.” These Aristotelian criteria are still influential in 1815, when Word- sworth uses them as the basis for his discussion of genre in the preface to his collected poems. He claims that in narrative poetry, “The distinguishing mark is, that the Narrator, however liberally his speaking agents be introduced, is himself the source from which everything primarily flows.”6 By contrast, in dramatic poetry, “The Poet does not appear at all in his own person, and . . . action is carried on by speech and dialogue of the agents.”7 When defining the lyric, however, Wordsworth surprisingly shifts to another Aristotelian criterion—the media of representation: the lyrical contains forms “in . . . which, for the production of their full effect, an accompaniment of music is indispensable.”8 Here he departs from definitions based on the relationships among characters, poet, and audience, which would have led to a definition of lyric as poetry in which the poet appears exclusively in his own person. In twentieth-century literary criticism, we can see Aristotle’s influence in Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg’s study of narrative: “By narrative we mean all those literary works which are distinguished by two characteristics: the presence of a story and a story-teller. A drama is a story without a story-teller. . . . A lyric, like a drama, is a direct presentation, in which a single actor, the poet or his surrogate, sings, or muses, or speaks for us to hear or overhear. Add a second speaker . . . and we move toward drama. Let the speaker begin to tell of an event . . . and we move toward narrative.”9 Here again, lyric is defined as univocal, drama is a direct presentation of multiple speakers, and narrative filters its presentation through one primary voice. A second set of definitions emerges from their description, however: lyric has a teller but no story, drama has a story but no teller, and narrative has both.10 We are still left with

6. William Wordsworth, “Preface of 1815,” in Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 176. 7. Ibid., 177. 8. Ibid. Even when the presence or absence of musical accompaniment is used as the basis of Wordsworth’s generic classification, narrative still falls between drama and lyric, because drama admits music “only incidentally and rarely,” and narratives “neither require nor reject the accompaniment of music.” Ibid. 9. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 4. 10. Scholes and Kellogg go beyond their basis in Aristotle, however, in addressing the possible tension between the story-teller and the story: “The problem of point of view is narrative art’s own problem, one that it does not share with lyric or dramatic literature. . . . The narrative situation is . . . ineluctably ironical,” but irony “is utterly alien to the lyricist.” Scholes and Kellogg, 240. According to Scholes and Kellogg, irony enters ~ I n t r o d u C t I o n

the question of what constitutes a story. Scholes addresses that question when he offers an alternative definition of narrative: “A narration is the symbolic presentation of a sequence of events connected by subject matter and related by time.”11 Saying that the elements of narrative are “related by time” makes explicit the temporal relation already implied by saying narrative represents “a sequence of events.” By overtly stating the necessity of temporal progression in a story, Scholes more precisely defines his concept of a story and exposes narrative’s most fundamental feature. Scholes and the long tradition of Aristotelian approaches to narrative have, in recent decades, been joined by theories focused on narrative structures. The one point on which all narratologists seem to agree is the essential temporality of the form: narratives depict events over time, and these representations must themselves unfold through time. Some structural approaches only imply, but unambiguously imply, the necessity of temporal relations in narrative by focusing on events, which are themselves changes in time. For example, Seymour Chatman reiterates the Structuralist and Russian Formalist distinction between “story” and “discourse,” between the content of a narrative and the textual performance through which the content is expressed, and then contends that a story is composed of “events” and “existents” (the former being subdivided into “actions” and “happenings,” the latter into “characters” and “settings”).12 Other structural analyses more explicitly discuss the temporality of narrative. Gérard Genette evaluates narrative according to three broad categories: temporal relations, mood, and voice. The much greater length of analysis given to temporal relations, and their subcategorization into order, duration, and frequency, suggest the primacy of temporal aspects of narrative.13 Peter Brooks, in his psychoanalytic approach to narrative structure, is sensitive to plot’s development in time: “Plot as I conceive it is the design and intention of narrative. . . . We might think of plot as the logic or perhaps the syntax of a certain kind of discourse, one that develops its propositions only through temporal sequence and progression.”14 Temporal progression is

narrative only when a written tradition begins, and it would not have been an important feature when literary composition was a primarily oral process. Scholes and Kellogg, 51. 11. Robert Scholes, “Language, Narrative, and Anti-Narrative,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 205. 12. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Itha- ca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 19. On events, see especially 43–95. 13. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Itha- ca: Cornell University Press, 1980). See especially 33–160. 14. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), xi. n A r r At I v e , ly r IC , A n d t I m e ~ also important for Meir Sternberg, who defines narrative as dominated by “the play of suspense/curiosity/surprise between represented and communicative time.”15 Paul Ricoeur goes even further. For him, time is not just the medium through which narrative conveys its content. Rather, time gives narrative its central meaning, and narrative makes time intelligible.16 Some theorists require a stronger link than mere temporal succession in order for a group of events to qualify as a narrative, and argue that succession must be joined by causation. Narrative events do not just follow each other in time; they logically follow each other based on concepts of cause and effect. In S/Z Roland Barthes identifies five codes through which literary texts signify, and two of them require temporal progression and causality. The proairetic code is the logic of minimal sequences of actions, of one action or part of an action probably implying another based on our knowledge of “the ‘already-done’ or ‘already- read’” of experience.17 The hermeneutic code is composed of “all the units whose function it is to articulate in various ways a question, its response, and the variety of chance events which can either formulate the question or delay its answer; or even, constitute an enigma and lead to its solution.”18 It gives the actions of a narrative a more resonant meaning. The proairetic and hermeneutic codes provide a narrative with an armature of cause and effect, though for Barthes, this is a negative characteristic.19 Although Barthes sees a strong sense of narrative causation as something to be minimized in literary texts, many critics recognize the importance of causality but do not judge its value negatively. Paul Ricoeur, for instance, argues: “Every narrative combines two dimensions in various proportions, one chronological and the other nonchronological. The first may be called the episodic dimension, which characterizes the story

15. Meir Sternberg, “Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity,” Poetics Today 13.3 (Fall 1992): 529. For Sternberg, however, the interplay between the time of story and the time of discourse is even more important than temporal progression per se: “What distinguishes narrative effects as such from all others is less their play over time than their interplay between times.” Sternberg, 519. 16. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3. 17. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 19. 18. Ibid., 17. 19. Barthes believes “the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text”; texts that invite such productiv- ity from the reader are writerly texts, and those that foreclose it are denigrated as readerly texts. Barthes, 4. Barthes associates these two codes and their emphasis on causation with the readerly, rather than with the writerly, text. Barthes, 181–82. ~ I n t r o d u C t I o n

as made out of events. The second is the configurational dimension, according to which the plot construes significant wholes out of scattered events.”20 For Ricoeur, narrative texts link time with causation, which can help extract “significant wholes” and greater meaning out of “scattered events.” There are, however, dissenting voices on the necessity of causation in narrative. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan writes: “I would like to argue that temporal succession is sufficient as a minimal requirement for a group of events to form a story. My argument is based on: (1) the . . . suggestion that causality can often (always?) be projected onto temporality; and (2) the counter-intuitive nature of [requiring causality]. If . . . we posit causality and closure . . . as obligatory criteria, many groups of events which we intuitively recognize as stories would have to be excluded from this category.”21 I agree that temporal succession is the only truly essential feature of narrative. Clear causal connections between events are not strictly necessary in a narrative mode. But a text has a higher degree of narrativity, and is more satisfying as a narrative, if it invites the reader to infer causal connections.22 Just as narrative is marked by temporal succession, lyric is marked by the absence of noticeable temporal succession. Jonathan Culler offers an influential definition of lyric based on its atemporality in his essay “Apostrophe.” Culler suggests that “one [can] distinguish two forces in poetry, the narrative and the apostrophic, and . . . the lyric is characteristically the triumph of the apostrophic.”23 The importance of apostrophe,

20. Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980–81), 174. 21. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983), 18. 22. James Phelan suggests the central elements of narrativity are “the introduction and complication of instabilities involving the characters and the [reader’s] judgments associated with those instabilities.” Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2007), 225. Causation may be important for both the instabilities and the judgments, but it is not the only contributing factor to narrativity. 23. Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe,” in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Decon- struction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 149. Although apostrophe’s atemporality is most important for my purposes, other aspects of Culler’s analysis have inspired further critical debate. Barbara Johnson has applied Culler’s ideas to argue that the rhetoric in political debate and poetry about abortion resembles the rhetoric of apostrophe in its emphasis on (and ambiguity about) animation, and in the breakdown of a clear binary of I and thou. See “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987): 185–99. J. Douglas Kneale follows the tradition of classical rhetoric in defining apostrophe as a turning away from the original, proper auditor to address someone or something else; as a result, he argues that Culler discusses not apostrophe but rather address, exclamation, and prosopopoeia. Nonetheless, Kneale admits that “what Culler has to say about the temporality of apostrophe is useful.” “Romantic Aversions: Apostrophe Reconsidered,” ELH 58 (1991): 161. n A r r At I v e , ly r IC , A n d t I m e ~ and its resistance to narration, stem from its detachment from temporal succession:

If one puts into a poem thou shepherd boy, ye blessed creatures, ye birds, they are immediately associated with what might be called a timeless present but is better seen as a temporality of writing. Even if the birds were only glimpsed once in the past, to apostrophize them as ‘ye birds’ is to locate them in the time of the apostrophe—a special temporality which is the set of all moments at which writing can say ‘now.’ This is a time of discourse rather than story. So located by apostrophes, birds, creatures, boys, etc. resist being organized into events that can be narrated, for they are inserted in the poem as elements of the event which the poem is attempting to be.24

The lyric mode shares these characteristics of apostrophe. Lyric creates a timeless present, an indefinitely suspended moment, which contrasts with narrative’s past progression of events. Rather than emphasizing the time of the story and distancing the reader’s encounter with the text from the time of the events, lyric emphasizes the time of discourse, creating a sense of immediacy among the reader, text, and content. Since a lyric is composed of “the set of all moments at which writing can say ‘now,’” it de-emphasizes the passage of time required to read it and instead creates the illusion of a simultaneous apprehension of the poem’s elements and meanings. Apostrophe as a figure and lyric as a mode have another, more subtle, means of resisting narrative temporality. Culler argues that the you being addressed is constituted by the addressing I in apostrophe, so the real relationship is of the mind to itself rather than between the self and an object. This internalization within the mind of the poet resists narration, and the causality and passage of time associated with it.25 Rather than encouraging the reader to forge connections

24. Culler, “Apostrophe,” 149. 25. Ibid., 148. This claim about apostrophe is similar to Paul de Man’s objection to the symbol. According to de Man, the sympathetic apprehension of objects in a symbol is problematic, because sympathy applies “to the relationship between subjects rather than to relationships between a subject and an object. The relationship with nature has been superseded by an intersubjective, interpersonal relationship that, in the last analysis, is a relationship of the subject toward itself.” “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., Theory and History of Literature, vol. 7 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 196. The symbol is mystifactory because it creates the illusion that the speaker can borrow the temporal stability of the natural world, and that image and substance can simultaneously coincide. de Man, “Rhetoric,” 197, 207. The symbol is suspicious, then, precisely because it appears atemporal. 10 ~ I n t r o d u C t I o n

of cause and effect as narrative does, lyric connects its material based on the subjective mental associations of the poet. These characteristics are rarely, perhaps never, present in a pure and absolute form, though. Even the most canonical of brief Romantic lyrics display some narrative elements, but their focus on subjective mental associations and their apostrophic atemporality give them a higher degree of lyricality than narrativity. Although Wordsworth’s “A Slum- ber Did My Spirit Seal” implies a crucial narrative event in the gap between its two stanzas—Lucy’s death—the emphasis falls not on what caused her death, but on its current emotional impact on the speaker. He has, at some point in the past, undergone a radical change in attitude and belief, but his current understanding seems lasting and timeless, even though what he understands is the inexorability of time. The three stanzas of Keats’s “To Autumn” present three views of the season, corresponding to early, mid, and late autumn, and each stanza contains actions and gestures toward temporality. The overarching tone suggests the speaker accepts the temporal change of autumn’s departure, and yet this acceptance is communicated through repeated apostrophes to autumn and closes with a vista explicitly located in the poem’s “now.”26 In some sense, all poetry combines lyric and narrative elements, but the four poems discussed in the following chapters are much longer and more complex experiments in formal hybridity. Culler is not alone in defining lyric based on its predominant atemporality. Susan Stanford Friedman makes similar claims of subjective associationism and a suspended present moment when she argues, “As a discourse of subjectivity, the lyric is said to ‘resist’ narrative. A narrative may stand implicitly behind the lyric moment, but the lyric itself exists in a timeless present, outside history.”27 Peter Brooks contrasts lyric with narrative by emphasizing the former’s illusion of simultaneous discourse, and Sharon Cameron places lyric discourse outside the time of action and discusses its concern with timelessness.28 Rimmon- Kenan implies that lyric does not feature temporal succession when she notes that “narrative fiction differs from other literary texts, such as lyrical poetry or expository prose. Unlike the latter, narrative fiction

26. For a discussion of temporality in “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” see de Man, “Rhetoric,” 223–25. For the temporal aspects of “To Autumn,” see the chapter on the poem in Helen Vendler’s The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983). 27. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Gender and Genre Anxiety: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H. D. as Epic Poets,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5.2 (Fall 1986), 204. 28. Brooks, 20; Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 243. n A r r At I v e , ly r IC , A n d t I m e ~ 11 represents a succession of events.”29 I agree with this strand of criticism, identifying lyric as focused on the time of discourse, an indefinitely suspended present moment. I differ from Culler, however, in placing much less emphasis on apostrophe as a figure through which lyric atemporality is manifested. Treating lyric as a mode rather than a genre and defining lyric based on its atemporality provide a powerful complementary category to narrative as it is defined by much current theory. Perhaps the only point on which all narrative theorists agree is the essential temporality of narrative forms, their dependence on the passing of time in both the stories they tell and the discourse through which they are told. This project’s emphasis on temporality, and its search for the peculiar narrative structure of each long poem studied, may seem to lend itself to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope—the expression in literature of a particular set of temporal (and spatial) relations. While some of the poems I study share important features with specific chronotopes described by Bakhtin (for instance, The Prelude shares traits with the stoic autobiography, and Don Juan resembles an adventure novel of ordeal), Bakhtin’s methodology and terminology have certain limitations that prevent me from adopting them. First, Bakhtin focuses on the novel rather than on narrative more generally, and he seems hostile toward lyric because he perceives it as ideologically conservative.30 Second, Bakhtin emphasizes the level of story and temporality as it is experienced by characters, whereas I want also to consider the level of discourse and the temporal experience of readers. Finally, I hope to show the variety of lyric-narrative interactions in a time when the traditional genres analyzed by Bakhtin are breaking down. Because I want to apply aspects of narrative theory to texts that usually are unaddressed by or tangential to narrative theory, I pare down the idea of narrative to what I take to be its essential features. I can thus temporarily discard other common tenets of narrative theories that are based on the nineteenth-century novel, freeing me from the constraint of forcing narrative poems to fit a model potentially alien to them. To make lyric a complementary term to my definition of narrative, I pare down

29. Rimmon-Kenan, 2. 30. For instance, Bakhtin denigrates the transcendence, subjectivity, and isolation usually associated with lyric: “man’s image was distorted by his increasing participation in the mute and invisible spheres of existence,” and “the personal and detached human being . . . lost the unity and wholeness that had been a product of his public origin.” M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 135. 1 ~ I n t r o d u C t I o n

lyric to its essential simultaneity. In doing so, I treat other features commonly attributed to lyric (brevity, intensity, sincerity, subjectivity) as less essential, perhaps even unnecessary.31 And this could induce the objection that I am emptying traditional definitions of lyric of their meaning, or even suggesting that specific poems long taken as exemplars of the lyric do not actually fit the category. I would like to avoid these negative consequences by maintaining a distinction between lyric as mode and lyric as genre. The lyric genre is a narrower category: for a poem to be generically lyric, it must be written primarily in the lyric mode and have at least some of the additional attributes mentioned above. Clearly, many poems in the literary tradition fit this more narrow definition of lyric. And clearly it is often useful to have even narrower definitions of lyric subgenres. There are still, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, poems that are recognizable as sonnets, odes, elegies, and songs. But there are also an increasing number of generically hybrid poems, some so hybrid as to defy generic categorization at all. As Dorothy Mermin has said, “Disdain for genre rules was common in the nineteenth century: the Victorians wrote poems in all sorts of strange and nameless forms without worrying about how to define them.”32 In these cases, the broader category of mode can provide a powerful framework to elucidate underlying structures that do not fit traditional generic categories; the four chapters that follow each provide an example of the modal approach’s usefulness. Taking lyric and narrative as complementary modes based on their respective simultaneity and temporal progression has another result that may seem troubling: it eliminates drama as a third category on the same hierarchical level as the other two. Most narratologists implicitly subsume drama under narrative, seeing them both as structurally similar,

31. In Romanticism, Lyricism, and History Sarah M. Zimmerman similarly treats lyric as a mode (rather than a genre) and questions some of the characteristics commonly attributed to lyric, arguing against the critical equations “solitary = asocial, sincere = antitheatrical and introspective = disengaged.” She also recognizes the lyric’s focus on the present moment and its associationism. She notes, “Two of the mode’s qualities—a sense of immediacy and of intimacy—combined to create a poetics of presence.” And Zimmerman finds that the critical tradition from John Stuart Mill through M. H. Abrams has made “Romantic lyricism . . . the poetic vehicle for psychological processes: the digressions of recollection and the associative mechanisms of reflection.” Her study differs from mine, however, in its emphasis on subjectivity rather than temporality, its focus on biographical contexts, book production, and contemporary reception, and its choice of primary texts. See Sarah M. Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 36, 31, 17. 32. Dorothy Mermin, “Genre and Gender in Aurora Leigh,” The Victorian Newsletter 69 (Spring 1986): 8. n A r r At I v e , ly r IC , A n d t I m e ~ 1 essentially temporal forms that use two different media of presentation. Although I generally agree with this classification of drama as a subspe- cies of narrative, I do not therefore see the specific medium of drama and its conventions of presentation as unimportant. I also recognize the possibility that some dramatic works may minimize the importance of time, and hence become more lyrical in nature. By now, it should be clear that this project has a distinctly formalist emphasis. Since the 1990s, literary criticism, and nineteenth-century studies in particular, have experienced a resurgence of interest in the formal features of literary texts. In the roughly two decades prior to this revival, formalist approaches to literature were often subordinated to ideological considerations, and sometimes dismissed as apolitical and escapist eva- sions of social meanings and historical contexts. Two identifiable varieties of New Formalism have responded to this perceived neglect of form. Marjorie Levinson has suggested the label “normative formalism” for those critics who advocate “a sharp demarcation between history and art” as a “backlash” against New Historicism, and has adopted Susan Wolfson’s term “activist formalism” for “a new formalism that makes a continuum with new historicism.”33 The latter responds to Herbert Tucker’s call for more critics to adopt what he termed a “Cultural Neo- formalist” approach, one which would benefit from the gains of New Historicism and cultural studies but would also attend to the cultural implications of “detailed textual signifiers,” and to Caroline Levine’s call for “strategic formalism” within cultural studies.34 My work may not be as pervasively historicist as the activist criticism called for by Tucker and Levine, but I see the relationship of my work to more historicist approaches as complementary rather than oppositional, and for that reason I do not consider myself a “normative formalist.” Narrative Means, Lyric Ends makes the implicit argument that attention to form is

33. Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122.2 (March 2007): 559. The latter approach is evident in such groundbreaking texts as Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics and Susan J. Wolfson’s Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). I have elsewhere discussed the current revival of formalist approaches in “Productive Convergences, Pro- ducing Converts,” in Whither Victorian Poetry? ed. Linda K. Hughes, spec. issue of Victorian Poetry 41.4 (Winter 2003): 500–504. For an extended discussion of the history of formalist movements and reactions against them, see Wolfson, Formal, 1–30. For a briefer discussion that places more emphasis on the continuities among New Criticism, Deconstruction, New Historicism, and Neoformalism, see Susan J. Wolfson, “Reading for Form,” Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 1–16. 34. Herbert Tucker, “The Fix of Form: An Open Letter,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27.2 (1999): 535, 533; Caroline Levine, “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies,” Victorian Studies 48.4 (Summer 2006): 625–57. 1 ~ I n t r o d u C t I o n

a necessary element in understanding literary texts, but that formalist approaches should not exclude other considerations. Formal analysis must be among our array of available critical techniques, because form is capable of augmenting, complicating, qualifying, or undermining a text’s more obvious surface meanings. Without an acute sensitivity to the subtleties of form, we are in danger of mistakenly extracting from a work explicit meanings or implicit ideologies which unduly distort and oversimplify the text. In some cases, texts that have been denigrated as unreflective transmitters of ideology may be shrewdly resisting their ideological content through their formal construction, and constructedness.35 This monograph also participates in the newly emerging critical interest in lyric-narrative hybridity.36 Peter Hühn, for example, has fruitfully applied to lyric poems a range of narratological concepts, including general categories of the temporal relations between story and discourse.37 Recently James Phelan has analyzed lyric-narrative hybridity from a rhetorical perspective using several twentieth-century texts, and Heather Dubrow and Monika Fludernik have each begun to theorize lyric-narrative interactions using Renaissance poetry.38 Dubrow calls for more attention to cooperation (rather than competition) between the lyric and

35. In this I agree with Wolfson that “any view of poetic artifice that perceives only its power to occlude or mystify misses . . . the capacity of poetry to strengthen critical understanding by engaging attention with its constructedness, making a reading of its forms fundamental to any reception of or quarrel with its power.” Wolfson, Formal, 4. 36. I discuss this emerging work at greater length in “Lyric Narrative Hybrids in Vic- torian Poetry,” Literature Compass 4.3 (May 2007): 917–34. 37. Peter Hühn, “Plotting the Lyric: Forms of Narration in Poetry,” in Theory Into Po- etry: New Approaches to the Lyric, eds. Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik (Am- sterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 147–72. Hühn claims that poetry theory and criticism is “deficient” and “unsatisfactory” compared to the methodological achievements of narratology, yet he does not address the existing criticism on the poems he uses as examples. Hühn, 147. I disagree with Hühn’s dismissal of poetic theory, and I have benefited greatly from the sophisticated criticism available on Byron, Wordsworth, and the Brownings. 38. See chapters 7–9 of James Phelan, Experiencing Fiction; James Phelan, “Progression and Audience Engagement in Lyric Narratives: ‘Now I Lay Me’ and ‘Doc’s Story,’” in Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration, 158–96 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); James Phelan, “Rhetorical Literary Ethics and Lyric Narrative: Robert Frost’s ‘Home Burial,’” Poetics Today 25.4 (Winter 2004): 627–51; James Phelan, “Character and Judgment in Narrative and in Lyric: Toward an Understanding of Audience Engagement in The Waves,” in Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology, 27–42 (Colum- bus: The Ohio State University Press, 1996); Heather Dubrow, “The Interplay of Narrative and Lyric: Competition, Cooperation, and the Case of the Anticipatory Amalgam,” Narra- tive 14.3 (October 2006): 254–71; and Monika Fludernik, “Allegory, Metaphor, Scene and Expression. The Example of English Medieval and Early Modern Lyric Poetry,” in Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, eds. Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik, 99–124 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). n A r r At I v e , ly r IC , A n d t I m e ~ 1 narrative modes, asking critics to recognize that “rather than attempting to impede, suppress, or supersede each other, lyric and narrative may further common agendas.”39 In each of the following chapters, we shall see examples of the two modes cooperating when narrative is used to further lyric agendas. U

Although it is possible to apply temporal definitions of lyric and narrative productively to literature of any period, the nineteenth century is an especially rich period for the study of these modes because of lyric poetry’s rise in prestige during the Romantic period, and the novel’s rise in popularity in the Victorian era.40 Traditionally, lyric poetry is viewed as brief and intense, while long poems are assumed to have narrative interest to sustain their length. Wordsworth famously states, “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” thus equating worthy poetry with the emotional intensity usually associated with the lyric.41 This attempt to give prestige and merit to the emotion associated with lyric is reiterated when he contrasts his poetic project to the popular (and hence, for Wordsworth, suspect) narrative poetry of the time. He comments on the Lyrical Ballads: “I should mention one other circumstance which distinguishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day; it is this, that the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.”42 The “feeling” of lyric is of greater importance than the “action” of narrative. Shelley also denigrates narrative, viewing the elements of a mere story as mechanical and arbitrary, whereas poetry expresses the

39. Dubrow, 256. 40. While poetry continues to be identified with the lyric in the Victorian period, it also becomes socially marginalized. At the same time, the novel’s literary merit and social importance is increasingly recognized. For an excellent discussion of this complex phenomenon, see Dino Franco Felluga, The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). As he argues, “What we witness in the movement from the Romantic into the Victorian period . . . is an important turning point in the fate of the nineteenth-century poet: whereas the novel had previously been singled out as dangerous and perverse . . . by 1826, thanks to the growing critical acceptance of historical and domestic novels after Scott and Austen, the rhetoric of pathology became increasingly disentangled from the novel and applied instead to poetry.” Felluga, 107. 41. William Wordsworth, “Preface and Appendix to Lyrical Ballads (1800, 1802),” in Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 72. 42. Ibid., 73. 1 ~ I n t r o d u C t I o n

necessary and universal. He states, “There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts which have no other bond of connection than time, place, circumstance, cause, and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchange- able forms of human nature as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.”43 A decade later John Stuart Mill reiterates the contingent nature of narrative and the higher value of emotionally intense lyric poetry. He claims, “There is a radical distinction between the interest felt in a story as such, and the interest excited by poetry; for the one is derived from incident, the other from the representation of feeling. In one, the source of the emotion excited is the exhibition of a state or states of human sensibility; in the other, of a series of states of mere outward circumstances.”44 To make his preference for poetry of emotion even clearer, he then goes on to locate interest in narrative with children and childish races. In 1846 Edgar Allan Poe places such value on emotional intensity in a poem, intensity that can be only briefly sustained, that he declares a long poem is an impossible contradiction in terms.45 Despite this declaration of impossibility, many nineteenth-century writers composed long poems. And despite the preeminence given to lyric, these poets, to a greater or lesser extent, incorporated narrative elements into their long poems. Why might this be the case? One possibility is that the epic may have carried lingering prestige, that this long narrative form was still viewed as the final and highest achievement of a poet striving for greatness. A second possibility is that poets were responding to a new narrative form, one that gradually rose in popularity and prestige as the nineteenth century progressed—the novel. The century opened with the sensational popularity of Sir Walter Scott for both his narrative poetry and his historical novels. Between 1805 and 1830, The Lay of the Last Minstrel sold 44,000 copies; Marmion and The Lady of the Lake each sold 50,000 copies between their dates of publication (1808 and 1810, respectively) and 1836.46 Sales figures for some of his novels are

43. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Shelley’s Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1966), 281. 44. John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 1, eds. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 344–45. Mill’s essay is better known by the title “What Is Poetry?” 45. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Selections from the Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. F. C. Prescott (New York: Gordian Press, 1981), 153. 46. All sales figures in this paragraph are taken from: Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 383–87. n A r r At I v e , ly r IC , A n d t I m e ~ 1 roughly equivalent: from 1814 to 1836 Waverly sold about 57,000 copies, and from 1818 to 1836 Rob Roy sold over 40,000. Half a century later, Ten- nyson was the best selling of the now canonical Victorian poets, and his sales figures were of the same order of magnitude as Scott’s, although Tennyson’s poems may have sold more rapidly. In Memoriam sold 60,000 copies in the first few years after its 1850 publication, and by 1869 Idylls of the King had pre-publication orders amounting to 40,000 copies. These figures are impressive, but as the century progressed they were dwarfed by the sales of some novels. From 1837 to 1863, Dickens’s Pickwick Papers sold 140,000 copies in book form alone, and by 1879 it had sold 800,000 copies. In 1871, the penny edition of Oliver Twist sold 150,000 copies in only three weeks. Perhaps the biggest sales sensation of the century was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which, in the year after its publication in 1852, sold one and a half million copies throughout the British empire.47 Given the increasing critical prestige afforded to lyric, and the increasing popularity of the novel as the preeminent narrative form, poets felt a heightened sense of the conflict between lyric and narrative as the nineteenth century progressed. The chapters that follow examine manifestations of the tensions between lyric and narrative in some of the varied and complex poems produced from this conflict. The confluence in the nineteenth century of a strong critical preference for lyric and a strong popular interest in narrative also suggests a literary climate in which older generic hierarchies were being reevaluated, and new generic experiments were likely to occur. Indeed, nineteenth-century England saw the revival and elevation of older forms (the ballad, the sonnet), and the creation of several well-defined new genres (the conversation poem, the dramatic monologue). It also saw the creation of many hybrid forms, works which have largely defied critics’ attempts at generic classification: the four texts at the heart of this study are among the most prominent examples, but there are countless others. For this reason, I believe an examination based on the broader categories of modes, rather than more narrow definitions of genres and subgenres, is especially fruitful, providing the critical flexibility necessary when dealing with formal experimentation. By stating that nineteenth-century England is a particularly fertile period for the study of this topic, I in no

47. Though as Dino Felluga reminds us (citing sales figures from Altick), the 1790s witnessed sensational sales of some nonfiction prose: Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts may have sold in the millions. Felluga, 61. Book sales were impeded, however, by paper shortages during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, spurring publishers to produce costly editions of poetry marketed to the upper ranks. Felluga, 61–62. 1 ~ I n t r o d u C t I o n

way mean to imply that experiments combining lyric and narrative are exclusive to this period. On the contrary, I hope to engage other scholars in a dialogue about the usefulness and applicability of a modal study of lyric and narrative in other texts and periods. Of course, choosing a period of particular interest was not the only constraint needed to define the scope of this project. This study is further delimited based on the size of the texts to be examined: long poems— more precisely, poems of comparable length to novels and epics. These texts are of sufficient length to arouse expectations of strong narrative development to sustain the reader’s interest. Their extended duration also pushes the limits of lyric, and not only because specific lyric genres are typically very short. The author of a long work, especially one that requires many sittings to read, written in the lyric mode may find it difficult to maintain the illusion of a suspended moment of time. To write a work of this length in this period virtually requires generic experimentation and innovation, because the epic tradition faced several new challenges. Lyric had become more highly valued, the individual had become a more central focus, and modern times had encroached on the mythic past. As Herbert Tucker has convincingly shown, throughout the nineteenth century, poets continued to write epics, and to address contemporary culture through them, but they required great adaptability and creativity (and the freedom offered by poor sales) to do so.48 U

In the four poems under examination in this book, length is accompanied by complexity and varied modal interactions. I begin my study with Lord Byron’s Don Juan because it stands on one extreme of my dichotomy: it is a primarily narrative poem with little overt lyricism. But it is by no means a simple poem. Don Juan is seemingly exhaus- tive (and exhausting) in its proliferation of narrative subjects, narrative conventions, and digressions from narrative. Byron’s commitment to multiplicity even extends to plot lines and similes. The poem repeatedly describes what might have been, elaborating on plot lines it itself does not take. Byron also frequently provides many options in his similes, giving a long list of objects to which a simile’s subject could be compared. The effect of this narrative and poetic proliferation, I argue, is to highlight the arbitrariness of these events and comparisons, which then

48. Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1901 (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2008). n A r r At I v e , ly r IC , A n d t I m e ~ 1 draws attention to the author’s choice in the act of writing. Narrative conventions are used, then, to foreground the time of composition, the suspended moment of lyric. In addition, the poem’s focus on the narrator’s ennui-laden present suggests that the poem itself is a method of passing the time: Don Juan frantically gallops forward in a vain attempt to put as much as possible behind, to fill an insatiable present moment, and to find oblivion in the future. Byron’s poem shows that lyricism can be seemingly endless (rather than necessarily brief) and deliberately heard (rather than seemingly overheard). A complement to Don Juan is provided by William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude. This book-length lyric poem, which is the focus of my second chapter, gets very little of its impetus through usual narrative means. Each of The Prelude’s episodes begins with a very basic narrative but is essentially a subjective lyric experience, and initial plot movement gives way to a suspension of time. The individual lyrics, in turn, are unified by a radical model of narrative underlying the poem, a model that takes to a new extreme tendencies latent in confessional literature. Wordsworth constantly directs his readers to process the text prospectively—to look forward to the endpoint as they read the poem, rather than to confer retrospective significance at the end of the reading process. This unusual narrative structure has an associative logic that unites each episode to the final goal, rather than a causal logic that would directly link each episode to the next. Prospective reading allows the series of short lyrics to function together as one long lyric, restruc- tures the presentation of time, and creates a more equal distribution of knowledge between the author and his audience. For modern readers, The Prelude also serves as a striking counterexample to narrative theory that assumes narrative is essentially a retrospective mode for the reader, assumes that full and confident understanding can be conferred only by the ending. In chapter 3 I turn to a Victorian verse-novel that strikes an even balance between lyric and narrative—Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. Barrett Browning alternates between forwarding the plot and adding lyric delay; for every small step forward in the narrative, a lyric pause follows, creating discrete but regular motion. Barrett Browning’s incessant use of similes provides another, more subtle, method of advancing the plot while introducing elements that call attention to its status as poetry. In a simile, the tenor and vehicle, the literal and figurative elements, are kept separated by “like” or “as,” keeping them more grammatically distinct than is the case in a metaphor or symbol. A simile’s literal meaning is explicitly stated and is a discrete unit, thus leaving its 0 ~ I n t r o d u C t I o n

relation to the plot remarkably clear. But a figurative element is added, allowing for self-consciously poetic moments with all the formal play and virtuosity of lyric. Aurora Leigh’s greatest complexity, however, lies in the changing times at which Aurora composes her story, and this is the focus of much of my analysis. Because she writes her story in distinct stages, with crucial events happening between bouts of writing, Aurora takes on the varied conventions of the (typically feminine) narrator of a diaristic novel, the (typically masculine) retrospective narrator of autobiography, and the (ambivalently gendered) spontaneous lyric poet. The complex interactions of these conventions emphasize the aesthetic and ideological limitations of each, arguing for the necessity of the generic hybridity the poem embodies. Barrett Browning thus sometimes exposes narrative conventions to promote the purposes of lyric, and sometimes exposes lyric to promote narrative. In my final chapter I examine Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book—a twelve-book poem that reveals all the key elements of the story in book 1. The same material is worked over twelve times, narrated by ten separate speakers. Lyric and narrative are given different empha- ses by different speakers; I choose three books as notable case studies. Nonetheless, all the dramatic monologues which comprise the text share some important features: each emphasizes the act of storytelling at least as much as the story events, and each draws the reader’s attention to the discourse which noticeably unfolds in time, presenting a gradual revelation, often implying different responses from an interlocutor at different points in time. I argue that the genre of dramatic monologue shares with lyric a focus on the time of discourse, but gives the discourse the developing temporality of narrative, rather than aspiring to the seemingly simultaneous meaning of lyric. In the case of The Ring and the Book, the temporal movement across monologues, from the occasion of one to that of the next, mimics on a larger scale the moving time of discourse within a single dramatic monologue. I also note the frequent and obtrusive alliteration common in all twelve books, and suggest that readers attribute it to Browning rather than to his characters, focusing their attention on the author’s poetic craft. The work as a whole creates a triple vision of time: the reader is simultaneously aware of the time of the story being narrated, the time of each character’s act of narration, and the time of Browning’s writing. The multiple retellings also create a reading experience that mimics the experience of epic myth, allowing the audience to hear a familiar story with familiar episodes, and analyze each episode for the ways in which it demonstrates a character’s exemplarity, and the ways in which it leads to (or delays) the story’s ultimate end. But n A r r At I v e , ly r IC , A n d t I m e ~ 1 the reader of The Ring and the Book searches for characters’ exemplarity, not in the actions of the narrative, but rather in their motivations and thought processes—internal, subjective states which are standard topics of lyric. Browning’s success at fully incorporating narrative elements while subsuming them to more internalized, lyric interests, and his focus on the influence of the narrator, are important precursors to key aspects of the Modernist novel and point to the wider importance of Victorian poetry.

1the LabyrInthIne pLots and LyrIc stasIs of Don Juan

This narrative is not meant for narration. —lord byron, Don Juan 14.7

Lord Byron’s Don Juan serves as the starting point of this book for several reasons. Chronologically, it was the first poem in my study to be published, appearing in installments from 1819 through 1824. More importantly, it stands at one extreme of my dichotomy: on the surface, it seems to be overwhelmingly narrative in nature, with little overt lyricism.1 Byron’s poem is an especially useful example because it deliberately exposes many of the conventions of narrative; it lays bare the very structures under examination in this project. But even in Don Juan, the separation between narrative and lyric breaks down, and Byron’s poem has some surprising and nuanced lyrical effects. U

1. According to Stuart Curran, a lyric subgenre appears in the episode with Haidée, which plays with pastoral conventions. Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 192–95.

23 ~ C h A p t e r 1

Most discussions of the genre of Byron’s Don Juan have emphasized its relation to epic and satire. Rather than seeing Don Juan’s satiric elements as in competition with the poem’s epic aspirations, Jerome McGann believes they are the basis of its epic claims. McGann asserts, “Don Juan is a serious poem, but its special character in the history of epic is that it is the first poem in the tradition to have defined its seriousness almost completely on the basis of comic and satiric forms.”2 Although the majority of critics place Don Juan in the narrative genre of epic, two have noted strong lyrical elements in the poem, and many have noted other narrative genres contained within the poem. According to Peter J. Manning’s analysis, Byron’s narrative impulse centers on Juan’s adventures, and the narrator embodies the contemplative impulse of lyric.3 Brian Nellist goes further, and seems to attribute strong lyricality to the poem as a whole. He claims that reading Don Juan feels more like reading a sonnet sequence or In Memoriam, than like The Prelude or other long poems,4 implying that Don Juan is more lyrical than most long poems. Don Juan does have pronounced lyrical effects, which will be discussed in detail in the final section of this chapter. But Nellist’s assertion is too strong: The Prelude contains more pervasive lyrical elements than does Don Juan, elements that will be examined in chapter 2. The narrative elements of Don Juan are more obvious, and are very diverse. The label “epic” by no means exhausts the poem’s generic possibilities. Some have called the poem novelistic; Michael Cooke, for instance, thinks “the poem falls somewhere between the picaresque and the Bildungsroman.”5 McGann, however, locates the novelistic elements

2. Jerome McGann, Don Juan in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), xiii. Every critic writing on Don Juan since owes a debt to McGann’s work, and while I am no exception, my overall critical orientation differs from his. McGann claims, “Don Juan does not imagine itself, . . . it imagines the world. It is ‘created’ to clarify the world of men, rather than the world of poetic processes” (165). I, perhaps perversely from McGann’s point of view, incorporate some of his findings but reapply them to the “world of poetic processes.” That is, I am interested in what Byron’s poem implies about the capabilities and limitations of literary modes, structures, and figures. For other discussions of Don Juan’s relation to epic and satire, see Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” in Lord Byron’s Don Juan, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 13; Michael G. Cooke, Acts of Inclusion: Studies Bearing on an Elementary Theory of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 233; Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 222–23. 3. Peter J. Manning, “The Byronic Hero as Little Boy,” in Lord Byron’s Don Juan, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 65. 4. Brian Nellist, “Lyric Presence in Byron from the Tales to Don Juan,” in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, eds. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), 43. 5. Cooke, 241. t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ and a sense of sustained narrative development in the final English cantos, rather than in the poem as a whole.6 In fact, the English cantos resemble a specific kind of novel; the setting in an old abbey and the appearance of the mysterious Black Friar invoke the Gothic tradition. The description of the siege at Ismail, though, reads like a historical novel in the tradition of Scott; Juan functions as an impressionable Waverly figure who is exposed to both sides of the battle (he consorts with the Turks but fights with the Russians) and who briefly interacts with historical figures (Suwarrow and, later, Catherine the Great).7 Don Juan also invokes a specific theatrical genre of “bedroom farce” in canto 1 when Julia lectures her husband while her lover hides in her bed.8 We find a subgenre of narrative poetry in canto 16, where, according to Stuart Curran, Byron puts forth and subverts romance conventions.9 What is the reader to make of this proliferation of genres? Curran has provided a perceptive description of its formal effects. He calls Don Juan “a tour de force of generic capaciousness,” which “realigns itself according to the conventions of one genre after another, analytically deconstructing each as to sufficiency or even adequacy, yet always, if obliquely, reinforcing them.”10 Indeed, Don Juan is almost a catalog of genres, in which each type is both embodied and parodied. The mere collection of so varied a range of genres, one after another, would be enough in itself to draw attention to generic conventions. But Byron aug- ments this by having the narrator constantly note, analyze, and ridicule general poetic practices and the features of particular genres. They are exposed as arbitrary constructions, but they are employed within this poem nonetheless: they are both “deconstruct[ed]” and “reinforc[ed].”11 The cumulative effect of these highly visible and highly varied genres is a sense of playful multiplicity. But this is not the only notable feature of Don Juan which emphasizes multiplicity and exposes conven-

6. McGann, Context, 129. 7. These two characteristics are consistent with Georg Lukács’s description of Scott’s novels, which he sees as exemplars of the form. See The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 36, 39. 8. F. M. Doherty, “Byron and the Sense of the Dramatic,” in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, eds. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), 226. 9. Curran, 191–92. 10. Ibid., 198, 192. 11. This seems a specific instance of more general phenomena which prompt Jerome McGann to claim that “[Byron’s] work was invisible through deconstructive lenses exactly because it is a discourse of failure, plainly imperfect—a ‘spoiler’s art’ whose first aim is to spoil itself.” Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2002), 14. ~ C h A p t e r 1

tions. Within each episode, each invoked genre, the course of the plot is multifarious, and it deconstructs some of the general assumptions and structures of narrative.

LabyrInthIne pLots

Many theorists agree that what distinguishes a narrative from a mere series of events is the overall structure and meaning conferred by causation; events do not merely follow each other in time, they logically follow each other.12 Of course, narratives do not require causation in the strong sense of scientific determinism, nor do they require the precise logic of mathematics or philosophy. Rather, they rely on conventionally held notions of what is probable, of everyday causes and effects, of what could reasonably result from a certain set of circumstances and actions.13 Causation is especially prominent in key plot moments, which Seymour Chatman has labeled “kernels”: “Kernels are narrative moments that give rise to cruxes in the direction taken by events. They are nodes or hinges in the structure, branching points which force a movement into one of two (or more) possible paths.”14 As is implied by Chatman’s language, a common metaphor for this model of narrative is a repeatedly forking path. Each fork represents an event with several possible outcomes, depicted by the branching paths. At each fork, only one path can be followed. As the narrative progresses, possible paths are foreclosed, and the remaining paths that could be followed are fewer and fewer. According to Chatman, “The working out of plot . . . is a process of declining or narrowing possibility. The choices become more and more limited, and the final choice seems not a choice at all, but an inevitability.”15 Early in a narrative, the reader can imagine many plausible plot developments and many possible dénouements, but late in the story the possible outcomes are fewer. The conclusion of a narrative ends the

12. For a more detailed discussion of critical debate on causation as a defining feature of narrative, see pages 7–8 of the Introduction. 13. In this respect, I think the causality of narrative is similar to Roland Barthes’s description of the notions of causality governing the proairetic code. I would add, however, elements from the cultural code to supplement the reader’s understanding of a plot’s causal development, and I think the enigmas of the hermeneutic code mark parts of the narrative’s causal chain that the reader does not yet understand, but will understand by the end of the narrative. See S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 18–21. 14. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Itha- ca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 53. 15. Ibid., 46. t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ reader’s speculation about plot development, and provides one definitive plot path. Typically, alternative plot paths are only vaguely implied, and are created when an active reader anticipates what might happen later in the narrative. Don Juan, however, explicitly describes plot paths that might have been taken but weren’t. It contains numerous instances of what Gerald Prince calls the “disnarrated”: “events that do not happen but, nonetheless, are referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode) by the narrative text.”16 Through this technique, Byron resists the process of declining possibilities, which characterizes most narratives. The poem contains instances of characters discussing missed opportunities and what might have been, as when Julia lists suitors to whom she could have succumbed but didn’t.17 Not only does Julia contemplate the lost possibilities of the past; she also imagines future possibilities. While musing on the nature of her affection for Juan, she assumes she will be able to love him honorably, with no damage to her virtue, and she imagines that if her husband should happen to die, Juan will then be a suitable companion for her (1.81–85). Of course, this scenario does not happen, and the reader is left with a vivid description of a plot path the poem does not follow. Even more numerous and conspicuous than characters’ musings on what might have been are the narrator’s comments on that topic. After Juan’s unfortunate affair with the married Julia, the narrator says of his protagonist:

Had he but been placed at a public school, In the third form, or even in the fourth, His daily task had kept his fancy cool, At least, had he been nurtured in the north; (2.2)

Although the form of this statement is amusing, with its piling up of hypotheticals and its culminating qualification (“at least”), its content is not especially surprising. The narrator merely asserts that if, at a forma- tive period in Juan’s young life, his mother had reached a different decision on the important question of where to educate him, Juan’s character might have been different. Despite the list of hypothetical conditions,

16. Gerald Prince, “The Disnarrated,” Style 22.1 (Spring 1988): 2. 17. George Gordon Byron, Don Juan, in The Complete Poetical Works, vol. V, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 1.148–50. All subsequent citations are from this edition. Canto and stanza numbers will be provided parenthetically within the text. ~ C h A p t e r 1

the narrator provides scant details about this public school, compared to the elaborate description of Inez’s idiosyncratic home schooling. He only vaguely describes the change it would later have produced in Juan, suggesting a general cooling in his character based on pseudo-ethno- graphic claims that national character is determined by climate (a frequent joke in the poem). Elsewhere, the narrator does make surprisingly specific assertions about how events might have turned out differently. During Juan and Alfonso’s scuffle, the narrator says of Alfonso’s sword:

For Juan very luckily ne’er saw it; His temper not being under great command, If at that moment he had chanced to claw it, Alfonso’s days had not been in the land Much longer. . . . (1.185)

Here a brief moment of imperception, someone not catching sight of an object, has literally life-or-death consequences. Moreover, the narrator seems sure of the result of this alternative plot; the hypothetical situation is stated so confidently that it almost gains the force of fact. The might-have-been feels almost as real as what was. This example is not an isolated one; rather, definitive statements about alternative plots are a common trope in the poem. In canto 2 the passengers try to prevent their ship from sinking by using cloth to stop the leaks, but the narrator declares:

all such ingredients Would have been vain, and they must have gone down, Despite of all their efforts and expedients, But for the pumps. . . . (2.29)

Again, the reader receives definitive information that lives were (temporarily) saved because of one object, one circumstance. This pattern is soon repeated when Juan swims toward Haidée’s island and we are told, “Nor yet had he arrived but for the oar” (2.107). The details upon which the plot turns become farcically trivial in the bedroom scene in canto 1. After apologizing to his wife for accusing her of infidelity, Alfonso stumbles upon: t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~

A pair of shoes!—what then? not much, if they Are such as fit with lady’s feet, but these (No one can tell how much I grieve to say) Were masculine. . . . (1.181)

Because a certain pair of shoes belongs to a man rather than a woman, Alfonso is proven a cuckold, Julia is confined to a convent, and Juan is sent abroad in a doomed ship. This repeated presentation of what might have been in Don Juan exposes the underlying structure of much narrative literature. The narrator points out turning points in the story (or “kernels,” as Chatman calls them), and tells us what would have happened if a different plot path had been followed. This makes visible the structure of the plot, by making explicit not only what were the key moments in the story, but also what the results would have been if something else had happened then. Byron clearly sketches the forking path of the plot for the reader, showing us the assumptions about causality and narrowing possibility on which most narratives depend. As Gerald Prince claims of the disnarrated generally, “it makes explicit the logic at work in narrative whereby . . . every narrative function opens an alternative, a set of possible directions, and every narrative progresses by following certain directions as opposed to others: the disnarrated [are] choices not made, roads not taken.”18 In the case of Don Juan, it is as if Byron wants to avoid the narrowing of possibilities on which narrative depends, as if he wants to keep options open after they have been foreclosed, as if he does not want to leave any road untaken.19 The result is a multitude of plot options kept before the reader’s eyes, a tangle of narrative possibilities. Don Juan’s narrative paths could be described as a set of forking paths folded in on themselves, nested within each other—as a labyrinth.20

18. Prince, “Disnarrated,” 5. 19. This seems in keeping with Jerome Christensen’s comment that in Don Juan “improvisation should not be considered as the postponement of the moment of decision that must come—such is the closural logic proper to the theater and to the novel—but as the continual renewing of decisions that defer the decided.” Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 246. 20. I am using the terms “labyrinth” and “maze” interchangeably. That is, I am using “labyrinth” in a broader sense that includes forked paths, rather than the narrower definition of “labyrinth” as a single path folded on itself, with only one route to follow. For a suggestive meditation on the labyrinth, in the narrower single-path sense, as a metaphor for narrative structures, see J. Hillis Miller, “Ariadne’s Thread: Repetition and the Narra- tive Line,” in Interpretation of Narrative, ed. Mario J. Valdés and Owen J. Miller (Toronto: 0 ~ C h A p t e r 1

The analogy between Byron’s narrative and a maze is consistent with Byron’s five references to “labyrinths” in Don Juan. The first appears in the narrator’s long disquisition on the nature of his epic:

There’s only one slight difference between Me and my epic brethren gone before, . . . They so embellish, that ’tis quite a bore Their labyrinth of fables to thread through, Whereas this story’s actually true. (1.202)

Here a labyrinth explicitly refers to the construction of a narrative. The narrator’s attempt to distance his own work from the labyrinthine nature of other epics obviously must be read ironically. When one of the most notoriously digressive narrators in literature argues against embellishment, we clearly cannot take him at face value. Rather, his own digressions and elaborations align him closely with the epic authors he criticizes, and suggest that his own narrative is just as winding a maze as theirs.21 Of course, his attempt to distinguish his epic based on its truth is also ironic: he opens the first canto by choosing as his hero an “ancient” figure from “pantomime” rather than a contemporary leader covered in the “gazettes” (1.1). Elsewhere in the poem, labyrinths refer to structuring devices and key thematic elements of Don Juan. For instance, the harem episode contains the quip:

’Tis time we should return to plain narration, And thus my narrative proceeds:—Dudù, With every kindness short of ostentation, Shewed Juan, or Juanna, through and through This labyrinth of females . . . (6.57)

This maze contains beautiful women, a wealth of possible erotic objects for Juan’s desire. It is precisely Juan’s string of romances that comes

University of Toronto Press, 1978): 148–66. 21. Jane Stabler adopts the rhetoric of labyrinths and possible paths to describe the reader’s process of following (or not following) the possible digressions offered by allusions in Don Juan. See Byron, Poetics and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11, 128, 133, 167. t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ 1 closest to unifying the poem; almost every episode contains a new romantic liaison.22 The poem itself could easily be described as a maze of females, a tangle of Juan’s various romantic relationships. Such a reading is strengthened by a second labyrinth reference during the harem episode:

Oh enviable Briareus! with thy hands And heads, if thou hadst all things multiplied In such proportion!—But my Muse withstands The giant thought of being a Titan’s bride, Or travelling in Patagonian lands; So let us back to Lilliput, and guide Our hero through the labyrinth of love In which we left him several lines above. (6.28)

Again the poem associates labyrinths with romantic entanglements, and here the link to narrative structure is more explicit. The narrator says he will guide Juan through “the labyrinth of love,” and in guiding the hero through the harem, the narrator also guides the hero through the story. The analogy of the maze thus functions on both a thematic and structural level. In the larger context of this stanza, the reference to Briareus, who had one hundred hands and fifty heads, immediately follows the narrator’s wish that he could kiss all the women in the world at once. This places the labyrinth reference in the context of a desire for multiplicity, an unwillingness to choose one option over others. Such an association is quite appropriate to a metaphor for the narrative structure of Don Juan. Byron’s repeated presentation of hypothetical plots, his assertions of what might have been but was not, shows an interest in keeping a multiplicity of possible plots juxtaposed and suspended. His labyrinthine narrative keeps all plot paths present and tightly com- pacted, wound round each other. We are left with the final two references to labyrinths, both involving philosophy, another recurrent theme of the poem. The narrator laments, “But I’m relapsing into metaphysics, / That labyrinth” (12.72). Although

22. One possible exception is the shipwreck episode; if it is isolated from the rest of canto 2, the shipwreck incident has no romantic interest beyond Juan’s lamentations for Julia, which are interrupted by a bout of seasickness. It does seem significant, however, that canto 2 also introduces Juan’s greatest love, Haidée. A second possible exception is the Ismail episode. The siege does result, however, in Juan’s (admittedly Platonic) relationship with the orphan Leila. And even here there may be a sexual charge, a suggestion that in a few years when she comes of age, Leila might be a temptation to Juan. ~ C h A p t e r 1

Byron’s skepticism prevents him from making assertions about the ultimate composition of reality, prevents him from entering that maze of metaphysics, his poem is strewn with philosophical positions, only some of which he takes. His poem resembles the metaphysical labyrinth, but Byron’s is missing belief. Philosophical thought is again associated with a maze in the remaining labyrinth reference:

I won’t describe—that is, if I can help Description; and I won’t reflect—that is If I can stave off thought, which, as a whelp Clings to its teat, sticks to me through the abyss Of this odd labyrinth; ...... but, as I said, I won’t philosophize, and will be read. (10.28)

The referent for “this odd labyrinth” is ambiguous; it could plausibly refer to both the world inhabited by the narrator, and to the narrative he writes. The latter interpretation gains precedence from the self-refer- ential content of the stanza, which begins with a list of what is excluded from his writing style, and concludes with the determination to write an accessible and appealing poem. If “this odd labyrinth” refers to Don Juan, then the poem is also “an abyss.” Byron’s work is an involuted version of the forked-path model of narrative, with mutually exclusive paths twisted around each other, grouped closely together from the narrator and reader’s view from above. But this narrative labyrinth has an abyss in the middle, for the poem ultimately has no stable ground, no central or final meaning that can be asserted at the exclusion of others, no goal toward which the poem teleologically builds. Rather, the poem gives value to movement itself, to following the various twists of plot, and to recognizing the poem’s irreducible multiplicity.

chance versus choIce

On many occasions the poem provides alternative plots, which imply that, with very slight modifications, the story could have followed a radically different course.23 What is the point, or effect, of this phenome-

23. To give some idea of the prevalence of disnarration in Don Juan, there are extended descriptions of alternative plot paths in stanzas 6.119–20 and 3.40–41, brief but pronounced assertions of other possible plot developments in stanzas 1.111, 1.183, 2.95, and 4.42, and t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ non? One possible interpretation is suggested by Jerome McGann; while his account is insightful, it gives us only half the picture. He notes the prevalence in canto 1 of characters imagining possible futures and laying plans for bringing them into existence: “Donna Inez and all the characters in the first episode have their own designs and purposes on the events, but nothing turns out as any of them had hoped or expected.”24 McGann extrapolates the characters’ lack of success in anticipating the future into a general principle of the poem:

This pattern of unforeseen consequences operates throughout Don Juan . . . and it is based upon Byron’s assessment of his own life as well as the general idea that too many factors impinge upon an event for anyone to be able to know at the time what it means, or where it will lead. And after the event, in the apparent security of retrospective understanding, the chains of causation and relationship which one perceives represent themselves not as the operation of necessary order but as a bizarre series of coincidental linkages. The result of a Byronic narrative in Don Juan is not even retrospectively a sense of probabilities but of achieved possibilities. Not everything has been assimilated, and the narrative line, as a result, seems factive rather than fictive. Events might have been otherwise, and with just as much reason, but they weren’t.25

This seems an accurate description of the characters’ experience of the poem: the characters are at the mercy of “unforeseen consequences,” implied alternative plots in stanzas 1.142, 1.144, 1.172, 2.35, and 2.105. These are in addition to the examples discussed above. The later cantos tend to describe multiple, mutually exclusive plot paths through different methods. Stanza 17.12, for instance, leaves unresolved “Whether his [Juan’s] virtue triumphed—or, at length, / His vice” in the previous night’s encounter with the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke. The narrator also leaves unresolved the nature and extent of Juan’s friendship with Adeline because it “keeps the atrocious reader in suspense” (14.97). He teases us by saying, “It is not clear that Adeline and Juan / Will fall; but if they do, ‘twill be their ruin” (14.99). Rather than describing during or after the fact what could have happened but definitely didn’t, here the narrator describes two possible future outcomes without deciding between them. Here the effect on the reader is, as Byron claims, suspense about future events, a reader response much more associated with narrative than with lyric. Stanzas 6.119–20 are an intermediate case, since at the time of the stanzas it is unresolved which plot path will be taken, but the subsequent canto resolves the plot. For the importance of suspense in narrative, see, for example, Meir Sternberg’s discussion of suspense, curiosity, and surprise in narrative in “Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity,” Poetics Today 13.3 (Fall 1992): 463–540. See also Peter Brooks’s discussion of “the anticipation of retrospection” in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 23. 24. McGann, Context, 101. 25. Ibid. ~ C h A p t e r 1

and a pattern of contingency and coincidence operates throughout the poem. The poem’s characters are unaware of the “chains of causation” binding them as they act; causation can be understood only after the fact. In McGann’s view, the narrator may have a retrospective understanding of the events, and confidently assert some of the details that were crucial for events turning out as they did (the presence of the pumps on the ship, for instance, or the masculine nature of the shoes). Yet the narrator’s greater wisdom is not accompanied by greater choice: he has no control over how the events did play out.26 McGann’s reading has been very influential, inspiring subsequent critics to pursue political readings of Byron’s depiction of contingency and causation.27 Nonetheless, McGann’s analysis of events that might have been otherwise depends upon a key assumption, which, as we shall see, does not hold true throughout the poem. McGann treats the narrator as a character interacting with the other characters, emphasizing the moments of greatest distance between the narrator and Byron. In that case, the narrator experiences many of the same limitations as the other characters, and is just as subject to the contingency of the world he describes. Whether or not we agree with this analysis depends upon whether the poem favors chance or choice, and whether it emphasizes the narrator-as-character or narrator-as-author. As I hope to show, Don Juan is playfully inconsistent and does both. In many instances, the poem emphasizes the narrator’s freedom and portrays him as having authorial choice. Contrary to McGann’s reading, the narrator could decide that events be otherwise. Of course, this freedom is not absolute:

26. Peter J. Manning also claims the narrator cannot control the events in the poem, but explains it through the stability of Juan’s character, rather than the contingency and coincidence within the represented world: “For stanza after stanza [the narrator] abandons Juan to pursue his own interests, yet in regard to the story he often claims that he would rather have had matters otherwise but cannot deviate from the facts. This fixity corresponds with the fixity of Juan’s character; it is only the telling that Byron can make protean.” Byron and His Fictions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), 220. 27. Most notably, Jerome Christensen discusses illusory notions of consent influenced by commercial culture, political ideology, religious belief, and gender norms; and James Chandler examines the interrelation of intelligibility, causation, political causes, and historical cases in Don Juan. See Christensen, 214–57, and James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 350–88. Whereas Christensen adopts oppositional rhetoric to distance his own position from McGann’s, Chandler explicitly acknowledges his debt to McGann and to Christensen. I agree with Chandler’s assessment that Christensen’s approach is more similar to McGann’s than Christensen’s rhetoric suggests. See Chandler, 357–58. Jane Stabler has also discussed contingency and risk in Don Juan, with an emphasis on the siege cantos, economics, Byron’s publishing practices, and Shakespearean allusion. Stabler, 121–35. t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ there are historical, ideological, and legal constraints on Byron and on the narrator he uses as his mouthpiece. For instance, Gary Dyer has rightly warned us that “[t]o call the style of Don Juan versatility or virtuosity is too voluntaristic and too celebratory,” because the poem’s poly- glossia often encodes material dangerous to its author.28 There are also practical constraints imposed by the needs of the discourse. Despite the narrator’s suggestions of Juan’s precarious situation in the shipwreck, the pumps and the oar must save him; for if Juan died in canto 2, even this narrator’s powers of digression would be hard-pressed to continue the poem to epic lengths without its eponymous hero.29 Nevertheless, I wish to explore the freedom that is available to the narrator and author. By doing so, I do not intend to dismiss or refute McGann’s reading, but rather to supplement it, because Don Juan alternately invites both of these readings.30 McGann’s reading gains support from the narrator’s many comments on chance. During the siege of Ismail, the narrator says that “Juan, by some strange chance . . . By one of those odd turns of Fortune’s tides,” is separated from his comrades and left to fight alone (8.27). Even if the wheel of Fortune reference is taken as an invocation of a controlling higher power, its operation is random and indistinguishable from “strange chance.” According to the narrator, luck operates in the drawing room as well as on the battlefield. After describing the Amundev- illes’ guests, who have avoided public disgrace and been given good standing in high society, the narrator comments, “I can’t exactly trace their rule of right, / Which hath a little leaning to a lottery” (13.82). And if the characters’ world seems ruled not by the gods but rather by chance, then so, by his own admission, does the narrator’s world. He says of dreams:

28. Gary Dyer, “Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets: Being Flash to Byron’s Don Juan,” PMLA 116.3 (May 2001): 574. 29. Peter Manning notes an instance when the narrator himself exposes the link between an untimely death for Juan and an untimely end for the poem: “The narrator misses no chance to underscore the artifice of his narrative, often by the most obvious devices: ‘Lambro presented, and one instant more / Had stopped this Canto, and Don Juan’s breath’ (IV, 42).” Manning, Byron and His Fictions, 228. While Manning observes that these lines expose the poem’s artifice, he does not relate them to the larger phenomenon of the poem repeatedly mentioning plot paths it does not pursue. 30. I thus agree with Michael O’Neill’s comment that “there is a fascinating tug between Don Juan’s impulse to draw experience into itself and its desire to suggest that it is being shaped by, rather than shaping, what Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage calls ‘Circumstance, that unspiritual god’ (IV. 125).” Michael O’Neill, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 101. ~ C h A p t e r 1

I’ve known some odd ones which seemed really planned Prophetically, or that which one deems ‘A strange coincidence,’ to use a phrase By which such things are settled now-a-days. (6.78)

Fate, the planning of the gods, has been replaced in the narrator’s skeptical society by the mundane vagaries of chance. Finally, chance is also said to influence the way the narrator treats the characters. He lists people in Lord Henry’s party and then admits, “I have named a few, not foremost in degree, / But ta’en at hazard as the rhyme may run” (13.83). The reign of randomness often seems to apply equally to the narrator and the characters. In this context, the narrator seems to be part of the same world as the characters, and is perceived to be yet another character internal to the story, rather than an author figure controlling the story. The poem can be read as creating a full, self-consistent world which mirrors and comments upon Byron’s own. These discussions of chance in the text thus support the treatment of the narrator as character necessary for McGann’s interpretation, and his emphasis on Don Juan as a critique of the world. Despite the seeming randomness of the plot the poem takes (at the exclusion of other plots which are mentioned), and despite the narrator’s frequent remarks about chance, other narratorial remarks imply that other forms of causation are at work within the poem. At times, the narrator attributes agency to the characters, and ascribes surprising events not to chance but rather to the characters’ free will. In the English cantos, the narrator provides this suggestive analogy: “Good company’s a chess-board—there are kings, / Queens, bishops, knights, rooks, pawns; the world’s a game; / Save that the puppets pull at their own strings” (13.89). The world may have the appearance of a game governed by chance or by the inscrutable machinations of a higher power, but the participants in the game move themselves. One reason that will sometimes masquerades as chance is given in this characterization of Adeline:

The Lady Adeline Amundeville; The fair most fatal Juan ever met, Although she was not evil, nor meant ill; But Destiny and Passion spread the net, (Fate is a good excuse for our own will) t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~

And caught them;—what do they not catch, methinks? But I’m not Oedipus, and life’s a Sphinx. (13.12)

If “fate is a good excuse for our own will,” then perhaps chance is an equally good excuse, especially since the poem so often blurs chance and fate, seeing the former as a skeptical age’s name for the latter. While human will may technically be free, it functions as a net that entraps us because intentions can so easily be divorced from results. Adeline “was not evil, nor meant ill,” but she is potentially “fatal” to Juan. She is a prime example that in Don Juan “too many factors impinge upon an event for anyone to be able to know at the time what it means, or where it will lead.”31 So many factors impinge, so many other people’s wills clash with hers, that Adeline is unable to predict the results of even her own choices. Indeed, the poem suggests that the world is so complex that it is often difficult even to recognize free will at work; it is due to this complexity that life is a Sphinx whose riddle can never be answered. The assertion that “Passion” helped “spread the net” for Adeline is important; Don Juan presents the passions as especially obscure and ungovernable manifestations of willfulness. Not only do characters unadvisedly act on their emotions in an unreflective way, but they also willfully deceive themselves about the nature of those emotions. (Julia’s ‘Platonic’ passion for Juan springs to mind.) Gulbeyaz provides an obvious example of acting according to passion, with unfortunate results. The narrator says of her:

Gulbeyaz rose from restlessness; and pale As Passion rises, with its bosom worn, . . . The nightingale that sings with the deep thorn, Which Fable places in her breast of Wail, Is lighter far of heart and voice than those Whose headlong passions form their proper woes.

And that’s the moral of this composition, If people would but see its real drift;— (6.87–88)

31. McGann, Context, 101. ~ C h A p t e r 1

The story of Philomela’s rape, mutilation, and transformation into a forever-wailing nightingale is, perhaps, the ultimate tale of suffering. But Byron presents Philomela’s sorrow as less extreme than Gulbeyaz’s, because he thinks the victims of another’s violent will are better off than those who willfully, actively pursue their own passions to miserable ends.32 Viewed in this context, Juan’s passivity is a positive quality, a possible solution for avoiding the torments of misplaced will. A second possible solution is a better understanding of the likely consequences prior to acting on passion. In Don Juan, with its unpredictable complexity, this solution is not available, at least, not for the characters in the poem. The many comments on their inability to anticipate outcomes, or to understand causes, form a sharp contrast with the narrator’s confident assertions of why the plot happened as it did, and how the plot would have changed if certain details had been different. The narrator’s coy remark “I’m not Oedipus” is disingenuous; taken as an authorial figure, the narrator can answer the riddles of his own poem.33 The many comments on the inscrutability of characters’ wills have the paradoxical effect of highlighting the great power of the narrator’s and author’s wills over their story. Passivity might be the only answer available for Juan, but the narrator can demonstrate remarkable activity and control in the creation of Juan’s story, as when he teases the reader with

What further hath befallen or may befall The hero of this grand poetic riddle, I by and by may tell you, if at all. But now I choose to break off in the middle. (8.139)

The decision of whether to view the narrator as another character (facing similar limitations on his knowledge and control), or to view

32. According to Edith Hamilton, in the original Greek myth Philomela was turned into a swallow. Her sister Procne took revenge on her husband, the rapist, and Procne was transformed into a nightingale. Subsequent Roman tradition switched the final fates of the sisters, and in English poetry, the nightingale is identified with Philomela. Byron seems to be following the English tradition, since the meaning of the passage clearly suggests the nightingale is a passive victim, not the active avenger that Procne was. See Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York: Mentor Books, 1940), 270–71. 33. James Chandler discusses the tendency in Don Juan for Byron to disclaim knowledge of causes, and reads it as a parody of Wordsworth’s “The Thorn,” which contains lines like “I cannot tell; I wish I could.” Chandler, 360–62. He also notes contrasting examples of “the jokes of a narrator who is in fact quite cavalier about the problem of identifying causes behind what he observes,” examples which show “Byron[’s] . . . unqualified confidence in his talent for lucid explanation.” Chandler, 363. t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ the narrator as an author figure (who controls the course of events in the poem), affects the reader’s assessment of the poem’s many alternate plot paths. McGann’s interpretation of the effect of the poem’s might- have-beens on the reader depends on viewing the narrator as a character who experiences the same limitations as other characters. There are, of course, moments in which the narrator claims to have known the participants in the story, as when he angrily complains that the young Juan doused him with water (1.24), when he asserts that he actually saw the devil take Juan (1.203), or when he claims to have eaten dinner at the Amundevilles’ home (16.81). Byron also sometimes portrays the narrator as a character distinct from himself; for instance, the narrator claims to be unmarried and childless (1.22) and says he does not speak English well (2.165). In addition, Byron’s abandoned preface to the first cantos makes an elaborate pretense of supposing the narrator to be a specific person (who is not Byron) in specific circumstances. If the narrator is viewed as on the same level as the other inhabitants of the poem’s world, then the tenuous causal relations he describes are understood as evidence of how the world portrayed in the poem functions, and by analogy, how Byron’s world functions. We would agree with McGann that all of the possible (but untaken) plot paths described have the primary function of reminding us of the haphazardness of the world. Don Juan would then resemble a mimetic text that “resort[s] to the disnarrated mainly on the level of story . . . in order to emphasize that the world presented is modeled in terms of reality rather than convention.”34 And if we stay immersed in the level of story, the many might-have-beens may create brief suspense about the plot, or heighten our interest in what actually happens in the narrative. There are, however, numerous moments when the narrator explicitly comments on his activity of writing a fictitious poem, as when he discusses selecting as his hero the Juan of “ancient” stories and current “pantomime[s]” (1.1), and when he requests that the reader “recollect the work is only fiction” (11.88).35 At times, the narrator also strongly resembles the biographical Byron; for instance, he alludes to having written English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1.212) and Cain (11.56) and says he swam the Hellespont (2.105). To ignore the narrator’s authority

34. Prince, “Disnarrated,” 6. 35. According to Peter J. Manning, “By unveiling the artificiality of his own proce- dures Byron displays the fictiveness of language generally and the delicate and complex consensus through which it is preserved,” a consensus which depends upon literary and historical precedents and contexts. I focus on artificiality’s relationship to lyric timelessness, rather than to the history of language. See “Don Juan and Byron’s Imperceptiveness to the English Word,” Studies in Romanticism 18.2 (Summer 1979): 229. 0 ~ C h A p t e r 1

over his fiction, or his alignment with Byron, runs contrary to much of the poem. But Byron’s multiple plot lines have an additional effect on the reader, one that shifts our focus away from knowledge of the world. By presenting the reader with what might have been in addition to what was, the poem allows for two contradictory responses, and invites both of them. If we treat the narrator as having authorial control, or if we instead focus on the implied author, then all of the poem’s might-have-beens are seen as alternative plots that the poem could have followed but did not.36 The responsibility for events turning out as they did is placed not on the quirky and unpredictable ways of the world, but rather on authorial choice. The focus shifts from the chance happenings within the story, to the artistic decisions made by the narrator and author at the level of discourse. In a discussion of self-referentiality in poetry, Jona- than Culler has remarked, “A work’s self-descriptions do not produce closure or self-possession but an impossible and therefore open-ended process of self-framing.”37 In Don Juan we find the reverse scenario of impossible and open-ended proliferation creating a sense of self-referentiality. Read this way, the poem resembles an “explicitly metafictional text [which] resorts to the disnarrated mainly on the level of discourse in order to insist on its own artificiality.”38 This attention to authorial choice and control may provide the reader with a more satisfying framework for viewing the poem than if we focus exclusively on the characters’ viewpoints. Events within the poem are so coincidental that the world inhabited by the characters seems to lack comprehensible laws of cause and effect, and if incidents cannot be explained within the world of the story, then the reader may look for explanations within the world of discourse. The narrator can provide answers: the characters may be unable to comprehend cause and effect, but the narrator is often definitive on that topic, to a degree that can only be attributed to an authorial figure. The more contingency the characters experience, the greater the author’s and narrator’s control seems to be. We acknowledge that “events might have been otherwise, and with just as much reason, but they weren’t,” but instead of attributing this to the “bizarre series of coincidental linkages” within the characters’ world, we can attribute it to the narrator’s

36. For the distinctions among narrator, implied author, and historical (or real) author, see Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 70–76. 37. Jonathan Culler, “Changes in the Study of the Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, eds. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 52. 38. Prince, “Disnarrated,” 6. t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ 1 or to Byron’s choices in creating this fictional world.39 The seeming arbitrariness of the author’s choice further emphasizes his willfulness, and his agency. All of the narrator’s statements about what characters might have done (but didn’t) remind the reader of other poems he might have written, and of the arbitrariness of this fictive creation.40 Crucially, this focus on the constructedness of the poem creates an awareness of time as a suspended moment of composition, which, in turn, creates the impression of lyric timelessness. That is, by laying bare its narrative conventions, Don Juan creates lyrical effects. A reader who focuses on authorial choice and the level of discourse will turn his or her attention away from the temporal development of the plot path that is taken, and instead directs attention to the key moment that could have led to several possible developments, and on the selection process through which the author chose one plot over many others.41 In terms

39. McGann, Context, 101. McGann is, of course, aware of the frequent alignment between author and narrator in Don Juan, even referring to “Byron the narrator.” Context, 117. He also suggests that Byron uses episodes as experiments in social interactions, but he seems to limit Byron’s agency to choosing the initial conditions for each experiment, as though the subsequent results were out of his control. Context, 116–31. Perhaps this (limited) authorial agency is what provokes Jerome Christensen’s critique that Don Juan in Context presents Byron as “a humanistic poet who is the master strategist of his poem, who thematizes contingency and pays lip service to the ‘god circumstance,’ but who, ironisti- cally, occupies a standing place of transcendental freedom outside the ‘array’ from which he, designing agent, can artfully dispose accident, contingency, and circumstance to the greater glory of Byron, ‘properly so-called.’ In my reading the unfolding of Juan is fully circumstantial, subject to no master plan.” Christensen, 215. In effect, Christensen makes McGann’s position sound much closer to mine (since I emphasize the freedom available to the author and narrator as designing agents). But I believe that, in doing so, Christensen distorts McGann’s analysis. It is difficult to accept, for instance, Christensen’s implication that McGann sees Don Juan as subject to Byron’s master plan, when McGann explicitly argues that Byron has no such plan for the poem: “Byron, the god of his poem, is a local deity, and he has neither a prevenient sense of his poem’s order nor a retrospective com- prehension of that order.” Context, 116. More recently, McGann has said of Don Juan, “the writing will not—indeed, cannot—achieve anything but provisory and limited control over its own materials.” Byron and Romanticism, 130. 40. Despite this difference with McGann, I am not alone in the assertion that a work’s focus on plot paths that it does not take produces an acute awareness of its fictional status. Peter Brooks has noticed similar phenomena in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir. Both the protagonist, Julien Sorrel, and the narrator think about hypothetical plots and comment on what would have happened if only a certain circumstance were different. As Brooks describes it, “Constantly referring to . . . the missed chances and might-have-beens, the narrator repeatedly adumbrates other novels, texts of the might-have-been-written. This obtrusive narrator . . . claims to demonstrate why things necessarily happened the way they did, yet inevitably he suggests the arbitrariness and contingency of every narrative turn of events, how easily it might have been otherwise.” See Brooks, 75. 41. Anne K. Mellor also notes Don Juan’s movement between narrative past and lyric present: “Time never stands still, but arbitrarily shifts about. Beginning in the present tense with Southey’s fall and the narrator’s pressing need of a hero, the poem then leaps into the ~ C h A p t e r 1

borrowed from Structuralism, the reader is led to concentrate on the paradigmatic rather than the syntagmatic axis. He or she focuses on a realm of multiple possibilities for a given narrative opening, considered out of time, rather than the progression in time from one selected possibility to another. This momentarily derails the temporal progression of narrative and creates a lyric timelessness; it also emphasizes the act of selection, and hence the lyric time of discourse in which the narrator and author make this selection. While the poem invites attention to both the world of the story and the narrator’s creation of discourse, the narrator strengthens the latter reading by insinuating himself in some descriptions of alternate plots. When he reveals the shoes in Julia’s bedroom are masculine he claims, “I grieve to say” the news (1.181). And after declaring the pumps temporarily saved Juan’s ship, the narrator comments, “I’m glad to make them known / To all the brother tars who may have need hence” (2.29). The poem’s lyricism is not restricted to its labyrinthine plot, though. Lyrical effects are also created by the ironic tension between characters’ dialogue and subsequent events, and by Byron’s distinctive use of similes. In addition, the narrator himself often draws our attention to the act of composition, and hence to the lyric presentness of Don Juan, through explicit descriptions of himself, addresses to the reader, and comments on his writing process.

IronIcaLLy fuLfILLed decLaratIons

Don Juan’s peculiar comments on chance and volition have more reper- cussions than I have discussed thus far. They also have a strange influence on the importance (or rather, unimportance) of motivation in the poem, and on the ironic fulfillment of some of the characters’ declarations. For Don Juan’s characters, intentions and motives are no guarantee of results; too many other factors impinge for the intended result to match the actual result. The reverse is also true: a given result cannot be definitive evidence of the motive behind it.42 Given this disjunction

past tense to create its fictive plot, the life and loves of Don Juan.” The poem “[r]epeatedly pass[es] from fictive past to authorial present and back again.” English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 42. The labyrinthine plots I describe, however, do not merely leap from Juan’s past to an explicit description of the narrator’s present. Rather, they create a sense of lyric presence through the very description of Juan’s past possibilities. 42. Peter Manning notes that Juan refuses Gulbeyaz out of pride rather than virtue and suggests “Byron’s satire is a reminder that actions give no clue to motives.” Manning, t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ between actions and motives, the poem places much greater importance on the former. The narrator emphatically declares, “I hate a motive” (14.58), and then goes on to say:

’Tis sad to hack into the roots of things; They are so much intertwisted with the earth: So that the branch a goodly verdure flings, I reck not if an acorn gave it birth. To trace all actions to their secret springs Would make indeed some melancholy mirth; But this is not at present my concern, And I refer you to wise Oxenstiern. (14.59)

“Wise Oxenstiern” reportedly told his son that kingdoms are governed by folly, that great things arise from petty causes. This is why tracing the “secret springs” of actions would produce “melancholy mirth.” Root causes are “intertwisted” and hence difficult to disentangle, and even if they are successfully uncovered and separated, they often yield disap- pointing information. Such a search for motivation “is not at present [the narrator’s] concern,” which implies that at another time, it might be. The narrator is capable of scrutinizing motives in a way the characters are not, but Byron presents this as unproductive work, and usually chooses to leave the characters’ motivations ambiguous or completely unaddressed. If the characters in Don Juan are often described as two- dimensional, then it seems their flatness results from the author’s deliberate choice to avoid interiority. Another consequence of the general uncertainty of characters’ motivations is a correspondent uncertainty about whether or not characters are successful in acting out their intentions. This, combined with Juan’s almost complete passivity, creates an overarching sense that no one in the poem can effectively realize his or her intentions. There is one very odd subset of these phenomena. There are several instances in Don Juan of a character’s words uncannily foreshadowing subsequent events. Although his or her words appear to be prescient,

“Byronic Hero,” 58. Tom Mole goes further, and claims that Don Juan as a whole shows that “because the deep subject is not legible to onlookers, other people’s motivations cannot be reliably assayed.” More generally, Mole argues that although Byron’s celebrity depended on a modern notion of subjectivity that assumed interiority (including motivation) was legible, in Don Juan Byron turned against the basis of his own popular success to expose this thinking as cant. See Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007): 143. ~ C h A p t e r 1

the ensuing reality runs contrary to the speaker’s intent. Here, too, intention can not be successfully enacted. In some of these cases, the words are used rhetorically but are manifested literally. One of the most prominent examples occurs when Lambro returns and confronts Juan: “‘Young man, your sword;’ so Lambro once more said: / Juan replied, ‘Not while this arm is free’” (4.40). Juan does not give up his sword. He fights instead, but is injured and defeated by Lambro’s men, surviving only to become a slave. Juan thus purposefully fulfills the intended meaning of his oath by not surrendering, but he also suffers the contrary state invoked by his oath: he is no longer a free man when they deprive him of his sword. His words become reality too literally, beyond the bounds of his actual intention. His own rhetoric seems to have turned against him. The same scene contains a second example of this phenomenon. When Lambro has a pistol aimed at Juan, Haidée steps between them and says, “‘On me . . . let death / Descend—the fault is mine . . .’” (4.42). Although Lambro does not shoot Haidée, she suffers a paroxysm at the sight of Juan’s injuries. After a few weeks of wasting away, she dies of grief at being separated from Juan. Presumably, Haidée asks for death to descend on her rather than Juan for rhetorical effect, to convince her father to spare them both. Her words, however, are literally enacted in the text, for Juan lives but she does not. Of course, in both these cases, the poem offers naturalistic explanations of these results. Lambro is responsible for selling Juan into slavery, and since we are told he has a history of treating unexpected guests this way, we should not be surprised. Haidée’s fate is rather melodramatic, but her demise can be attributed to psychological and physiological factors: she has no will to live and hence refuses to eat. And yet Juan’s and Haidée’s words seem like premonitions. The paucity of direct quotation in the poem draws even more attention to their speech; when dialogue is given, it stands out. Thus, the reader’s focus may shift away from actual relations of cause and effect and move toward the ironic tension between Juan’s and Haidée’s words and a reality that runs contrary to each speaker’s intent. The reverse situation, a rhetorical statement that is followed by the opposite of its literal meaning yet the fulfillment of the speaker’s intent, might occur in Julia and Juan’s first sexual encounter. The narrator says of Julia, “A little still she strove, and much repented, / And whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’—consented” (1.117). If we take Julia to be conscious of consenting at the time she speaks, then her words become an empty rhetorical gesture, a necessary but disingenuous attempt to retain t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ a semblance of virtue. In this case, the literal opposite of her words is quickly fulfilled, which is exactly what Julia wants. An equally plausible interpretation, however, is that Julia is still deceiving herself about her relationship with Juan, and literally (if briefly) means what she says when she declares she won’t consent. Given this interpretation of Julia, then her statement fits with other cases in which words are used literally by their speaker but are followed by events contrary to their meaning. A somewhat less ambiguous example is Juan’s protest to Gulbeyaz: “The prison’d eagle will not pair, nor I / Serve a sultana’s sensual phantasy” (5.126). Juan resists her charms, but he soon after serves an empress’s sensual fantasies when he becomes Catherine the Great’s favorite. As does Michael G. Cooke, “We [too] can appreciate the irony of Juan’s defying Gulbeyaz with his profession that love is for the free, and then literally fighting his way into the moral and physical subjection and exhaustion of the Empress Cath- erine’s boudoir.”43 Juan’s assertion of his will is momentarily successful, but seriously undermined a few cantos later. The most striking case of a declaration (and its speaker’s intention) being undermined by subsequent events, is uttered by Juan later in the poem. As he approaches London, he muses aloud on England’s merits:

‘Here laws are all inviolate; none lay Traps for the traveller; every highway’s clear: Here’—he was interrupted by a knife, With, ‘Damn your eyes! your money or your life!’ (11.10)

Immediately after declaring England free of highwaymen, Juan is attacked by one. Given that these utterances form a recurring pattern in the poem, the question remains, what is their overall effect on the reader? If we were to adopt McGann’s approach to the poem, then they would serve as a commentary upon the world, as reminders of the unpredictability of human affairs, of unforeseen events and failed intentions. But I believe these ironically realized statements are also strong reminders of Byron’s control over his poem. The heavy irony and incredible coincidences of these strange declarations call attention to themselves, and they can be read as evidence of the author’s intervention and the author’s sense of humor. I agree with Brian Nellist that “Byron’s authority as poet is

43. Cooke, 235. ~ C h A p t e r 1

constantly manifest to us in the process of reading his work,”44 and in these cases his authority is especially prominent. Since these phenomena are linguistic, they point even more heavily toward the author, a particularly able word-user. The seeming force of the characters’ words to materialize themselves intensifies our awareness of the poet’s ability to construct a fictional world with words. Again, our attention is drawn to the lyric time of discourse.

proLIferatIng sImILes

Don Juan also manifests a surprising multiplicity, and draws explicit attention to the author’s whim in its construction, on the small scale of figurative language. Similes in particular provide concentrated examples of some of the poem’s most important and unusual characteristics. Multiplicity is especially prominent in the following passage:

The evaporation of a joyous day Is like the last glass of champagne, without The foam which made its virgin bumper gay; Or like a system coupled with a doubt; Or like a soda bottle when its spray Has sparkled and let half its spirit out; Or like a billow left by storms behind, Without the animation of the wind;

Or like an opiate which brings troubled rest, Or none, or like—like nothing that I know Except itself;—such is the human breast; A thing, of which similitudes can show No real likeness . . . (16.9–10)

Here Byron provides five possible vehicles for one tenor in the extended simile. Their status as a list of alternatives is made more conspicuous by the anaphora of “or” beginning a line five times. Byron couples two rhetorical devices which, individually, call attention to their own construction: anaphora is a structuring device which exposes its operation through its prominent placing, and simile announces itself, and keeps

44. Nellist, 39. t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ its literal element structurally distinct from its metaphorical element, through its use of “like” or “as.” I discuss the significance of this clear separation between vehicle and tenor in chapter 3, but in the case of Don Juan a simile’s obtrusiveness is its more relevant feature. Here, the combination of simile and anaphora makes the author’s craft and playfulness even more obvious. Although Byron’s extreme use of simile calls pointed attention to how the device functions, it also undermines the very function that gives the device its name—its creation of similitude. With each alternative he piles on, Byron implies that the vehicles he has already provided are insufficient, that they are unable to convey fully the desired characteristic of the tenor.45 In the end, he must admit that the tenor is “like nothing that I know / Except itself.” The form this admission takes plays wonderfully against its content. The phrase begins in a line that contains “or” twice, repeats “like” immediately after itself, and has the two negatives “none” and “nothing” alliterate with “know.” In short, this line asserts radical uniqueness but is full of repetition. The arrival of “except itself” in the following line, and its freedom from repetition, recuperates the individuality that was just undermined. After five failed comparisons and one assertion of similarity through identity, the stanza abandons simile and instead invokes “the human breast.” It only now becomes clear that the “evaporation of a joyous day” was itself a metaphor for the melancholy born from fleeting joy (though one may have noted earlier that the word “evaporation” is used metaphorically in the similes’ tenor, and that its literal meaning may have influenced the choice of liquids in several of the vehicles). “The human breast” stands in metonymic relation to the melancholy (and to the other emotions) it contains, and is then placed in apposition with the category of things “of which similitudes can show / No real likeness”—but the narrator does not say how large a category that may be. One end result of Byron’s flurry of vehicles and the failure of simile is a conviction of the uniqueness of their tenor, its dissimilarity from everything else. A sense of uniqueness does not only adhere to the tenor, however; the terms in the list of vehicles are taken from such wide-ranging sources that the trait they share may become less important than

45. Erik Gray suggests that lists of similes are “essentially self-destructive,” yet in some contexts a list of similes “represent[s] a movement away from perfect likeness—each new vehicle weakens similitude,” while in other cases “[t]he same device . . . represents the opposite movement, a faithful aspiration toward perfection, though always eventually futile.” Erik Gray, “Faithful Likenesses: Lists of Similes in Milton, Shelley, and Rossetti,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48.4 (Winter 2006): 292, 304. ~ C h A p t e r 1

their diversity. J. Drummond Bone says of the lists scattered throughout Beppo, “The reader does not experience randomness, but does experience the sense of a multiplicity of things surprisingly allowed to be only themselves.”46 This, I think, holds equally true of the lists of similes in Don Juan: they give us a profound sense of individuality within multiplicity. If some of Byron’s similes show the breakdown of comparison, others use this very insufficiency to undertake a different kind of comparative task. The transition from one form to the other is illustrated by his attempts to describe Gulbeyaz’s anger:

Suppose, but you already have supposed, The spouse of Potiphar, the Lady Booby, Phedra, and all which story has disclosed Of good examples ...... But when you have supposed the few we know, You can’t suppose Gulbeyaz’ angry brow.

A tigress robb’d of young, a lioness, Or any interesting beast of prey, Are similes at hand for the distress Of ladies who cannot have their own way; But though my turn will not be served with less, These don’t express one half what I should say. (5.131–32)

Here we are given two separate lists of vehicles all for one tenor, and both are followed by explicit admissions of their failure. Supposing various scorned women from fiction will be insufficient for supposing Gulbeyaz’s angry expression, and beasts of prey also fall short in con- juring her ferocity. But the narrator’s confession, “Though my turn will not be served with less, / These don’t express one half what I should say,” points the way toward the success of his lists. The comparisons do not state an exact equivalence between tenor and vehicle, but they are comparative in the sense of the grammatical comparative degree. That is, the objects in the list are similar in kind but different in degree: the tenor is even more of the trait shared by the vehicles. His vehicles “will

46. J. Drummond Bone, “Beppo: The Liberation of Fiction,” in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, eds. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), 108. t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ not be served with less” because they need to indicate more, as much as they can. The tenor becomes the superlative of these comparatives, becomes unique in the extreme degree to which it manifests the common trait. The reported insufficiency of the simile to convey Gulbeyaz’s anger serves the purpose of intensifying the anger we must attribute to her. The copiousness of the list displays the writer’s inventiveness, and the reader exercises her imagination in following the progression of vehicles and then making the inductive extension to the greater intensity of Gulbeyaz. The seeming inability of language to create an exact equivalence is turned into an asset as it involves the reader in an imaginative leap that heightens the comparison beyond what any one equivalence could do.47 The poem’s self-denigrating comments about its own devices belie a surprisingly nuanced effectiveness, which often is underappreciated by critics. In fact, the general rapidity of Don Juan’s verse and its flippant assertions of being unplanned unfortunately encourage readers to leave the poem’s stylistic details underexamined.48 Perhaps most emblematic of this neglect is T. S. Eliot’s complaint “that [Byron] added nothing to the language, that he discovered nothing in the sounds, and developed nothing in the meaning, of individual words. I cannot think of any other poet of his distinction who might so easily have been an accomplished foreigner writing English.”49 The rewards of examining Don Juan’s style should be made manifest by another passage in which Byron ridicules his own similes. In the course of enumerating the beauties of the sleeping harem girls, the description lingers on one girl in particular:

A fourth as marble, statue-like and still, Lay in a breathless, hushed, and stony sleep;

47. This technique is fairly common in Don Juan. Some of the other comparative lists in the poem are descriptions of: the beauty of the women of Cadiz (2.5–6), the rapture of watching one’s beloved sleeping (2.196), and the sweetness of first love (1.122–27). Byron seems especially drawn to the technique when he wants to evoke an intense emotional state. 48. An important exception to the underappreciation of Byron’s form is Susan Wolf- son’s insightful analysis of form in The Corsair, in chapter 5 of Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 49. T. S. Eliot, “Byron,” in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 201. Peter Manning challenges Eliot’s claim by suggesting, “One could sketch a poetics based not on the word but on words: . . . on the relationship between words in themselves unremarkable. In contrast to Eliot’s bias toward the symbolic, hence the static, one might urge the disjunctive and the dynamic.” He finds such a dynamic poetics in Don Juan’s use of allusion. Manning, “Don Juan,” 208. For a more recent analysis of allusion in Don Juan, see chapters 4 and 5 of Jane Stabler’s Byron, Poetics and History. 0 ~ C h A p t e r 1

White, cold and pure, as looks a frozen rill, Or the snow minaret on an Alpine steep, Or Lot’s wife done in salt,—or what you will;— My similes are gathered in a heap, So pick and chuse—perhaps you’ll be content With a carved lady on a monument. (6.68)

McGann takes seriously Byron’s claim that his “similes are gathered in a heap.” He picks up on the phrase when, after quoting stanzas 16.9–10 (discussed above), he asserts, “This is an instance of Byron’s use of series, one of the poem’s staple devices. Byron gathers his similes in a heap, and the bizarre congruence of different items produces surprising tonal opportunities.”50 I agree that series are a staple device, and that they produce surprising results from “the bizarre congruence of different items,” but I do not think that they are as loosely piled up as he claims. McGann’s assertion of careless randomness in the series is more explicit when he argues that Don Juan is “a tenacious poem, anxious to include almost anything, whether it ‘may suit or may not suit [the] story’ (XV, 19). The poem uses the series device repeatedly to gather armloads of material into itself, most of which is useless to the advancement of the plot or to the coherence of anything but the loosest generalizations about the poem’s ideas.”51 It is true that the elements in Byron’s lists of similes do not advance the plot, and they are often only tangentially related to the poem’s chief themes. But to say that the series “gather armloads of material” is misleading, because it implies a haphazard juxtaposition of elements. In reality, Byron’s extended similes are often finely structured, even the simile above in which he disingenu- ously declares that his “similes are gathered in a heap.” After providing several alternatives for the simile’s vehicle, the narrator entreats, “Perhaps you’ll be content / With a carved lady on a monument.” By offering as the final vehicle a statue, the stanza circles back on itself, recalling the adjectives originally used to describe the sleeping girl—“marble,” “statue-like,” “stony.” This repetition also calls to our attention qualities of the other vehicles which might have otherwise been overlooked. By describing the snow cap on a mountain as a “minaret,” Byron invokes an architectural feature which aligns with the building mentioned later—the “monument.” The “statue” on the monu-

50. McGann, Context, 95 51. Ibid., 133. t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ 1 ment is prefigured by Lot’s wife, who is transformed into the equivalent of a statue, an equivalence which is emphasized by the phrasing “Lot’s wife done in salt,” the language of a sculptor who “does” a certain figure in a certain medium. The “frozen rill” may not connect to monuments or statuary, but it is akin to the snow of the second vehicle, and all three vehicles describe natural substances which are usually mobile but are here immobilized. (Flowing liquid water is frozen in two of them, and in the third salt, which by association with water might be imagined as dissolved in the ocean, is turned into a solid block.) In case the careful structure of this simile is suspected to be a fluke, consider this example:

I hate a motive like a lingering bottle, Which with the landlord makes too long a stand, Leaving all claretless the unmoistened throttle, Especially with politics on hand; I hate it, as I hate a drove of cattle, Who whirl the dust as Simooms whirl the sand; I hate it, as I hate an argument, A Laureate’s ode, or servile Peer’s ‘Content.’ (14.58)

The stanza forms a geometrical progression in which the amount of space given to each vehicle diminishes by half—4 lines, then 2, then 1, then half a line. The second vehicle, the “drove of cattle,” contains an embedded simile: they “whirl the dust as Simooms whirl the sand.” All the vehicles share the characteristic of dryness, either the literal aridity of the empty bottle and the driven dust, or the figurative dryness of dead language. Byron’s similes use the impossibility of equivalence to perform more effective comparatives, and in the process create subtle repetitions, producing several kinds of multiplicity within a single figure. By giving several possibilities for one tenor, Byron also suspends the poem’s syntagmatic progress and highlights the author’s act of selection. Here the paradigmatic possibilities consist of figurative language, rather than the alternate storylines that form Byron’s labyrinthine plots. The tenor of a simile can be an important element in the larger narrative, an element that could be quickly amplified by a standard simile with one short vehicle. And some of Byron’s vehicles have narrative content: they may contain temporal progression (as in “the last glass of champagne, without / The foam which made its virgin bumper gay”), or they may allude to other narratives (as do the references to Lady ~ C h A p t e r 1

Booby and Lot’s wife). But in Don Juan, this narrative content is paired with a lyrical effect. The list of vehicles temporarily draws our attention away from the tenor, and the larger narrative to which it is tied. Instead, the explicitly poetic constructions of the figurative elements divert our attention. That is, the figurative nature of the multiple vehicles further amplifies the constructedness of the poem, and hence the lyric moment of its construction.

authorIaL ennuI, LyrIc stasIs, and hopeLess cycLes

The poem’s self-reflexivity and attention to the level of discourse, achieved through several techniques repeatedly used in the poem, should by now be clear. One might object, however, that not all instances of self-reflexivity are necessarily lyric in nature. While I agree that self- reflexivity does not automatically equate to lyricism, in the case of Don Juan additional features give the prominent level of discourse the timelessness specific to lyric. The most noticeable method through which Byron makes the moment of composition feel static, suspended in time, and hence lyrical, is his characterization of the narrator as ennui-laden. The narrator’s claims about why he writes reveal his ennui, and the poem’s sense of stasis at the level of discourse:

And yet I can’t help scribbling once a week, Tiring old readers, nor discovering new. In youth I wrote, because my mind was full, And now because I feel it growing dull.

But ‘why then publish?’—There are no rewards Of fame or profit, when the world grows weary. I ask in turn,—why do you play at cards? Why drink? Why read?—To make some hour less dreary. It occupies me to turn back regards On what I’ve seen or ponder’d, sad or cheery; And what I write I cast upon the stream, To swim or sink—I have had at least my dream. (14.10–11)

The narrator repeatedly characterizes the world as weary of him, yet the stronger impression created by the passage is that the narrator himself t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ is weary, and initially tries to displace his ennui onto others. When he was young, his “mind was full.” Now, he can “feel it growing dull.” The repeated consonants of “feel” and “full” link the two words, and give “feel” positive connotations of robust feeling. These connotations are reinforced by the mention of growth, which for a fleeting second suggests the narrator’s once-full mind has now become even more capa- cious. The suggestion collapses with the revelation that his mind has only grown “dull,” that tiredness affects him as well as his public, that he is as unlikely to discover new matter for his mind as he is to discover new readers. The hopeful diction of growth is again quickly negated when the “world grows weary.” The repetition of r and w sounds in all three words in the phrase, as well as in “rewards” in the previous line, draws attention to the phrase and slows it down: the lingering sounds of r and w make the line drag along, imitating the weariness it describes. The quick, clipped monosyllables of the following line (“I ask in turn,—why do you play at cards?”) make a sharp contrast, and enact the energy and spirit people hope to attain from the pastimes he lists. The narrator passes the time by writing; he composes this poem “to make some hour less dreary.” These stanzas on “why publish?” immediately follow a stanza declaring the narrator’s passionate nature, his former fame, and his current unpopularity, remarks that closely align the narrator with the historical Byron. Since the stanzas occur in a context that minimizes the distance between narrator and author, their content can be justifiably applied to the implied author (the persona that Byron projects through this work) as well as to the narrator. Comments suggesting the implied author’s weariness are especially frequent in the later cantos, such as, “ennui is a growth of English root” (13.101), and in Britain “there’s little left but to be bored or bore” (14.18). If the implied author is writing to combat ennui, then it is perfectly logical for him to make the poem as full and varied as possible.52 By exploring plot paths his hero could have taken but didn’t, the author gives the narrative a wider assortment of decisions, events, and results than it could have sustained by limiting its attention to one path. A multiplicity of plots also takes up more space on the page, and correspondingly takes more time to write, than a single plot would. The poem’s many long lists of similes, with multiple vehicles for one tenor, also fill the page and occupy more of the author’s time than more concise figures of speech would. If the implied author’s object

52. Peter Manning also discusses stanza 14.11 in the context of writing as a method to stave off ennui and melancholy, and suggests the poem engages in headlong motion in order to defy time and fixity. See Manning, Byron and His Fictions, 234–35, 202–3. ~ C h A p t e r 1

is to pass the time, then these stylistic strategies make good sense: Don Juan’s multiplicity is consistent with the Byronic persona it creates. Although the author seems to use prolixity to combat his own weariness, he is also aware that it might cause weariness in others:

. . . You lose much by concision, Whereas insisting in or out of season Convinces all men, even a politician; Or—what is just the same—it wearies out. So the end’s gain’d, what signifies the route? (15.51)

Although the connection between them is inverted here, avoiding concision is again thematically linked to boredom, reinforcing their connection and reiterating the narrator/author’s tendency to project his own boredom onto others. The passage’s final line, with its attention to ends and its indifference to means, also resonates with broader themes. Just as this passage focuses on results rather than the factors leading up to them, elsewhere the poem ignores the motives which lead to actions, and emphasizes chance which interferes with predictable causality. The assertion that “the route” is not significant resonates with the poem’s attitude toward plot paths, and toward paths in general. If the route is not important, then by metaphorical extension, the particular path the plot follows is not crucial, either. Since no one plot path should be privileged, the presentation of other possible paths has a leveling effect, enacting the idea that the route that is taken does not signify any more than the routes that aren’t. The stanza still seems concerned with end results, and with the final destination, despite its indifference to the road taken to arrive there. But when juxtaposed with the following stanza, the end no longer corresponds to the destination:

Now there is nothing gives a man such spirits, Leavening his blood as Cayenne doth a curry, As going at full speed—no matter where its Direction be, so ’tis but in a hurry And merely for the sake of its own merits: For the less cause there is for all this flurry, The greater is the pleasure in arriving At the great end of travel—which is driving. (10.72) t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~

The “great end of travel,” its sole goal for the narrator, is motion itself, a flurry of activity with no particular destination or direction in mind. The motion of the poem could be expressed in a similar way. Don Juan is not teleological; the hero’s destination at the end of each episode does not carry any special weight or importance. Rather, the mere fact that he is thrown into another adventure, that he and the story remain moving, is of primary importance. Juan’s travels keep him, the reader, the narrator, and the implied author occupied. The direction taken by the narrative, the particular path it follows, matters much less than its mere continu- ance, because evidence within the poem suggests its main goal is to help its teller pass the time. The headlong activity of and within the poem form a strong contrast to the implied weariness of its author, but are of a piece; the narrative must gallop along if it is to hold the attention of an ennui-ridden man who has seen everything.53 Travel and writing are not the narrator’s only palliatives, however. Intoxication is frequently mentioned as a comfort, and the hangovers that follow are mentioned almost as frequently. The longest meditation on alcohol in Don Juan contains some illuminating and carefully crafted lines:

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; The best of life is but intoxication: Glory, the grape, love, gold, in these are sunk The hopes of all men, and of every nation; Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk Of life’s strange tree, so fruitful on occasion: But to return,—Get very drunk; and when You wake with head-ache, you shall see what then.

Ring for your valet—bid him quickly bring Some hock and soda-water, then you’ll know A pleasure worthy Xerxes the great king; For not the blest sherbet, sublimed with snow, Nor the first sparkle of the desert-spring, Nor Burgundy in all its sunset glow, After long travel, ennui, love, or slaughter,

53. This seems in keeping with Dino Felluga’s argument that “according to the science journals of the time period,” in poets generally and in Byron in particular “overwrought intensity serves but to mask imminent, deathly exhaustion.” Dino Franco Felluga, The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 122. ~ C h A p t e r 1

Vie with that draught of hock and soda-water. (2.179–80)

Travel is not the only available method to leaven the blood; alcohol can produce similar results. “The grape” is included in a list with “glory . . . love, gold” because they all are able to produce “intoxication,” to bring pleasure and heightened sensibility to those who pursue them. In this respect, drunkenness is allied with goal-oriented activities. Alcohol is described as a life-giving “sap” that nourishes and produces positive results—the branches of life’s growth. The passage suggests that intoxication produces not wasteful oblivion but rather motivation and hope directed toward the future. But wine’s inclusion in a list with glory, love, and gold cannot completely elide its differences with the other members of the series. Wine is not “fruitful” in the same way as the other terms in the list. Alcohol produces only immediate intoxication, and a hangover which must be relieved with “hock and soda-water.” This hangover cure is compared to a list of three alternatives, and this second list also associates drunkenness with the thrill of travel and activity, rather than with static oblivion. The “sherbet, sublimed with snow,” invokes snow-topped mountains, the sublime landscape par excellence. The orthographic similarity of “desert” to “dessert” recalls the sherbet of the previous line, and continues the association of edibles and landscapes. The double meaning of “spring” as both season and source of water conveys a double meaning to the line as a whole: the attraction can either be the beauty of a usually barren landscape filled with sparkling but transient flowers (springtime in the desert), or the relief of pure water in the midst of aridity. “Burgundy” is both a region and its wine, and the “sunset glow” can refer to a time of day in the former or to the color of the latter. Thus, dual meanings of natural scenery and refreshment are overlaid in all three examples in this list. The more or less exotic locations they evoke—sublime mountains, desert plains, the rolling hills of the French countryside—imply travel. Yet the imperative “Ring for your valet” suggests the reader should stay at home to enact this hypothetical situation. The strong implication that the narrator has repeatedly indulged in this scenario of drinking followed by his hangover cure, locates the narrator firmly and regularly in his own home. The varied locales evoked by the passage divert attention from the unchanging repetition and suspension actually portrayed in these lines. These three comparisons also share a series of references to light and to time. The desert spring “sparkle[s]” and Burgundy “glow[s]” t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ with light. The sherbet is “sublimed with snow,” which might mean it is awe-inspiring, but which also has a relevant meaning in chemis- try. A substance sublimes if it transforms directly from solid to gas, as when ice produces water vapor. The “blest sherbet” would then be surrounded with a hazy halo of water vapor, on which light would play as it would on a miniature cloud. Time also lends unity to this passage. Snow suggests winter, which is reinforced by the appearance of “spring” in the following line (even though its primary meaning in this context is a source of water rather than a season). A more overt temporal reference follows in “sunset.” But even here the reference is somewhat oblique, as “sunset” is used not as a noun but rather as an adjective, referring to the colors associated with the time of day. These complex interrela- tions are also unified sonically, by the heavy alliteration of s, both at the beginning of words and internally: sublimed, snow, sparkle, spring, sunset, blest, first, its. (Surely these stanzas refute T. S. Eliot’s critique “that [Byron] added nothing to the language, that he discovered nothing in the sounds, and developed nothing in the meaning, of individual words.”54) The references to cyclical time are apt, since the passage itself describes another cycle in which the narrator seems to be caught: the pleasure of intoxication, the pain of a hangover, and the pleasure of a hangover cure (hock and soda water). In this representation, the series is positive; it begins and ends with pleasurable experiences, separated by the inconvenience of a headache—a minor pain. Elsewhere in the poem, the cycle of drunkenness is not so benign.55 We are told, “The drainer of oblivion, even the sot, / Hath got blue devils for his morning mirrors” (15.4). Hangovers can be much more terrifying and destructive than a mere headache. And there is a fourth stage in the process, which is only obliquely mentioned in the passage above: boredom. A hangover cure might bring the momentary pleasure of relief from pain, but it also returns the narrator to his initial state—ennui. Intoxication is a means to

54. Eliot, 201. 55. Anne Mellor links stanza 2.179 to the passion of Juan and Haidée, and has a very optimistic reading of it: “In such moments of intoxication, they experience a kind of self- transcendence—an expansion of human possibility, a widening of the sense and the spirit that is the closest they can come to divinity.” Mellor, 46. While Mellor accurately suggests that intoxication is here used as a metaphor for all intense experience, especially love, she ignores the prominent and repeated negative associations with hangovers. This oversight likely results from her emphasis on Romantic irony’s potential for liberation and affirma- tion. Michael O’Neill objects more generally to this optimistic interpretation of the poem: “It is tempting to gloss the workings of Don Juan by reference to theories of Romantic Irony. But the poetry’s sense of being at the mercy of the mobility it practices makes Byron’s role- playing and changes of mood difficult to categorize.” O’Neill, 105. ~ C h A p t e r 1

escape temporarily from boredom, for the process always returns to this initial condition. The list of conditions from which sherbet or burgundy might bring relief—“long travel, ennui, love, or slaughter”—is telling. The latter pair are the primary themes of Juan’s adventures, his “fierce loves and faithless wars” (7.8). “Long travel” and “ennui” are thematically appropriate to the narrator, and might be the keys to his characterization and to his writing process. The intense excitement he attributes to the former and the utter boredom of the latter form a vicious cycle, in which the stimulants used to escape ennui work only temporarily, and eventually result in more complete weariness. The narrator’s inability to find rest without restlessness suggests he might be a comic form of the usually tragic Byronic hero.56 McGann sees Byronic heroes as falling into two fates: inertia so complete that the hero is broken and utterly oblivi- ous, or more frequently, uncontrolled intensity of feeling and craving for action.57 The narrator of Don Juan combines both traits and mellows them through comedy. These traits equally characterize the implied author of the work. On the back of his manuscript to canto 1, Byron wrote:

I would to Heaven that I were so much Clay— As I am blood—bone—marrow, passion—feeling– Because at least the past were past away– And for the future—(but I write this reeling, Having got drunk exceedingly to day So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling) I say—the future is a serious matter– And so—for Godsake—Hock and Soda water.

Because of the curious location of this stanza on the verso of the manuscript, it is tempting to read it as a commentary on all that it contains within, on the poem as a whole. It is also tempting to attribute it to an authorial voice, if not to the historical Byron, then to the version of himself he evokes and embodies as the author of this work. Thus, the stanza strongly connects the implied author to the poem’s discussions of

56. Susan J. Wolfson has an intriguing suggestion for where we might find the serious Byronic hero in Don Juan: “From Donna Julia forward, the Byronic hero that starred in the Regency gains a female form. It may be that in boyish Juan and the wry narrator of Don Juan the Byronic hero flickers into parody. But its romance burns in the heroines.” Border- lines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 180. 57. Jerome McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1968), chapters 3.3 and 3.4. t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ intoxication and hangovers. In this instance, the process is represented not as cyclical but rather as halted. The reference to getting drunk “to day” focuses attention on this present instant, rather than on a possible habitual pattern. The past is something to be left behind, and the future can only induce the minimal attention of the hock and soda water that would make facing it a little easier. The author seems trapped in this extended moment, and his only priority is passing the time. Writing is explicitly mentioned here, again suggesting that the poem’s composition is an elaborate method of whiling away the hours. The diversion of writing is an insufficient cure, however. The author claims he is full of too much “passion [and] feeling,” that he would rather be insensible “Clay.” This suggests that his hypersensitivity and overstimulation is a general condition, and that intoxication is a method of temporarily gain- ing oblivion, contrary to associations elsewhere in the poem between drunkenness and activity.58 His craving for oblivion is overtly linked to a death drive; he wishes his “blood—bone—marrow” replaced by “Clay,” anticipating the decomposition of his body after death. If time is merely something to be endured, then only death offers true respite from the tedium. And yet, the poem repeatedly reminds us that some consequences haunt us even after death, that it does not offer a respite from everything. The most obvious instances are the four explicit mentions of “post-obits”—debts that come due after another’s death. The phrase is used literally for debts that must be paid by an old woman’s inheritors in stanza 1.125. It twice refers to posthumous fame, in the Preface to Cantos 1 and 2, and in stanza 17.9. Finally, the narrator asserts the Fates leave little behind but “the post-obits of theology” (1.103). It is possible to read the phrase as theology’s promises of an afterlife, promises that could be collected only after death. The more traditional interpretation, however, is that God lends man his life, and when he dies God collects the debt. The latter interpretation is supported by other references to the event of death itself as paying off a debt. Adeline is described as:

A page where Time should hesitate to print age, And for which Nature might forgo her debt— Sole creditor whose process doth involve in’t The luck of finding every body solvent. Oh, Death! thou dunnest of all duns! thou daily

58. As Michael O’Neill aptly describes this stanza, it displays “the desperate exu- berance—or should that be exuberant despair?—typical of Byronic self-awareness in Don Juan.” O’Neill, xxviii. 0 ~ C h A p t e r 1

Knockest at doors, at first with modest tap, Like a meek tradesman when approaching palely Some splendid debtor he would take by sap: (15.7–8)

Nature has leant youth, beauty, and life, and nature is always successful in collecting because everyone must die. In this passage and in others, death is the ultimate price to be paid, the final and inevitable consequence of a life of action. But elsewhere in the poem, there are suggestions of debts to be paid even after one’s own death. The narrator says of age and conscience:

But at sixteen the conscience rarely gnaws So much as when we call our old debts in At sixty years, and draw the accompts of evil, And find a deuced balance with the devil. (1.167)

Although exactly who is in debt to whom is obscure, a relation of debt with the devil is clear, suggesting an afterlife in which evil can be paid back with evil. Suffering might continue even after life has ended, and sinners may have to pay dearly for their sins. This fear is more overt in the declaration that the heart “Prompts deeds eternity can not annul, / But pays off moments in an endless shower / Of hell-fire” (2.192). Despite the comedy of Don Juan, the situation and attitude of the implied author is tragic and desperate. For him, life is a series of moments, perhaps one excruciatingly extended moment, to be endured. He undertakes activities to pass the time (travel, drinking, writing), and they are necessary palliatives and can produce some good. But they are only briefly effective, and may have negative consequences which are much more lasting. The only relief to enduring the present is brought by death, and even that might be followed by further suffering. What Brian Nellist says of The Giaour holds equally true for Don Juan: “The consequences must be abided for the sake of the action. We are in a continuous present where redemption is impossible.”59 This focus on time as something to be endured, coupled with the attention given to the narrator’s act of writing to pass the time, creates an acute awareness of time as a suspended moment, the moment of composition. In short, it creates the impression of lyric timelessness.

59. Nellist, 52. t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ 1

Larger structures of pLot and the consequences of Don Juan’s LyrIcIsm

The presence of lyrical aspects in Byron’s narrative poems has been noted by a handful of critics. According to Peter Manning, “In Byron’s early tales ostensibly mimetic narrative repeatedly modulated into a prolonged gaze at an unchanging crisis. The two modes, sequential narrative and lyric plaint, were in continual conflict, with plot forever yielding to static monologue.”60 But Manning thinks that Don Juan reduces this conflict between lyric and narrative: “In Don Juan Byron solves, or at least suspends, the problem by centering his poem on the narrator. Juan’s adventures provide movement while the narrator self-consciously makes the contemplative impulse which had obstructed narrative into his most fertile subject.”61 While I agree that Byron finds a solution for the harmonious coexistence of lyric and narrative impulses, Manning understates Byron’s success and subtlety in doing so. The two genres are not merely suspended side by side, neatly divided with Juan the center of narrative and the narrator the center of lyricism, as Manning suggests. Rather, narrative means are used to serve lyric ends, and both genres exist simultaneously throughout the poem. The lyrical aspects of Don Juan are not restricted to sections marked by the narrator’s self- presentation; the moment of composition is also made manifest by the poem’s narrative structure. Brian Nellist has astutely discussed the prominence given to the present moment of discourse in Byron’s earlier narrative poems, and the resulting lyricism within them. He remarks of Childe Harold’s Pil- grimage, “It is this constituting of the poem at the point of its discovery which makes the process lyric, song-like. . . . The poetry in these lines is in the middle of its own coming-into-being.”62 He bases his analysis on a definition of lyric that emphasizes its temporal aspects, and in this, my treatment of lyric is consistent with his. There are, however, some important distinctions between our definitions, as is shown in Nellist’s characterization of the essential nature of lyric: “It is this constitution of the poetry at the moment of its occurrence which seems to be the special mark of lyric as genre. . . . This is to assume that, though lyric is often personal, that quality is not of its essence and indeed lyric can accommodate itself to any shape or form of subject. The characteristic brevity, that it is read at one go, seems more its sine qua non and in literature

60. Manning, “Byronic Hero,” 64. 61. Ibid., 65. 62. Nellist, 42. ~ C h A p t e r 1

space becomes time.”63 First, I believe that the lyricism of Don Juan is even more pronounced than Nellist’s description of lyric as poetry constituting itself “at the moment of its occurrence,” fixed in the suspended time of the reader’s interaction with the present of the poem. Don Juan shares this focus on the time of discourse and the “now” of the reader and poem, but it also does more. It dramatizes its own “coming-into- being” by drawing attention to the narrator and the implied author, by emphasizing not only the “now” of the reader’s experience, but also the “now” of the poem’s composition. Don Juan does not present itself as mysteriously self-creating out of a void, but rather as the construction of a specific person (or rather, persona) in a suspended moment involving an author as much as a reader. My interpretation is based on an assumption that poetry in general, and lyric poetry in particular, does not necessarily create the illusion of being overheard. I disagree with John Stuart Mill’s assertion that poetry must appear to be unconscious of its audience. It might be argued that if the reader is aware of the poem’s status as a public, written document, then the reader would also be aware of a gap in time between the poem’s composition and the act of reading, and that such a gap would disrupt the lyric illusion of being caught up in the speaker’s present moment. I do not think such a disruption necessarily follows. In the case of Don Juan, Byron seems to invite us into his study as he writes, and describes the “old portraits” and “dying embers” that surround him during his late nights of writing (15.97). This illusion of being in the conscious (rather than unconscious, overheard) presence of the author creates the related illusion of inhabiting the same moment as him.64 The moment of reading and the moment of writing are both called to our attention, and the moments seem to coincide, creating a resonance that intensifies, rather than diminishes, our lyric experience of time. A more general difference between my view of lyric and Nellist’s involves the issue of brevity. While it is certainly easier for an author to create the illusion of a suspended moment in a short work, I do think

63. Ibid. 64. Jerome McGann agrees that, while much Romantic rhetoric aligns with Mill’s notion of poetry as overheard, Byron’s does not. He argues, “Byron’s work and his audiences, by contrast, always tend to preserve a clarity of presence toward each other. This remains true even when Byron is working in lyrical forms. In general, it is as if Byron in his work were not simply meditating in public, but were declaring or even declaiming his inmost thoughts and feelings out loud, and directly to others.” Byron and Romanticism, 117–18. Herbert Tucker comments on the intimacy between Don Juan’s poet and the reader “whom he flatters into attendance and convinces of the present reality of fellowship.” Tucker, Epic, 227. t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ it is possible for a lyric suspension of time to continue indefinitely, in a work that takes many sittings to read. Nellist, however, claims that brevity is a necessary condition for lyric. It is initially difficult to reconcile that claim with his characterization of the lengthy Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as a lyric work. The key to their reconciliation seems to lie in his assertion that the poem “lives continuously in its own presentness and each Spenserian stanza becomes the realization of the moments that constitute that present.”65 I infer from this that Nellist thinks each stanza of Childe Harold functions like a separate lyric, that the poem as a whole is a connected series of individually brief lyrics. Nellist says this momentary aspect is “close in definition to . . . the lyric mode,” but presumably is not quite the same as a single, autonomous lyric poem whose sine qua non is its brevity.66 The reader of Don Juan can similarly focus on the stanza currently being read. The narrator invites such an approach with his frank admissions that one stanza often contradicts previous ones, and the most recent one should be given precedence. But Don Juan also has larger structures that contribute to its lyricism: a key example is the poem’s proliferation of possible narrative paths, discussed earlier in this chapter. This is an extreme and unusual illustration of Nellist’s claim that lyric can “accommodate itself to any shape or form of subject,” even narrative, which often functions as its antithesis. More often, lyric requires a particular form; it must be organized by associational thinking, rather than by the causality that governs narrative. Its associational logic is one of several reasons that digression is important for Byron’s lyricism.67 As J. Drummond Bone remarks of the digressions in Beppo, “Self-evidently they reduce the importance of plot in the poem by continually distracting our attention from its development.”68 That is, digressions derail narrative. Since the temporal progression required in narrative is usually antithetical to lyric, getting rid of plot can potentially clear the way for lyricism. But Byron sometimes gives a “digression on the bad habit of digressing. This makes the reader aware of the contingency of what is being read—it could have been

65. Nellist, 41. 66. Ibid. 67. Nellist himself comes close to suggesting this when he comments that if we recognize Byron’s lyricism, his focus on the moment, then “digression is the centre.” Nellist, 43. 68. Bone, 98. T. S. Eliot, however, thinks that digressions paradoxically draw our attention away from the plot yet make us care more about it: “The effect of Byron’s digressions is to keep us interested in the story-teller himself, and through this interest to interest us more in the story.” Eliot, 196. ~ C h A p t e r 1

otherwise, maybe should have been otherwise.”69 By highlighting the contingency of the author’s or narrator’s choices, digression can draw us into the time of discourse and composition, the time of lyric. And Byronic digression possesses a lyricism beyond derailing narrative progression and focusing on the suspended moment of composition. It also exhibits the associational, rather than causal, logic characteristic of lyric. In Don Juan, the narrator’s asides go beyond the illustrations, amplifi- cations, deductions, and generalizations that we expect in a narrative. These asides are not grounded in the particulars of the narrative and are not meant to heighten the importance of the story, as we would expect elsewhere. Rather, they truly are digressions that meander far enough from the plot almost to lose its path,70 and they usually have much more to do with the personal predilections and subjective associations of the narrator and author than they have to do with the narrative. These associations are tied by memory, and can link items based on an individual’s unique experiences, or on more general grounds of similarity or proximity. In either case, mental association can bring together (through memory and writing) objects and events that were widely separated in time. The causation of narrative requires that events can be reconstructed in a particular order in time; lyric association overcomes time, and suspends its objects out of time. While digressions are so frequent that they constitute a large percentage of the poem and form a pattern in Don Juan as a whole, individually they operate on a small scale. There are, however, large-scale structures in the poem that replace causal logic with associational logic. Each episode, taken as a substantial individual unit, technically operates according to the causality characteristic of standard narratives. But this narrative causality is severely weakened by repeated reminders that events all-too-easily could have happened differently, and by the characters’ inability to act successfully on their intentions. Perhaps Don Juan’s weakened sense of causation is most evident in its reader’s inability to arrive retrospectively at a sense of the story’s governing order. Many theorists consider such a retrospective understanding to be an essential aspect of standard causal narratives. The importance of retrospection derives from the forked-path structure, discussed earlier in the chapter, which underlies many narratives. At the beginning of such a narrative, there are many possible paths that

69. Bone, 98–99. 70. I agree with Anne Mellor that the narrator “creates the tale of Don Juan by telling it; he de-creates it by digressing so far from it that for moments at a time we forget that it exists.” Mellor, 60–61. t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ the reader can imagine the plot taking, but as a standard narrative progresses, it must follow one path at the exclusion of others. The end of a story is not usually predictable when viewed from the beginning; it is only when the final outcome has been reached that it seems inevitable, and it is only from the vantage point of the ending that we can retrace the steps of the plot and judge its coherence and probability. As Roland Barthes has said, “Disclosure is the final stroke by which the initial ‘probable’ shifts to the ‘necessary’: the game is ended, the drama has its dénouement.”71 Paul Ricoeur expresses a similar view when he writes, “Rather than being predictable, a conclusion must be acceptable. Look- ing back from the conclusion to the episodes leading up to it, we have to be able to say that this ending required these sorts of events and this chain of actions.”72 The beginning, to a first-time reader, does not require the ending that follows, but the ending, once reached, should seem to require everything that preceded it. It is only after events have played themselves out that we as readers can look back and assign causes for the end result, that we can identify which incidents were crucial for the final outcome and which were irrelevant. What distinguishes a standard narrative from a mere series of events is this overall structure and meaning that can be conferred only from a backward-looking gaze. Only retrospection can firmly establish causation, and that is why narratives are often taken to be, by definition, retrospective.73 The reader of Don Juan, however, gains no such retrospective understanding, and this lack cannot be attributed solely to the unfinished state of the poem. It is true that the poem was left off abruptly due to Byron’s death, that it has no finished ending from which the reader can view the work as a whole. But the existing episodes of Don Juan are only flimsily connected in the first place, and each individual episode functions as an autonomous unit. Even if the reader treats an episode as its own freestanding story, the end of the episode does not lend a retrospective order and significance to the events leading up to it. Jerome McGann argues for the absence of necessity in each episode’s dénouement: “After the event, in the apparent security of retrospective understanding, the chains of causation and relationship which one perceives represent themselves not as the operation of necessary order but as a bizarre series of coincidental linkages. The result of a Byronic

71. Barthes, 188. 72. Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T Mitchell (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1980–81), 170. 73. Peter Brooks, for instance, calls narrative “in essence a retrospective mode.” See Reading for the Plot, 77. ~ C h A p t e r 1

narrative in Don Juan is not even retrospectively a sense of probabilities but of achieved possibilities.”74 Even from the viewpoint of the end of an episode, events do not necessarily lead to that end. Rather than providing the reader with a final sense of inevitability, Don Juan provides an astonished sense of improbability, of fortuitous contingency. The absence of retrospective understanding corresponds to the weakened sense of causation within the poem. Events are so coincidental that the world inhabited by the characters seems to lack comprehensible laws of cause and effect, and the providential responsibility for the outcome of events shifts to the narrator and author. If incidents cannot be explained within the world of the story, the reader naturally looks for explanations within the world of discourse; the more contingency the characters experience, the greater the author’s control appears to be. Although a standard narrative in which retrospection strongly functions requires a sense of authorial selection and ordering, the author’s presence in Don Juan is of a different nature, which makes the author’s act of selection more obvious but which confers less meaning. While the narrator does sometimes claim a definitive understanding of events, the source of his knowledge seems to be his authorial improvisation, rather than his retrospective thoughts on prior events.75 When the narrator asserts that a specific, different outcome would have resulted from a specific change in circumstance, he does so at the moment he is describing the situation, not after the fact.76 The narrator’s focus on the present is shared by the reader. Since in this poem the reader understands no greater meaning and finds no larger significance by looking

74. McGann, Context, 101. 75. I believe Bernard Beatty attributes retrospective understanding to the narrator, and by implication a retrospective structure to the poem, when he claims, “Juan lives forwards, the narrator understands backwards.” “Fiction’s Limit and Eden’s Door,” in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, eds. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), 29. Here I disagree with him. For the importance of improvisation in Don Juan and the inspiration provided by the improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci, see Angela Esterhammer, “Improvisational Aesthetics: Byron, the Shelley Circle, and Tommaso Sgric- ci,” Lord Byron’s Canons, ed. Jeffrey Vail, spec. issue of Romanticism on the Net 43 (August 2006). 76. This phenomenon of frustrated retrospection provides another similarity between Don Juan and Le Rouge et le noir, as it is analyzed by Peter Brooks. Brooks comments, “Stendhal makes curiously non-retrospective use of narrative. . . . The Stendhalian protagonist ever looks ahead, planning the next moment, projecting the self forward through ambition. . . . The narrator generally seems concerned to judge the present moment, or at most the moment just past, rather than to delve into the buried past in search of time lost.” Brooks, 77. The characters in Don Juan often ‘look ahead, planning the next moment,’ albeit unsuccessfully. And the poem’s narrator very rarely reviews the past events of his story, focusing instead on the present moment he is describing (when his attention is directed toward the story and not elsewhere). t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~ back at past happenings in the poem,77 he or she can stay focused on the present moment within the narrative, on what is currently happening in the story (that is, when the narrator is not digressing from the story). And since the lack of satisfying causality calls attention to authorial figures, the reader can also focus on the present moment of discourse, on the act of writing. The lack of retrospection in Don Juan thus creates a double presentness: narrative immersion and lyric intensity. If the understandable relations of cause and effect, upon which standard narratives are based, are weakened within Don Juan, then we must look elsewhere to find the poem’s structuring principle and method of organization. The answer may be the poem’s affinities with the picaresque. In the picaresque, one event does not clearly lead into the next, and the tight causal relations of other narratives are relatively absent. Don Juan makes us aware of this picaresque narrative option through its large-scale episodic structure. Causality (obscure though it may be) operates within individual episodes but does not strongly link one episode to the next. The poem usually explains the shift from one situation to another; Juan travels from Russia to England to perform a diplomatic mission and to recover his health, for example. But these are mere pre- tenses to move Juan quickly into another episode, and the reason for the transition never plays an important role in the subsequent episode.78 As Geoffrey Ward remarks, “The relatively two-dimensional hero will be bounced from escapade to escapade with a bravura that is anecdotal virtually to the point of amnesia.”79 It is as if Juan finds his way out of one narrative labyrinth only to be dropped in the midst of another,

77. I imagine that some readers find that the meanings (in terms of both social criticism and generic categorization) of certain episodes are clarified by their endings. In particular, Julia’s relegation to a convent and her self-contradictory farewell letter to Juan reinforce the light-hearted comedy of canto I, and highlight the social restrictions placed on women. Haidée’s death reaffirms the strength of her love and transforms the idyllic into the tragic. But other episodes undermine the reader’s wish for the ending to confer significance. The attempted comedy of Ismail’s aged virgins waiting to be ravished undermines the seriousness of what went before, confusing the significance of the episode. Juan’s stay in Russia ends when his languor causes him to leave, making the Catherine episode seem even more pointless than it did midway through. And the harem episode is abruptly left off, without any explanation of how Juan and his companions managed their remarkable escape: here the reader isn’t even given an ending from which she can struggle to foist meaning on what came before. 78. McGann might have had something similar in mind when he wrote that “formal coherence and probability” applies within an individual episode, but not to the plot of the poem as a whole. Context, 122. 79. Geoffrey Ward, “Byron’s Artistry in Deep and Layered Space,” in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, eds. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), 212. ~ C h A p t e r 1

very differently shaped, maze. These abrupt transitions, where causation within the story is unimportant, emphasize the narrator’s caprice and the author’s control over Juan’s fate. It may be true that “Byron, the god of his poem, is a local deity,”80 but he is also a very powerful one. Once again, Don Juan draws attention to its status as a fictive creation, and in this case, it also draws attention to the conventions of picaresque narrative by taking them to their extremes. Since the poem’s overall organization is strikingly, self-consciously, picaresque, and the individual episodes strikingly, self-consciously illustrate their contingent causal relationships, the poem thus exposes the conventions of both episodic and causally coherent narratives. Don Juan is intensely episodic, or as Jerome McGann phrases it, “radically, aggressively episodic.”81 Although the episodes are not linked through cause and effect, they are linked through association; the episodes are variations on a theme (or themes, for instance, love and war). In this I agree with Harold Bloom, who says of Don Juan, “The poem organizes itself by interlocking themes and cyclic patterns, rather than by clear narrative structures.”82 One could treat these variations and cycles as McGann does, seeing them as related experiments, in which some initial conditions are kept constant and others are varied, in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of how the world works. But one could also treat them as a string of mental associations, as all the things that occur to the narrator or author when he contemplates the themes of the poem. In the latter case, the poem’s large-scale episodic structure mimics its smaller-scale digressiveness in its associational, rather than causal, logic. The poem is thus organized according to the logic of lyric rather than the logic of narrative. McGann himself comes close to suggesting this: “As in a Coleridgean conversation poem, or as in The Prelude, ideas and perceptions in Don Juan generate other, further ideas and perceptions. But Don Juan differs from such works because its associational movement does not build up comprehensively (i.e., ‘organically’). . . . The point of Don Juan’s ‘piecemeal’ (Childe Harold IV, 157) method is to prolong the experience, and the activity, of learn- ing in the human world.”83 Coleridge’s conversation poems are preeminent examples of a lyric genre, and The Prelude, as I shall argue, both is composed of small lyric segments, and functions as one large lyric whole. McGann’s likening of Don Juan’s “associational movement” to these poems strongly hints at the lyricism underlying Byron’s poem.

80. McGann, Context, 116. 81. Ibid., 3. 82. Bloom, 3. 83. McGann, Context, 111. t h e l A b y r I n t h I n e p l o t s A n d ly r IC s tA s I s o f D o n J u a n ~

McGann is also right, however, in asserting the poem’s lack of organic wholeness, and its tendency to ‘prolong the experience’ of the reader. Indeed, one of the consequences of associational logic is the potential for interminable extension. A standard causal narrative cannot continue indefinitely: it requires the story to progress more and more inexorably toward a seemingly necessary ending from which the reader can retrospectively understand all that went before. Associational logic is resistant to retrospection and does not require an ending. Instead, associations can accumulate indefinitely, and are limited only by the author’s imagination, or lifespan. Indeed, Don Juan has no teleology driving it toward a necessary end, but rather ends arbitrarily with Byron’s death. As Geoffrey Ward has said, “Don Juan is unfinished, yet interminable; the ending, in one sense made arbitrary by the author’s death, is simultaneously apt.”84 The cantos do not build toward a probable ending, but rather “the function of each canto in Don Juan is to make the next one possible, and the poem is interminable.”85 Byron could have added episode after episode, narrative after narrative, and could have paradoxically created an indefinitely suspended lyric moment. Don Juan is constructed out of narrative episodes which each, due to the very nature of narrative, require temporal progression. Yet the frantic gallop of Byron’s story paradoxically results in the lyrical suspension of time. Byron’s poem uses narrative means to achieve lyric ends. Although Don Juan seems in many ways antithetical to The Prelude, and although the sensibilities of Byron and Wordsworth are so different that they divide many readers and critics into opposing camps, there are strong similarities between the two poems when viewed in the context of lyric and narrative. The Prelude is as potentially interminable as Don Juan, and shares its large-scale associational structure. Wordsworth’s poem, however, is overtly and inescapably teleological, and in this way differs from Byron’s poem. The Prelude is able to sustain the contradiction of being interminable and teleological through its very unusual narrative structure. Whereas Don Juan is composed of small narratives held together by lyric association, The Prelude consists of small lyrics held together by a larger narrative. And yet Wordsworth’s poem provides a narrative model that functions associationally, and allows the poem as a whole to function as one large lyric. Wordsworth, too, is using narrative means to achieve lyric ends.

84. Ward, 221. 85. Ibid., 219. 2pLot antIcIpatIon and LyrIc assocIatIon In The PreluDe

something evermore about to be —william wordsworth, The Prelude 6.609

Ever since William Wordsworth’s The Prelude was first published in 1850, after half a lifetime of revision, there has been controversy about its genre. Early reviewers, perhaps taking their cues from the subtitle (“The Growth of a Poet’s Mind”), quite correctly identify its primary subject as the thoughts and emotions of the poet. They also rightly assert that the poem is not, nor was meant to be, plot-driven; that it is not an exciting narrative in any usual sense of the word. The Eclectic Review, for example, warns its readers, “In reading the ‘Prelude,’ we should never forget that his object is not to weave an artful and amusing story, but sternly and elaborately to trace the ‘growth of a poet’s mind.’ . . . He leads us accordingly, not so much from incident to incident, as from thought to thought, along the salient points of his mental history.”1 Tait’s Edinburgh

1. Review of The Prelude, by William Wordsworth, Eclectic Review 27 (1850): 550–62, quoted in The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), 555.

70 p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ 1

Magazine laments: “As ‘The Prelude’ is not, nor pretends to be, a tale of stirring interest, and as it is also of very considerable length, it necessarily requires all legitimate aids of poetic art to sustain the continued interest of the reader. Unfortunately, Wordsworth never attributed to these their just importance.”2 The reviewer in Graham’s Magazine notes that the events in the poem are not so much interesting in themselves, but rather are presented in relation to their psychological effect on Wordsworth. He complains, however, that the poem lacks a “sustained richness of diction and imagery,” does not often indulge in the “easy yielding of the mind to the inspiration of objects,” and excludes “ecstatic utterance of the emotions.”3 The Prelude fails, in the reviewer’s opinion, because it lacks the basic elements of lyric. Herbert Lindenberger gives a provisional explanation for this early hostility towards the poem now regarded as Wordsworth’s masterpiece: “To what, then, must we attribute the failure of the Victorians to grasp The Prelude? The problem is at least partly one of genre classification: the poem somehow refused to fit into any of the established categories, at least as they were defined in 1850. If taken as a poem, why could its passion not be sustained? If an autobiography, why did it not possess the richness of detail of such models as Dichtung und Wahrheit? If a commentary on great men and events, why so many trivial incidents?”4 For the Victorians, then, The Prelude would not fit into any one genre as neatly as they desired, for it is missing both sustained narrative interest, and the sustained passion of lyric poetry. Twentieth-century critics also debate the generic classification of The Prelude, but they are more flexible in their classifications, allowing that the poem may fit most but not all of the criteria for a particular genre, or that the poem may have marked allegiances to more than one genre. Lindenberger himself asserts the multiplicity of forms which the poem fits, comparing it to epics, idylls, didactic poems, and satires, and calling it “a poem in search of a genre.”5 Many contemporary critics of The Prelude focus on only two of its generic possibilities, either identifying it as a string of disconnected short lyrics, or a unified epic of unusually personal subject matter, or

2. Review of The Prelude, by William Wordsworth, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 17.201 (Sept. 1850): 521. 3. Review of The Prelude, by William Wordsworth, Graham’s Magazine (Philadelphia) 37.5 (Nov. 1850): 322. 4. Herbert Lindenberger, “The Reception of The Prelude,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 64 (1960): 205. 5. Herbert Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s Prelude (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 14. ~ C h A p t e r

both at once.6 I contend that the poem is a series of short lyrics united by an unusual narrative structure, which creates complex temporal movements and allows the work as a whole to function as one large lyric. The temporal complexities of The Prelude have also long attracted critical attention. M. H. Abrams, in his foundational study Natural Super- naturalism, notes, “The construction of The Prelude is radically achronolog- ical, starting not at the beginning, but at the end—during Wordsworth’s walk to ‘the Vale that I had chosen,’” and he further observes that “in the course of The Prelude Wordsworth repeatedly drops the clue that his work has been designed to round back to its point of departure.”7 That is, the episode which comes last in a chronological reconstruction of story events—the walk to the chosen vale—is narrated twice, at the beginning and again at the end of the discourse. In the course of this walk Wordsworth finds inspiration in the breeze, which “assures him of his poetic mission and, though it is fitful, eventually leads to his undertaking The Prelude itself”; as a result, “The Prelude . . . is an involuted poem which is about its own genesis—a prelude to itself.”8 Much of the poem consists of Wordsworth’s interactions with nature, which “assure[d] him of his poetic mission.” The goal of the poem is to demonstrate his fitness to produce great poetry, and The Prelude itself becomes evidence of that fitness. Wordsworth alerts readers to this teleological drive of the poem in its opening book, when he asks, “Was it for this / That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved / To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song?”9 As Geoffrey Hartman explicates the rhetoric of this

6. As a small sample of such arguments for genre, Lindenberger often treats The Prelude “as a group of great lyrical passages,” David Bromwich emphasizes The Prelude’s “tone of lyric apology,” Karl Kroeber thinks “in essence The Prelude is a narrative poem” which “is epic in its rejection of the traditional principles of epic narrative,” and Mary Jacobus believes there is an “incompatibility between the lyric voice of The Prelude and its much-desired, ‘distracting’ epic progress,” but eventually settles on calling it “an extended personal lyric.” See Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s Prelude, 102; David Bromwich, Dis- owned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790’s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 172; Karl Kroeber, Romantic Narrative Art (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 104, 102; Mary Jacobus, “Apostrophe and Lyric Voice in The Prelude,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, eds. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 172, 181. 7. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Litera- ture (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971), 74, 79. 8. Ibid., 75, 79. 9. William Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) 1.269–71. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent citations are from the Cornell edition of the 1850 version; book and line numbers will be cited parenthetically. Citations marked as the 1805 version of The Prelude are taken from William Wordsworth, “AB-Stage Reading Text,” The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols. (Ithaca: Cor- nell University Press, 1991), vol. 1. I have chosen the 1850 version as my base text because p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ passage, “‘Was it for this’ potentially simplifies into ‘it was for this’ and even ‘it was.’ The question wants to be a statement about an ‘it’ (nature) that ‘was’ (acted in the past) ‘for this’ (a poetry it calls to birth).”10 In this chapter, I revisit such discussions of The Prelude’s temporality and teleology from the perspective of narrative theory, in the belief that Wordsworth’s poem and narratology can shed light on each other. The Prelude qualifies generalizations about the retrospective nature of narrative, throws into high relief some of the characteristics of confessional literature, and troubles some of Gérard Genette’s categories for prolepsis. Narrative theory illuminates the unusual causal relations among The Prelude’s story events, and the importance of the river metaphor used to describe those causal relations. The Prelude’s rhetoric and narrative structure also exert a powerful influence over the temporality of the reading process, create an ambiguous temporal relationship between the narrator and the poem’s endpoint, and produce a specific hybrid of lyric and narrative. All of these implications depend on one central argument: Wordsworth encourages his audience to read prospectively, constantly looking forward to a conclusion the reader knows from the very start—Wordsworth’s status as a great poet, fostered by nature.11 And yet Geoffrey Hartman is right to assert that “[r]anged against this affirma- tion are not only doubts about the tendency of the past but also about the poetry it fosters.”12 Richard Onorato has shown that Wordsworth compensates for such doubts by creating an idealized, fictitious version of himself, a fiction which the reader can see through: “To the reader, it is always plain that Nature’s choice of Wordsworth is Wordsworth’s imaginative choice of Nature.”13 Wordsworth’s doubts about his past and about his poetry have received so much commentary that Tilottama Rajan has declared, “A study of The Prelude could not now take literally its figures of genesis and memory, which claim to ground Wordsworth’s

I emphasize ways the poem directs the reader’s temporal and intellectual experience, and it seems fitting to use the version crafted for public dissemination. 10. Geoffrey Hartman, “‘Was it for this . . . ?’: Wordsworth and the Birth of the Gods,” in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, eds. Kenneth R. Johnston et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 14. 11. Several critics have called The Prelude prospective or forward-looking, but in the context of Wordsworth looking forward to a possible future, rather than the reader looking forward to a future of which she is constantly assured. See, for instance, Abrams, Natural, 37; Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 29–30; and Susan J. Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 129. 12. Hartman, “Was it for this . . . ?” 14. 13. Richard J. Onorato, The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in The Prelude (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 268. ~ C h A p t e r

interpretation of his life by attributing causality and factuality to something he himself was always revising.”14 This chapter certainly does not assume that Wordsworth’s interpretation of his life is literally true, but it does explore the consequences of Wordsworth’s explicit rhetoric for readers who suspend their disbelief and allow themselves to be guided by his rhetoric.

prospectIve readIng

The Prelude quite explicitly advertises its subject matter as the growth of the poet’s mind, giving a clear teleology with a clear endpoint—Word- sworth’s status as a mature poet. When the poem was published in 1850 shortly after the poet’s death, Wordsworth’s status as a much beloved poet laureate would be strong evidence that Wordsworth’s goal was reached. More importantly, within the text Wordsworth ensures that the reader is certain of the end of the plot, from the very beginning of the reading experience. This certainty results from a constant tendency in the poem to look forward to the outcome,15 even when the poet is examining the distant past of his childhood. It allows even a first-time reader to know the end to which each episode tends, and hence to know its significance even before reading an individual episode, rather than

14. Tilottama Rajan, “The Erasure of Narrative in Post-Structuralist Representations of Wordsworth,” in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, eds. Kenneth R. Johnston et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 365. 15. A. D. Nuttall has a reading of the poem contradictory to mine. He claims, “The Prelude ends in the future tense because it is exactly what its name tells us: all proem, all exordium. Therefore even when one quotes the conclusion one is still quoting from an opening. The poet is still clearing his throat, preparing to sing.” A. D. Nuttall, Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 115. Rather than seeing the poem as constantly oriented toward its own end, he sees it as stuck in its own beginning. Perhaps this is due to Nuttall’s greater emphasis on The Prelude as pre- paratory to The Recluse, and hence as falling short of its promises of what will follow it. Thus, in Nuttall’s view, “The work proposed my [sic] be described as imminent, but the future tenses somehow work in a contrary direction, suggesting an ever-growing distance between the poet and his design.” Nuttall, 118. By choosing to emphasize the successful completion of The Prelude itself as confirmation of Wordsworth’s poetic powers, I see an ever-narrowing distance between the poet and his design. Joseph Sitterson also has an interpretation of The Prelude apparently in contradiction to mine: “The meaning is in the search, and narration, not in the end or origin toward which we are always arriving.” Jo- seph C. Sitterson, Jr., Romantic Poems, Poets, and Narrators (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2000), 86. But if the end and meaning of the poem is Wordsworth’s status as a poet, then the very process of narration is the end, the goal, of the poem, for the act of poetic composition is the best evidence of the author’s status as poet. Sitterson’s distinction is thus dissolved. p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ having to wait until the end of the text for a retrospective significance to be conferred on what preceded it. The structure and content of book 1 reveal the goal and purpose of the poem. After briefly celebrating his escape from the city and his burst of poetic energy and confidence (1.1–96), Wordsworth laments that his creative energy is vexed and unproductive, creating in him the desire to write without the present ability to do so (1.96–145). He then briefly lists reasons he should be an able poet, and lists at length possible topics for a poem, all of which he has rejected (1.146–233). After confessing himself a mockery to his profession (1.234–69), Wordsworth exclaims, “Was it for this / That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved / To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song” (1.269–71). The remainder of book 1 consists mainly of additional ways nature influenced him as a child. The logic of the progression is clear: the focus is on Wordsworth’s as- yet-unfulfilled ability to write a great poem. By asking “Was it for this” that nature ministered to him, Wordsworth clearly shows his belief that nature has fitted him to be a great poet, and his feeling that he has not yet lived up to this potential. This unambiguously tells the reader that the experiences which follow will illustrate how nature has fitted him for poetry. To reinforce that he does, in fact, achieve this final goal of poetic greatness, at the end of book 1 Wordsworth feels that his faculties are rejuvenated and that he will finish this poem on the growth of his own mind, a confidence that is obviously confirmed by the very existence of the poem his audience is reading (1.637–47). As Susan Wolfson observes, “To begin the poem this way, with the protagonist in full possession of his powers, is to premise the investigation on its outcome. Wordsworth’s goal, in other words, becomes his inspiration.”16 Between book 1’s descriptions of his boyhood experiences with nature, Wordsworth repeatedly reminds us of the relationships among the experiences, his mental development, and his final status as a poet.17 Wordsworth tells us explicitly, and repeatedly, that nature has fostered and guided the growth of his mind. For example, the narrator declares, “Sedulous . . . I have been to trace / How Nature by extrinsic passion first / Peopled the mind with forms sublime or fair / And made me love them . . .” (1.544–47). The passage emphasizes nature’s agency in several ways: “Nature” is the grammatical subject governing the verbs “peopled” and “made,” its capitalization implies its personification, and nature seems almost coercive in making Wordsworth love these forms.

16. Wolfson, Questioning, 153. 17. The line numbers in book 1 of the 1850 versions are 340–56, 401–16, 464–75, 544–58, and 581–612. ~ C h A p t e r

These lines also clearly argue that nature directs its agency toward Wordsworth’s “mind” and emotions, and they suggest that it provides specifically aesthetic direction. It fills his mind with “forms sublime or fair,” with embodiments of the two most highly valued aesthetic concepts of the Romantic period—the sublime and the beautiful. This dual aesthetic development is reiterated when the narrator states, “Fair seed- time had my soul, and I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear” (1.301–2). Here, the poem explicitly names the category of the beautiful, and strongly implies the category of the sublime through the emotion it inspires: fear. The combination of the organic development implied by the metaphor of soul as seed, and nature’s maternal, nurturing influence implied by the verb “fostered,” again portrays nature’s intervention as conscious and directed, rather than accidental. This, in turn, creates a greater sense of the sureness, even inevitability, of the outcome. Other reminders in book 1 more explicitly announce that the outcome nature desires is, specifically, Wordsworth’s success as a poet. Within the first 50 lines of the poem, the author gives thanks for the gentle breeze, and for his new-found liberty in the countryside, away from the stultifying city:

Thanks to both, And their congenial powers that, while they join In breaking up a long continued frost, Bring with them vernal promises, the hope Of active days urged on by flying hours; Days of sweet leisure taxed with patient thought Abstruse, nor wanting punctual service high, Matins and vespers, of harmonious verse! (1.38–45)

The regenerative natural surroundings suggest to Wordsworth that his activity and thought will produce “harmonious verse,”18 and the impor-

18. This passage does, obviously, refer to his “hope” that he will produce poetry, rather than guaranteeing he will, which suggests (contrary to what I have argued thus far) some uncertainty in the poem’s outcome. The disjunction between the reader’s position of certainty toward the poem’s outcome, and the narrator’s position of uncertain anticipation toward it, will be discussed in detail later in this chapter. Lorne Mook reads this passage very differently, minimizing its goal-oriented quality: “The two breezes bring, in short, not hope of days spent working toward a goal but spent in leisure and leisurely thought, not poetry that will be driven by any desire to put together over time a great work but poetry that will, like morning and evening prayers, have a ritualizing and steadying effect on each day.” Lorne Mook, “The Everyday and the Teleological: Time-conflict, Progression, and Af- fect in Books 1 and 2 of The Prelude,” European Romantic Review 17.5 (December 2006): 596. p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ tance he places on such poetic production emerges from the metaphors of religious service he uses to describe it (verse as morning and evening prayer). The reader receives additional guidance, and an unambiguous explanation of the poem’s goal, before the poem even begins. In fact, Word- sworth explains the endpoint and significance of The Prelude long before the poem is published, in the 1814 preface to The Excursion:

Several years ago, when the Author retired to his native mountains, with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary Work that might live, it was a reasonable thing that he should take a review of his own mind, and examine how far Nature and Education had qualified him for such employment. As subsidiary to this preparation, he undertook to record, in verse, the origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he was acquainted with them. That Work, addressed to a dear Friend . . . has long been finished. . . .— The . . . poem is biographical, and conducts the history of the Author’s mind to the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were sufficiently mature for entering upon the arduous labour which he had proposed to himself.19

The purpose of The Prelude, the “biographical” poem “addressed to a dear Friend,” is clearly to give a “history of the Author’s mind” and to trace “the origin and progress of his own [poetic] powers.” Word- sworth’s readers thus have a blueprint of how to read The Prelude before they have the poem itself. Given the thirty-six year lag time between the publication of this preface and the publication of The Prelude, many of the latter’s readers might have been unfamiliar with the preface, or might have forgotten it in the interim. But this possibility was avoided, because the first edition of The Prelude reprints four paragraphs from the preface to The Excursion, including the above quotation.20 This addition provides the published poem’s first readers with a clear explanation of the poem’s goal and the story’s end before the poem begins. It also indicates that Wordsworth’s ideas about the poem were apparent to those who were close to him and responsible for the poem’s posthumous publication. The Prelude’s title and subtitle—“The Growth of a Poet’s Mind”—were chosen by his

19. William Wordsworth, “Preface to The Excursion (1814),” in The Prose Works of Wil- liam Wordsworth, vol. 3, eds. W. J. B Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Claren- don Press, 1974), 5. 20. “Advertisement,” in The Prelude: Or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind, by William Word- sworth (London: Edward Moxon, 1850). ~ C h A p t e r

widow, Mary, although Wordsworth did himself refer to it as the poem on the growth of his mind. Mary’s choice of subtitle suggests that she clearly understood the poem’s point, and that she wanted to make it unmistakable for the poem’s other readers.

a modeL of prospectIve readIng: the rIver

The Prelude not only encourages a strongly prospective reading experience; it also offers the reader a metaphorical model of its atypical narrative structure. Both the difficulties of employing traditional narrative techniques to Wordsworth’s chosen topic, and his alternative method of structuring a narrative, are illustrated in the following passage:

But who shall parcel out His intellect, by geometric rules, Split like a province into round and square? Who knows the individual hour in which His habits were first sown, even as a seed? Who that shall point, as with a wand, and say, “This portion of the river of my mind Came from yon fountain”? Thou, my friend! ...... No officious slave Art thou of that false secondary power By which we multiply distinctions ...... And thou wilt doubt with me, less aptly skilled Than many are to range the faculties In scale and order, class the cabinet Of their sensations, and in voluble phrase Run through the history and birth of each As of a single independent thing. Hard task, vain hope, to analyse the mind, If each most obvious and particular thought, Not in a mystical and idle sense, But in the words of reason deeply weighed, Hath no beginning. (2.203–32) p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~

The passage clearly states the purpose of the poem—to trace the progress of the poet’s “intellect,” to “analyse [his] mind”—but the topic does not lend itself to typical methods of narration. Since Wordsworth cannot identify the “individual hour in which / His habits were first sown, even as a seed,” he cannot depict an event of limited duration, an “individual hour,” in clear causal relation to the outcome. His chosen topic lacks the distinct events that would easily identify it as a story. He reiterates this point when he says of his sensations that he is unable to “Run through the history and birth of each / As of a single independent thing.”21 Moreover, this passage emphasizes another departure of The Prelude from standard narrative—the poem’s dearth of characters. It is not individual people whose births and histories Wordsworth is unable to tell; he instead is unable to give precise histories to his own sensations. His mind and its components are the real, very unorthodox, characters of this tale. These ‘characters’—his “thoughts” and “faculties”—have “no beginning,” no point at which everything that precedes it lacks causality or necessity, nowhere from which to start a standard causal narrative. What Wordsworth offers up instead is exemplified by an image that dominates The Prelude: a river. Wordsworth asks if anyone is able to “point, as with a wand, and say, / ‘This portion of the river of my mind / Came from yon fountain,’” clearly implying that for himself such a division is impossible. This again emphasizes the unfitness of a usual narrative structure for his topic, but also suggests a positive alternative: the metaphor of the river of the mind describes the narrative project Wordsworth envisions. A river’s path is determined and teleological, not governed by a series of independent choices, with many influences adding to and intermixing with the main stream. The various tributaries by which elements arrived

21. In his study of The Prelude as confessional literature, Frank McConnell gives a very different reading of this passage. He thinks Wordsworth writes a retrospective narrative in The Prelude, and that the negative alternative discussed in this passage, the attempt to “Run through the history and birth of each, / As of a single independent thing,” refers to the “Lockean epistemology and associationism gone mad” exemplified by Tristram Shandy. Frank D. McConnell, The Confessional Imagination: A Reading of Wordsworth’s Prelude (Bal- timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 51–53. I believe it is traditional narrative structure which is being rejected. Kenneth Johnston also thinks this passage questions “whether narrative per se is the appropriate form for the representation of mental growth.” Johnston argues, however, that Wordsworth does not reject narrative and instead decides that “the problem of not being able to tell his story’s beginning may be solved by refusing to admit it ever ends—a solution good for continuing The Prelude but fatal to starting The Recluse.” Kenneth R. Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 74, 76. 0 ~ C h A p t e r

can be noticed by tracing backwards, but which individual parts of the river were contributed by each stream is impossible to discover retrospectively. This is a vivid and suggestive analogy for Wordsworth’s view of personal history as an accretive, inextricably fused set of associations, rather than as a chain of discrete causes and effects. The river is emblematic of the growth of the poet’s mind and the structure of the poem that describes that growth.22 While M. H. Abrams may be right that the poem has a “circular shape” at the level of discourse since it begins and ends by narrating the same event,23 if we reconstruct the temporal and causal relations among story events they will more closely resemble a river. Wordsworth’s arrangement of his narrative has an associative logic that unites each episode to the final goal, rather than a causal logic that would directly link each episode to the next. This repeatedly impels the reader to think forward to the poem’s end, processing and understanding the narrative prospectively, rather than retrospectively. The shape of a river and its tributaries is similar to that of a much more common metaphor for narrative structure—a repeatedly forking

22. I agree with Richard Onorato that “the fusion of the character created and the poet creating him is to be understood by understanding the significance of recurrent metaphors and the associational nature of metaphor itself.” Onorato, 20–21. Onorato, however, emphasizes metaphors of rootedness and of foot journeys, and only mentions the “stream of mind” in passing. Onorato, 169. M. H. Abrams remarks upon the water imagery used to represent Wordsworth’s mental development, noting that in book 13, “Abruptly, Word- sworth now discloses . . . that what he has all along been narrating is the story of the birth, growth, disappearance, and resurrection of imagination. He represents this faculty in the metaphor of a stream.” Abrams, 118. He does not pursue the implications of this metaphor, however, nor does he acknowledge that this metaphor is established much earlier (in book 2), or that it applies to all of Wordsworth’s mental faculties (imagination being one important stream flowing into the broader river). Kenneth Johnston recognizes that the river is a dominant metaphor for the poem itself and briefly discusses several of its appearances. Johnston, 131, 157–58, 210, 213–14. Geoffrey Hartman has, in passing, compared the poem itself to a river: “A poem without a proper name, of obscure origin, mazy as a river, stretches its casual magnificence to epic length. It has never been subdued to one great theme.” Hartman, Wordsworth’s, 208. Hartman, however, emphasizes the meandering aspects of a river, whereas I emphasize its clearly determined end. Lorne Mook notes the “teleological implications” of the River Derwent in the “Was it for this?” section of the poem. Mook, 599. And two early reviews of The Prelude adopt the river metaphor to describe Wordsworth’s mind or the poem itself but do not pursue the metaphor’s implications. See Review of The Prelude, Eclectic, 548, 549; Review of The Prelude, Tait’s, 526. For a more general discussion of water imagery and its temporal implications in Wordsworth’s poetry, see John Beer, Wordsworth in Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 60, 70, 170–83, 190–91. In the course of arguing that Wordsworth denies history by transmuting it into lyric, Alan Liu discusses the association of rivers with riots and revolutionary violence, and notes examples of both turbulence and stillness in Wordsworth’s water imagery. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 362–65. 23. Abrams, 79. p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ 1 path. As we saw in chapter 1,24 each fork represents a decision or event with several possible outcomes, depicted by the branching paths. At each fork, only one path can be followed, and as the narrative progresses, the remaining paths that could be followed are fewer and fewer. It is only when this final outcome has been reached that it seems inevitable, and it is only from the vantage point of the ending that we can retrace the steps of the plot and judge its coherence and probability. The forking path model is well-suited to many narratives which invite a primarily retrospective, rather than prospective, response from the reader. But such an emphasis on retrospection sometimes becomes strongly affiliated with most or all narratives, so much so that narrative has been called “in essence a retrospective mode.”25 For theorists who require causation in addition to chronology in defining narrative, retrospection becomes especially important. In this view, what distinguishes a narrative from a mere series of events is the overall structure and meaning that can be conferred only from a backward-looking gaze; this gaze can occur both within and outside the text. First, narrators often assume a retrospective position toward story events: the time of discourse is subsequent to the time of story. As Seymour Chatman remarks, “Most narratives set their story-NOW at . . . ‘past time’; verbal narratives usually show it by the preterite.”26 Linguist Suzanne Fleishman provides a stronger statement of the case: “Narration is a verbal icon of experience viewed from a retrospective vantage; the experience is by definition ‘past.’ . . . The tenses appropriate to the verbal activity of narrating are accordingly tenses that include past time reference as part of their basic meaning.”27 But as Uri Margolin has persuasively argued, this is not always the case. Some acts of narration are nearly concurrent with the events told, as in epistolary novels, and in other cases the narrator tells a story prospectively, taking a prophetic or hypothetical stance toward events which have not yet happened.28 In addition, Dorrit Cohn and James Phelan have investigated the recent phenomenon of simultaneous narration—a narrative

24. See especially pages 26–27, 29, and 64–65. 25. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 77. 26. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Itha- ca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 80. 27. Suzanne Fleishman, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fic- tion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 23–24. 28. Uri Margolin, “Of What Is Past, Is Passing, or to Come: Temporality, Aspectual- ity, Modality, and the Nature of Literary Narrative,” in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1999), 150–59. ~ C h A p t e r

situation that cannot be understood mimetically, in which a first-person narrator tells his or her story entirely in the present tense, experiencing events and narrating them simultaneously.29 Despite these important exceptions, the majority of narratives are retrospective in terms of the narrator’s relation to events. Usually, retrospection is also important for the reader’s relationship to the narrative as a whole. During the process of reading, we pro- visionally evaluate how one event or element relates to another, and we might speculate on how the story may end, but we usually cannot predict the ending with complete confidence. Only after we have read the ending do we feel its necessity, and only then can we look back and assign probable causes for the end result, and identify which incidents were crucial for the final outcome and which were irrelevant. When encountering a story, we usually assume that “the end of the story is the retrospective revelation of the law of the whole.”30 In most cases, this emphasis on the reader’s retrospection is well justified, most obviously because a first-time reader will necessarily be missing information until he or she reaches the end of a narrative, and we usually assume that, at a minimum, a reader must be familiar with all the parts in order to have a comprehensive understanding of the whole. The value placed on readerly retrospection may also derive, in part, from the reader’s desire to assume a similar viewpoint as the narrator (unless the reader has perceived the narrator as unreliable). Typically, when reading a story told by a retrospective narrator, the audience can only take a similar position as the narrator’s after reading through to the end. This concept of narrative is not universally applicable, though. Rather, it is a twentieth-century articulation of a structure developed in the literature of the previous two centuries. Generally, the notion of a strongly causal and retrospectively understood plot is primarily derived from, and best applies to, the realist novel of the mid-eighteenth to early-twentieth century.31 Peter Brooks freely admits that “our common

29. Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 96–108; James Phelan, “Present Tense Narration, Mimesis, the Narrative Norm, and the Positioning of the Reader in Waiting for the Barbarians,” in Understanding Narrative, eds. James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1994), 222–45. Phelan uses simultaneous narration to modify some of Suzanne Fleishman’s claims about tense and narrative. 30. J. Hillis Miller, “Ariadne’s Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line,” in Interpreta- tion of Narrative, eds. Mario J. Valdés and Owen J. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 158. In his essay, Miller complicates this idea by questioning linearity and simple causation, emphasizing repetition instead of succession. 31. It is true that a similar notion of plot has sometimes been inferred from Aristotle’s comments on tragedy. Aristotle enjoins, “It is the function of a poet to relate . . . things p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ sense of plot. . . . has been molded by the great nineteenth-century narrative tradition,” and that he gets his premises from and focuses on this tradition.32 Although many other narrative theorists share these predispositions, not all openly acknowledge them, and ideas derived from realist novels are sometimes presented as more broadly applicable. Scholes and Kellogg react against precisely this, and they undertake their study in order to “put the novel in its place . . . seeing the novel as only one of a number of narrative possibilities,” because “the tendency to apply the standards of nineteenth-century realism to all fiction naturally has disadvantages for our understanding of every other kind of narrative.”33 The Prelude serves as a counterexample to the necessity of reader retrospection. Wordsworth encourages his audience to read prospectively, constantly looking forward to a conclusion the reader knows from the very beginning of the poem. Wordsworth’s chosen model for his narrative structure—a river—emphasizes the differences between his text and retrospectively processed narratives. With a river, the flow happens in the opposite direction from a forking path, which changes the implications of the model and makes a river a more apt metaphor for prospective texts. With a path, the possible options are ever increasing when looking to the future, but only one option can be followed; the person traveling has a series of choices that decide an otherwise indeterminate future. A river emphasizes instead the simultaneous contributions of many small tributaries, all of which travel inexorably toward the same predetermined end. In a text with a plot structured like a river, there is no guesswork involved about which path the plot might follow, because there is always only one point toward which all the plot elements could and will converge. temporaL bLurrIng and LyrIcaL effects

The Prelude’s temporality becomes much more complex at the local level of an individual episode. The ice-skating section exemplifies such temporal complexity, and the poet’s concluding gloss of the episode that may happen, i.e. that are possible in accordance with probability or necessity,” and he denigrates episodic plots “in which there is neither probability nor necessity that the episodes follow one another.” See Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987) 12, 13. 32. Brooks, xi, xii. 33. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) 3, 6. ~ C h A p t e r

provides strong guidance to the reader. As a boy, Wordsworth and his friends stay out late to play on the frozen lake:

for me It was a time of rapture!—Clear and loud The village Clock toll’d six—I wheeled about, Proud and exulting like an untired horse That cares not for his home...... So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle: with the din Smitten, the precipices rang aloud; ...... while the stars, Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away. Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay,—or sportively Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng To cut across the reflex of a star That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed Upon the glassy plain: and oftentimes, When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks on either side Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still The rapid line of motion, then at once Have I, reclining back upon my heels, Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by me—even as if the earth had rolled With visible motion her diurnal round! Behind me did they stretch in solemn train, Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep. (1.429–63)

Early in the episode Wordsworth overtly describes what he felt at the time of the experience: “it was a time of rapture,” and he was “proud and exulting.” This mood colors the entire episode, but rather than continuing to state directly what he felt as a boy, Wordsworth begins to embody the emotion in his language. He implies the exultation of the actions through verbs like we “flew” and the banks “came sweeping p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ through the darkness,” and expresses it in the phrase, “we had given our bodies to the wind.” As Geoffrey Hartman notes, “Nature soon responds to the activity of the skaters. . . . The precipices ring” and “even the cliffs, which most easily give the impression of stock-still solitude, are now seen to participate in the general movement that informs the earth.”34 By the end of the episode it is not only nature that identifies with the emotions of the young boy; the older narrating Wordsworth has identified with his younger self, re-experiencing the rapture and steeping his language with the exultation he once again feels. As M. H. Abrams characterizes this phenomenon, “Wordsworth does not tell his life as a simple narrative in past time but as the present remembrance of things past, in which forms and sensations . . . evoke the former self which coexists with the altered present self in a multiple awareness.”35 Abrams maintains, however, that “there is a wide ‘vacancy’ between the I now and the I then.”36 Here the relationship between the “I now” and the “I then,” between Wordsworth as narrator and Wordsworth as character, changes noticeably over time, within a single episode. The emotional distance between the narrating and the narrated Wordsworth that we may infer at the opening of the ice-skating passage, has vanished by the end of it. The double consciousness associated with narrative retrospection, the “wide ‘vacancy,’” thus disappears as the episode progresses. Just as the emotional gap between narrator and character closes, so, too, does the temporal gap between discourse and story. The verbs are in the past tense, but it is an iterative past: the episode first implies, and later explicitly says, the described event has occurred numerous times.37 This passage uses simple past tenses (“the . . . Clock toll’d,” “I wheeled,” “we flew”), which in itself allows for the possibility of either singular actions, or single representative examples of repeated actions.38 Each

34. Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hop- kins, Rilke, and Valéry [1954] (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 18. 35. Abrams, 75. 36. Ibid. 37. Gérard Genette points out the importance of iterative narrative. See Narrative Dis- course: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 113–60. 38. W. H. Hirtle writes, “In our discussion of the simple and progressive forms . . . it was pointed out that the former often expressed a customary event, that is, an event which gives the impression of regular recurrence, or even of such a possibility.” W. H. Hirtle, Time, Aspect, and the Verb (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1975), 72. Laurel Brinton remarks, “In the simple past, there is no distinction between single situations and habits.” Laurel Brinton, The Development of English Aspectual Systems: Aspectualizers and Post-Verbal Particles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 250. Of course, a few moments’ reflection on English usage corroborates these claims. ~ C h A p t e r

action within the episode is thus directly and vividly presented, and seems like a particular event, even though the action might be iterative rather than singular. The temporal setting of the episode intensifies this ambiguity. We are given the very precise detail that “the village Clock toll’d six,” and we know that the events occur during the brief period of twilight when stars are visible in the east but the west is still orange from the just-set sun. Despite this specificity of time of day, other temporal information is quite vague. It is winter, but we do not know what month or date. We know Wordsworth is a young boy, but we do not know the specific year. The temporal setting thus associates the actions with a particular time of evening, but suggests that there were many such evenings in Wordsworth’s boyhood. This suggestion is confirmed by adverbs such as “not seldom” and “oftentimes” mentioned relatively late in the passage, which make explicit the iterative nature of this episode. The overall effect is to give the individual actions the vividness of singularity, but to unmoor from time the episode as a whole.39 The episode is not attached to any particular past moment, but it has the vividness of particularity—and it can thus seem almost present to readers.40 The combined emotional and temporal immediacy achieved by the end of the passage shifts its mode from narrative to lyric. As we have seen in the previous two chapters, lyric creates a sense of presentness in its illusion of simultaneity and its stress on the “now” of the poem’s creation or transmission. By the end of the ice-skating episode, Word- sworth has collapsed the emotional and temporal distance between his narrating self and the narrated boy. The reader, by extension, encounters Wordsworth’s perceptions and emotions as if they were related in the suspended present moment of lyric discourse. Herbert Lindenberger’s comment on the Dawn Dedication is equally appropriate to this and many other episodes: the passage moves “from a world of transitory

39. David Bromwich has noticed a similar iterativity, and a similar blurring of present and past tenses, in “Tintern Abbey,” where he finds “the invention of a grammatical tense that seems to cover both present and past.” Bromwich, 86. 40. The effect is similar to one described by Uri Margolin in his examples of verb tenses which do not match the temporal relationship between utterance and event. He categorizes these types of tense shifts, and some of their possible rhetorical effects, claiming that “in retrospective first-person narratives the historical present is clearly associated with the narrator’s reliving a past situation in its affective immediacy.” Uri Margolin, “Shifted (Displaced) Temporal Perspective in Narrative,” Narrative 9.2 (May 2001): 199. One type of historical present occurs in first-person retrospective narratives when “the speaker’s past state of consciousness act[s] as deictic center.” Margolin, “Shifted,” 199. I argue that in the skating episode (and in many other episodes in The Prelude), such a shift of consciousness occurs, and the narrator “reliv[es] a past situation in its affective immediacy,” but without a concomitant shift in verb tenses. p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ things to intimations of a more eternal realm . . . from the language of prose . . . through a landscape appropriate to the short lyric. . . . In time the passage moves from a sense of great distance between Wordsworth’s present state and the event he is depicting . . . to a gradual apprehension of the oneness of past and present.”41 Wordsworth has found a way to give the narrated event the timelessness and intensity of lyric. There are indeed narrated events, at least at a minimal level, within this particular episode, and within the lyric episodes generally. The episode involves characters who perform actions, and it implies basic causality. But if the narrative itself is extracted from the episode and examined on its own, the story is a terribly impoverished one, and has very little intrinsic interest or meaning. When the emotional and spiritual impact on Wordsworth is taken into account, the episode is of great significance. In The Prelude, as in the Lyrical Ballads, “the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and the situation and not the action and situation to the feeling.”42 The focus of the episode, what makes it so memorable, is the emotional effect of the events on Word- sworth. He puts the events of narrative in the service of the intense, subjective feeling of lyric. The content of the skating episode could be seen as an allegory of Wordsworth’s use of narrative elements to create lyric moments. For the first half of the episode, the young Wordsworth is in the company of his friends, surrounded by other characters. Half way through, he “leav[es] the tumultuous throng” and skates by himself, shifting away from the initial gesture toward social interaction and moving toward isolated subjective experience. While alone, Wordsworth tries “to cut across the reflex of a star / That fled, and, flying still before [him], gleamed / Upon the glassy plain.” He pursues a star—perhaps the closest thing in our experience to something fixed, permanent, and transcendent. In doing so, he actively moves in relation to the objects that surround him (the borders of the lake, the other skaters, etc.), but his changing relation to them is unimportant and does not influence the fixed distance between him and the image of the star. The unchanging relation between his subject position and the transcendent image is crucial. This mimics the poem’s abandonment of actions and characters to pursue the poet’s subjective relationship to what is permanent and transcendent, and consequently his status as lyric subject. A second optical curiosity described

41. Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s Prelude, 146. 42. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800),” in The Prose Works of Wil- liam Wordsworth, vol.1, eds. W. J. B Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 128. ~ C h A p t e r

in the skating episode reiterates this point. Wordsworth skates very fast in a circle, then “stop[s] short; yet still the solitary cliffs / Wheeled by [him]—even as if the earth had rolled / With visible motion her diurnal round!” Wordsworth is initially active and in motion in relation to the outside world. When Wordsworth stops and is still, the entire world seems to revolve around him. Action is used to bring about the appearance of a solitary, motionless subject in whose perception the objective world swirls and coalesces around him. The action of narrative thus ends in the extreme subjectivity of lyric, and the frenetic motion of the narrated event yields to the tranquility Wordsworth associates with poetic composition.43 As we have seen, Wordsworth recreates the emotional intensity of the original experience by blurring the narrating speaker into the narrated figure. The lyricization of the passage heightens the emotional intensity and creates a sense of atemporality and immediacy. The reader, however, is then invited to reinforce the continuity of the speaker’s personality by temporally blurring the episode in the opposite direction, moving from Wordsworth then to the Wordsworth now undertaking the narration. The ice-skating episode itself is immediately followed by an apostrophic rhetorical question:

Ye presences of Nature, in the sky, And on the earth! Ye visions of the hills! And Souls of lonely places! can I think A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed Such ministry, when ye, through many a year Haunt[ed] me thus among my boyish sports . . . ? (1.464–69)44

43. In his complementary reading of the ice-skating episode, Jeffrey Baker argues that the young Wordsworth defies both human time (by ignoring the church bells) and natural time (by staying out past sunset), and through this defiance achieves “a kind of liberation from time” in his visionary experience. Jeffrey Baker, Time and Mind in Wordsworth’s Poetry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980), 134. Christopher Miller thinks this episode “exemplifies the poetics of evening” by depicting “a dilation of time,” but puts more emphasis than I on how “the lapse of time is registered” in such evening scenes. Christopher R. Miller, The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2006), 101, 6. 44. This is one of many instances that prompt Geoffrey Hartman to note, “The episodes that constitute [Wordsworth’s narrative] run off into apostrophe and didactic speech . . . shifting from narrative to apostrophe, from description to an interpretation that assumes a ‘fellowship’ between nature and the developing poet.” Hartman, “Was it for this,” 18. p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~

The reference to nature’s “ministry” recalls previous associations of worship with poetry, suggesting that Wordsworth’s required response to nature’s ministrations is the creation of verse.45 Wordsworth presents poetry as the clear spiritual goal of nature’s intervention in his life, yet by phrasing it as a question he is inviting the reader’s participation in reaffirming the answer. We are spurred to think forward from this description of his “boyish sports” to the endpoint of The Prelude itself—Wordsworth’s status as a mature poet. The temporal unmooring of the episode facilitates this movement forward; because Wordsworth deemphasizes and renders ambiguous its precise chronological relationship to other episodes, the reader can more easily focus on its relationship to the ending. Since the goal toward which The Prelude tends is made explicit at the beginning rather than withheld until the end, there is little gap between the knowledge of the narrator and that of the reader. Wordsworth may have built into the poem an intellectual alliance with his audience, an immediate exchange of knowledge, to foster the reader’s own poetic development. For him, a poet has the same faculties as other men, albeit some of those faculties are more strongly developed. In the 1850 preface to the Lyrical Ballads, after listing the characteristics of a poet, Word- sworth explains, “Among the qualities there enumerated as principally conducing to form a Poet, is implied nothing differing in kind from other men, but only in degree.”46 If the structure of The Prelude encourages readers to follow closely and empathize with his development as a poet, then the poem might be meant to stimulate a similar development of the reader’s imaginative potential.47 As M. H. Abrams reminds

45. Metaphors of poetry as a form of worship, or a type of religious vocation, occur frequently in The Prelude, as when the narrator declares, “To the open fields I told / A prophecy:—poetic numbers came / Spontaneously, to clothe in priestly robe / A renovated Spirit singled out, / Such hope was mine, for holy services” (1.50–54). 46. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1850),” in The Prose Works of Wil- liam Wordsworth, vol. 1, eds. W. J. B Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Claren- don Press, 1974), 142. 47. The frequent addresses to Coleridge as an intended recipient of the poem suggest that Wordsworth’s ideal audience has both imaginative potential and empathy for him. But what Sarah Zimmerman says of Dorothy Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” might also be true of Coleridge in The Prelude: “[H]er suitability for the role of reader raises questions about the extent to which she can then represent an audience, and hence a social arena, in the poem.” Sarah M. Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (Albany: State Univer- sity of New York Press, 1999), 99. Nevertheless, The Prelude’s orientation toward the reader contradicts the school of thought, exemplified by J. S. Mill, that poetry in general, and lyric poetry in particular, is unconscious of an audience, is overheard rather than heard. Ken- neth Johnston emphasizes the social arena of The Prelude by placing it in the context of The Recluse’s broader scope, and by exploring within The Prelude itself the interactions among 0 ~ C h A p t e r

us in his discussion of the Essay of 1815, “Above all, Wordsworth says, his task is difficult because his poetry cannot appeal to a ready-made, hence passive, sensibility, but must communicate to the reader an active ‘power’ to cooperate with the ‘powers’ of the poet as applied ‘to objects on which they had not before been exercised.’”48 Wordsworth leaves his readers ample space to exercise their powers: we are left free to speculate precisely how this and other interactions with nature fostered his poetic development. Wordsworth himself says remarkably little about the precise causal connections. Susan Wolfson has noted, “For many readers—perhaps even for Wordsworth himself—the passages of intense recollection retain a certain distance from the glosses crowded around them.”49 As is frequently the case in Wordsworth’s poetry, the question of why he is moved by something in nature is subordinated to the fact that he is moved.50 Whereas Geoffrey Hartman argues that in such cases we only accept or reject Wordsworth’s statements that something is so, but do not question its mechanisms, Susan Wolfson suggests that “Wordsworth’s own restrictive interpretations open up, rather than close off, a reader’s inquiries.”51 What form might such inquiry take? One could look for evidence that nature influences Wordsworth’s choice of a poetic vocation in the events themselves, but some of them (including the ice-skating episode) seem too common and unremarkable. Wordsworth, of course, does remark

“the three terms of Wordsworth’s epic project—Man, Nature, and Human Life.” Johnston, 195 48. Abrams, 397–98. In his study of the lyric turn in nineteenth-century literature and twentieth-century criticism, Clifford Siskin suggests that Wordsworthian lyric “undermines the inherited distinction of kind between poet and reader by inducing the sympathetic participation of the latter in the supposedly liberating act of ‘making’ the poem.” Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 55. 49. Wolfson, Questioning, 164. 50. Hartman, Wordsworth’s, 7. Geoffrey Hartman’s comment on “Tintern Abbey” applies equally well to many episodes in The Prelude: “The description of objects and the statement of emotion that these objects bring are expressed by separate operations. There is no attempt to relate anything specific in the description to any specific feeling in statement, no simple or complex attempt to reconstitute some nexus of cause and effect.” Hartman, Unmediated, 4. Whereas Hartman here emphasizes the interpretive gap between natural description and emotion, elsewhere he discusses the gap between these elements and their stated significance: in The Prelude “the moral message, whenever explicit, is kept causally separate from the narrated experience.” Hartman, Unmediated, 15. 51. Hartman, Unmediated, 38; Wolfson, Questioning, 165. Wolfson goes on to claim, “It is this excess [of meaning] that is the impulse of the Romantic lyric, and it is with this that the narrative argument remains at odds.” Wolfson, Questioning, 165. I will argue that the narrative argument is put in the service of lyric excess, that the particular narrative structure of The Prelude is meant to foster the associational logic and atemporality of lyric. p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ 1 them, and the very fact that he notices what so many others would overlook could be the basis for connecting an episode to Wordsworth’s poetic ability. The detail in which he describes events then becomes further proof of his careful attention and poetic sensitivity. Other readers might find evidence in the lyric sensibility and emotional intensity Wordsworth brings to the events. The poet’s audience may also turn away from the story level altogether, and instead look for confirmation of his poetic greatness in the skilful construction of the discourse, in the poet’s use of language in the act of narrating. One could also construct connections between an episode and the endpoint through a careful consideration of the relationships among event, initial emotional response, memory, and later emotional response, taking into account alterations that Wordsworth makes (with or without conscious awareness), an approach taken by many of Wordsworth’s best critics. The poem’s prospective narrative structure not only encourages the reader’s active, imaginative engagement, but also creates an associative logic which has more in common with lyric than with traditional narrative, and which provides the large-scale structure necessary to a long poem while allowing the poem as a whole to function as one extended lyric. In his study of the poem, Herbert Lindenberger proposes “to look at each spot of time throughout The Prelude as a repetition of the last, in fact, to look at the poem as saying essentially the same thing again and again. . . . There is no real progression in The Prelude.”52 I agree that the poem has no easily identifiable progression; it certainly does not develop a plot as one usually expects in a narrative. And the episodes are repetitious, “saying essentially the same thing”—that Wordsworth’s interaction with nature contributed to his growth as a poet. But, as Lindenberger has also noticed, “To repeat means also to accumulate. The difference between a single spot of time . . . and The Prelude as a whole is more than a difference in degree; the accumulation, one after another, of visionary moments produces an illusion of heroic enterprise that no work of narrower breadth can match.”53 Thus, in the process of asserting the prodigiousness of his poetic powers and describing their growth, Wordsworth creates a work that is itself prodigious both in length and in seeming grandeur. The individual experiences accumulate to foster Wordsworth’s poetic development, and the narration of these accumulated episodes provides increasing proof of Wordsworth’s poetic prowess. The episodes all directly relate only to their common

52. Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s Prelude, 188. 53. Ibid., 193. ~ C h A p t e r

endpoint—Wordsworth’s status as a poet, but have no direct causal relation to each other. Rather than forming a causal chain, the individual parts of The Prelude are loosely but suggestively associated with each other to form a nuanced and convincing meditation on the author’s poetic abilities. The poem as a whole functions according to the logic of lyric, not the logic of retrospectively read narrative. Thus The Prelude uses narrative means to achieve lyric ends. Each individual episode tends toward the lyric suspension of time. And rather than functioning as a straightforward narrative progression in time, the poem as a whole strives for lyric simultaneity: the focus is on each episode’s contribution to the suspended moment of composition, rather than on temporal disjunctions among episodes. The end result is a general sense of timelessness in The Prelude, an eternal suspension of time. Yet this is combined with the forward-looking structure that encourages prospective reading. Taken together, these two effects make The Prelude itself feel like “something evermore about to be” (6.609), something both eternal and anticipatory. Wordsworth himself seems to have a similar feeling about the poem. Although he desires completion and fulfillment of his poetic potential, it seems that he paradoxically wants to avoid completion of this particular poetic work, that he only wants to anticipate its completion. Biographi- cal information could easily be invoked to support this: Wordsworth spent over half a century composing and revising The Prelude, and it was not published during his lifetime. But there is also evidence within the poem. Wordsworth expresses his preference for anticipation rather than completion in a passage describing the first years of the French Revolution:

Not favored spots alone, but the whole earth The beauty wore of promise—that which sets (As at some moments might not be unfelt Among the bowers of Paradise itself) The budding rose above the rose full blown. (11.117–21)

The initial glory of the Revolution is in part due to the promise, the anticipation, it confers to the world. The higher value of growth toward a specific end, over an end fulfilled, is not limited to the time of the Revolution. Rather, the poem attributes it to humanity’s progenitors, Adam and Eve, and thus makes it seemingly universal. The strange- p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ ness of this attribution draws attention to the image and idea: paradise is usually associated with timelessness and an utter lack of change, but Wordsworth speculates that promised change is desirable even in Eden. To further emphasize mankind’s attraction to what is not yet, but soon to be, fulfilled, Wordsworth constructs lines that approximate their subject. The promised illustration which starts in the second line with “that which sets” is followed by a self-conscious aside that delays the fulfillment of the illustrative image. When the image is given in the final line, it culminates in three consecutive stresses (“rose full blown”), bringing the line to a ponderous halt after the lilting and regular movement of “the budding rose above.” The preference for the promising but incomplete over the finished but inert might also extend to literary creations, including Wordsworth’s own work. The description of Yordas Cave has a telling analogy; the cave contains:

. . . shapes and forms, and tendencies to shape That shift and vanish, change and interchange Like Spectres, ferment silent and sublime! That, after a short space, works less and less Till, every effort, every motion gone, The scene before him stands in perfect view, Exposed, and lifeless as a written book! (8.570–76)

If a written book is lifeless, then so, too, would be the completed Prelude. Such a comparison is strengthened by the ease with which the description of the cave could be instead a description of The Prelude. The poem, too, shape-shifts, often has “tendencies to shape” rather than any clear form, and contains much sublime ferment. Once the poet’s efforts and the poem’s motions cease, that is, once the work is written and complete, a deadness ensues. Wordsworth wishes to defer this deadness of completion, to add incessantly to and change the poem, to delay indefinitely the closure that other forms of narrative require.54 The prospective structure that Wordsworth uses lends itself to almost interminable extension, to the repeated deferral of closure, without veering from the central subject or invoking unlikely or contrived plot twists.

54. As Lindenberger has remarked, “there is no real conclusion” to The Prelude, and the poem “might as well go on indefinitely.” Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s Prelude, 191. ~ C h A p t e r

the narrator’s temporaL reLatIonshIp to events

Although the reader receives sufficient guidance to process the meaning of events prospectively, Wordsworth obviously writes about these life events retrospectively. At times, the narrative voice calls attention to the gap in time, and the gap in knowledge, between Wordsworth as narrator and Wordsworth as character. One such self-consciously retrospective moment occurs when he returns home for the summer after his unprofit- able and unpoetic first year at Cambridge. He describes:

The froward Brook; which, soon as he was box’d Within our Garden, found himself at once, As if by trick insidious and unkind, Stripp’d of his voice, and left to dimple down, Without an effort, and without a will, A channel paved by the hand of man. . . . And now, reviewing soberly that hour I marvel that a fancy did not flash Upon me, and a strong desire, straitway At sight of such an emblem that shew’d forth So aptly my late course of even days And all their smooth enthralment, to pen down A satire on myself. . . . (1805, 4.40–55)55

This passage is one of the most explicit disjunctions between the awareness of the narrator and the awareness of the former self he narrates. Karl Kroeber has remarked, “Until the last books of The Prelude . . . the reader is given a double vision of the action of the poem: what Word- sworth experienced at the time and what he now realizes the significance of that experience to have been.”56 At the time of this incident, the

55. I quote the 1805 version here because metrical irregularities I analyze are reduced in the 1850 version, making the passage, in my opinion, much less effective. 56. Kroeber, 96–97. I think Kroeber elsewhere overstates the disjunction between the narrator and narrated character: “The principal fact about all of the poet’s early experiences described in Books I–VI is that he did not, at the time of their occurrence, understand their meaning and significance. In retrospect he sees how they contributed to the development of his imaginative power. But until that power had developed he had no means of fully understanding what had happened to him. He was the victim of experience, not its master.” Kroeber, 96. Wordsworth may not have fully understood the significance of the experiences p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ full force of the comparison between himself and the muted brook did not strike Wordsworth, but the event has gained greater importance in retrospect. Only the narrator can see how far from his natural path he had strayed during his Cambridge days, and only the narrator knows for certain that he would find his path again. If we keep in mind the river’s status as a model for Wordsworth’s narrative, then the use of a brook as the vehicle for this lesson is quite appropriate. The Prelude contains several examples in which the natural flow of a river or stream is impeded, by the whirl of an eddy, by man- made dams, by backward-flowing tides. These examples show that the metaphor of a flowing river may not always imply a steady course toward a known and natural end. Just as a river’s flow can be diverted, so could Wordsworth have been diverted from his progress toward his poetic vocation. Through his choices, Wordsworth might have ignored, minimized, or even counteracted the poetic influence he attributes to nature. The river metaphor usually allays Wordsworth’s anxieties by presenting his poetic greatness as preordained, but as we see here water imagery can also express his fear of wasting nature’s ministrations. This particular “emblem” of his “late course of even days” is especially apt since the stream is “stripp’d of his voice”—a disastrous state for a poet. Scansion of these lines dramatizes the conflict between voiceless regularity and a more natural forcefulness, and displays Wordsworth’s current poetic control, perhaps to alleviate the anxiety created by his admission of past inarticulateness:

⁄ ˘ ˘ ⁄ ˘ ⁄ ˘ ⁄ ˘ ⁄ Stripp’d of | his voice, || and left | to dim | ple down,

˘ ⁄ ˘ ⁄ ˘ ˘ ˘ ⁄ ˘ ⁄ Without | an ef | fort, || and | without | a will,

˘ ⁄ ˘ ⁄ ˘ ˘ ⁄ ˘ ⁄ A chan | nel paved | by the hand | of man.

Added emphasis, and perhaps a greater sense of violence, is given to “Stripp’d of his voice” because of the initial trochee. The line “Without an effort . . .” seems to imitate the listlessness it describes due to the use of a pyrrhic as the central foot and the caesura that divides the pyrrhic. when they happened, but they were the very source of his developing understanding; I do not, therefore, see him as the “victim” of these experiences. ~ C h A p t e r

The final line is irregular because it has only nine syllables, only four of which are stressed, and this irregularity may emphasize Wordsworth’s need as a poet for freedom from undue constraint. If his verse had to be as regular and measured as the brook, he too might be voiceless.57 Irregularity is used to wonderful effect in the following lines:

˘ ⁄ ˘ ⁄ ˘ ⁄ ˘ ˘ ⁄ ⁄ At sight | of such | an em | blem || that | shew’d forth

˘ ⁄ ˘ ˘ ⁄ ⁄ ˘ ⁄ ˘ ⁄ So apt | ly my | late course | of e | ven days

˘ ⁄ ˘ ⁄ ˘ ⁄ ˘ ˘ ⁄ ⁄ And all | their smooth | enthral | ment, || to | pen down

These lines are rich in spondees which call attention to some key phrases. The stressed syllables of “shew’d forth” emphasize how forceful the emblem should have been, while the stress on “late course” amplifies the double meaning of “late,” indicating both that this lifestyle was in the recent past (in respect to the visit home being narrated), and that he was tardy in his progress down his life’s course. A final spondee occurs with “pen down,” which stresses the act of writing which the narrating Wordsworth now undertakes, and perhaps echoes the idea that the brook has been penned in, thus holding together both the idea of restric- tion and the activity which finally freed Wordsworth of the impediment. All of these spondees are especially strong because each follows a pyrrhic. In the midst of these doubly stressed feet are five perfect iambs, all with equal stress (“of even days / And all their smooth enthralment”), perfectly mimicking the smoothness they describe. Since Wordsworth describes a time at which he is voiceless, his forward-looking narrative, which depends on an anticipated and inevitable outcome, entertains the possibility that the expected outcome may never be reached. Of course, many of the described events of Wordsworth’s life did not, at the time that they happened, point inevitably to his future as a poet. But before Wordsworth begins writing The Prelude, he has committed himself to his poetic vocation and to asserting retrospectively the importance of past moments in contributing to this goal.58 This is

57. In 1850, however, Wordsworth regularizes the line to five iambs by changing it to “A channel paved by man’s officious care.” Wordsworth’s revision here seems officious, but it falls in line with his general tendency to make the meter more regular: the later Wordsworth seems to be more at ease with the constraints of meter. 58. For M. H. Abrams, this retrospective assertion of design helps explain the discrep- p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ not to say, however, that Wordsworth always asserts the relationship between past and present to be simple and continuous; many critics have focused attention on his direct and indirect admissions of doubt and discontinuity. Susan Wolfson argues that “The Prelude is a poem informed by questions . . . despite its author’s eager hopes and manifest strategies of resolution” and that it presents a “world of uncertain retrospect.”59 In chapter 4 of Formal Charges, she notes several ways in which Wordsworth disrupts his own plot of poetic development: Wordsworth includes or adverts to extraneous and disturbing material, sometimes suggests that nature may be forgetful of her charge, or that nature’s teachings must be corrected by books, and includes accidents that “threaten the possibility of coherent self-knowledge.”60 While I agree with Wolfson that Wordsworth’s poem features “the interplay between his voices of didactic determination and indeterminate self-inquiry,” I wish to explore the structural, temporal, and rhetorical effects of his “didactic determination.”61 While I do not deny his often subtle and indirect expressions of doubt, his “manifest strategies of resolution” and their consequences are made more prominent by The Prelude’s very existence and its place in the English canon.62 Geoffrey Hartman’s assessment of Wordsworth’s poetry may appear to pose a more serious challenge to my argument, in that he claims, “Wordsworth’s childhood experiences work in two conflicting ways, they (1) prophesy the independence from nature of his imaginative powers, and (2) impress nature ineradicably on them. His genius as a poet arises primarily from the first of these actions; through the second, he becomes an inmate of the world, a man speaking to men.”63 By stressing the tension in Wordsworth’s poetry between a dependence on nature and the autonomous exercise of the imagination, Hartman raises the possibility that nature’s interventions may have been at cross purposes with Wordsworth’s poetic development, that the relationship between The Prelude’s episodes and its endpoint is one of conflict rather than ancies between Wordsworth’s account and the facts of his biography: “The major alterations and dislocations of the events of Wordsworth’s life are imposed deliberately, in order that the design inherent in that life, which has become apparent only to his mature awareness, may stand revealed as a principle which was invisibly operative from the beginning.” Abrams, 76. 59. Wolfson, Questioning, 131, 129. 60. Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 110–11, 115, 117, 118. 61. Wolfson, Questioning, 92. 62. Ibid., 131. 63. Hartman, Wordsworth’s, 218. ~ C h A p t e r

continuity.64 Yet Hartman does recognize a continuity between the two. He argues that as the poem progresses, nature gently instructs Word- sworth to grow independent of her instruction eventually, and claims that “it is not nature as such but nature indistinguishably blended with imagination that compels the poet along.”65 While I find much value and insight in Hartman’s analysis of Wordsworth’s descriptions of the imaginative faculty, I am less concerned with how an individual reader interprets the relationship between a given episode of The Prelude and nature’s ministrations, and more concerned with the larger structures that encourage the poem’s readers constantly to seek such relationships. In addition, my focus is on Wordsworth’s conscious rhetoric, rather than on a disjunction between poetry and nature which Hartman acknowledges is largely suppressed. Although Wordsworth does clearly assume a retrospective vantage toward the individual episodes of his past personal history, and tries to marshal all the certainty retrospection usually implies, his temporal and epistemological relationship to the endpoint of the poem is more ambiguous. Wordsworth’s position toward the poem’s goal depends heavily upon precisely how we define that goal, and upon historical context and the author’s psychology. Textual evidence supports at least three ways of defining the endpoint towards which The Prelude’s readers prospectively direct their attention. First, we could say that the poem’s goal is to demonstrate beyond any doubt Wordsworth’s potential to be a great poet. That is, the endpoint is the maturity of the mental faculties necessary to produce poetry, rather than the actual production of poems. This interpretation gains support from the narrator’s explicit identification of the poem’s goal in its final book:

. . . We have reached The time (our guiding object from the first) When we may, not presumptuously, I hope, Suppose my powers so far confirmed, and such My knowledge, as to make me capable Of building up a Work that shall endure; (14.306–11)

64. Richard Onorato has a similar argument that Wordsworth’s “inspired belief in the powers of the poet necessitated beliefs that went beyond Nature and which came unac- countably from his own imagination,” creating a “need to be independent of her [nature] and even superior to her.” Onorato, 263. 65. Hartman, Wordsworth’s, 48. p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~

Here, the emphasis falls on his mental powers and capability, rather than on the completion of any one poetic work. If we label the poem’s endpoint as Wordsworth’s poetic potential, then presumably the goal has been reached before he begins composing the poem, and hence the narrator assumes a retrospective position toward the entirety of the poem, including its end. In Gérard Genette’s terminology, the early references to the poem’s endpoint would then be internal prolepses, temporally located within the main sequence of story events.66 And yet if we assume that the narrator’s proleptic comments refer to Wordsworth being fully endowed with poetic potential, then we find it difficult to imagine how such an event or state could be fully narrated in its “proper” chronological place at or near the poem’s end. Because Wordsworth presents his poetic faculties as fostered by a gradual, cumulative series of events (the significance of which often became apparent only retrospectively), it would seem impossible to pinpoint a precise moment at which his poetic potential became complete. That is, neither he nor his readers can locate the crucial tipping point, the event through which he became capable of writing “a Work that shall endure,” but prior to which he was not fully capable. If such an event exists, then Wordsworth may very well have included it as one of The Prelude’s episodes, but he does not (and perhaps cannot) explicitly label it as the single narrative moment to which he has proleptically alluded throughout the poem. Genette’s distinction between completing prolepses which “fill in ahead of time a later blank” that is not later narrated in its “proper” chronological place, and repeating prolepses which “still ahead of time—double, however slightly, a narrative section to come,” does not seem adequate to this scenario (or at the very least, the reader cannot confidently decide which of the two labels to apply).67 Given this definition of the poem’s endpoint, perhaps all that Wordsworth can do is to advert repeatedly to a moment that can never properly be narrated. Carlyle remarked, “Between vague wavering Capability and fixed indubitable Performance, what a difference!”68—a difference which leads us to the second likely definition of the poem’s endpoint. Wordsworth articulates this difference when he repeatedly mentions the philosophical poem The Recluse, which he hopes to write after completing The Prelude:

66. Genette, 49, 68–71. 67. Ibid., 71. 68. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, eds. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 126. 100 ~ C h A p t e r

Then, a wish, My last and favourite aspiration, mounts, With yearning, tow’rds some philosophic Song Of Truth that cherishes our daily life; With meditations passionate, from deep Recesses in man’s heart, immortal verse Thoughtfully fitted to the Orphean lyre; But from this awful burthen I full soon Take refuge, and beguile myself with trust That mellower years will bring a riper mind And clearer insight. (1.227–37)

If Wordsworth saw the composition of The Recluse, and only The Recluse, as his “work that shall endure,” as the true goal and endpoint of The Pre- lude, then the narrator has not yet reached the goal. In this second case of how to define the endpoint, The Prelude features retrospective narration of most story events, but a prospective narration (in Uri Margolin’s sense of “a narrative of that which has not yet occurred at speech time”69) of a conclusion that lies outside of the text. The Prelude’s proleptic allusions to The Recluse would function as a type of lyric-narrative hybrid which Heather Dubrow terms an “anticipatory amalgam.” Such texts “combine qualities of narrative and lyric by referring to events that generally are explicitly or implicitly flagged as not having occurred in what is diegeti- cally identified as a ‘real’ world—and that may . . . or may not do so at some point.”70 They are “located both in the mind in the present and in a physical space that may exist in the future. . . . [T]hey typically heighten the speaker’s agency (though in so doing they may also draw attention to its limits), manipulate the listener, and both rely on and thematize shifts in temporality.”71 Since readers of the posthumously published Prelude know that Wordsworth never actually finished The Recluse, we can safely assume that this anticipated event does not happen, and that the proleptic references to it are completing, rather than repeating. That is, we know we will never be given a full narration of this event in its “proper” chronological place, simply because the event never happened and so has no “proper” chronological place. Readers then experience a tension between Wordsworth’s confident rhetoric pointing us forward

69. Margolin, “Of What,” 153. 70. Heather Dubrow, “The Interplay of Narrative and Lyric: Competition, Cooperation, and the Case of the Anticipatory Amalgam,” Narrative 14.3 (Oct. 2006): 265. 71. Ibid., 268. p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ 101 to the fulfillment of his poetic powers, and our own knowledge that he would never fulfill them through the work he intended to be his masterpiece. Wordsworth’s expressions of doubt gain more importance, and pathos, in this reading. We may decide, of course, that Wordsworth’s other works amply fulfill his potential. A third definition of the poem’s goal is thus possible if we focus on the actual production of great poetry in general, rather than on the potential for poetic production, or on the production of The Recluse in particular. A passage that supports this option occurs near the end of book 1 when the narrator comments on the value of recalling his childhood and writing The Prelude:

Meanwhile, my hope has been, that I might fetch Invigorating thoughts from former years; Might fix the wavering balance of my mind, And haply meet reproaches too, whose power May spur me on, in manhood now mature, To honourable toil. Yet should these hopes Prove vain, and thus should neither I be taught To understand myself, nor thou to know With better knowledge how the heart was framed Of him thou lovest, need I dread from thee Harsh judgements. . . . (1.621–31)

Here the narrator focuses on “honourable toil” rather than on mere potential, but the worthy poetic production he desires is not explicitly linked to The Recluse. Rather, the narrator suggests that his toil, if successful, will teach him to understand himself and show his audience how his inner being was formed: the poem he here hopes to complete is The Prelude. As M. H. Abrams aptly states, Wordsworth “announces the end of his long preparation for writing his masterpiece. But in describing that preparation Wordsworth . . . has achieved the masterpiece itself.”72 In narratological terms, Wordsworth narrates the poem’s goal concurrently; that particular story event is simultaneous with the act of narration. More precisely, the discourse itself is the fulfillment of the goal. The frequent prolepses would then place us in the narrator’s present moment, in the time of narration. This possibility is acknowledged by Gérard Genette and Teresa Bridgeman, but has special resonance for

72. Abrams, 117. 10 ~ C h A p t e r

The Prelude, because in this context the narrator’s present moment could be thought of as the lyric time of discourse.73 The proleptic references would then, in themselves, be one of several narrative techniques which Wordsworth uses to create lyric effects. As we have seen, each of the three possible definitions of the poem’s endpoint is supported by textual evidence. Which of the three we find most compelling depends in part on Wordsworth’s biography and psychology. He began The Prelude in 1798, the year Lyrical Ballads was published. Though he was a practicing poet, his reputation was by no means well established. At this point, Wordsworth could have been certain only of his poetic potential; he could not yet know whether or not any of his works would endure. By 1804 when he returned to and expanded The Prelude, he had increased his poetic output and enhanced his reputation. At this point, however, Wordsworth himself emphasized The Recluse as the motivation for and the proper sequel to The Prelude. In an 1804 letter to Richard Sharp, Wordsworth says of The Prelude, “It seems a frightful deal to say about one’s self, and of course will never be published, (during my lifetime I mean), till another work [The Recluse] has been written and published, of sufficient importance to justify me in giving my own history to the world.”74 He deems The Prelude insufficient to be an end in itself. Given the importance Wordsworth placed on the unfinished Recluse, he likely tried so hard to convince The Prelude’s audience that he would finish his philosophical masterpiece in order to convince himself that he would finish it. For Wordsworth, one of the chief virtues of The Prelude’s prospective structure is the relief it seems to provide for the anxiety displayed at the poem’s start. “Was it for this?” exclaims Wordsworth at the opening of the Two-Part Prelude, lamenting that his poetic achievements thus far do not live up to the potential he associates with his childhood relationship with nature. Although this question is placed less prominently in later versions of the work, the anxiety it displays is still prominent in both the 1805 and 1850 versions of book 1. Almost 150 lines (1850 1.114–269) are spent enumerating the vexations, delays, and insecurities attending the troubled birth of the poem, providing a disheartening context for the question which follows: was it for this? Consider this characteristically anxious moment:

73. Genette, 69; Teresa Bridgeman, “Thinking Ahead: A Cognitive Approach to Prolep- sis,” Narrative 13.2 (May 2005): 132. 74. William Wordsworth to Richard Sharp, 29 April 1804, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years 1787–1805, edited by Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed., revised by Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 470. p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ 10

That hope hath been discouraged; welcome light Dawns from the East, but dawns—to disappear And mock me with a sky that ripens not Into a steady morning. . . . (1.124–27)

Here one of the most common and clear natural indicators of things to come—light in the east portending the coming dawn—has become deceptive, and the event it promises does not follow. This false dawn is an emblem for both Wordsworth’s recent false starts in writing a work of large scope, and for the fear that nature’s promises of poetic greatness will indefinitely remain unfulfilled. The many assertions of the aim of The Prelude as demonstrating the growth of a poet’s mind, and hence the author’s status as a great poet as the goal to which the poem tends, may counteract Wordsworth’s own anxieties about the accuracy of such claims.75 By repeatedly and forcefully asserting poetic greatness as the demonstrated end of the poem, he can convince himself (and others) that nature’s promises will be fulfilled, and he can continue writing this work, which will stand as further proof of his gift for poetry. It is as if by continually stating that the dawn will come, Wordsworth can force the sun to rise. As the years passed and The Recluse remained unfinished, its future completion became less and less likely, but still remained a possibility. Only Wordsworth’s death foreclosed this possibility, and guaranteed that this goal of The Prelude would not be attained. Curiously, then, The Prelude’s readers have greater certainty about its conclusion (even before they finish the poem) than the narrator does, at least if the conclusion is taken to be the completion of The Recluse. Even if we define the poem’s endpoint as the production of lasting poetry in general, readers may be more certain of the outcome than Wordsworth was, despite his high esti- mation of himself.76 Wordsworth may have died a respected poet laureate, but the reputations of laureates can quickly decline, as was the case with Wordsworth’s predecessor, Robert Southey. The more time passes with Wordsworth’s canonical status unchallenged, the more certain are

75. Many critics have noted the tension between Wordsworth’s confident assertions and his nagging doubts, but Susan Wolfson’s The Questioning Presence and Richard On- orato’s The Character of the Poet feature especially subtle and extensive discussions of this topic. 76. I thus disagree with Richard Onorato’s claim that “whatever questions we may feel The Prelude answers, it did not answer satisfyingly the question that led him to write it in place of the projected Recluse: ‘to determine how far Nature and education had qualified him for such employment.’ He was depressed by his answer.” Onorato, 89. 10 ~ C h A p t e r

his readers that he has written works that shall endure. And in the case of poetic potential being the poem’s goal, readers are at least equally certain as Wordsworth of this outcome. The Prelude’s prolepses could serve as a counterexample to Teresa Bridgeman’s claim that “the chief feature of the proleptic frame is its provisional nature, its inbuilt ‘reac- tivatability.’ For we cannot know, as readers, whether this prolepsis is repeating or completing, not having yet read the rest of the text, nor can we tell whether it is internal or external for the same reason (this is not to say that we do not make reasonable guesses . . .).”77 Those first-time readers of The Prelude who define the poem’s goal as the completion of The Recluse will know from the start that the prolepses are completing and external.

The PreluDe’s structuraL sImILarItIes to other texts

The Prelude differs from many other narratives not because it invites readers to think prospectively, but rather because of the prominence and frequency of those invitations, and because of the readers’ certainty in their prospective knowledge. The reader of any text looks forward as well as back. Even in an essentially retrospective reading experience, in which we arrive at the full meaning at the end only through a backward gaze, the audience can construct provisional meanings at earlier points in the text. That is, the reader can speculate on the meaning of what has passed and can look forward to possible outcomes that will make sense of what has gone before. Peter Brooks has coined the apt phrase “the anticipation of retrospection” to describe this forward-looking phenomenon.78 And Paul Ricoeur claims that anticipation and retrospection are intimately connected, that the “backward look [of retrospection] is made possible by the teleological movement directed by our expectations when we follow the story,” by our anticipation of a satisfying ending.79 But this phenomenon differs from how a reader experiences The Prelude. Wordsworth gives us a much stronger version of prospectivity: the reader does not guess a possible end, but rather each reader knows the end of The Prelude from the very beginning (though there may be some disagreement among readers as to precisely how to define that end).

77. Bridgeman, 130. 78. Brooks, 23. 79. Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980–81), 170. p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ 10

There are, of course, some texts that predate The Prelude in which the end is known from the beginning: most notably, epic myths, which tell stories that are already quite familiar to their audiences. An epic allows the audience to analyze each episode for the ways in which it demonstrates the hero’s exemplarity, and the ways in which it leads to (or delays) the story’s ultimate end. As Paul Ricoeur describes it, “As soon as a story is well known—and such is the case with most traditional and popular narratives as well as with the national chronicles of the founding events of a given community—retelling takes the place of telling. Then following the story is less important than apprehending the well-known end as implied in the beginning and the well-known episodes as leading to this end.”80 In national epics, then, the audience’s task is to understand how the early events in the tale contributed to the ending. Similarly, in Wordsworth’s poem, the emphasis is not on what happened but on how it happened: the proleptic evocations of the poem’s endpoint create what Meir Sternberg calls “retardatory suspense.”81 Epics also often feature an episodic structure, comparable to The Prelude. But there are two key differences from Wordsworth’s text: in many epics, the episodes delay the ending, rather than fostering the ending; and the audience of an epic is familiar not only with the ending but also with every episode. A first-time reader of The Prelude, in contrast, may know the endpoint but is unfamiliar with the individual episodes, and can thus experience a sense of novelty and wonder similar to what Wordsworth initially experienced. While the prospectivity of epic depends upon knowledge gained previous to an encounter with a particular version of the myth, the prospectivity of Wordsworth’s text is built into the poem itself. Autobiographical writings about theological or artistic vocations also have endings which are known from the beginning, and share other similarities with The Prelude. Critics often view Wordsworth’s project as a secularized outgrowth of confession literature that dates back to St. Augustine. This, in turn, influenced later writers on artistic vocation, most notably in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Remembrance of Things Past. Other texts in this genealogy exhibit some prospectivity: certainly a reader of a confession understands from the beginning that the episodes will all relate to sin or salvation, and that the point of the

80. Ibid., 175. 81. Sternberg claims, “overt anticipation . . . has the power to evoke suspense—or, where more reliable, the power to modulate genuine into retardatory suspense: ‘What will happen?’ into ‘How?’” Meir Sternberg, “Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity,” Poetics Today 13.3 (Autumn 1992): 536. 10 ~ C h A p t e r

text is the author’s conversion. These narratives share another key element: an associative, rather than causal, logic. In the case of The Prelude, the individual experiences accumulate to foster Wordsworth’s poetic development, and the narration of these episodes provides increasing proof of Wordsworth’s poetic prowess. More generally, in such texts the episodes all directly relate only to their common endpoint, the attain- ment of religious or artistic vocation, but the individual episodes may not have a direct causal relation to each other. This direct linkage to the endpoint fosters the forward movement of prospective reading. Given these similarities, the prospective structure of The Prelude clearly has antecedents in the confessional genre, and it, in turn, influenced later artists’ autobiographical works. The Prelude, however, is more purely prospective than many other histories of artists because Wordsworth carefully selects which character traits he presents, and specifies the kind of artist he is. By contrast, Rousseau in his Confessions presents himself as multifaceted and contradictory. As John Freccero remarks, Rousseau wants to differentiate himself from his readers to mark himself as a unique individual.82 The text through which Rous- seau presents his complex, contradictory personality is itself complex and contradictory: “To understand me, Rousseau says more than once in the Confessions, most impressively at the close of book 4, the reader must follow me at every moment of my existence; and it will be up to the reader, not Rousseau, to assemble the elements of the narrative and determine what they mean.”83 Wordsworth gives us a more simplified story, but this simplicity results from Wordsworth’s work in shaping his story into a coherent whole; whereas Rousseau leaves the work of organization and meaning production largely up to his reader, Wordsworth carefully guides his audience.84 The Prelude thus gives us a stronger sense

82. John Freccero, “Autobiography and Narrative,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Au- tonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, eds. Thomas C. Heller et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 23. 83. Brooks, 33. 84. I believe this also explains the difference between The Prelude and what Seymour Chatman calls “the modern plot of revelation.” Chatman, 48. Chatman says of revelatory plots, “Early on we gather that things will stay pretty much the same. It is not that events are resolved (happily or tragically), but rather that a state of affairs is revealed. Thus a strong sense of temporal order is more significant in resolved than in revealed plots. . . . Re- velatory plots tend to be strongly character-oriented.” Chatman, 48. I would argue that in most revelatory plots, the character revealed is much more multifaceted and contradictory than the aspects of himself Wordsworth presents in The Prelude. As a result, readers of The Prelude are more assured of the ending than in plots which present a more surprising revelation of character (with the changes in understanding as time passes implied by the word “revelation”). p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ 10 of the end at the beginning, and the associations from each episode to the end are more predictable. In the case of religious confessions like Augustine’s, the distinction between past and present selves is striking. In fact, the radical division between the past sinner and the present saint often makes it difficult to see the continuity between the two selves, and hence to see the end as immanent in the beginning. As M. H. Abrams remarks, “An important difference [from The Prelude] is that in Augustine’s account, although his spiritual preparation has been long, the conversion is instant and absolute, an accession of grace which takes place at a precise point in time . . . and effects at a stroke the destruction of the old creature and the birth of the new.”85 John Freccero also emphasizes this disjunction between selves, but goes on to see it as a necessary feature of all first- person retrospective narration. Freccero claims that Augustine’s Confes- sions is “the paradigm for all representations of the self in a retrospective literary structure.”86 He sees a split between the narrated self and the narrating self as the defining characteristic of this paradigm. Accord- ing to Freccero: “[The destruction of the self is a] theme inherent in the autobiographical genre, which, when it claims to be true, definitive, and concluded, implies the death of the self as character and the resurrection of the self as author. In theological terms, conversion is the separation of the self as sinner from the self as saint; but in logical, or narratological, terms, this separation founds the possibility of any self-portraiture, a separation between the self as object and the self as subject when the two are claimed to be the same person.”87 Wordsworth does occasionally manifest this division of selves, by acknowledging that the self as retrospective narrator understands more or differently than the self as character, as in the penned brook anecdote. But much more often, he elides the differences between the narrating man and the narrated youth by focusing on continuity rather than radical change. In fact, the major-

85. Abrams, 113. Geoffrey Hartman, in contrast, stresses the similarity between Words- worth and Augustine: “Wordsworth’s experience, like Petrarch’s or Augustine’s, is a conversion: a turning about of the mind as from one belief to its opposite.” Hartman, Wordsworth’s, 49. Susan Wolfson claims that Wordsworth differs from Augustine in the uncertainty of the former’s conversion: “The deeper subject of The Prelude is Wordsworth’s uncertain negotiations with the providential plot . . . of his argumentative intention. . . . The Prelude reads less like ‘spiritual autobiography’ and more like the dramatic monologue of a poet struggling to compose his life in such terms.” Wolfson, Questioning, 138. 86. Freccero, 17. 87. Ibid., 16–17. Susan Wolfson makes the opposite argument from Freccero: “It is the informing condition of autobiography that its aim is radically implicated with its means, that its agent of inquiry is continuous with its object of inquiry.” Wolfson, Questioning, 150. 10 ~ C h A p t e r

ity of the text virtually eliminates the split between selves.88 The resulting homogeneity of character allows the reader to project forward to the text’s end much more smoothly and consistently. The Prelude spans the autobiographical gulf between narrating and narrated self, serving as an interesting counterexample to Freccero’s analysis of the genre. The poem is a purer, more simplified exemplar of prospective reading than previous texts in the literary tradition of confessions and tales of artistic vocation. Wordsworth’s confidence as a retrospective author usually seeps into his presentation of his younger self, creating the impression that even as a young boy experiencing the described events, he understood that nature was forming him for poetry. Yet Wordsworth’s mode of presentation also preserves the sense of surprise and wonder he felt at the time of each experience, and recreates that sense so vividly that the older narrator seems to re-experience his initial emotional response. He may begin to recollect an emotion in tranquility, but through the process of description the powerful feeling once again spontaneously overflows.

changes In the 1850 PreluDe

The use of a prospective structure to replace a traditional retrospective reading experience and to push The Prelude toward lyric is very well- developed in both the 1805 and 1850 versions. The 1850 version further undermines novelistic, retrospective narrative in two distinct ways: it reduces embedded retrospective narratives, and it reduces direct discourse. Many sections of the 1805 Prelude that could be considered traditional retrospective narratives are shortened or eliminated in the 1850 version. These stories include the Discharged Soldier (1805, 4.361–504), the Maid of Buttermere (1805, 7.311–60), and the Matron’s Tale (1805, 8.222–311). They are all easily recognizable as typical narratives with multiple characters acting and being acted upon in a causal chain of

88. Clifford Siskin notes that by tracing his imagination, Wordsworth emphasizes continuity within the “chronological chaos of lyrical autobiography.” Siskin, 18. The exceptions to such continuity occur most frequently in the books on the French Revolution and its aftermath, a period that constitutes, for Abrams and many others, Wordsworth’s spiritual and political crisis. As Sarah Zimmerman suggests, “What Wordsworth discovers in lyricism . . . is its capacity to accommodate both his radical and conservative selves, and not just consecutively, but simultaneously, as ambivalence.” Zimmerman, 82. Nonetheless, much of the poem uses lyric association to reduce ambivalence and to enlist the reader in asserting the continuity and necessity of Wordsworth’s poetic development (if not his political development). p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ 10 events, structured to have a beginning, middle, and end, with the end of the story revealed only at the end of the discourse, at which time it can retrospectively confer greater significance on the events that came before. Brief plot summaries of these tales should provide a concrete sense of their recognizability as stories, that is, as standard retrospective narratives.89 In the first story, Wordsworth comes across a discharged soldier, recently returned to England from the tropics, walking his long journey homeward, and Wordsworth insists on leading the man to a nearby cottage where he can get food and shelter for the night; yet the soldier resists Wordsworth’s entreaties that in the future he will ask for assistance. In the Maid of Buttermere, the title character is wooed into a sham wedding ceremony with a man who is already married to another woman; but the deceived girl goes on to be a model of feminine mod- esty. In the Matron’s Tale, a shepherd’s young son goes looking for a stray sheep during a fierce storm and, in attempting to rescue the sheep, becomes stranded amidst torrential waters but is saved by his father. All three constitute short, yet complete and followable, stories that obey the usual conventions of narrative. Together, they comprise a very small percentage of the 1805 Prelude, but in the 1850 version these traditional narratives are noticeably diminished and are even more negligible to the poem as a whole. The tale of the Discharged Soldier is shortened by 42 lines, a reduction of a third, and the story of the Maid of Buttermere is shortened by 8 lines, a reduction of one sixth. The Matron’s Tale is completely eliminated. But the most notable and substantial expurgation is the story of Vau- dracour and Julia, which, in the 1805 version, consists of 380 lines and comprises nearly half of book 9. In the tale, Vaudracour is a young man of noble birth who falls in love with a commoner named Julia. Knowing that their marriage would be forbidden by his father, they pursue their passion, and Julia becomes pregnant. Vaudracour’s father is incensed

89. It might be objected that one could just as easily provide a plot summary for The Prelude as a whole. Such a summary might look something like this: as a young boy, Word- sworth had an unthinking but intimate and beneficent relationship with nature, which cultivated his poetic sensibility. When he went to college, this relationship became temporarily estranged, and Wordsworth’s experience with the French Revolution further disil- lusioned him. Yet under the influence of nature (and Coleridge and Dorothy), Wordsworth is rejuvenated and begins to be worthy of nature’s gifts by becoming a great poet. This is indeed a story, but the brevity of it compared to the expansiveness of the actual poem clearly shows that this thread of traditional narrative is not enough to sustain The Prelude. I argue that prospective narration strengthens the poem’s otherwise flimsy structure and allows the poem’s extensive elaborations to seem much more central and necessary than they would in a more traditional narrative framework, largely because the poem’s reader knows in advance the end to which all the episodes relate. 110 ~ C h A p t e r

and sends men to arrest his son, but Vaudracour resists and kills one of them. As a result, Vaudracour spends time in and out of prison, but he is able to return to Julia to see their son born. Soon after, Julia’s mother sends her to a convent, and Vaudracour chooses to raise the child alone. The baby soon dies by an unspecified unfortunate accident, and Vau- dracour ends an utter recluse. This plot is developed, clearly causal, and fairly complex, and bears all the marks of a conventional narrative. Vaudracour and Julia is by far the longest of the embedded traditional narratives in the 1805 Prelude, and it is entirely eliminated in 1850. Yet the story leaves some marks in the 1850 version; its expurgation is not smoothly and silently effected. In fact, Wordsworth explicitly notes its absence in the later version, composing this awkward transition where the tale once was: “So might—and with that prelude did begin / The Record; and in faithful Verse was given / The doleful sequel” (1850, 9.557–59). Further attention is drawn to the omission, and his editorial decision is partly explained, by the analogy that follows:

. . . But our little Bark On a strong River boldly hath been launched, And from the driving current should we turn To loiter wilfully within a Creek, Howe’er attractive, Fellow Voyager! Would’st thou not chide? . . . (1850, 9.559–64)

Wordsworth assumes that the reader would have chided the inclusion of the Vaudracour and Julia episode, and hence the reader will agree his editorial decision to omit it is a wise choice. The reader, as the “Fel- low Voyager” of the narrator, shares his knowledge of what material is important for this poetic project and what is tangential to it. In this case, the reader even shares knowledge of some of Wordsworth’s editorial practices in revising the poem. This passage, then, is a strong statement of the alliance on equal terms between the narrator and reader that is fostered by Wordsworth’s prospective guidance. This self-conscious, explicitly stated rationale for the change in narrative content of the poem is also noteworthy because it reinvokes the crucial river metaphor. The passage compares the main subject of the poem to a mighty river and denigrates the embedded tale of Vaudracour and Julia as a dribbling creek that only distracts from the progression of the main current. Rather than emphasizing that the stream, in its small way, contributes to the strength of the river, Wordsworth says the p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ 111 stream is a turn from the river, and that following it would be a willful avoidance of his bold task. By the logic of prospective reading and the poem’s subject, if an episode contributes nothing to the growth of the poet’s mind, it does not belong in The Prelude. And if the story of Vau- dracour and Julia is taken at face value, it is hard to see how it would contribute,90 except perhaps as strengthening Wordsworth’s support of the French Revolution by illustrating the wrongs of the class system under the Ancien Régime. The story is told entirely in the third person, and Wordsworth has never directly interacted with, or even seen, the characters it depicts. This would make difficult Wordsworth’s subjective appropriation of their objective experiences—an important reason for the dearth of novelistic third-person narratives in The Prelude. One side effect of these expurgations of narratives is a notable decrease in direct quotations of characters other than Wordsworth himself. The tale of Vaudracour and Julia contains three direct quotations of Vaudracour and one of Julia, and the episode known as the Matron’s Tale contains one direct quotation each from the matron and from the shepherd’s son.91 All six of these instances are clearly absent from the 1850 Prelude, and the 1850 version also eliminates a direct quotation in the section commonly referred to as the Dream of the Arab, discussed in detail below.92 These seven eliminations are more surprising when another statistic is kept in mind: only seven of the direct quotations of characters other than Wordsworth that appear in the 1805 version are retained in the 1850.93 A full half of the direct quotations are eliminated

90. Of course, many critics view the Vaudracour and Julia episode as a veiled expression of Wordsworth’s affair with Annette Vallon, and hence as very significant for the development of the poet’s mind. Whether or not the episode is a conscious or subconscious venue for confronting his feelings about Annette, it would not have been perceived as such by his readers in 1850. I thus consider the Vaudracour episode not in terms of its psychological value for Wordsworth, but rather in terms of its overt place in the poem’s narrative structure and the importance assigned to it by Wordsworth’s anticipated audience. 91. The line numbers are 9.707–11, 9.799–810, 9.818–19, 9.775, 8.252–57, and 8.248–52. See “Transcription of MS. A,” in The Thirteen-Book Prelude, vol. 2, ed. Mark L. Reed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 471–993. 92. In MS. A, the friend who had the dream is directly quoted from line 5.110–39, although a quotation mark appears only at the beginning of the quotation. In later revisions, the quotation mark is eliminated, as shown in lines 5.113–43 of Manuscript D. See “Transcription of MS. D,” in The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 347–1167. 93. Quotation marks are placed around these seven quotations in the Cornell edition transcriptions of both the Manuscript A version of the 1805 Prelude, and Manuscript D, which became the 1850 Prelude. The line numbers in Manuscript A are 5.88–90, 5.130–31, 9.519–20, 10.87–88, 10.100, 10.431–32, and 10.501. The corresponding lines in Manuscript D are 5.88–90, 5.134–35, 9.515–16, 10.93–94, 10.106, 10.433–34, and 10.498. 11 ~ C h A p t e r

in the later version.94 Even taking into account the overwhelming domi- nance of Wordsworth as the central character of the poem and the small space given to other characters, the initial number of direct quotations of other characters is surprisingly small, and the number is even further reduced in 1850. This scarcity could stem from the same cause that I think underlies the dearth of third-person narratives—Wordsworth’s inability to appropriate subjectively these objectively presented experiences. A direct quotation presents the particular words used by another character, and its visual presentation stresses its separation from the language of the narrator. Direct quotations carry an air of objectivity, and independence from the thought and language of the narrator, that make them difficult to subsume under Wordsworth’s experience and the language through which he expresses it. Rather than simply eliminating these troublesome quotations, Word- sworth could have subjectively appropriated them by transforming them into indirect discourse, subordinating them within his own language and thought patterns. Wordsworth does not use this potential solution, preferring instead the eliminations discussed above. There is, however, one stunning example of the appropriation of another character’s experience, one that goes beyond the grammatical change from direct to indirect discourse, found in the Dream of the Arab episode (1805, 5.49–139). The dream as a whole is attributed to a friend in the 1805 version and largely presented as a direct quotation of the friend’s recitation of the dream. In the 1850 version, Wordsworth does not merely change the dream to an indirect report in his own words—he now appropriates the dream itself, claiming that he, and not his friend, was the dreamer. The original says of the friend, “Sleep seiz’d him, and he pass’d into

94. There is one line that appears as an indirect quotation in 1805 and is changed to a direct quotation in 1850. The earlier version states, “. . . . he replied / In the familiar language of the day / That ‘Robespierre was dead’” (10.533–35). Though the italics and quotation marks denote a direct quotation, the verb tense of “was” and the use of “that” to introduce the quoted phrase strongly suggest the utterance is indirect. The quotation is made unambiguously direct in the 1850 version: “In the familiar language of the day / Cried, ‘Robespierre is dead!’” This one change from indirect to direct is counterbalanced, however, by the elimination of two other phrases that seem to be marked as direct in the 1805 version, but are somewhat ambiguous due to the absence of quotation marks. In 1805 the poem states that shepherds feed their flocks in coves “long as the storm is lock’d / (So do they phrase it)” (8.363–64), clearly marking the word “lock’d” as terminology specific to the shepherds. The 1805 version also implies that the Matron’s Tale is a direct quote of the matron by inserting the parenthetical aside “(thus did the Matron’s Tale begin)” (8.224). Both these quotations are entirely eliminated from the 1850 version. If these three slightly ambiguous cases are added to the tally, the 1805 version contains sixteen direct quotations from characters other than Wordsworth, and the 1850 version contains only eight. p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ 11 a dream” (1805, 5.70), after which the narrator spends 18 lines setting the scene of the dream in a third person narration of what his friend saw. The poem then directly quotes the Bedouin’s words, and promptly switches to an extended 50-line first person narration by the friend. That is, the 1805 poem shifts from an indirect report of the friend’s dream to a direct quotation of the friend’s recitation of the dream. This version is quite strongly marked as the friend’s report of his experience; the inter- jections “said my Friend continuing” (1805, 5.91) and “My Friend continued” (1805, 5.110) are clearly meant to remind the reader that these words, and this experience, belong to a third person and not to Word- sworth. In the 1850 version Wordsworth appropriates the words and the experience. The narrator now says, “Sleep seized me, and I passed into a dream” (1850, 5.70, emphasis mine). The change clearly indicates that at least one of the versions must be historically inaccurate: the dream could not have been dreamt by both Wordsworth and his friend.95 Despite this biographical illogicality, the change in attribution neatly follows the logic of Wordsworth’s poetic project in The Prelude. The importance of the dream does not come from providing an objective report of what was told to Wordsworth, from the identity of the friend who tells it, or from the relationship between Wordsworth and his friend. The dream’s significance is its suitability as an allegory for Wordsworth’s thoughts and feelings about poetry and science, as a manifestation of Wordsworth’s subjective experience. Even in the 1805 version, Wordsworth stresses how congenial the dream is to his own thoughts. Wordsworth tells his friend about his anxiety over the frailty of books as repositories of man’s knowledge, and the friend confesses that he experienced “kindred hauntings” before having the dream (1805, 5.55). The dream, then, stems from concerns shared by the two men, and afterwards Wordsworth is bemused by his friend’s vision, often thinking of the Arab and “fanc[ying] him a living man” (1805, 5.143). Wordsworth even identifies with the Bedouin, confessing, “I, methinks / Could share that Maniac’s anxiousness, could go / Upon like errand” (1805, 5.159– 61). If Wordsworth so closely identifies with the dreamer and the dream, the change in attribution of the dream to Wordsworth himself is a logical extension. His appropriation of the episode further emphasizes the relation of the dream to Wordsworth, his particular subjective reaction to it, and its relation to his thoughts. The 1850 version hence eliminates

95. In fact, it was dreamt by neither Wordsworth nor a friend of his. The episode is an elaboration of a dream of Descartes, as is demonstrated by Jane Worthington Smyser in “Wordsworth’s Dream of Poetry and Science,” PMLA 71 (1956): 269–75. 11 ~ C h A p t e r

the surrounding narrative implied by the friend’s existence and instead emphasizes the subjective vision of lyric, and the growth of the mind toward which the prospective structure tends.

the narratIve vaLue of personIfIcatIon

Because it diminishes the importance of traditional narrative and increases the importance of prospectivity and lyricism, the 1850 version has an even greater dearth of characters and of readily identifiable actions than the 1805 version. In both versions, this lack is somewhat compensated by the projection of activity and human character onto natural objects—by personification. That Wordsworth frequently ani- mates and humanizes the natural landscape is no surprise to his later readers. After all, Ruskin did cite Wordsworth as one of the poets to whom the pathetic fallacy, in which strong emotion prompts a poet to “attribut[e] . . . characters of a living creature” to an inanimate object,96 is most congenial. Wordsworth acknowledges this predilection in a passage from book 3:

To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower, Even the loose stones that cover the high-way, I gave a moral life; I saw them feel, Or linked them to some feeling. . . . (1850, 3.130–33)

By giving a moral life to natural objects, Wordsworth can make more tangible nature’s capacity for moral instruction, which is so central to Wordsworth’s thought. By claiming that he “saw them feel, / Or linked them to some feeling,” he juxtaposes perception and creation. But since the latter phrase likely functions as an appositive, rather than as an exclusive alternative, to the former phrase, the pairing blurs the line between perception and creation in a way that is consistent with Wordsworth’s larger philosophy, and blurs the distinction between literal and figurative language. An animated, personified natural landscape is well-suited to Wordsworth’s ideas about nature, perception, and language, and this suitability is a basic tenet of Wordsworth criticism.97 What remains to be

96. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 3, ed. John D. Rosenberg (Charlottesville: Uni- versity Press of Virginia, 1998), 65. 97. For instance, Roger N. Murray comments, “The Wordsworthian vision is a seeing of the middle ground where man and nature approach a common degree of animation; p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ 11 explored is its suitability to Wordsworth’s experiments with genre. For the blurring between “saw them feel” and “linked them to some feeling” allows personification both to present objects as active characters and to link these objects to Wordsworth’s subjective feelings. This partly compensates for the paucity of genuine narrative characters, and allows the projection of inner emotion and the display of poetic craftedness that are associated with lyric.98 Similar advantages might be reaped from two notable extensions of personification in the 1850 version. The first is a regular pattern of pronoun changes: “it” is changed to “her,” or “itself” to “herself,” fourteen times in the 1850 version. Five of these refer to the “mind,” two to “church,” one each to “heart,” “man’s nature,” “earth,” “bird,” “glow worm,” and “ear,” and in one instance an “it” referring to “mind” is changed to a “her” referring to the revised “soul.”99 In some cases, an ungendered noun, such as “heart” or “mind,” is gendered by the pronoun change, and is thus humanized and given a very low level of personification that was absent before. In other cases, the noun that functions as the pronoun’s referent was already overtly personified in the 1805 version, and the pronoun change reinforces that personification. One of the more interesting examples of the latter case reads “I saw the snow-white Church upon its hill / Sit like a throned Lady, sending out / A gracious look all over its domain” in the 1805 version (4.13–15). the life of things becomes more evident when the discontinuity between man and nature is overcome, and this can be partially accomplished either by animating things or by de- animating man.” Roger N. Murray, Wordsworth’s Style: Figures and Themes in the Lyrical Ballads of 1800 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 47. Herbert Lindenberger notes, “This habit of interchanging qualities of the animate and inanimate, of the mind and external nature, is central to The Prelude. . . . It is the natural method with which he communicates his early spiritual experiences and accounts in poetic terms for his mental and emotional development; above all, it is his way of recapturing poetically that sense of the unity of all existence which he had felt on so intuitive a level in early childhood.” He also states, “It is difficult to distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical level in Wordsworth, for the literal becomes figurative and then literal again.” Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s Prelude, 44–45, 69. Geoffrey Hartman notes Wordsworth’s tendency to describe the way a scene impresses his perception and then attribute that impression as a quality of the scene. Hartman, Unmediated, 22–23. Hartman elsewhere links the “dizzy openness of relation between the human mind and nature” to the blurring of literal and figurative. Hartman, Wordsworth’s, 66. 98. M. H. Abrams notes that “on the recurrent level of narration in which mind and nature must suffice to generate the plot of The Prelude, a heavy requisition is placed on nature.” He also observes, “In many passages, for example, nature is endowed with the attributes and powers of a mother, father, nurse, teacher, lover, as well as a deity (or dei- ties).” Abrams, 94, 92. 99. In the 1805 version, the respective line numbers are 3.112, 3.369, 6.180, 6.314, 6.667; 4.13, 4.15; 4.139; 5.18; 6.591; 2.133; 7.44; 2.434; 6.545. 11 ~ C h A p t e r

When both “its” are changed to “her,” the church is personified even before the simile of the “throned Lady” begins—the vehicle very subtly spills over into the tenor. This both enhances the activeness of the object, making it a stronger stand-in for actual characters, and enhances the metaphoric, noticeably poetic, element of the phrase. It thus, albeit in a limited way, counteracts the absence of the events of traditionally structured narratives, and emphasizes the lyric time of the writing and experiencing of the poem as poem. A second extension of personification in the 1850 version is its application to abstract concepts, in addition to inanimate objects. This extension is surprising, because Wordsworth vehemently objects to the overuse of abstract personifications in his 1800 “Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads”:

The Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes. . . . My purpose was to imitate, and, as far as possible, to adopt the very language of men; and assuredly such personifications do not make any natural or regular part of that language. They are, indeed, a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such; but have endeavoured utterly to reject them as a mechanical device of style. . . . I have wished to keep the Reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by doing so I shall interest him.100

Wordsworth clearly objects to the “mechanical,” conventional use of abstract personification so common in eighteenth-century poetry. In place of poetic convention, Wordsworth establishes “the very language of men” as the standard by which poetic diction must be chosen and judged. In The Prelude, however, we are only in the company of the poet’s flesh and blood: the poem does not contain the wealth of striking characters that we find in the Lyrical Ballads. Instead of allowing a variety of characters to speak in “the very language of men,” The Prelude is overwhelmingly dominated by the language of one man—Wordsworth. Because the poetic experiments being undertaken in the two works differ, one of the grounds for Wordsworth’s earlier objection to abstract personifications no longer holds, and a greater need for the illusion of character and action provided by personification is created. The 1805 Prelude, although it incessantly personifies natural objects, contains only four passages with personifications of abstract concepts.101

100. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1850),” Prose Works, vol. 1, 131. 101. In the 1805 version, the line numbers are 3.630–43, 6.99, 10.287, and 10.697. p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ 11

The less overtly narrative 1850 version keeps all four passages of abstract personification, and adds seven more.102 In one such addition, Word- sworth says of the streets of Paris, “. . . Not a look / Hope takes, or Doubt or Fear are forced to wear, / But seemed there present . . .” (1850, 9.60–62). These personifications are quite conventional and minimally drawn, yet in this context they could be viewed as effective shorthand for the human character types who display these traits. Many of Word- sworth’s other added personifications are not as felicitous, however. When he states that summer “. . . lacked not intervals / When Folly from the frown of fleeting Time / Shrunk . . .” (1850, 4.347–49), the figures have the disadvantage of being conventional and cursory, without providing any semantic or stylistic advantages. In at least one case, a personification added to the 1850 version unintentionally undermines its meaning. Wordsworth praises the work of a shepherd by intoning, “Philosophy, methinks, at Fancy’s call, / Might deign to follow him through what he does / Or sees in his day’s march . . .” (1850, 8.249–51). What philosophy can learn from a shepherd is the value of simplicity and naturalness; yet there is nothing simple or natural about the language in which the sentiment is expressed. These added personifications are often infelicitous, and it is tempting merely to write them off to the later Wordsworth’s habit of making damaging revisions. I suggest, however, that a more constructive motivation underlies these changes, and that the motivation may best be inferred from two of the most extreme examples of added abstract personifications. The first is a vehement exclamation: “—‘Stay, stay your sacrilegious hands!’—the voice / Was Nature’s, uttered from her Alpine throne;” (1850, 6.431–32). Here “Nature” is not only given distinctly human characteristics; she is also given a voice. Her words have the independent status conferred by direct quotation, making her seem even more objectively embodied. Finally, “Nature” is placed in a dramatic situation: her outcry is against a band of French soldiers who, in the midst of the Revolution, are expelling the monks from the Chartreuse monastery. Wordsworth added a similar abstract personification to the description of how the pent-up brook should have been an admonishing symbol of his regular days at Cambridge:

Well might sarcastic Fancy then have whispered, ‘An emblem here behold of thy own life In its late course of even days, with all

102. The relevant line numbers for these 1850 additions are 4.60–64, 4.347–49, 4.356–57, 6.430–31, 8.249–50, 9.60–62, and 10.237–38. 11 ~ C h A p t e r

Their smooth enthralment’ . . . (1850, 4.60–63)

The passage embodies fancy as human and gives it an independent voice presented in direct quotation. The sentiment it expresses, however, is clearly Wordsworth’s own. The same is obviously true of the previous example: it is Wordsworth who feels regret at the attack on Chartreuse. In both cases, the personification allows him to project his sentiments onto an abstract character of his creation. It also allows him to create a dramatic situation where none existed. Wordsworth was not actually present when the monks were expelled from Chartreuse, but his description of nature’s outcry allows an imagined intervention that Wordsworth himself could not have accomplished. In the example of fancy’s reprimand, Wordsworth retrospectively creates a tension that was not present in the lived experience, and makes the conflict between his narrating self and narrated self more embodied and more firmly rooted in one temporal frame by describing the conflict as between himself and a personified fancy. The use of personification thus creates pseudo-characters, direct quotations of others, and dramatic conflicts that are otherwise lacking in The Prelude. At the same time, these episodes clearly embody Wordsworth’s internal conflicts; readers know that the sentiments expressed are his, and that he is the writer creating these elaborate and easily recognizable poetic figures. Personification fills some of the gaps left by the absence of typical narrative, in a way that serves the ends of lyric—the presentation of subjective experience, and attention to the craftedness of the poem itself. U

Although The Prelude is primarily lyric in nature, it is far from a simple poem. Each episode begins with some narrative elements, but quickly subsumes them to the subjective intensity and temporal suspension of lyric. And despite taking the unprecedented step of writing so much poetry about himself, Wordsworth does not create a solipsistic poem. Rather, The Prelude actively guides its readers, and discloses as much as it can as early as it can, creating a sense of equality between author and public. By borrowing a narrative structure latent in another form of literary self-examination—the confession—and taking it to an extreme, Wordsworth is able poetically to edify his readers. This unusual narrative strategy alters the reading experience, giving a first-time reader the complete confidence about the story’s end that is usually reserved p l o t A n t ICI pAt I o n A n d ly r IC A s s o CIAt I o n I n T h e P r e l u D e ~ 11 for a retrospective view. The Prelude’s prospective structure provides a counterexample to the assumption that all narrative forms must be a retrospective experience for the reader, and it unites a series of short lyrics into one prodigious lyric. In the next chapter, we shall see how Elizabeth Barrett Browning takes issue with such extreme confidence about a life’s endpoint, and with the narrative structures that embody that confidence. She uses Aurora Leigh to interweave several sets of narrative conventions in a way that highlights the shortcomings of each narrative strategy, and she strikes a more even balance between lyric and narrative. 3Juxtaposed fragments of genres In aurora leigh

. . . the ballad’s race Is rapid for a poet who bears weights of thought and golden image. he can stand like atlas, in the sonnet—and support his own heavens pregnant with dynastic stars; but then he must stand still, nor take a step. —elizabeth barrett browning, Aurora Leigh 5.84–89

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, first published in 1856, is impossible to fit into only one category or describe with only one adjective. Virginia Woolf called it “stimulating and boring, ungainly and eloquent, monstrous and exquisite all by turns, it overwhelms and bewilders.”1 One of its most bewildering features is its generic hybridity: it is, by turns, novel and poem, retrospective and diaristic, epic and lyric. The poem contains fragments of many different genres, but I argue this is an indication of Barrett Browning’s artistic control, rather than a symptom of artistic sloppiness. The poem, for the most part, keeps the various generic fragments distinct; as discrete units juxtaposed with each other, they expose the conventions and liabilities of each genre

1. Virginia Woolf, “Aurora Leigh,” in The Second Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1960), 188.

120 J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 11 when considered separately. By incorporating conflicting generic conventions, the poem offsets the limits of one genre by the strengths of another; narrative is exposed to show the strengths of lyric, and lyric to show the strengths of narrative. Aurora Leigh thus implies the necessity of the generic hybridity it embodies. Aurora Leigh’s relationship to genre categories has been a vexed one, from its very inception. In a letter to Robert Browning discussing her early ideas for the poem, Elizabeth Barrett Browning declared, “My chief intention just now is the writing of a sort of novel-poem.”2 It was originally conceived as a generic hybrid, the exact nature of which was left ambiguous by the phrase “a sort of.” Critics have generally agreed with the author’s own label for her poem, but have sometimes called the form anomalous.3 Those who describe Barrett Browning’s poem through more narrow generic categories, most frequently apply the category of epic. Herbert Tucker views the poem as “at once a veiled autobiography, a reluctant novel, and an aspiring epic,” arguing that its use of certain epic elements allowed Barrett Browning “a variety of means for loosening the realist novel’s grip on Victorian narrative as a shaper of women’s lives.”4 Though Tucker suggests the poem uses elements of epic to escape the patriarchal restrictions of the novel, other critics think the more troublesome patriarchal restrictions are affiliated with the epic. Deirdre David sees Barrett Browning as complicit in a conservative gender ideology, and claims, “Aurora Leigh is a formal hybrid that attempts to fit the explosive material more often found in the social novels of the 1840s to the traditional, male form of the epic.”5 Alison Case is more ambivalent about the status of Barrett Browning’s conservatism, and sees the female novel tradition as a means through which she could resist the patriarchal restrictions of the epic.6 Susan Stanford Friedman makes a similar argument to Case’s but adds a crucial third term: lyric. Friedman sees

2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Robert Browning, 27 February 1845, The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. R. B. Browning (London, 1899), I, 32. 3. Dorothy Mermin writes, “Of all the important Victorian long poems, Aurora Leigh is the only ‘novel-poem,’ or novel in verse.” Dorothy Mermin, “Genre and Gender in Au- rora Leigh,” The Victorian Newsletter 69 (Spring 1986): 7. I think the Victorian verse-novel is less unusual than Mermin claims: Clough’s Amours de Voyage is a verse-novella, and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book could be thought of as a proto-Modernist novel in verse. 4. Herbert Tucker, “Aurora Leigh: Epic Solutions to Novel Ends,” in Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, ed. Alison Booth (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 62. 5. Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1987), 98, 102. 6. Alison Case, Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century British Novel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 107. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

Barrett Browning as entering the imposingly masculine tradition of epic with Aurora Leigh, incorporating elements of lyric and the novel (genres more accessible to female authors, dealing with topics more accessible to women) in order to feminize the epic and find a central place for a heroine.7 Other descriptions of the poem add more (and more specific) genres to the list of its key components.8 Rather than getting lost in a proliferation of specific genres, this chapter focuses on basic elements of the broader categories of lyric and narrative modes, dividing the latter category into retrospective narrative and epistolary narrative. By doing so, I hope to reach a better understanding of the rhetorical purpose of Aurora Leigh’s generic hybridity.

aurora’s changIng narratIve perspectIve

The poem manifests its generic hybridity in many ways, but one of the most prominent is the poem’s unusual narrative structure. In the first 4 of the 9 books comprising Aurora Leigh, Aurora describes her childhood, her early development as a poet, her rejection of her cousin Romney’s marriage proposal, and Romney’s subsequent failed attempt to marry a working class girl as an emblem of social reform, all from a confident retrospective vantage point as a single woman and established poet. In book 5, however, the time of the story has caught up to the time of discourse: rather than describing events that happened months or years before, Aurora writes about a social gathering that happened earlier that evening. From that point on, the described events happen at a later time than when Aurora wrote the first four books of the poem. In books 6 and 7, Aurora’s habits of composition more closely resemble journal

7. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Gender and Genre Anxiety: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H. D. as Epic Poets,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5.2 (Fall 1986): 203–28. 8. According to Marjorie Stone, “Aurora Leigh combines a verse bildungsroman or spiritual epic like The Prelude . . . with a treatise on poetics . . . and a heavily plotted novel . . . all enlivened by liberal dashes of racy social satire in the manner of Byron’s Don Juan.” Marjorie Stone, “Genre Subversion and Gender Inversion: The Princess and Aurora Leigh,” Victorian Poetry 25.2 (Summer 1987): 115. Amanda Anderson offers a similar list of genres for Aurora Leigh, but specifies two types of novel—“the courtship novel and the ‘social problem’ novel.” Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 169. Dorothy Mermin says of Barrett Browning, “It is as if she held in suspension all the elements of Victorian poetry, all its potential voices, with now one, now another, precipitating into verse. . . . She was always looking for a new subject, a generic innovation.” Dorothy Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 2. J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 1 entries than a retrospective autobiography, since she records events that occurred in the near past, sometimes on the same day that she sits down to write about them. In the final two books, the relationship in time between the story events and the composition of the discourse is extremely ambiguous, for reasons I shall discuss later. This unusual narrative structure has attracted the attention of a number of critics, but to my mind, the most persuasive discussion to date is in Alison Case’s book, Plotting Women. As she describes it, “The narrative confusions result from the coexistence of two seemingly incompatible plots: a female Künstlerroman and a feminine love story, for both of which Aurora serves as heroine-narrator.”9 Case convincingly argues that, according to nineteenth-century narrative conventions, the two kinds of stories corresponded to two very different narrative techniques. The Künstlerroman plot in books one through four “is told as a fully-conceived, retrospective narrative. . . . The form and subject here complement each other, the reader’s sense of the narrator’s conceptual control of her story, her authority over it, contributing as much to a belief in the tale’s telos—successful authorship—as the events of the story itself.”10 But Case’s central argument is that the heroine of a love plot, if she is to be perceived as properly feminine, cannot be so assertive of her narrative mastery. Rather, if she is allowed to tell her story herself, she is most often relegated to epistolary or diaristic forms, through which she presents events that she only partly understands, leaving an editor or author to give them narrative shape and meaning. The later books of Aurora Leigh adopt these epistolary conventions, and keep them relatively separate from the earlier retrospective Künstlerroman. Case not only provides this explanation based on general nineteenth-century literary conventions, but also argues that the narrative structure is necessary for the reader’s understanding of character motivation within this particular poem. The early books must be retrospectively told from a point midway through the overall events in order to present convincingly Aurora’s initial rejection of Romney as the proper choice at the time. While Case’s description of the poem is accurate and astute, it leaves some of the strangest elements of the narrative structure unexplained. A more complete understanding of Aurora Leigh can be attained by moving beyond the dualism of retrospective versus epistolary narrative, and examining a third category crucial to this poem—the lyric. Lyrical sections

9. Case, Plotting, 107–8. 10. Ibid., 117. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

are scattered throughout the poem, from Aurora’s self-coronation with an ivy crown, to her effusions about the Italian landscape, to her meditations on the nature of art. Lyrical elements are also introduced in less direct ways, and the poem’s indirect lyricism can clarify sections of the poem that have been viewed as confusing, capricious, or sloppy. The subsequent sections of this chapter examine two of these confusing episodes, in an effort to understand how Barrett Browning juxtaposes lyric and narrative, allowing them to illuminate and critique each other. First, however, I want to return to the issue of Aurora’s retrospective vantage on only part of her poem, and when and how the temporal gaps in Aurora’s composition become visible. Herbert Tucker offers a different temporal scheme for the composition of the early books. He claims, “The ‘now’ from which Aurora has surveyed her youth in books 1 and 2 and the ‘now’ of book 3, in which she shoos Susan off and tears into today’s mail, cannot be identical.”11 It is certainly true that if the reader pauses to consider it, the “now” of writing at the beginning of book 1 is not precisely the same as the “now” at the beginning of book 3: at the moment when Susan’s interruption is recorded, Aurora has written over 2,400 lines of poetry, which would require a substantial amount of time. While Susan’s interruption, which will be discussed at length in the next section, does physically contextualize Aurora’s act of writing, its primary effect is not (at least for me as a reader) to draw attention to the temporal gap between writing books 1 and 2 and writing book 3. Moreover, there are indications that the gap in time between Aurora’s composition of books 1 and 2 and her composition of book 3 is not a large one. At the end of book 2, Aurora mentions that “it is seven years since” her rejection of Romney’s proposal, and one of the letters Susan brings in book 3 is from Vincent Carrington, who arouses Aurora’s interest because he knows Romney and “may say a word / Of something as it chanced seven years ago.”12 In addition, the other letters she receives in book 3 contain advice from critics on her latest volume of poetry (3.66–98), and at the beginning of book 1 Aurora declares herself an established poet, saying she has “written much in prose and verse” (1.2). The only possible suggestion of a substantial gap in time between Aurora’s composition of books 1 and 2 and her composition of book 3 is found in the lines which end book 2:

. . . we let go hands, my cousin and I,

11. Tucker, “Aurora Leigh,” 66. 12. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 2.1238, 3.145–46. All subsequent citations are from this edition; book and lines numbers are presented parenthetically. J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 1

And, in between us, rushed the torrent-world To blanch our faces like divided rocks, And bar for ever mutual sight and touch Except through swirl of spray and all that roar. (2.1244–48)

If Aurora is definitively asserting that she and Romney are “bar[red] for ever [from] mutual sight and touch,” then either she is blatantly lying to her readers, or she writes these lines prior to the events in books 3 and 4, when she sees Romney again. But Aurora does not make this a definitive assertion: she qualifies it by saying “except through swirl of spray and all that roar,” an apt description for the tumultuous failed wedding and the discussions preceding it, narrated in books 3 and 4. It matters whether or not Aurora writes the first two books before the events of books 3 and 4 occur, because it affects the emotional resonance and the generic implications of her choice to write. If she writes books 1 and 2 without having seen Romney since rejecting his proposal, then writing so much of him likely implies her longing and regret, and hence emphasizes the romance plot. If she writes all four opening books after Marian leaves Romney at the altar, then Aurora writes so much of him after seeing his symbolic plan for class reconciliation fail. Her romantic longing is then offset by pity that Romney’s scheme has gone awry, and perhaps satisfaction that his overconfidence has proven unfounded. And if Romney has been wrong about the best methods for healing society’s wounds, perhaps he has been wrong, too, in his scornful dismissal of her poetry. If books 1 and 2 were written after the events described in books 3 and 4, as I think they were, then more emphasis falls on the Künstlerroman plot and Aurora’s growing confidence in her choice of vocation over marriage. Firmly establishing the time frame of Aurora’s composition also helps clarify which standards of verisimilitude are being invoked at different points in the narrative. Herbert Tucker, for reasons of verisimilitude, emphasizes the gap between writing book 3 and writing book 5: “If we apply to the scene of writing the same canons of verisimilitude that book 5 theoretically and practically invokes, we must assume that the night of Lord Howe’s party is later than the night on which Susan was sent up to bed in book 3.”13 It is logical that the night of Lord Howe’s party is later than the night Susan brings letters to Aurora, but there is

13. Tucker, “Aurora Leigh,” 67. More recently, Tucker has reiterated the temporal gap between the composition of book 3 and book 5, but has emphasized book 5 as the decisive break that exposes the changing time of narration. Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 381. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

strong evidence that the books were written at roughly the same period of Aurora’s life, and that the poem does not draw much attention to any small gap between their composition. Both these nights, and hence the composition of books 3–5, happen after Marian leaves Romney waiting at the altar, and Aurora takes a firmly retrospective view of that event. Margaret Reynolds has suggested that we can establish Aurora’s composition of book 3 as after the failed wedding, because one of the letters Susan brings contains a reference to Romney’s use of his family estate as a Fourierian phalanstery, a project he seems to have undertaken after Marian’s disappearance.14 Specifically, the letter from Vincent Car- rington asks, “Have you heard of Romney Leigh, / Beyond what’s said of him in newspapers, / His phalansteries there, his speeches here” (3.106–08). That the phalansteries were established after the failed wedding is suggested by Aurora’s writing in book 5:

. . . I have not seen Romney Leigh Full eighteen months . . . add six, you get two years. They say he’s very busy with good works,— Has parted Leigh Hall into almshouses. (5.572–75)

The passage suggests Aurora only has second-hand knowledge of Rom- ney’s phalansteries, which, in turn, suggests that he implemented the plan after his last parting from Aurora, after the failed wedding to Mar- ian. Vincent Carrington’s letter, and Aurora’s entire composition of book 3, must happen after Romney is jilted. And her writing book 3 through the beginning of book 5 must happen in a period of time less than eighteen months, perhaps much less than eighteen months. This passage has itself caused additional speculation on the changing time of Aurora’s composition. Alison Case quotes lines 5.572–73 as evidence of “the poet apparently noting with ellipses a lapse of six months during which the manuscript had been abandoned literally midline.”15 Such a casual and yet blatant admission of so much lapsed time might seem realistic but also violates expectations for the organic development of art (which are discussed later in this chapter). It is possible that “add six months” indicates that interval has elapsed between starting book 5 and finishing it the night of Lord Howe’s party. (The description of the party begins a few lines later.) But such an inference is only an inference,

14. Margaret Reynolds, “Critical Introduction,” in Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 30. 15. Case, Plotting, 118. J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 1 and not definitive, because it is also possible to interpret the remark as indicating that six months from now, it will be two years since seeing Romney. The strange imperative to add six months might be a rhetorical gesture to emphasize the length of time they have been separated. Such an interpretation is strengthened by the adjective “full” in “full eighteen months,” indicating that Aurora feels as if the separation has been long, perhaps feels as if it must be longer than it is. Regardless of whether or not a six-month gap in composition occurs prior to Lord Howe’s party, it is much clearer that after Lord Howe’s party there are gaps in composition. It is also clear that on the night of the party, the time of events has caught up to the time of discourse. Before this evening, readers might fail to notice the potential gaps, and the realistic sense of time passing with composition, noted by Herbert Tucker. After this evening, Aurora’s writing demands to be read as more immediate and intermittent, as a time-bound process resembling sporadic journal entries. a present-tense IntrusIon

There is, however, a moment well before the start of book 5 that creates a sense of immediacy, an unexpected present-tense intrusion in the otherwise retrospective book 3:

Leave the lamp, Susan, and go up to bed. The room does very well; I have to write Beyond the stroke of midnight. Get away; Your steps, for ever buzzing in the room, Tease me like gnats. Ah, letters! throw them down At once, as I must have them, to be sure, Whether I bid you never bring me such At such an hour, or bid you. No excuse; You choose to bring them, as I choose perhaps To throw them in the fire. Now get to bed, And dream, if possible, I am not cross. (3.25–35)

Herbert Tucker suggests this very odd moment is a key example of how, by “narratizing its own composition, Aurora Leigh renders elas- tic the relation of the writing present to the written past.”16 I do think

16. Tucker, “Aurora Leigh,” 66. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

this moment begins to “narratize” the poem’s composition, precisely because it suggests that writing takes time, that composition is not an indefinitely suspended moment but rather a process that extends over many days and nights. But this temporal process is only suggested, and is not the main focus of the passage. Rather, the dominant effect is to concretize or contextualize the moment of composition. Tucker suggests, “In dismissing her maidservant and introducing a specific context for the writing act, Aurora dismisses the supports of conventional autobiography, and supplants a hypostatized present by an actual, mobile one.”17 I agree that “an actual, mobile” present replaces an abstract, static one; but in this case, it is not so much retrospective autobiography that is being invoked and undercut, but rather lyric poetry—a genre which can be defined precisely by its abstract, static present, its suspended moment of discourse. My suggestion that we view Susan’s interruption in a lyrical, rather than narrative, context is supported by the nature of Aurora’s poem immediately prior to the interruption—an abstract, allusive, metaphorical meditation on death, youthful aspirations, and social strictures (3.11–24). By introducing a concrete, particularized moment of composition, Barrett Browning creates a startling contrast to some of the conventions of lyric poetry. Generally, lyric poems emphasize a decontextualized present moment of discourse, which blurs the distinction between the moment of composition and the moment of reception. There are two common ways for poets to create this illusion, and for critics to describe it. The first is to de-emphasize the author. The poem, then, seems to be mysteriously self-creating out of a void, rather than a production of a particular person in a particular social and historical setting. This illusion of ahistoricism is the underlying target of critiques of New Criticism, which deliberately isolated poems as objects of detached aesthetic analysis, separate from social and historical contexts. Lyric poetry’s seeming ahistoricism is also the basis for critiques of it as being politically disengaged.18 But throughout Aurora Leigh we are given very particular social and historical settings, from the slums of Victorian London to high society dinner parties, from Parisian markets to Florentine streets. In their comments on art, both Aurora and Barrett Browning explicitly advocate

17. Ibid. 18. One notable exception is Theodor Adorno, who views lyric’s deliberate avoidance of specific historical contexts and the details of material and social life as a method of political critique. Lyric’s ahistoricism is, paradoxically, “in itself social in nature,” constituting “a protest against a social condition which every individual experiences as hostile, distant, cold, and oppressive.” “Lyric Poetry and Society,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 214. J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 1 poetry’s representation of present times rather than a distant, mythic past, and this poem follows through on the belief. In the passage where Aurora scolds Susan for interrupting her, the sense of the present, the localized, and the particular is taken to an extreme, representing details of the artist’s surroundings usually considered too trivial and mundane to be included in poetry.19 Even though a concrete setting at a particular historical moment has been substituted for the suspended moment of lyric poetry, the poem still creates the sense of extreme immediacy and presentness associated with lyric. The text offers what seem to be Aurora’s exact words to Susan, without any framing commentary, and gives the reader the sense of overhearing Aurora as she speaks. This combination of a particular setting, and the illusion of overhearing a speaker’s remarks to a particular person, suggests a resemblance to dramatic monologues.20 The resemblance is even more striking when we note that Susan’s words are not reported, although the passage clearly implies that she speaks to Aurora: dramatic monologues frequently feature such a silent interlocutor. The passage also resembles a dramatic monologue in that Aurora’s speech reveals a specific (in this case, unflattering) aspect of her character, and such a revelation is not her primary intention in speaking. Unlike the speakers of most dramatic monologues, however, Aurora is aware of the negative character traits revealed by her comments. Imme- diately after she reprimands Susan, Aurora writes, “Why what a pettish, petty thing I grow” (3.36). Because Aurora finds herself at fault, readers are not forced to distance themselves from Aurora in order to judge her. Readers can identify with her without dissonance or ethical discomfort because the identification includes judgment. We can thus

19. Holly Laird asserts that “a nonwriter reading the entire poem could glean from it an accurate description of a successful writer’s life. . . . It is precisely through this contex- tualization that . . . Browning places her theory in action; she refuses to divorce philosophical rationalization from practical contexts.” See Holly A. Laird, “Aurora Leigh: An Epical Ars Poetica,” in Writing the Woman as Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture, ed. Suzanne W. Jones (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 363. 20. Herbert Tucker’s characterization of Tennyson’s and Robert Browning’s early dramatic monologues applies equally well, I contend, to this section of Aurora Leigh: “The charmed circle of lyric finds itself included by the kind of historical particularity that lyric genres exclude by design.” “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, eds. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1985), 228. Similarly, Melissa Valiska Gregory notes, “Browning’s dramatic monologues inherently bridge or create a generic slippage between the social setting of the novel and the subjective utterance of the Romantic lyric, featuring speakers who firmly locate themselves historically and rhetorically.” “Robert Browning and the Lure of the Violent Lyric Voice: Domestic Violence and the Dramatic Monologue,” Victorian Poetry 38.4 (Winter 2000): 494–95. 10 ~ C h A p t e r

react as though overhearing Aurora with the extreme immediacy, even immersion, associated with lyric, rather than with the tensions between judgment and sympathy associated with the dramatic monologue.21 In the broader context of the passage, then, the lyric elements begin to outweigh the resemblance to a dramatic monologue. The idea of poetry as overheard leads to lyric poetry’s second common method for blurring the distinction between composition and reception: to de-emphasize the receiver, to present the poet as unconscious of an audience. Perhaps the most famous formulation of this is John Stuart Mill’s claim that “eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard.”22 This, in turn, has led to the critique that lyric poetry, especially Roman- tic lyricism, is overly self-absorbed and isolated, even solipsistic.23 In this section of Aurora Leigh, readers may feel as though they overhear Aurora, but Aurora is not completely isolated. Susan is present, and her intrusion reminds us that many authors, particularly women, have difficulty finding the privacy to write, finding a room of their own. If a poet does acquire the necessary privacy, too much isolation might make him or her inconsiderate and antisocial, as Aurora implies in her comments immediately after yelling at Susan. She admits:

Why what a pettish, petty thing I grow,— A mere, mere woman, a mere flaccid nerve, A kerchief left out all night in the rain, Turned soft so,—overtasked and overstrained And overlived in this close London life! And yet I should be stronger. (3.36–41)

21. The classic articulation of the dramatic monologue as creating “tension between sympathy and moral judgment” is Robert Langbaum’s The Poetry of Experience: The Dra- matic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1957), 85. For a detailed discussion of the dramatic monologue, see chapter 4. 22. John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 1, eds. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 348. As stated before, this essay is better known by the title “What Is Po- etry?” 23. Sarah M. Zimmerman rightly observes, “Mill’s grand gesture of severing poetry from eloquence inaugurates a critical history of divorcing lyricism from rhetorical—and by extension, social—concerns.” See Sarah M. Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism, and His- tory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 1. For a good discussion of Mill’s lasting influence on criticism and the continued association of lyricism with isolated introspection, see Zimmerman 10–19. Zimmerman herself questions the supposed asociability of lyricism and finds subtle and varied forms of social and political engagement in a range of Romantic texts. J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 11

There is some ambivalence about what is causing her pettishness. Is it being “overtasked” by straining too much at the traditionally masculine pursuit of poetry, or being “overlived” by being too connected to the feminine private sphere? Is it being isolated in a too “close” room, or being too closely surrounded by bustling London life? Whatever the cause of Aurora’s foul mood, she chides herself for resenting Susan’s presence and for dealing with her too harshly. Aurora recognizes that even poets are not free from social bonds, thus refuting both the illusion of isolation within lyric poems, and the Romantic cult of the socially detached genius who writes such poems.24 An even stronger reminder of the poet’s connection to others, and of readers’ reception of her work, is provided by Aurora’s description of the letters Susan has brought her. This is clearly an instance of Aurora as a reader, as a recipient of other people’s compositions. And the contents of the letters include descriptions of how other people have received Aurora’s poetry. In fact, four of the letters are from critics, with contradictory views on Aurora’s latest volume (3.68–98). Even though the contents of these letters are subject to mild satire, correspondence with others is given value as a source of knowledge. The heroine chides herself, “Never burn / Your letters, poor Aurora! for they stare / With red seals from the table, saying each, / ‘Here’s something that you know not’” (3.41–44). Such a strong emphasis on the reception of writing is unusual in lyrical contexts, though not without precedent: Byron’s narrator sometimes speculates about the poem’s reception during the lyrical sections of Don Juan. As was discussed in chapter 1, some critics might argue that if the reader is aware of the poem’s status as a public, written document, then the reader would also be aware of a gap in time between the poem’s

24. Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes, “Making a female character be a ‘woman of genius’ sets in motion not only conventional notions of womanhood but also conventional romantic notions of the genius, the person apart, who, because unique and gifted, could be released from social ties and expectations” (84–85). She claims that most nineteenth-century works place “their final emphasis on the woman, not the genius” (87). See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). I think that Aurora Leigh does emphasize the woman, but does so partly to critique the social irresponsibility of detached male genius. I infer that for Barrett Browning, the model of the poet implied by The Prelude, in which the emphasis falls on his relationship to the natural world, is overly isolated. My reading is thus compatible with Amanda Anderson’s suggestion that “despite the manifold ways in which autonomy emerges as an imperative for the woman artist, throughout the story Aurora also struggles against isolation and autonomy, partly out of a deep-seated desire for romantic and familial affections but also because of the pretensions to social action lodged within Barrett Browning’s project.” Anderson, 177. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

composition and the act of reading, and that such a gap would disrupt the lyric illusion of being caught up in the narrator’s present moment. But I do not think such a disruption necessarily follows. In this case, the reader is given a description of the reception of one of Aurora’s other poems, and on some level the reader is aware that there are gaps in time between her writing the last poem, its publication, someone reading it, someone writing to Aurora about it, and Aurora reading the letter. But the text that is Aurora Leigh still creates the illusion of immediacy, of direct access to the poem’s coming-into-being. Barrett Browning’s reader experiences the lyric illusion at the very same time that the illusion is exposed. And because this unveiling occurs in a specific social/historical setting, lyric poetry is placed in a social context. In such a context, this odd passage cannot be seen as mere sloppiness or caprice on Barrett Browning’s part, but rather as an implied critique of poetic conventions that are resistant to the progressive elements of her politics and poetics.

past-tense confusIons

A second strange aspect of Aurora Leigh has yet to be adequately explained but benefits from analysis within the context of lyric conventions: the contradictory narrative techniques of the last two books. Book 8 begins simply enough with “One eve it happened” (8.1), presenting a singular past event with the implied promise that it will be told retrospectively, from an unspecified distance in time. But on the next page Aurora slips into the present tense for 15 lines, declaring, “The duomo-bell / Strikes ten” (8.44–45), and “I see it all so clear” (8.59). After this interlude, Auro- ra’s commentary is consistently in the past tense for the remainder of the poem. This sounds fairly straightforward, but such a description is at odds with Margaret Reynolds’s reading of the last two books: “The action covered by these two books takes place on the one night, and yet no lapse of time is included which might allow Aurora the opportunity of formally recording the events. Instead, the living Aurora overlaps with the narrating Aurora at the moment of experience.”25 According to Reynolds’s description, the two books are not retrospective at all, not even allowing the marginal distance of a journal entry or letter. Instead, Aurora’s experience of the story-events seems to overlap with the discourse. And yet this section of the poem contains the remark, “But what

25. Reynolds, 31. J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 1 he said . . . I have written day by day, / With somewhat even writing” (9.725–26).26 In keeping with the standards of verisimilitude, Aurora writes these pages in the days after the night of the events. But I agree with Reynolds that there is an illusion of immediacy, and I believe it is created by cues to the reader that are at odds with the explicit use of the past tense in most of Aurora’s commentary. There is, as I have mentioned, a brief section told in the present tense. Much more prevalent is the use of dialogue, with very little commentary between direct quotations of Aurora and Romney. The long stretches of direct quotation create a sense of immediacy for their words, with very few reminders that the dialogue occurred in Aurora’s past. In some instances, the transcription of Aurora’s words mimics the halting way in which she originally spoke them. Aurora’s declaration of love to Romney is rendered:

—And if I came and said . . . What all this weeping scarce will let me say, And yet what women cannot say at all But weeping bitterly . . . (the pride keeps up, Until the heart breaks under it) . . . I love,— I love you, Romney’ . . . (9.603–8)

The frequent pauses in Aurora’s admission are indicated by four sets of ellipses, two dashes, and an aside placed in parentheses, all in just six lines. But perhaps the most crucial method that counteracts, or even contradicts, Aurora’s retrospective stance, is her withholding key pieces of information. Even though she reports the events of that night in the past tense, she writes as though she doesn’t have the knowledge she gained later that same night, creating instances of paradoxical paralipsis: “an omission or misrepresentation of information on the part of a retrospective homodiegetic narrator that appears to be inconsistent with the knowledge and perspective otherwise assigned to that narrator.”27 A representative example is when Aurora reacts to Romney’s request that she visit the scorched remnants of his family estate:

26. While books 8 and 9 share the seeming overlap of experience and narration characteristic of simultaneous present-tense narration, this remark and the prevalence of the past tense are crucial differences in technique. 27. Alison Case, “Gender and History in Narrative Theory: The Problem of Retrospec- tive Distance in David Copperfield and Bleak House,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 313. Case builds on James Phelan’s discussion of paradoxical paralipsis in Narrative as Rhetoric. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

I made no answer. Had I any right To weep with this man, that I dared to speak? A woman stood between his soul and mine, And waved us off from touching evermore, With those unclean white hands of hers. (8.1037–41)

At the time of Romney’s question, Aurora falsely believed that he was married to the selfish and superficial, and possibly quite wicked, Lady Waldemar, the woman with “unclean white hands.” The narrating Aurora knows Romney is not married, since that revelation occurs later in the same conversation with him. But nothing here indicates a gap between Aurora’s knowledge then and her knowledge now. There is no flag to the reader to take Aurora’s statement that “a woman stood between us” as provisional, as a position that she will later abandon. For the reader, this statement and many similar ones have all the certainty that they had for Aurora at that moment. As a result, this paradoxical paralipsis “allows the reader to experience more fully the shock of the subsequent enlightenment” that Romney and Lady Waldemar are not married.28 This sense of close proximity to the described experience is associated with both epistolary or diaristic narrative, and with lyric poetry. Dorothy Mermin has noted some of the similarities between the two genres: “One thinks of familiar letters as (except for the diary) the most private of literary forms. . . . Like lyric poetry as the Victorians typically conceived it, their essential charm requires the appearance of having sprung spontaneously out of a particular moment, concentrating entirely on the intended recipient and unaware of any other prospective reader.”29 Although both genres seem to “spr[ing] spontaneously out of a particular moment,” I would argue that lyric allows for an even greater sense of spontaneity and immediacy than either letters or diaries. With epistolary forms, there must be at least some small gap in time between an event and its recording, otherwise we find the writer absurdly in contradiction with our notions of verisimilitude. A classic example of the absurdity produced by extreme epistolary immediacy is Letter VI of Shamela: “Thursday Night, Twelve o’Clock. Mrs. Jervis and I are just in bed, and the door unlocked; if my master should come—Odsbobs! I hear him just coming in at the door. You see I write in the present tense, as Parson

28. Case, “Gender and History,” 313. Hence, I believe the paradoxical paralipses in Aurora Leigh have the rhetorical effect discussed by James Phelan, rather than “reinforcing the femininity of [the] narrative voice by means of a gendered literary code” as Case reads the use of paralipsis in Bleak House. Ibid. 29. Mermin, EBB, 125. J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 1

Williams says. Well, he is in bed between us, we both shamming a sleep; he steals his hand into my bosom. . . .”30 In lyric poetry, however, such questions of verisimilitude are not at issue.31 Lyric creates an illusion of experience blurred with discourse, of absolute simultaneity in a suspended moment. As Jonathan Culler has argued, lyric removes elements of experience from the poet’s past and places them in “a special temporality which is the set of all moments at which writing can say ‘now.’”32 This lyrical merging of experience with discourse is, I believe, the best way to describe the anti-retrospective elements in the last two books of Aurora Leigh. Barrett Browning presents narrative material through this lyrical technique, however; Aurora’s experiences have the immediacy of lyric discourse, but the experiences are allowed to develop in time, rather than remaining in the suspended moment of lyric.

ImpLIcatIons for epIstoLary and retrospectIve forms

Such juxtapositions of generic conventions have several important results. First, they may suggest that epistolary forms should not be devalued for their immediacy and sincerity, as was often the case due to nineteenth-century suppositions about gender and genre. Rather, Barrett Browning may imply that epistolary forms should partake of the critical prestige afforded to lyric in the Romantic tradition, since lyric was often valued precisely for its seeming immediacy and sincerity. She may also move Aurora out of the restrictive feminine implications of epistolary writing, and into the more ambivalent gender associations of lyric. Critics have strongly disagreed about the relationship between gender ideology and lyric poetry in the nineteenth century, likely because the nineteenth-century public expressed contradictory thoughts on the

30. Henry Fielding, Shamela, in Joseph Andrews, Shamela, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961), 313. 31. I acknowledge that there are examples of epistolary immediacy in which verisimilitude is not the primary focus. Alison Case, for example, notes that verisimilitude is violated in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary when Bridget continues to write anxious diary entries as a deadline rapidly approaches. Case argues that the reader hardly notices the breach of mimetic logic, because the passage heightens the comedy, which is given greater emphasis than mimesis. Alison Case, “Authenticity, Convention, and Bridget Jones’s Diary,” Narrative 9.2 (May 2001): 179–80. Since the ending of Aurora Leigh aspires to high seriousness, rather than to the comic effects of Henry Fielding or Helen Fielding, I find it more plausible to ascribe its extreme sense of immediacy, not to comic epistolary conventions, but rather to the transcendent efforts of lyric. 32. Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe,” in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Decon- struction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 149. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

subject. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that women had difficulty writing poetry, particularly lyric poetry, because of its distinctly masculine tradition as self-asserting, dependent on classical education, and aspiring to a priestly role.33 Dorothy Mermin starts from the opposite premise but ends with the same result for women poets. She thinks “the lyric in particular seemed female to the Victorians—private, nonlogical, purely emotional,” and yet a Victorian woman poet did not necessarily have comfortable access to the genre: “for Victorians writing poetry seemed like woman’s work, even though only men were supposed to do it.”34 Dino Felluga agrees, and discusses the troubling consequences of the “the charge of effeminacy that was increasingly directed at the male poet in the Victorian period.”35 Susan Stanford Friedman discusses the more liberating aspects of lyric. She notes that psychoanalytic feminist theory often claims lyric poetry allows women writers to be subversive of male traditions (though Friedman goes on to explore the subversive potential of narrative as well).36 Susan Wolfson, in her study of gender in the Romantic period, breaks down binary divisions between genders and between genres by exploring “the wavering, arbitrary, and often tra- versable borderlines that vex and complicate the symbolic order.”37 Just as contemporary critics and the Victorian public are conflicted about the gender associations of lyric, so is Barrett Browning herself. In the lines that serve as the epigraph to this chapter, Aurora says of a poet weighed down with thought, “He can stand / Like Atlas, in the sonnet—and support / His own heavens pregnant with dynastic stars” (5.86–88). Her choice of pronouns establishes the poet writing in the lyric genre of the sonnet as male. Yet this may result from Atlas’s gender, and a spilling over of the simile’s vehicle into its tenor. Matters are further compli- cated by the mention of the “pregnant” heavens, adding a feminine and maternal element to the lyric poet. It would seem that lyric poetry has the benefit of contested and malleable gender associations, which may

33. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 545–49. 34. Dorothy Mermin, “The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet,” Criti- cal Inquiry 13.1 (Autumn 1986): 69, 67. 35. Dino Franco Felluga, The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 153. 36. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Craving Stories: Narrative and Lyric in Contemporary Theory and Women’s Long Poems,” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, eds. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 15. 37. Susan J. Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 35. J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 1 free Aurora and Barrett Browning from the more restrictively feminine epistolary form, grant them access to the masculine authority remaining to the lyric poet, and allow them an opportunity to critique more stable gender categories. Elsewhere in the poem, Barrett Browning employs a different strategy to undermine gender-based assumptions about epistolary forms. To reiterate Alison Case’s persuasive argument, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, female epistolary narrators had to be artless in their compositions in order to be perceived as properly feminine. If a woman’s letter betrayed signs of study, art, or narrative control, then she would be considered morally suspect and unfeminine.38 In Aurora Leigh, the heroine very carefully writes a letter to Lady Waldemar, and pauses to consider the Lady’s likely reaction. Aurora speculates, “That’s quiet, guarded: though she hold it up / Against the light, she’ll not see through it more / Than lies there to be seen” (5.1145–47). This comment presents a woman’s letter as planned, and as not completely sincere or revelatory. It also imagines that the female recipient will try to read between the lines, to be an artful and plotting reader. Aurora decides against a certain phrase because she fears Lady Waldemar “would twist it thus,” and because she fears “her writing back / Just so” (5.1151, 5.1157–58). This conceives of Aurora as an artful female writer, whom the reader supports in her efforts against the morally suspect Lady Waldemar. The passage thus implicitly critiques the artlessness expected of female letter-writers, and undoes the association between female artfulness and immorality by separating those traits into two different characters. The narrative and lyric techniques of Aurora Leigh also have consequences for retrospective conventions. As we have seen, the poem resists retrospection at the end, at the moment when readers most expect retrospective security. The exact time of composition, and the interval that has elapsed since the depicted events, remain unclear. No events after Aurora and Romney’s conversation are mentioned: Aurora never says, “Reader, I married him.” Instead, the final lines are Aurora’s description of the dawn—we end with a sense of beginning. This erasure of retrospection has sometimes been seen as a flaw in the poem. One contemporary reviewer said of the poem in general, and the revelations of the last books in particular, “It is difficult to conjecture at what epoch of the story the book purports to have been written. It does not seem to have been written in the form of a journal, while the events were taking place; nor yet after the story was completed. . . . This contradiction confuses

38. Case, Plotting; see especially the chapter on Clarissa. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

the reader, and he feels almost as if he were trifled with.”39 Alison Case suggests some of the criticism may be due to readers’ inclination to fit the poem within a single set of narrative conventions; as the romance plot and its corresponding epistolary form gain prominence in the latter half of the poem, we seem forced to deny “the artistic/narrative mastery that validates the Künstlerroman.”40 I agree with Case that part of readers’ dissatisfaction lies in making an either/or choice between a naive romance heroine and an assured narrative artist, and that the poem makes much more sense if we view Aurora’s status as both/and. There are two additional reasons why critiques of Aurora’s insufficient narrative mastery over the romance plot are flawed. Viewed from within the level of story, as if the events are real, it is odd to criticize Aurora for not having narrative mastery over events that had not yet happened to her, for not being able to foresee the shape and meaning of her entire life at the tender age of twenty- seven, when she begins to write the poem.41 Such high expectations are irreconcilable with her character’s conformance to basic principles of verisimilitude. Viewed at the level of discourse, as Barrett Browning’s fictive creation, the unusual structure of the final books is not necessarily evidence of Barrett Browning’s lack of narrative control. On the contrary, I see it as most likely a conscious artistic choice, meant to undermine the authority of retrospective narration. Some of the chief lessons of Aurora Leigh are that life stories change, that knowledge is provisional, that people must constantly be open to reevaluating their lives. Marjorie Stone places Aurora Leigh in the tradition of Victorian sage discourse, but also finds in the poem a critique of authoritative discourse. She says of Aurora, “Throughout much of the poem she speaks . . . as a sage-information whose wisdom is in process of revision and often contradicted

39. Review of Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (October 1857): 421–22. North Ameri- can Review 85. 40. Case, Plotting, 112. 41. One could take the opposite view, that instead of finding fault with Aurora for lacking artistic control over future events, we should be pleasantly surprised that she has the prescience to include so much about Romney, Marian, and Lady Waldemar in books 3 and 4, before she can know their direct connection to her own future happiness. That is, when Aurora writes books 3 and 4, it would be difficult to say why the Romney/Marian/Lady Waldemar plot deserves such prominence in Aurora’s story of her own artistic and personal development. Of course, it is possible to read that prominence as a symptom of Aurora’s repressed love for Romney, or even as self-justification that her choice of art over Romney’s schemes was the right one since his scheme failed. A more radical interpretation is that Aurora knows to include the failed wedding plot because she writes the entire poem after all the events have ended, but chooses to present some of the events as if they happened more immediately. If the last two books can be written retrospectively but with an illusion of immediacy, why not the entire poem? J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 1 by her own actions. The textual ironies thus generated call in question the authoritative stance so strenuously asserted by some male Victorian sages.”42 When juxtaposed with Wordsworth’s overwhelmingly authoritative stance in The Prelude, presenting his poetic development as not only firmly established but also preordained, Aurora Leigh provides a marked contrast to and critique of that male Romantic sage’s Victorian publication. Barrett Browning’s criticism is even more wide-ranging, taking aim at broader targets than Wordsworth in particular or sage discourse in general. I agree with Herbert Tucker that it is Aurora’s “need to occupy a commanding [retrospective] vantage . . . that the migrant narrative viewpoint of the poem subjects in turn to structural irony.”43 All forms of retrospective authority seem to be questioned by Aurora Leigh’s unusual mixture of narrative techniques. Epistolary narratives are implied to be more truthful than retrospective ones, precisely because epistolary forms are more willing to incorporate and acknowledge error, rather than to assert the transcendence of error.

“unLIke sImILItudes”

Barrett Browning also prefers to acknowledge error, rather than disin- genuously asserting its transcendence, in the smaller-scale structure of her poetic figures. She does so through her frequent use of simile. In addition, similes allow her to incorporate both narrative progression and lyric elaboration, keeping both elements distinct and clear. In order to understand the capabilities of simile, however, we must first establish its important differences from the Romantic image and symbol. In his influential essay “The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery,” William Wimsatt claims that Romantic figures “mak[e] less use of the overt statement of similitude” that is so prominent in the classical and Renaissance traditions.44 That is, Romantic poets are less likely to use actual similes and much more likely to use images or symbols which feature a “blurring of literal and figurative,” a blurring of tenor and vehicle.45 Whereas similes maintain a tension between similitude and

42. Marjorie Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London: Macmillan, 1995), 162. 43. Tucker, Epic, 382. Tucker also notes that “the forward motion of Aurora’s point of view mobilizes an ongoing critique of the obsolescent certitudes that at any given moment she has impulsively, confidently sworn by.” Ibid. 44. William K. Wimsatt, Jr., “The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery,” (1954) in Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970), 82. 45. Ibid., 86. 10 ~ C h A p t e r

dissimilitude, in Romantic images, “The interest derives not from our being aware of disparity where likeness is firmly insisted on, but in an opposite activity of discerning the design which is latent in the multi- form sensuous picture.”46 That is, the similarity expressed by the poet is at least partly attributed to the essential nature of the objects, rather than to the inventive wit of the poet, and the reader is expected to interrogate the poet’s image and agree to its fitness. A Romantic image “can be explored and tested by the wit of the reader,”47 and Romantic symbols aspire to express something true about nature or the spiritual world; they aspire to be more than just subjective associations based on the contingencies of physical proximity, memory, and personal history. This element of Wimsatt’s argument has had a long critical afterlife,48 and has sometimes been adopted as a truism about Romanticism by theorists who wish to criticize, rather than valorize, Romantic poets for their transcendental aspirations. In this camp, Paul de Man is among the most influential detractors of Romantic images and symbols. De Man argues that Romantic images’ aspirations to transcendence reveal not essential truths about objects, but rather a misguided denial of the essential difference between objects and language. Such images betray a desire to attribute the permanence and primacy of objects to language: “Poetic language seems to originate in the desire to draw closer and closer to the ontological status of the object. . . . We saw that this movement is essentially paradoxical and condemned in advance to failure. There can be flowers that ‘are’ and poetic words that ‘originate,’ but no poetic words that ‘originate’ as if they ‘were.’”49 Even though de Man views the technique as mystificatory rather than productive, he agrees with Wimsatt that Romantic poets tend to blur the vehicle and tenor: “At times, romantic thought and romantic poetry seem to come so close to giving in completely to the nostalgia for the object that it becomes difficult to distinguish between object and image, between imagination

46. Ibid., 83. 47. Ibid., 82. 48. Despite Wimsatt’s influence in creating a prevailing critical assumption that the organic image or symbol is the Romantic figure par excellence, some critics have discussed Romantic usages of simile. I am indebted to Susan Wolfson’s nuanced and insightful discussion of Coleridge’s use of simile in chapter 3 of Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). She also approaches similes through the context of Wimsatt’s and de Man’s thoughts on Romantic images and symbols. Chapter 1 of the present book mentions various discussions of Byron’s idiosyncratic use of simile. 49. Paul de Man, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image” (1968), in Romanti- cism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970), 70. J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 11 and perception, between an expressive or constitutive and a mimetic or literal language.”50 I infer that since de Man considers the simile to be “the simplest and most explicit of all metaphorical structures,” he would consider the simile as more likely to avoid the mystifications of Romantic symbols.51 Since similes explicitly call attention to the disjunction between tenor and vehicle, and call attention to their own use of language to assert similarity, they would not occlude the differences among object, idea, and word.52 Given these implications of simile and symbol, Aurora Leigh is an intensely contradictory text: Aurora desires the organic correspondence between tenor and vehicle exemplified by the Romantic symbol, yet she incessantly uses the seemingly more artificial figure of simile to express herself. Aurora asks the rhetorical question:

. . . What is art But life upon the larger scale, the higher, When, graduating up in a spiral line Of still expanding and ascending gyres, It pushes toward the intense significance Of all things, hungry for the Infinite? (4.1151–56)

By beginning with “What is art / But life,” Aurora ever-so-briefly seems to claim that art is life, that sign and referent, language and object, are identical. But Aurora quickly qualifies this as she suggests art also approaches the infinite (“the larger scale, the higher”). Here Aurora does not assert an absolute identity between art and a transcendent idea, between language and permanence, but she does assert an ever-nearer approach of one to the other, resulting in an “intense significance,” a discovered Truth. Despite the ostensible optimism about the close relationship between art, life, and truth, several formal elements of the passage undermine Aurora’s confidence. By using the metaphor of ever-expanding gyres, Aurora implicitly admits that the path to the infinite is circu-

50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 66. 52. Based on such a description, simile might share some of the features de Man elsewhere attributes to allegory, as distinguished from symbol. Allegory recognizes the incom- mensurability of the sign with the permanent natural object it signifies, and demonstrates awareness of its functioning within a system of signifiers. See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., Theory and History of Literature, vol. 7 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

itous, and may imply that no stable final ground of understanding can ever be reached. The passage as a whole is in the form of a question, rather than an assertion, opening up the possibility of an interlocutor who would answer the question differently than Aurora, suggesting that this is one definition of art among many possible definitions.53 The specific form of the question raises additional problems: “What is art but life . . . when . . . it pushes toward . . . the Infinite?” Initially, the passage suggests that art can be nothing but life, that life is the only possible substance of art. But by following this with a “when” clause, the identity of art with life becomes provisional on either art or life (the antecedent of “it” is ambiguous) aspiring to the infinite, and the passage itself does not address how frequently (if ever) such a condition is fulfilled. The difficulties of asserting a desired identity among object, language, and idea become even more obvious when similes are used. For this reason, it should come as a surprise that a poet who is so invested in uniting the real and ideal through art54 uses similes so frequently. In fact, Aurora Leigh contains over 250 similes; the simile is Barrett Brown- ing’s preferred poetic figure in the work.55 If this figure creates troubling and obvious tensions in the similarity it asserts, why might Barrett Browning rely so heavily on it? There are several plausible and inter- related answers. Similes emphasize the provisionality of knowledge, which would appeal to a poet so determined to expose the dangers of over-confident authority. Similes also invite the audience to agree or disagree with the offered similarity, engaging the reader in the effort to find

53. An imaginary interlocutor is actually given a voice in another description of the nature of poetry:

What’s this, Aurora Leigh, You write so of the poets, and not laugh? Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark, Exaggerators of the sun and moon, And soothsayers in a teacup? I write so Of the only truth-tellers now left to God, The only speakers of essential truth, Opposed to relative, comparative, And temporal truths . . . (1.854–62)

The passage more explicitly states both possible objections to the truth-value of poetry and Aurora’s belief that it does express truth. 54. Readers are encouraged to align Barrett Browning’s thoughts on art with Aurora’s, by Barrett Browning’s remark in the poem’s dedication that Aurora Leigh contains “my highest convictions upon Life and Art.” 55. This counts as a simile any metaphorical comparison that contains “like” or “as” as the link between vehicle and tenor, but excludes pseudo-similes which use the link “as if.” J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 1 a better approximation to the truth. Finally, similes offer a convenient means to balance lyric and narrative, allowing Barrett Browning to offset the limitations of each genre with the strengths of the other. Barrett Browning’s sense of the advantages and liabilities of simile can be approached by examining one of her self-reflexive descriptions of the figure:

As I spoke, I tore The paper up and down, and down and up And crosswise, till it fluttered from my hands, As forest-leaves, stripped suddenly and rapt By a whirlwind on Valdarno, drop again, Drop slow, and strew the melancholy ground Before the amazèd hills . . . why, so, indeed, I’m writing like a poet, somewhat large In the type of the image, and exaggerate A small thing with a great thing, topping it. (2.1162–71)

If similes can be, as Susan Wolfson suggests, a “potent formation, at once intellectual and poetic, whose critical agency is . . . its consciousness of its explicit construction,”56 then this example foregrounds such self-consciousness. Here Aurora explicitly critiques the simile she has just constructed, and the inadequacy of its construction. She admits the danger of exaggeration in poetic comparisons, the possibility of the vehicle and tenor being mismatched rather than organically unified. But in this passage, Barrett Browning seems to shy away from a thorough exposure of simile’s misfirings. The passage implies that in this simile, the vehicle is the correct “type” for the tenor, like in kind and merely taken to too great a degree. And while the action of tearing a letter in itself may not seem to merit such a comparison, its consequences do: by tearing up the letter, Aurora destroys the evidence through which Romney could have guaranteed she inherit 30,000 pounds, and demonstrates that she must earn her living as a writer. The grandiose vehicle is more than justified by the plot developments which hinge on this action.57 Moreover, “the amazèd hills” are an apt reflection of Romney’s astonished reaction.

56. Wolfson, Formal, 65. 57. Marjorie Stone makes a very similar suggestion when she says of this passage, “Aurora undercuts her own epic pretensions, but perhaps a ‘large’ image is in fact well- suited to the apparently trivial gesture by which she frees herself from any economic dependence upon Romney’s patriarchal legacies, since in tearing up the document she gains . . . independence.” Stone, “Genre,” 120–21. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

A more thoroughgoing commentary on false similitudes is the description of Aurora and Romney’s reaction to Marian’s parting letter, which fails to explain clearly why she left Romney at the altar:

. . . For days, her touching, foolish lines We mused on with conjectural fantasy, As if some riddle of a summer-cloud On which one tries unlike similitudes Of now a spotted Hydra-skin cast off, And now a screen of carven ivory That shuts the heavens’ conventual secrets up From mortals overbold. We sought the sense. (4.987–94)

This comparison describes the very process of forging similitude, and everything in it suggests conjecture and mutability rather than certainty and permanence. Strictly speaking, the comparison is in the form of a hypothetical rather than a simile, using “as if” rather than “as.” But the “as” of simile itself carries the suggestion of “as if,” and this passage makes explicit the hypothetical valence latent in all similes.58 Of course, the mention of “unlike similitudes” both invokes the figure of simile and questions its efficacy in stating meaningful connections. Aurora’s efforts to find meaning in Marian’s letter are presented as “conjectur[e],” “fantasy,” passing the time by playing with a “riddle.” Despite the dev- astating consequences of Marian’s disappearance, efforts to understand it are denigrated as inefficacious play, calling to mind Romney’s critique of poetry as a similarly unproductive distraction. Anxieties about simile as poetic form continue to build in the vehicle that describes the frustrated attempt to extract meaning. The object to be deciphered is compared to a mutable cloud, and the first attempted meaning is a shed skin, a surface detached from what used to lie beneath it. At least in the Hydra-skin comparison, the surface was once attached; the skin at one time had an organic connection as a piece of a whole. But in the second vehicle for a sought meaning, we are given a screen which has no necessary connection to the meaning it hides, and which marks the ideal and transcendent as inaccessible to human understanding. Susan Wolfson has argued that Coleridge sometimes uses similes as “a meta-trope . . . exposing the unity vested in the privileged form of

58. Susan Wolfson discusses this link between similes and hypotheticals. Wolfson, For- mal, 69–70. J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 1 the symbol as an illusory or factitious (however intensely desired) effect of poetic form.”59 I believe this passage from Aurora Leigh performs a similar function. It describes a disconnection between vehicle and tenor, signifier and signified, stripping away the symbol’s illusion of unity. Aurora’s hypothetical does itself successfully communicate the unread- ability of Marian’s letter. Yet it employs the logic of simile to express not only the potential inauthenticity of metaphorical meanings, but also the potential for thwarted communication due to the factitiousness of language itself. Although Barrett Browning acknowledges these potential failures of meaning, she does not seem to despair at them. Her art may never fully realize or convey the Truth to which it aspires, but she still values the pursuit, and suggests that the provisional truths offered by art may provide closer and closer approximations to Truth. Art “pushes toward the intense significance / Of all things, hungry for the Infinite” (4.1155–56). Barrett Browning’s use of similes help expose the false confidence of symbols, and in this respect, it mirrors her use of lyric and epistolary forms to expose the false confidence of retrospective narration. In both cases, she implies that human knowledge must be seen as provisional rather than absolute, but is nevertheless still valuable and necessary.60 By using similes to acknowledge that the likenesses ascribed by figurative language cannot be unquestioningly attributed to the objects themselves, Barrett Browning places the source of similitudes in the poet’s agency or in language itself. And since similes are described as presenting a writer’s assertion or a coincidence of language, rather than an objective truth about the world, figurative language can be questioned, interrogated, and possibly disagreed with, by the reader. Similes may expose the possibilities of thwarted communication, but they also contain an invitation for debate, for meaningful dialogue. One of the most explicit instances of a debated simile61 is Aurora’s assertion that the runaway Marian will remain virtuous, followed by Romney’s reply:

. . . I hold it true, As I’m a woman and know womanhood, That Marian Erle, however lured from place,

59. Wolfson, Formal, 66. 60. Again, Wolfson’s analysis of Coleridge parallels my analysis of Barrett Brown- ing. She finds in Coleridge’s use of the form evidence that similes “prove a resource for representing those very orders of thought that symbol would overcome: the tentative, the provisional, the uncertain, the ambiguous, the illusory.” Wolfson, Formal, 73. 61. An even more extended debate about the meaning of a simile occurs between Aurora and Lord Howe in lines 5.854–67. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

Deceived in way, keeps pure in aim and heart As snow that’s drifted from the garden-bank To the open road.’ ’Twas hard to hear him laugh. ‘The figure’s happy. Well—a dozen carts And trampers will secure you presently A fine white snow-drift. Leave it there, your snow! ’Twill pass for soot ere sunset. . . . (4.1066–75)

Romney agrees with Aurora’s choice of vehicle, but only because he assigns to it the opposite meaning that Aurora does. Case cites this passage as an instance of a misused metaphor that implies the opposite of what Aurora intends and undermines Aurora’s artistic control, and she notes that the poem fulfills the unintended implication—Marian is sullied.62 It is equally important to recognize that the poem also fulfills Aurora’s intention: Marian may be labeled as sullied and fallen by societal conventions, but she was assaulted against her will and hence remained “pure in aim and heart.” Aurora and Romney are both right, and the use of a simile, rather than a symbol or image, invites the discussion and disagreement that can show the simultaneous validity of two seemingly opposite interpretations. Barrett Browning’s incessant use of similes also provides a method of advancing the plot while introducing elements that call attention to the work’s status as poetry. In a simile, the tenor and vehicle, the literal and figurative elements, are kept separated by “like” or “as,” keeping them more grammatically distinct than is the case in a metaphor or symbol. A seamless blending of the two elements, the apparent unity of tenor and vehicle celebrated by Wimsatt and deplored by de Man in their descriptions of Romantic images and symbols, is much more difficult to effect in a simile. This semantic and syntactic separation which is, by definition, so marked in a simile, has consequences for Barrett Browning’s use of both lyric and narrative elements. A simile’s literal meaning, what is actually happening, is explicitly stated and is a discrete unit, thus leaving the plot remarkably clear. But a figurative element is attached to the literal one, allowing for self-consciously poetic moments with all the formal play and virtuosity of lyric. As Dorothy Mermin has remarked, Aurora Leigh’s “heightened feeling and language, especially its elaborate metaphors and ostentatious epic similes, are deeply and

62. Case, Plotting, 119–20. J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 1 often obtrusively ‘poetical.’”63 Barrett Browning can clearly refer to a character or action, keeping the current plot line in the reader’s mind, but add lyric elaboration of thought, which reminds the reader of the craftedness of the discourse and very briefly delays the advancement of the plot. Such issues are explicitly addressed in Aurora’s comments on the ballad, a narrative genre, and the sonnet, a lyric genre. Returning again to this chapter’s epigraph:

My ballads prospered; but the ballad’s race Is rapid for a poet who bears weights Of thought and golden image. He can stand Like Atlas, in the sonnet,—and support His own heavens pregnant with dynastic stars; But then he must stand still, nor take a step. (5.84–89)

Since Aurora makes the complementary complaints that narrative moves too quickly to appreciate subtleties of thought and beauties of imagery, and that lyric can appreciate them endlessly without making any progress, she implies that finding a compromise between the two, a slow but steady pace, would be more appealing. A simile allows Bar- rett Browning to maintain such a compromise. For every small step in the narrative, a lyric pause follows, creating discrete but regular motion forward. This passage contains a simile (“stand / Like Atlas . . .”), and enacts the problem it describes and the solution it implies. It begins by rapidly summarizing a period in Aurora’s poetic career—“My ballads prospered.” This certainly provides narrative clarity, but it oversimpli- fies the matter. Aurora then pauses to use a metaphor to explain her thoughts on the drawbacks of such rapid narrative. While her reference to “weights of thought” may initially suggest that thought is a burden in general rather than merely an impediment to narrative, this suggestion is canceled by the positive connotations of “golden image[s],” and the overall implication is that rapid narrative excludes that which Aurora values. The passage then goes on to provide just such a gleaming image, describing in suggestive detail Atlas with a whole universe, rather than one world, on his back. The vehicle of this simile reveals, in turn, two problems with lyric forms. First, lyric must “stand still” and resists the incorporation or enactment of change, lest the universe come toppling

63. Mermin, “Genre,” 8. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

down. Second, lyric thought may be pregnant with only the poet’s “own heavens”; that is, it may be restricted to gestating subjective thoughts. The combination of these two critiques amounts to the common fear that lyric is isolated and solipsistic, unable to recognize social concerns or advocate social change. Taken as a whole, the passage links a narrative beginning to a lyric end, and offsets the limitations of each genre with the strengths of the other, incorporating both socially contextualized story progression and subtle lyric elaboration. If we agree with Holly Laird that “[Barrett] Browning’s central aesthetic choice and worry appears to be between the Wordsworthian advocacy of a solitary songster inspired by the deep urgings of nature and the Carlylian demand for a didactic writer with urban concerns that he records through rhetorical narratives,”64 then in her use of similes Barrett Browning can keep both concerns operative, joined together by the hinge of “like” or “as.” Even if we do not label these two tendencies as specifically Wordsworthian and Carlylian, the general point still remains valid. By constantly placing lyric song and didactic narrative side by side, Barrett Browning can have the space to develop subtleties of thought, but still put them in a social context to serve a rhetorical purpose. One of the dangers of this technique is that the poet’s overindulgence in lyrical elaboration and poetic play will prove too great a distraction for the reader, who will lose track of the simile’s tenor and hence lose track of the plot. Some contemporary critics of Aurora Leigh had just such a reaction, finding some of its poetical effects overwhelming and confusing. W. E. Aytoun complained of Barrett Browning, “She has a decided tendency, not only to multiply, but to intensify images, and occasionally carries this so far as to bewilder the reader.”65 In his review, John Nichol quoted lines 1.154–63, in which Aurora describes her perceptions of her mother’s portrait, and called it “a perfect shoal of mangled and pomp- ous similes.”66 Not all of Barrett Browning’s readers, however, reacted to her similes with such scorn. George Eliot was much more forgiving,

64. Laird, 357. 65. W. E. Aytoun, review of Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 81 (January 1857): 37. 66. John Nichol, review of Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Westminster Review 68 (July and October 1857): 401. More recent criticism has found much more value in this passage, since Barbara Gelpi has convincingly argued that the portrait represents Aurora’s conflicted feelings about her own femininity and traditional gender roles for women. See Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, “Aurora Leigh: The Vocation of the Woman Poet,” Victorian Poetry 19.1 (Spring 1981): 35–48. J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 1 claiming, “There is no petty striving after special effects, no heaping up of images for their own sake, no trivial play of fancy run quite astray from the control of deeper sensibility.”67 productIve fragmentatIon

If Aurora Leigh is composed of bits of retrospective narrative, epistolary and diaristic forms, and lyric poetry, all intricately interacting, then what are readers to make of the overall structure of this poem? Stone claims that “Barrett Browning does not merely mingle genres; she fuses them together to form a new whole,”68 but other readers have thought the poem’s generic parts remain distinct rather than forming a coherent whole. Kerry McSweeney celebrates its diverse offerings, calling the poem a “bravura performance” that “unscrupulously mixes genres . . . and holds them all suspended in a cornucopian fluency of discourse.”69 Alison Case is more critical, and “suggest[s] that Barrett Browning’s juggling of narrative modes does not so much reconcile these conflicting roles and impulses as allow them an uneasy coexistence.”70 I agree that the different generic conventions are not blended harmoniously, and are instead left as discrete units, but I think their “uneasy coexistence” creates productive tensions. By weaving together threads of conflicting genres, Barrett Browning exposes arbitrary generic conventions. Such an exposure is important for both the heroine and the author of Aurora Leigh. Aurora frequently complains about the con- striction of abstract and arbitrary conventions, and Barrett Browning’s poetic practice in Aurora Leigh suggests she agrees with her heroine on these matters. One of the most explicit complaints against traditional literary forms appears in the midst of Aurora’s ars poetica in book 5:

What form is best for poems? Let me think Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit, As sovran nature does, to make the form; For otherwise we only imprison spirit

67. George Eliot, review of Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Westminster Review 67 (January 1857): 307. 68. Stone, “Genre,” 115. 69. Kerry McSweeney, Introduction to Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), xx. 70. Case, Plotting, 108. 10 ~ C h A p t e r

And not embody. Inward evermore To outward,—so in life, and so in art Which still is life. Five acts to make a play. And why not fifteen? why not ten? or seven? What matter for the number of the leaves, Supposing the tree lives and grows? exact The literal unities of time and place, When ’tis the essence of passion to ignore Both time and place? Absurd. Keep up the fire, And leave the generous flames to shape themselves. (5.223–36)

Aurora challenges the arbitrariness, even randomness, of literary convention by questioning why plays have five acts, when they might just as reasonably have fifteen or seven. Note that Aurora suggests only the possibility of plays with more acts than is common; she does not suggest the possibility of a two-act or four-act play. This preference for expansiveness may bring to mind the length of Aurora Leigh itself, and a displeased reviewer’s remark that “this poem is two thousand lines longer than ‘Paradise Lost.’”71 But her loquaciousness does have an ostensible purpose. Literary forms are arbitrary, but an artist who constricts the forms further, makes works smaller, only exacerbates the problem. Writing more expansive poems or plays is a straightforward strategy for including more (and potentially more diverse) material, and is a clear argument for fitting the size of the work to the material, rather than fitting the material to traditional forms. Barrett Browning reiterates her disdain for constraining conventions in her dismissal of “the literal unities of time and place.” As an alternative to such restrictive conventions, Barrett Browning offers up the Romantic ideal of organic form. The number of acts in a play should come as naturally as the leaves on a tree, the crucial point being not the number of parts, but the energy and development of the whole: “What matter for the number of the leaves, / Supposing the tree lives and grows?” The idea that artistic production should resemble organic growth is made even more explicit in Barrett Browning’s plea that poets should “trust the spirit, / As sovran nature does, to make the form.” The Romantic tradition usually expects organic forms to produce unity, beauty, and a sense of fitness or naturalness. Such an expectation

71. Coventry Patmore, review of Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, North British Review 26 (February 1857): 240. J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 11 is found in Barrett Browning’s letter to Mary Russell Mitford, with which this book opened: “I want to write a poem of a new class, in a measure— a Don Juan, without the mockery & impurity, . . . under one aspect,—& having unity, as a work of art,—& admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digression (which is in fact a characteristic of the age) as I like to use.”72 We may still wonder what would be left of Don Juan if its “mockery and impurity” were taken away, but one possible remainder is its digressiveness, and Barrett Browning desires the freedom to digress in her own poem. She also wants to give it the “unity, as a work of art” that characterizes organic form, and to fuse the digressiveness “under one aspect.” By these standards, Barrett Browning’s form for Aurora Leigh has sometimes been found lacking. One of the poem’s earliest reviewers complained, “We have no experience of such a mingling of what is precious with what is mean—of the voice of clarion and the lyric cadence of harp with the cracked school-room spinet. . . . Milton’s organ is put by Mrs. Browning to play polkas in May-Fair drawing-rooms.”73 Aurora Leigh often undermines a sense of the unified and natural on both the small scale of poetic practice and the large scale of narrative structure. An example of small-scale disruption occurs in the very poetic passage just under discussion. Ironically, this endorsement of organic form and critique of literary conventions is contained within a section of text that, at the limits of perception, suggests the formal restrictions of end-rhymed forms generally, and the sonnet in particular. This section is a fourteen-line unit, set off from the text before and after as a separate verse paragraph, in iambic pentameter: it is the proper size for a sonnet. Of course, it lacks the elaborate rhyme scheme of a sonnet proper, but it does have suggestions of end rhyme, with “evermore” and “ignore” almost unnoticeably rhyming because of their distance from each other, and with many examples of consonance in the words at lines’ ends.74

72. Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 30 December 1844, The Let- ters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836–1854, vol. 3, eds. Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan (Waco, Tex.: Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, 1983), 49. 73. H. F. Chorley, review of Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Athenaeum (22 November 1856): 1425. 74. To specify the approximate end rhymes: “spirit” is repeated, and if its two syllables are elided into one (as they might be to avoid the extra syllable and the feminine ending), then it produces consonance with “art”; “evermore” is an approximate rhyme with “form,” and the sounds are repeated in the second half with “ignore” and its consonance with “fire” in the next line; “play” and “place” have both alliteration and assonance; and there is consonance among “seven,” “leaves,” and “themselves.” The passage also contains many internal repetitions: “form,” “forms,” and “form”; “inward” and “outward”; “life” is repeated; “acts” and “exact”; “leaves,” “lives,” and “leave”; and “time and place” is repeated. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

The passage, then, both invokes restrictive conventions and creates a sense of fragmentation and disruption. On a larger scale, the narrative structure is fragmented and seemingly suffers from disruptions. Barrett Browning does occasionally describe the dangers of her literary practices. In book 3 Aurora voices dissatisfaction with her earliest poetic productions, but thinks that her more recent poems are more vibrant and organic:

. . . But I felt My heart’s life throbbing in my verse to show It lived, it also—certes incomplete, Disordered with all Adam in the blood, But even its very tumours, warts and wens Still organised by and implying life. (3.338–43)

The biological metaphors and the claim that these poems were “organised by and implying life” suggest they meet Aurora’s standard of organic growth. Yet these works are disfigured. Barrett Browning thus suggests that beauty and uniformity do not necessarily follow from organicism, and that they are less important than organic growth itself. A poem’s “tumours, warts and wens” paradoxically may indicate a poem’s health- fulness, since they constitute evidence of a poem’s unconventionality.75 Here again, the poem presents deviations from expected literary forms as a type of superabundance, as growth beyond normal boundaries, suggesting that poetry should be more expansive in its range. Aurora Leigh may not embody with complete success the organic form it advocates, and many of its readers may find its “tumours, warts and wens” to be a fault, rather than an asset. But there are advantages to the poem’s patchwork of genres, benefits to be gained from allowing its generic components to remain fragmentary. Both Mermin and Stone argue that Aurora Leigh crosses boundaries of genre in order to question traditional boundaries of gender.76 Of course, this practice also questions boundaries of genre, and the poem successfully displays the faults of various traditional literary forms. Mermin claims that in Aurora Leigh, “Juxtapositions of lyric intensity and modern daily life are not

75. Barrett Browning seems to posit the organic and the conventional as opposite terms in literary production, with slavish imitation being an extreme form of the conventional, but with no middle term between convention and nature. That is, she does not acknowledge the possibility of a poem being both unconventional and unnatural in form. 76. Mermin, “Genre,” 11; Stone, “Genre,” 103. J u x tA p o s e d f r A g m e n t s o f g e n r e s I n a u r o r a l e i g h ~ 1 intended (whatever their effect may be) to play off against or diminish each other.”77 I agree that such juxtapositions are not included for comic effect, nor are they meant to diminish the importance of either lyric intensity or the representation of daily life. But I suggest the poem’s generic juxtapositions are meant to play off one genre against another: the strength of Aurora Leigh’s fragmentary structure lies precisely in exposing the limitations and insufficiencies of any one fragment, any one genre. Since each individual genre is viewed as flawed and insufficient, Aurora Leigh implies that, for a work of its scope and ambition to be successful, it must incorporate many genres, offsetting the limitations of one with the strengths of another. In this respect, when Virginia Woolf writes, “The best compliment we can pay Aurora Leigh is that it makes us wonder why it has left no successors,”78 she misses a crucial point. Because Barrett Browning is against the slavish imitation of preexisting forms, the best compliment her followers could pay her is to create their own experimental generic hybrids, rather than to write works that are recognizably imitations of Aurora Leigh. Certainly, not all of Barrett Browning’s readers went on to write their own experimental works of fiction, but the poem does invite other, somewhat less demanding, responses as well. The poem displays great faith in the reader as an active participant, who will both re-experience Aurora’s development, and will infer a subtle critique of a wide range of literary forms from Barrett Browning’s complex construction of the poem. Usually in works with female epistolary narrators, as Case describes it, “Rather than being subjected to their narrative authority, we [the readers] are invited to assume authority over them—to construct a plot and a meaning out of their words that they themselves cannot understand, or do not wish us to know.”79 For this reason, “a great part of the pleasure feminine narration provides is that it thus appears to reverse the power relations of narrator and reader.”80 Even though the latter half of Aurora Leigh resembles feminine epistolary forms, and even though Aurora does misunderstand or deny her own feelings for Rom- ney through much of the work, the audience may respond differently to this particular text. In some aspects of her life, Aurora is intelligent and insightful, and she is given the control of retrospective narration for part of the work, making it difficult for the reader to adopt an attitude of superiority over her. More importantly, although at times the implied

77. Mermin, “Genre,” 9. 78. Woolf, 192. 79. Case, Plotting, 30. 80. Ibid., 16. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

author may know, and readers may infer, more than Aurora knows, the tone of the text generally treats Aurora’s errors with sympathy, rather than ridicule. The reader is invited to identify with Aurora and to accept her changing knowledge, beliefs, and actions.81 If the reader’s identification with Aurora requires an acceptance of change, and a constantly revised understanding, then so, too, does the reader’s identification of the poem’s form. Reynolds says of Aurora Leigh’s formal features, “These constantly renewed attempts at repetition, variety, and revision suggest the inadequacy of any absolute conclusion. But they also indicate the potential for an approximation to vision through this legible, if fragmented, text.”82 Just as Barrett Brown- ing shows the inadequacy of an unwillingness to change, of remaining locked in an absolute conclusion, she also demonstrates the inadequacy of formally restrictive genres, which lock a poet’s ideas into a preexisting form. The fragmentation of Aurora Leigh is necessary and illuminating, because it exposes the limitations of various genres when taken individually. Barrett Browning sometimes exposes narrative conventions to promote the purposes of lyric, and sometimes exposes lyric to promote narrative. The poem’s readers are not asked to judge Aurora harshly, but they are expected to judge literary forms, and to see the necessity of the generic hybridity the poem embodies. The next chapter examines a poem whose goal is precisely the judgment of the poem’s speakers—Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, a work that fuses, rather than fragments, lyric and narrative through its use and expansion of the dramatic monologue.

81. I agree with Reynolds that rather than judging Aurora, “The reader is asked to share all the fluctuating opinions of the actor-narrator enacted before her, not to demand consistency but to experience each step toward a notional growth as and when Aurora herself experiences it.” Reynolds, 28. 82. Ibid., 48. 4temporaL hybrIdIty In the dramatIc monoLogue and The ring anD The Book

you know the tale already. —robert browning, The Ring and the Book (1.372)

Whereas the previous chapter argued that Aurora Leigh juxtaposes discrete fragments of lyric and narrative to have the two modes comment on each other, this chapter contends that Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book achieves a seamless blend of the two modes. Browning’s poem is, nonetheless, a complex, changeable work, and numerous genres may have influenced it. One study claims that the poem has links to the epic, the novel, narrative poetry, novels in verse, romance, the moral- ity play, the medieval story cycle, and the novella.1 I do not think it follows, however, that “possessing attributes of several literary genres, the poem belongs to none.”2 Critics agree that most, if not all, of the ten internal books are dramatic monologues,3 and the dramatic monologue

1. Richard D. Altick and James F. Loucks, II, Browning’s Roman Murder Story: A Reading of The Ring and the Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 7–8. 2. Ibid., 7. 3. Many critics label the Pope’s speech as a soliloquy rather than a dramatic mono-

155 1 ~ C h A p t e r

is the essential genre of The Ring and the Book. The form itself seamlessly blends lyric and narrative in a very particular way, and all ten monologues share this modal blending. Within these parameters, however, the contents of individual monologues vary in their lyricism or narrativity. The poem as a whole exhibits a similar blend of lyric and narrative temporality peculiar to the individual dramatic monologues; the temporal movement across monologues, from the occasion of one to that of the next, mimics on a larger scale the moving time of discourse within a single dramatic monologue. And in The Ring and the Book as a whole, the repetition of the story in some respects mimics the features of epic, creating a similar audience response. The story’s retellings diminish its narrative interest, however, and refocus attention on static character traits, and on the importance of discourse—key elements of lyric and of the dramatic monologue. Repetition on the smaller scale of alliteration also emphasizes the level of discourse and characterization, and readers see this pervasive technique as the author’s, rather than any individual character’s. Browning narrativizes the moment of discourse, but does so in part to serve the static interests of lyric. Yet these static interests are also placed in the service of narrative’s rhetorical project: engaging the reader’s judgment.

the dramatIc monoLogue’s rhetorIcaL reLatIon to LyrIc and narratIve

We cannot understand the mixture of lyric and narrative in The Ring and the Book without first understanding the conventional relationship of lyric and narrative within the dramatic monologue in general. Critical discussions of the dramatic monologue have often placed it in an intermediate position between lyric and drama, or between lyric and narrative, primarily based on rhetorical considerations. Some of the narrower definitions of the form are prescriptive about the fictional rhetorical situation, focusing on the relationship between the speaker and the fictional

logue. The framing books 1 and 12 are written in Browning’s own voice, and hence are not dramatic monologues in any conventional sense. Morse Peckham, however, claims that “Book I is a dramatic monologue uttered by Robert Browning” because “the Robert Browning of Book I is to be conceived as interpreting the documents according to his own interests—necessarily and ineluctably.” More broadly, Peckham argues that Browning, influenced by nineteenth-century historiography, recognizes the author’s bias in each of his historical documents, and recognizes his own bias as historiographer. “Historiography and The Ring and the Book,” Victorian Poetry 6.3–4 (Autumn–Winter 1968), 245, 246. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1 addressee.4 Several influential studies instead emphasize the rhetorical effects on the reader. Isobel Armstrong, for instance, stresses the dual audience responses in what she calls “double poems”—a category which includes dramatic monologues. A double poem is simultaneously “not only the subject’s utterance but the object of analysis and critique. It is, as it were, reclassified as drama in the act of being literal lyric expression. To re-order lyric expression as drama is to give it a new content and to introduce the possibility of interrogation and critique.”5 In his foundational study, Robert Langbaum emphasizes the “tension between sympathy and moral judgment” in the reader’s response to the dramatic monologue.6 The audience is able to sympathize with an immoral or emotionally unstable speaker because the poet has established a model for such identification, by seeming to project his own vital consciousness into his creation.7 While this identification takes place, readers “remai[n] aware of the moral judgment we have suspended for the sake of under-

4. Ina Beth Sessions suggests an elaborate scheme for labeling dramatic monologues based on the presence or absence of seven formal characteristics: “A Perfect dramatic monologue . . . has the definite characteristics of speaker, audience, occasion, revelation of character, interplay between speaker and audience, dramatic action, and action which takes place in the present.” “The Dramatic Monologue,” PMLA 62.2 (June 1947), 508. More recently, W. David Shaw has emphasized the play of vocatives and apostrophes in the speaker-auditor relationship: “If pressed to offer a one-sentence definition of the genre, I should be tempted to say that a dramatic monologue is a poem of one-sided conversation in which the swerve of lyric apostrophe away from rhetoric often deflects the speaker from his ostensible purpose of persuading or manipulating a silent auditor.” “Lyric Displace- ment in the Victorian Monologue: Naturalizing the Vocative,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 52.3 (December 1997): 303. While Shaw draws on Jonathan Culler’s analysis of apostrophe, Shaw’s discussion runs counter to Culler’s thoughts on the relationship between apostrophe and the dramatic monologue: “Apostrophes trouble attempts to read poems as dramatic monologues.” Jonathan Culler, “Changes in the Study of the Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, eds. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1985), 40. Ivan Kreilkamp also focuses on the role of voice in the dramatic monologue, claiming it is “like the lyric, a form of print culture defined by its mimicry of voice; yet, unlike the lyric, it complicates this mimicry by calling attention to the difference between author and speaker,” creating a tension between voice and print that he associates with the Victorian novel. Ivan Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 157. 5. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (New York: Rout- ledge, 1993), 12. Armstrong’s position seems consistent with Herbert Tucker’s earlier claim that in a dramatic monologue “the business of articulation, of putting oneself into words, compromises the self it would justify; it disintegrates the implicit claim of self-presence in the lyric into a rhetorical fabric of self-presentation” and turns the speaker into “an object of interpretation.” Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., “From Monomania to Monologue: ‘St. Simeon Stylites’ and the Rise of the Victorian Dramatic Monologue,” Victorian Poetry 22.2 (Summer 1984): 125, 126. 6. Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Liter- ary Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1957), 85. 7. Ibid., 94. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

standing,”8 and the greater the speaker’s immorality, the greater the tension created by our suspension of judgment. More recently, James Phelan has offered alternative rhetorical definitions of dramatic monologue, lyric, and narrative, and sympathy and judgment again play crucial roles. For Phelan, narrative invites judgment, while lyric invites sympathetic identification with the speaker. He claims that “in narrative internal judgments of characters (and narrators) are required, while in lyric such judgments are suspended until we take the step of evaluation.”9 A lyric poem instead “allows readers to project themselves into the poem,” but for Phelan a necessary precondition for such identification is that either “the distinction between speaker and author does not exist,” or if there is a distinction, the speaker is not very individualized.10 Phelan disagrees with Langbaum by claiming that the dramatic monologue does not evoke the reader’s sympathetic identification with the speaker; rather, since “the implied author and the speaker are distinct figures . . . the authorial audience remains in the observer role.”11 Although reading a dramatic monologue “typically involves judging the character” this judgment is not necessary in Phel- an’s view, and when present is subordinated to “our coming to know the character.”12 Phelan’s emphasis on the revelation of character as the purpose of the dramatic monologue is the one crucial point on which he and Langbaum agree. For despite the predominance of sympathy and judgment in his discussion of the form, Langbaum does explicitly relegate those audience responses as subsidiary effects of character revelation: “To present in their original concreteness, to evoke, as we say, a person, idea, or historical period, is the whole purpose of the dramatic

8. Ibid., 96. Some critics have since questioned the universality of such reader responses. Glennis Byron finds Langbaum’s emphasis on sympathy misleading, especially in dramatic monologues by women, and she recommends we focus instead on the social critiques launched through monologues by both male and female authors. Glennis Byron, Dramatic Monologue, The New Critical Idiom, ed. John Drakakis (London: Routledge, 2003), 59. Cynthia Scheinberg claims that she finds it impossible to suspend her judgment of the Duke in “My Last Duchess” and sympathize with him, and that more generally “a reader’s capacity for sympathy is almost always linked to a reader’s cultural, political, and gendered identity” rather than being a universal constant. Cynthia Scheinberg, “Recasting ‘sympathy and judgment’: Amy Levy, Women Poets, and the Victorian Dramatic Mono- logue,” Victorian Poetry 35.2 (Summer 1997): 178, 176. 9. James Phelan, “Character and Judgment in Narrative and in Lyric: Toward an Understanding of Audience Engagement in The Waves,” in Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1996), 33. 10. Ibid., 34, 32. 11. James Phelan, “Rhetorical Literary Ethics and Lyric Narrative: Robert Frost’s ‘Home Burial,’” Poetics Today 25.4 (Winter 2004): 636. 12. Ibid. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1 monologue—of which purpose the particular perspective is the condition, and the disequilibrium between sympathy and judgment the consequence.”13 Phelan and Langbaum may disagree about the cognitive faculties involved, but both see the reader’s vital and tangible compre- hension of the speaker as the raison d’être, and the defining feature, of the form.14 I agree that the revelation of character is the primary rhetorical purpose of the dramatic monologue, and is central to any definition of the genre. In the following pages, I shift attention away from character per se, however, and focus instead on the temporal dynamics through which a dramatic monologue communicates character to its reader. I do so not because character is unimportant, but rather because previous critics have already firmly established the importance of character, while they have given less sustained attention to the temporal features I discuss. In addition, a focus on the temporality of discourse allows me to reframe the dramatic monologue’s relation to lyric and narrative. Phelan argues that the dramatic monologue is distinct from lyric and narrative and falls into a third category (which he calls portraiture). Langbaum, in contrast, uses rhetorical considerations to identify the dramatic monologue as a mixture of lyric and dramatic, or narrative, elements.15 Dramatic monologues call attention to the speaker’s discourse, since they contain a “superabundance of expression, more words, ingenuity and argument than seem necessary for the purpose.”16 This “superfluity and unaccountability of the dramatic monologue are antithetical to the structure of drama and narrative, where the point is precisely to achieve economy and accountability,” and such a superabundance must be attributed to the lyrical elements of the form.17 This perceived antagonism between lyric and narrative in the dramatic monologue—their antithetical interests and the related tension between

13. Langbaum, 140. 14. Isobel Armstrong is a noteworthy voice of dissent on this topic. She claims that “Browning’s monologues are not studies of character but studies of evolving states of feeling, psychological processes. . . . [T]he monologues . . . are never written for the primary purpose of exploring the ‘character’ or ‘motivation’ of particular speakers and this holds also for The Ring and the Book.” “A Note on the Conversion of Caponsacchi,” Victorian Poetry 6.3–4 (Autumn–Winter 1968): 271. 15. For the purposes of my study, drama has been implicitly conflated with narrative. I consider dramatic works as primarily narrative forms, presented in a different medium than works meant to be silently, privately read. Given the temporal basis for my definitions of lyric and narrative, the essential temporality of drama should clearly align it with narrative. 16. Langbaum, 182. 17. Ibid., 188. 10 ~ C h A p t e r

sympathy and judgment—has been a common feature in discussions of the form. Herbert Tucker articulates this modal antagonism in his claim that “character in the Browningesque dramatic monologue emerges as an interference effect between opposed yet mutually informative dis- courses: between an historical, narrative, metonymic text and a symbolic, lyrical, metaphoric text that adjoins it and jockeys with it for authority.”18 I would like to question the necessity of this antipathy and competition between the two modes. If we instead focus on the temporal features of lyric and narrative, we find that the dramatic monologue seamlessly blends the two modes, creating a true hybrid, rather than a violent grafting, of lyric and narrative.

the temporaL structure of dramatIc monoLogues

The seamless blend of lyric and narrative temporalities in the dramatic monologue lies, as we shall see, in the method through which the poet communicates to the reader. The content of the communication, however, can be quite variable in its relation to lyric or narrative. All dramatic monologues will express the speaker’s character as the key part of their content (though it may be expressed indirectly). In most cases, the speaker’s character is static, rather than dynamic. Robert Langbaum suggests that the monologue’s subject matter is “habitual action,” which implies a sense of stasis, an unchanging or repetitive quality more typically associated with lyric than with narrative.19 In this view, actions in dramatic monologues are interesting because they are emblems of an entire life, of a person’s basic character; the actions themselves are not the focus of the work.20 James Phelan agrees: “In portraiture, events typically are present, but not because they are essential to the progression of a story of change but because they are an effective means to reveal character. Change is not present, because portraiture is focused on depicting a character at a particular moment or a particular phase of life that we understand as ongoing.”21 While this is usually true, there

18. Herbert F. Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, eds. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1985): 229–30. 19. Langbaum, 157. 20. According to Langbaum, character is victorious over action in the dramatic monologue. Langbaum, 182. 21. James Phelan, Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2007), 153. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 11 are some important exceptions—monologues that depict a speaker who has undergone (or is undergoing) a marked change in character. In The Ring and the Book, Caponsacchi’s monologue discusses a past moment at which his sense of religious duty and his interactions with women underwent a dramatic change. In “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician” Karshish’s letter enacts his present struggle between a newfound sense of wonder and faith and his long-held rationality and doubt. Thus, while character itself is frequently static in dramatic monologues, it need not be. Similarly, the overt content of the speaker’s utterance in any given dramatic monologue does not necessarily need to fit the lyric mode or the narrative mode. In this I agree with James Phelan, who argues that the dramatic monologue “is neutral on both change and stasis, since its point is neither event nor thought, belief, or situation but character.”22 The speaker may describe a related series of events, which constitutes a narrative. Such is the case in “Porphyria’s Lover,” whose speaker recounts the evening’s shocking events in a fairly straightforward, chronological fashion: Porphyria came through a storm to his cottage (lines 1–7), stoked the fire and removed her dripping outergarments (8–13), and embraced him, declaring her love (14–21). After a brief allusion to their backstory (lines 22–29 hint she is unwilling to give up her family and their wealth to marry her less prosperous lover), we’re told that the speaker decided to preserve her adoration of him by strangling her (31–41), and then propped her corpse against his body, where it has remained all evening (43–59). In other dramatic monologues, the

22. Phelan, “Rhetorical,” 635–36. Although he argues that “the opposition between sequence and stasis does not adequately pinpoint the difference between lyric and narrative,” this opposition features prominently in his descriptions of the modes. Phelan, “Character,” 31. While “narrative involves a sequence of related events during which the characters and/or their situations undergo some change,” a lyric speaker describes a static situation or “his or her meditations on something.” Phelan, “Rhetorical,” 634, 635. In arguing that dramatic monologues can describe either static lyric states or dynamic narrative events, Phelan and I thus disagree with Elisabeth Howe, who locates a narrative element characteristic of dramatic monologues solely within the stories they tell: “One feature that relates the dramatic monologue to the novel—and differentiates it from the lyric—is its characteristic narrative element. Like the protagonists of a novel, Browning’s personae have a past, and as in a novel we attend to the gradual unfolding of their story . . . or of a particularly significant incident in their lives.” Elisabeth A. Howe, The Dramatic Monologue, Studies in Literary Themes and Genres, ed. Ronald Gottesman, no. 10 (New York: Twayne, 1996), 10. In contrast, Alan Sinfield suggests that the “dramatic monologue has very little plot.” Alan Sinfield, Dramatic Monologue, The New Critical Idiom, ed. John D. Jump, no. 36 (London: Methuen, 1977), 3. I depart from all three critics in that I am about to argue that the narrative element constant to all dramatic monologues occurs at the level of discourse, not story. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

speaker may instead describe a state of mind, or set of meditations, which form the atemporal subject matter of lyric. As the title suggests, “Johannes Agricola in Meditation” is an example. The only narrative in the poem (if it can be called a narrative) is a cosmic one: “Ere stars were thundergirt, or piled / The heavens, God thought on me his child; / Ordained a life for me . . .” (14–16).23 The reader does not focus on the “plot” of how God predestined Johannes for heaven, however, but rather on Johannes’s twisted logic, and the pride and complacency it reveals. In contrast to other Browning poems taken as most exemplary of the dramatic monologue form, this speaker’s dramatic situation is left almost entirely unspecified.24 This vagueness of spatial and temporal setting enhances the poem’s sense of a suspended moment, detached from the flow of time.25 In “Johannes Agricola” we are drawn to lyric discourse, rather than narrative story. Complex combinations of narrative and lyric subject matter are also possible, as in “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” The first three stanzas focus on Roland’s discovery of the path supposed to lead to the Dark Tower, events which seem to be in the recent past. The next four stanzas briefly and subjectively narrate the more distant past of Roland’s long quest; later in stanzas XV–XVII he remembers two of his predecessors in the quest, and their eventual disgrace. Surrounding that reverie are stanzas VIII–XIV and XVIII–XXVIII, which describe in detail a landscape made lyrical by the almost hallucinatory affiliation of the surroundings with Roland’s mental state:26 nature is “starved [and] ignoble” (56), a horse embodies “grotesqueness” and “woe” (82), and

23. This and all subsequent quotations from Robert Browning’s works (including The Ring and the Book) are taken from The Complete Works of Robert Browning with Variant Read- ings and Annotations, eds. Roma A. King, Jr. et al., 16 vols. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969–). Line numbers will be provided in parenthetical citations. 24. The poem’s first lines—“There’s heaven above, and night by night / I look right through its gorgeous roof”—do suggest Johannes is staring at the night sky while speaking, but even this scanty information is rendered less specific by the repetition of this activity “night by night” and by the possibility, supported by the context of his religious musings, that “heaven” here refers at least as much to an abstract eternal paradise as to the visible sky. 25. Herbert Tucker notes a similar atemporality: “Johannes makes past, present, and future not only continuous but simultaneous.” Browning’s Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 173. 26. Samuel L. Chell notes of the poem, “Barren, sterile nature . . . is consonant with the speaker’s own lost hope and arrested energy.” The Dynamic Self: Browning’s Poetry of Dura- tion. English Literary Studies, gen. ed. Samuel L. Macey, no. 32 (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1984), 19. Donald S. Hair says of Childe Roland, “What he meets in the wasteland are the horrors within his own soul.” Browning’s Experiments with Genre (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 85. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1 the willows are “suicidal” (118). And yet these sections describing the landscape have distinctively narrative elements. Roland repeatedly questions how the landscape came to such a condition, asking for explana- tory narratives which are never provided: “What made those holes and rents” (69), “Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank / Soil to a plash?” (130–31), “What bad use was that engine for” (140). Roland also provides explicit cues to the temporal sequence of his motion through this landscape: “Back . . . again” (104), “A sudden” (109), “while” (121), “Then” (145), and “Now” (151). The epiphany of the last six stanzas, in which Roland realizes he has arrived at the tower and announces his success through song, is a lyrically intense moment, and yet it serves as the climax of Roland’s protracted narrative, conferring retrospective meaning on his past. And while the poem is in the past tense, the vivid and unmediated experiences described convey a present-tense immediacy.27 Lyric and narrative elements are interwoven, inseparable, and seemingly contradictory throughout “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Still other monologues feature neither lyric nor narrative as their predominant content. In “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” the Bishop self- consciously structures his speech as an artful rhetorical argument, and draws attention to its logical steps through such phrases as: “Thus much conceded, still the first fact stays—” (49), “I mean to prove it in due time” (164), and “I mean to meet you on your own premise” (171). While there is a clear progression in his speech, the emphasis falls on the logical progression of rhetoric rather than the temporal progression of narrative.28 While a focus on the temporal content of a story (for those dramatic monologues in which the speaker recounts a narrative), or on the atemporal content of static conditions (for those in which the speaker provides lyric meditations), usefully illustrates the variety of subjects across dramatic monologues, it can obscure the temporal structuring common to all dramatic monologues. This common structure emerges only if we instead focus on the temporality of discourse. The dramatic monologue differs from many pure narratives in that it emphasizes the act of storytelling at least as much as the story events, drawing more of the reader’s attention to the time of discourse. The dramatic monologue differs from pure lyric, however, in that the discourse noticeably unfolds over time, giving a prominence to temporal progression that is absent in

27. Chell also notes that “the poem has an unmistakably present-tense effect despite the past-tense form.” Chell, 22. 28. Herbert Tucker finds similar sequentiality in “Cleon” based on the steps in the letter’s argument. Tucker, however, places greater emphasis than I on the temporal aspect of this sequentiality. Tucker, Browning’s Beginnings, 212. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

lyric. Whereas the story content of dramatic monologues is quite variable, the crucial and unvarying feature of the form is the temporal progression within the discourse. There are, however, two ways of viewing the discourse of a dramatic monologue: it is a speech event which occurs both between the speaker and the fictional addressee, and between the poet and the reader.29 This, of course, allows for the frequent disjunction between what the speaker consciously reveals to the addressee, and what he unwittingly reveals to the reader (hence creating the judgment which the reader uneasily suspends while sympathizing with the speaker). It also allows for temporal developments within the communication to the reader, and within the relationship between speaker and addressee. All dramatic monologues reveal the speaker’s character to the reader gradually, in stages. Rather than accumulating additional evidence for a character trait apparent at the start of the poem, a dramatic monologue intermittently unveils new aspects of the speaker’s character, or later makes a previously unveiled trait so extreme that it seems to differ in kind (rather than merely in degree) from our previous conception of it. The reader’s understanding of the speaker at the beginning of the poem and her understanding at its end markedly (sometimes shockingly) differ. A dramatic monologue will convey such character revelations in decisive moments, surprising turning points that alter the reader’s assessment of the speaker and the poem. To return to my previous examples, “Porphyria’s Lover” contains two particularly shocking and abrupt moments of character revelation. The first occurs in line 41, when the speaker calmly narrates how he strangled Porphyria, transforming him in the reader’s mind from a self- pitying suitor to a pathologically possessive murderer.30 Many readers, myself included, would agree with U. C. Knoepflmacher’s claim that “[t]he last two lines of ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ jar the reader almost as much as the strangling acknowledged in line 41.”31 Those last two lines

29. Ralph Rader makes a similar point, using “My Last Duchess” as his example, when he notes that “we imaginatively hear the words of the poem as spoken by the Duke” yet at the same time we attribute the poem’s rhymes to the poet’s craft, not to the Duke’s speech act. “The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms,” Critical Inquiry 3.1 (Autumn 1976): 133. 30. Ralph Rader also notes Browning’s “need to prevent the reader from too early inferring the Lover’s murderous insanity while at the same time clearly developing its probability,” and he thinks that both the murder and his insanity are revealed in lines 37–41. “Notes on Some Structural Varieties and Variations in Dramatic ‘I’ Poems and Their Theoretical Implications,” Victorian Poetry 22.2 (Summer 1984): 111. 31. U. C. Knoepflmacher, “Projection and the Female Other: Romanticism, Browning, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue,” Victorian Poetry 22.2 (Summer 1984): 153. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1 reveal another layer of the lover’s insanity, and suggest that the entire poem may have been addressed to God: “And all night long we have not stirred, / And yet God has not said a word!” (59–60)32 That final exclamation could be read as an act of defiance and self-assertion, daring God to respond to the murder, and revealing unexpected depths of the speaker’s egotism. More likely, though, the lines register mild surprise that God has not spoken (to scold him, or for some other, less obvious, purpose), and hence expose a delusional state previously unsuspected by the reader.33 Few dramatic monologues contain moments of character revelation quite as shocking and melodramatic as those in “Porphyria’s Lover,” yet they do contain concentrated and well-defined moments at which the reader’s understanding shifts, noticeably progressing over time. In “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” one such concentrated section is lines 13–20, which reveal the speaker’s narcissism in thinking that God ordained every detail of his life before creating the heavens. His Antinomianism is later unveiled in especially vivid and macabre terms:

I have God’s warrant, could I blend All hideous sins, as in a cup, To drink the mingled venoms up; Secure my nature will convert The draught to blossoming gladness fast: (33–37)

In the case of “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” Roland quite consciously reveals his despair when he admits he is “not fit to cope / With that obstreperous joy success would bring” (21–22). Yet Roland is likely unaware of the self-loathing he indirectly but vividly reveals when he describes a gaunt horse: “Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; / I never saw a brute I hated so; / He must be wicked to deserve such pain” (82–84). For as Donald Hair observes, “[H]is instinc- tive hatred for the horse’s purported guilt is actually revulsion from his own guilt.”34 The poem ends soon after Roland realizes in an instant

32. John Maynard suggests that the dead Porphyria and God are “proto-listeners in the poem,” and claims that God’s silence spurs the reader’s ethical response to the poem. “Reading the Reader in Robert Browning’s Dramatic Monologues,” in Critical Essays on Robert Browning, ed. Mary Ellis Gibson (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1992): 74. 33. Herbert Tucker suggests “the Browningesque ‘giveaway’ of the final line . . . leaves us in doubt whether it is God’s approval or reproof that is awaited.” Tucker, “Monomania,” 126. 34. Hair, Browning’s Experiments, 85. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

that he has found the Dark Tower. He compares the moment of insight to “a click / As when a trap shuts” (173–74), and says “Burningly it came on me all at once” (175). The same could be said for the reader’s insight into aspects of his character, or the character of any dramatic monologue’s speaker. In some cases, dramatic monologues create additional temporal progression in the discourse viewed as an exchange between the speaker and a fictional interlocutor. To do so, they can imply developing responses from the interlocutor at different points in time, or emphasize the monologue’s relationship to the implied events that preceded or will follow the monologue itself.35 “Andrea del Sarto,” for example, frequently implies Lucrezia’s responses to Andrea’s speech, suggesting both her physical movements—“You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?” (4), “Come from the window, love” (211)—and the questions and statements she directs to Andrea—“(What he? why, who but Michel Agnolo? / Do you forget already words like those?)” (199–200), “Must you go? / That Cousin here again? he waits outside?” (219–20) The poem’s opening suggests that an argument immediately preceded the monologue itself: “But do not let us quarrel any more” (1). And the final line—“Again the Cousin’s whistle! Go, my Love” (267)—implies Lucrezia’s imminent departure for her rendezvous with her “cousin.” Some dramatic monologues blend together these sources of temporal progression (plot development within the speech’s story content, gradual revelation of the speaker’s character, development in the relationship with the addressee, and implied events before and after the discourse itself)—to create even more complex rhetorical effects and a heightened awareness of time’s passing. “The Laboratory” contains some narration of past events, but the poem’s narrative force derives from the dramatic situation, and what will likely happen soon after the monologue ends. The speaker “plots” in the sense of laying plans for future action—she is buying poison which she intends to administer to

35. Loy D. Martin analyzes techniques through which Browning “signif[ies] an immediately contiguous past out of which the poem’s moment grows” and uses “Andrea del Sarto” as an example. He suggests that Browning can indicate the temporal continuity of the present with the past for a particular speaker in a particular setting through progressive verbs, temporal adverbs, and deictics and determiners. Loy D. Martin, Browning’s Dramatic Monologues and the Post-Romantic Subject (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 90, 84–95. Herbert Tucker, however, claims that in many Browning poems the opening lines “share the property of being aggressively first: they are lines that defy, interrupt, plead, yearn, or somehow intend a beginning. They register discontinuities that are no less striking for the fact that a reader is totally uninformed what they are discontinuous with.” Tucker, Browning’s Beginnings, 149. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1 her husband’s mistress, most likely that very evening. The revelation of these future events is accompanied by a revelation of the speaker’s character, and not just through the intended actions themselves. Rather, the bluntness of her question to the apothecary, “Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?” (4), shows how casually, and with how little shame or guilt, she can plan a murder. The poem closes with her blithe exclamation “next moment I dance at the King’s!” (48), where she has imagined killing her rival; the gleeful tone exacerbates the reader’s revulsion. Perhaps the most effective dramatic monologues are ones that enlist temporal developments in both the dramatized occasion for the speech and in the past events recounted in the speech, to enhance the reader’s changing apprehension of the speaker over time. “My Last Duchess” does both, which may partly explain its popularity as an exemplary dramatic monologue. The first of the poem’s shocking revelations occurs during the Duke’s recounting of past events, in which he implies he ordered the murder of his late wife (45–46). The poem’s second shock is the late revelation of the addressee’s identity: we belatedly realize the Duke has been speaking all along to a representative negotiating the terms of the duke’s next marriage (49–53). The dramatic monologue, then, shares with lyric a focus on the time of discourse, but gives the discourse the developing temporality of narrative, rather than aspiring to the seemingly simultaneous meaning of lyric. This claim about the dynamism of Browning’s discourse comple- ments previous critical discussions of time in Browning’s aesthetics and thematics.36 It also explains why such temporally dynamic terms

36. Loy D. Martin has suggested, “As the Romantic lyric perpetuates the illusion of discretely boundaried discourse, the dramatic monologue instantiates an open-ended discourse that only invokes traditional poetic devices of symmetry and closure ironically, in order to deny their traditional effects. The monologue is always, among other things, a deictic gesture toward the fading and uncertain vistas of a linear dimension of time and speech.” Martin, 25. While Martin briefly discusses the Romantic lyric, he is not interested in the relationship of the dramatic monologue to lyric, drama, and narrative, relegating the topic to an endnote. Martin, 268. Instead, Martin is interested in temporal continuity as one of several ways in which dramatic monologues unsettle and fragment Romantic subjectivity. In his study of the significance of anticipation, beginning, and revision in Brown- ing, Herbert Tucker argues that “meaning for Browning is always processional, current, eventual. Meaning occurs by the way, not because it is only incidental to Browning’s work, but because it is an incident, something that happens in poetic time.” Tucker, Browning’s Beginnings, 12–13. W. David Shaw claims, “The distinctive feature of Browning’s rhetoric is not its exposition of a philosophic, religious, or aesthetic ‘system,’ but its dialectical temper, its habit of imitating and rejecting different attitudes and beliefs, which forces the reader to discover the astonishing (and often disturbing) life of the ideas.” W. David Shaw, The Dialectical Temper: The Rhetorical Art of Robert Browning (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 3. And Samuel L. Chell builds on Henri Bergson’s discussion of time to argue that “Browning’s poetry discloses a world of undivided continuity and ceaseless becoming, a 1 ~ C h A p t e r

as “surprise” or “revelation” are used so frequently in discussions of Browning’s monologues.37 And since the surprising revelations which highlight the passing time of discourse tend to be the moments of greatest tension between the reader’s sympathy and judgment, my analysis is consistent with Langbaum’s. Thus far, I have been making an argument about the dramatic monologue using a small number of Robert Browning’s poems as examples. Because my present purpose is to establish a foundation for analyzing Browning’s expansion of the genre in The Ring and the Book, it would be beyond the scope of this chapter to attempt a definitive argument about the dramatic monologue in general, as it has been employed by a variety of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century authors. While I am currently arguing that an emphasis on discourse that noticeably unfolds over time—a specific combination of lyric and narrative temporality—is a constant feature in Browning’s dramatic monologues, I can only hypothesize that it is a constant feature of the genre as used by other practitioners. As a brief gesture toward expanding this argument beyond Browning, I now turn to two works contemporary with Browning’s productions which may initially seem resistant to my claim: Augusta Webster’s “Circe” (1870) and Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (1842).38

world of duration in which the individual retains continuity with the past and has power to shape the future.” Chell, 11. 37. Herbert Tucker claims “attention and surprise” are “exemplary for [Browning’s] readers.” Tucker, Browning’s Beginnings, 19. Roma A. King, Jr. notes “the intense moment of revelation” and the “gradual self-revelation” in a number of Browning monologues. The Bow & the Lyre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), 11, 128. W. David Shaw describes Browning as “a master of compressed insight and sudden illumination,” and he suggests the Duke deliberately unleashes “a breath-taking progression of dramatic shocks.” Shaw, Dialectical, 127–28, 100. Loy Martin discusses the “sequential and fragmentary revelation of character” in “My Last Duchess.” Martin, 96. James Phelan describes the revelation that the Duke has been speaking to an envoy to arrange his next marriage as a “delayed disclosure” which provides the “climactic strokes in the portrait of the character.” Read- ing People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 7. Samuel Chell briefly discusses the reader’s awareness of the “dynamic moment of actual experiencing” in dramatic monologues. Chell, 63. And John Maynard describes the dynamic experience of reading a dramatic monologue through the analogy of a boxing match between the speaker and reader, “a wonderful violence of shove and response.” Maynard, 77. 38. Cynthia Scheinberg has lamented the exclusion of dramatic monologues by women from most discussions of the genre: “The genre’s relation to other literary forms—the Romantic lyric, the Victorian novel, modernist poetry—has been a central defining feature of much critical work. . . . My hypothesis is that each time dramatic monologues by men have been theorized as the “other” kind of poetic utterance, the “Others” of our literary tradition (in this case, women), have been written out of the theory.” Scheinberg, 175–76. Because the central focus of this chapter is Browning’s The Ring and the Book, I have drawn most of my examples of dramatic monologues from his works. Though my discussion of a single monologue by a woman cannot redress the larger critical gender imbalance, I do t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1

In both poems, the eponymous speakers express dissatisfaction with their static lives and crave change and adventure.39 To an extent, the discourse matches the subject matter, and is less dynamic than many of Browning’s dramatic monologues. Webster’s Circe laments the cloying sameness of her privileged existence in long, languorous sentences of iambic pentameter:

What fate is mine, who, far apart from pains And fears and turmoils of the cross-grained world, Dwell like a lonely god in a charmed isle Where I am first and only, and, like one Who should love poisonous savours more than mead, Long for a tempest on me and grow sick Of rest and of divine free carelessness! Oh me, I am a woman, not a god;40

Circe not only complains about the lack of change and excitement in her life, but in so doing also functions as a metaphor for the position of Victorian women. As Glennis Byron aptly notes, “In focusing upon Circe’s boredom, her longing for something to break ‘the sickly sweet monotony’ (32) of her restricted life on the island, for example, Webster can be seen to be obliquely commenting upon middle-class Victorian woman’s existence.”41 Moreover, when Circe sighs, “I am a woman, not a god,” she indirectly voices the complaint of idolized but restricted Victorian women who were treated as, in Coventry Patmore’s famous formulation, an Angel in the House. Dorothy Mermin has suggested that when writing dramatic monologues, “women seem usually to sympathize with their protagonists” and “the poet and the dramatized speaker . . . blur together.”42 Despite the reader’s inclination to follow the hope it will show that criticism can apply concepts of lyric and narrative to monologues by women. 39. As Robert Langbaum notes, “Most characteristic of Tennyson is a certain life-weariness, a longing for rest through oblivion,” but in the case of “Ulysses” that ennui is “couched in the contrasting language of adventure.” Langbaum, 89, 90. Glennis Byron connects “Ulysses” and “Circe” on the same grounds; she suggests Webster presents Circe “as being just as bored by the monotony of life on her island as Tennyson’s Ulysses is on Ithaca.” Byron, 81. 40. Augusta Webster, “Circe,” in The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Po- etic Theory, eds. Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle, 1010–13 (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1999), lines 58–65. All subsequent citations will be from this edition. Line numbers will be provided in parenthetical citations. 41. Byron, 58. 42. Dorothy Mermin, “The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet,” Criti- cal Inquiry 13.1 (Autumn 1986): 75, 76. The immediate context is a discussion of Elizabeth 10 ~ C h A p t e r

poet in sympathizing with Circe, and by extension, with the plight of Victorian middle-class women, there are shocking moments that reveal less savory aspects of her character. As Circe joyously anticipates that a rising storm might wreck a distant ship on her island, she imagines how she would welcome the shipwrecked men and how “one will slug- gishly besot himself, / And one be lewd, and one be gluttonous; / And I shall sickly look and loathe them all” (166–68). These lines and others jar the reader into recognizing Circe’s misanthropy and cruelty, and such moments, when the reader’s understanding of her abruptly changes, in turn produce a sense of passing time. Given the existing criticism on “Ulysses,” we may not expect to find shocking moments which abruptly reveal the speaker’s character and make the reader aware of the passing time of discourse. A number of critics have argued that Tennyson’s dramatic monologues, compared to Browning’s, are more lyrical, and create more sympathy for (and less judgment of) the speaker. Ralph Rader goes so far as to claim “Ulysses” is not a dramatic monologue at all, but rather a “mask lyric” that indirectly expresses Tennyson’s own feelings.43 And yet some readers don’t sympathize with Ulysses when he complains:

It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race,44

Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti. Webster’s “Circe” would, by Mermin’s account, distance the poet from the speaker somewhat by “using [a] character[] with an independent literary existence” as Tennyson does. Mermin, 75. Glennis Byron modifies Mermin’s position by suggesting that “even if the women are said to sympathise more with their speakers, this does not mean that they do not objectify them or frame them with irony. What it does mean is that their ultimate target is more the systems which produce the speakers than the speakers themselves.” Byron, 59. 43. Rader, “Dramatic Monologue,” 140. Elisabeth Howe suggests that “Tennyson’s impulse is toward lyricism,” and that “judgments of Tennyson’s protagonists are harder to make because he is less inclined to choose reprehensible characters, or indeed to endow his speakers with recognizable personality at all.” Howe, 53, 51–52. Alan Sinfield claims Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and some of his other dramatic monologues are “close in manner to lyric poems in his own person.” Sinfield, 19. Herbert Tucker says of Tennyson’s use of the dramatic monologue, “With such memorable ventures as ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Tithonus’ he in effect relyricized the genre, running its contextualizing devices in reverse and stripping his speakers of personality in order to facilitate a lyric drive.” Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue,” 229. Yet Tucker elsewhere cautions that Ulysses inspires in him terror rather than sympathy, and that Tennyson produces a self so stripped of context that it is “nearly naked aggression, an identity that is all but unrecognizable to the human eye.” Tucker, “Monomania,” 136, 137. 44. Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses,” in Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 11

Certainly the poem’s opening establishes the sense of stasis against which the speaker rebels. But the reader may experience a “shock of mild surprise”45 at the derision with which Ulysses speaks of his people. And even some Victorian ears, though accustomed to the growing discourse of separate spheres, may have detected a dissonant note in Ulysses’s callous dismissal of the ever-faithful Penelope.46 A second moment that may create distance between the speaker and the reader, and that may make the reader aware that the poem and its character revelation is unfolding over time, occurs during Ulysses’s description of his son Telemachus:

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine. (39–43)

This praise is half-hearted at best, since Ulysses has been scornful of such household duties and considered himself “idle” when engaged in the same work. In addition, the division of separate work between father and son is fallacious; Ulysses mentions “my” household gods, and so expects Telemachus to do Ulysses’s work for him. And as W. David Shaw aptly observes of line 43 (“He works his work, I mine”), “If we disturb the natural iambic stress by giving weight to the pronominal adjective ‘his,’ the speaker’s tongue may start to curl: we may detect a sneer or slight hint of contempt in his voice.”47 Certainly there are some

Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), lines 1–4. All subsequent citations are from this edition. Line numbers will be provided parenthetically within the text. 45. The phrase, of course, is Wordsworth’s, used in a very different context in The Prelude (1850 5.384). 46. Glennis Byron discusses one late-Victorian reader who expressed his dismay through a dramatic monologue of his own: “Stephen Phillips’s cross-gendered ‘Penelope to Ulysses’ (1897) takes particular issue with the snarling impatience of Tennyson’s Ulysses at being stuck on Ithaca, ‘matched with an aging wife’ (3). . . . Phillips’s Penelope, while professing great love for her husband, seems to be putting Tennyson’s Ulysses in his place as she makes it quite clear that, after so many nights spent anticipating and imagining his return, she finds him falling short of the fantasy she has entertained in his absence.” Byron, 81. 47. W. David Shaw, Alfred Lord Tennyson: The Poet in an Age of Theory (New York: Twayne, 1996), 138. Shaw also raises the interesting question, “What must Telemachus and the long suffering Penelope be thinking of Ulysses?” Shaw, Alfred, 71. Christopher Ricks, however, evaluates this passage differently. Ricks notes, “There is a recurring argument as to how much Ulysses himself is admired or endorsed by the poem. But this uncertainty 1 ~ C h A p t e r

readers who don’t detect a sneer of contempt here, but those who do hear a note of hauteur and derision in these lines will likely feel that their understanding of Ulysses’s character has shifted. In addition, virtually every first-time reader of the poem will be surprised by the belated revelation in line 45 that Ulysses is speaking to a group of mariners.48 Even in as lyricized a monologue as “Ulysses” there is at least one mild shock, and potentially several shocks, that could make the reader aware of the passing time of discourse. How strong these shocks are, and consequently how noticeable the temporal progression is, depends upon whether a given reader treats “Ulysses” as a dramatic monologue or as a mask lyric. A reader who senses a distance between the title character and the implied author will focus on discovering (and likely judging) the type of person who would utter those thoughts, rather than wholly (if temporarily) sympathizing with the character and adopting his thoughts as her own. If a poem has a strong tension between speaker and author, focuses on revealing the speaker’s character, and in addition gradually discloses that character in discrete revelations, then the discourse will have the noticeable temporal movement I have been discussing. I take these features to be the central dynamics of dramatic monologues. Mask lyrics lack these dynamics, even though they share many formal features with dramatic monologues: the entire poem is the speech of a single person who is not the poet, uttered in a specific situation, to one or more implied auditors. Conversely, the rhetorical and temporal features of dramatic monologues may also be found in texts that do not fit the genre. Recently James Phelan has found similar dynamics in two short stories that share an emphasis on revealing character, an interplay between sympathy and judgment or observation in the reader, and crucial delayed disclosures that alter the reader’s understanding of the character (and, I would add, make the reader aware of the discourse unfolding in time). Yet Phelan finds these dynamics in prose stories narrated in the third person, told wholly or partly in the past tense—characteristics that separate them from dramatic monologues.49 As a final example of the dynamics of

seems less a matter of a valuable contrariety than of a weakness.” He believes Tennyson had a lapse in his poetic powers here, and “the Telemachus lines are faultily wooden rather than dramatically revealing,” and “the apparent lordliness of ‘He works his work, I mine’ . . . seems therefore more the poet’s lapse into misjudgment than Ulysses’ lapse into an unattractive and significant hauteur.” Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (New York: Macmil- lan, 1972), 126. 48. Loy D. Martin says of this disclosure, “Such a late revelation of what kind of poem we are reading is closely related to the delay of crucial information that characterizes so many of Browning’s strategies.” Martin, 206. 49. Phelan, Experiencing, 178–98. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1 a dramatic monologue found in another genre, I would offer the lyrics to The Hold Steady’s “You Can Make Him Like You.” The song is a second-person address with no discernible dramatic context for the utterance, and no detail about the speaker’s identity or character. Yet the song’s primary rhetorical purpose is gradually (and at times, shockingly) to reveal the character of the female addressee, rather than the male speaker, and it induces a mixture of sympathy with and judgment of her.50 This blend of lyric and narrative temporalities in the progression of the discourse is also present in the dramatic monologues that comprise The Ring and the Book. The following sections will analyze three examples—the monologues of Arcangeli, Caponsacchi, and Pompilia. All three monologues draw attention to the changing time of discourse in some way and at several moments, but they otherwise show different balances between an emphasis on story events and sequentiality, or on static states of mind and the act of describing them. They thus display both the variation possible within the dramatic monologue, and the stable and defining temporal feature of the form. arcangeLI

Arcangeli’s monologue gradually reveals his character and abruptly introduces new traits in the manner we expect from Browning’s dramatic monologues. One of the first jolts to the reader occurs early, when Arcangeli reveals his greed and callousness by hoping his son will inherit money from his “hale grandsire,—such are just the sort / To go off suddenly” (8.26–27). He later shows his utter disregard for the truth and his ambition to win the case when he rhapsodizes that if Guido had not confessed, he would have tried to blame Caponsacchi for the murders (8.360–73). The reader’s understanding of his character quickly and noticeably shifts, and this creates the temporal progression in the discourse typical of dramatic monologues. The most obvious temporal feature of Arcangeli’s monologue, however, is its constant anticipation. His consistent orientation toward the future becomes clear within the first twenty lines. The chief object of his

50. Popular music also contains examples of true dramatic monologues (in generic form as well as rhetorical and temporal dynamics), such as Talking Heads’ “Don’t Worry about the Government,” Radiohead’s “Creep,” The Smiths’ “Girlfriend in a Coma,” Neko Case’s “I Wish I Was the Moon,” and The Decemberists’ “On the Bus Mall.” Eminem’s “Stan” is a mixture of dramatic monologue and narrative, with lyric interludes provided by a Dido sample. My thanks to Derek Nystrom for suggesting The Decemberists. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

fixation is his son’s birthday feast, scheduled to happen later the same day as Arcangeli’s monologue:

It trots Already through my head, though noon be now, Does supper-time and what belongs to eve. Dispose, O Don, o’ the day, first work then play! (8.14–17)

The lawyer repeatedly represents his defense of Guido as a necessary but dull task which must be completed before he can enjoy the evening’s celebration. He gets much more pleasure from contemplating this future reward than he does from his present task. His son’s birthday dinner is not the only focus of his anticipation, however. Arcangeli also looks forward to his son’s progress in Latin: Hyacinth “Verges on Virgil, reaches the right age” (8.76). When Arcangeli’s concentration is on his present task, Guido’s defense, the lawyer is motivated primarily by the chance to embarrass the opposing counselor by predicting and undercutting his arguments. Arcangeli confidently asserts, “Oh, I quite expect his case” (8.1215), and anticipates, “Will not I be beforehand with my Fisc, / Cut away phrase by phrase from underfoot!” (8.200–201) This emphasis on anticipation has two important results for the mode of this monologue, for its balance of lyric and narrative elements. The first effect derives from Arcangeli’s acute awareness of the narrowing gap in time between his current activities and the night’s festivities. When the monologue begins, it is noon (8.15), and Arcangeli is looking forward to evening and “supper-time” (8.16). Later in the monologue, most of the afternoon has elapsed, and the lawyer is only an hour away from the evening’s feast. He motivates himself to complete his work by anticipating his favorite dish: “. . . See nothing else, / Or I shall scarce see lamb’s fry in an hour!” (8.1085–86) By the end of the monologue, the day is behind him, and dinner is at hand: “Now, what an evening have I earned to-day!” (8.1737). Through such overt references to specific times, Browning deliberately draws the reader’s attention to the discrete unit of fictional time spanned by Arcangeli’s monologue. The progression of the time of discourse, that specific blend of lyric and narrative common to all dramatic monologues, is given particular emphasis in this one. Second, Arcangeli’s consistent orientation toward future events diverts attention away from the past events of the poem, the primary narrative of Guido’s marriage and murders. A few elements of narrative remain prominent, however. There is a strong sense of temporal progres- t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1 sion, and there are identifiable events; Arcangeli’s workday will be followed by the birthday celebration, and the document he produces will be a part of the upcoming trial. But these events are only anticipated, and hence their descriptions are hypothetical and fragmented. As parts of a narrative, they are unsatisfying: they may produce a cohesive picture of Arcangeli’s character, but they do not form a complete chain of events. By the afternoon’s end, the monologue may be over, but Arcangeli’s work on Guido’s defense is not. He has finished a rough draft, but he plans tomorrow’s work of revision:

To-morrow stick in this, and throw out that, And, having first ecclesiasticized, Regularize the whole, next emphasize, Then latinize, and lastly Cicero-ize, Giving my Fisc his finish. There’s my speech! (8.1729–33)

This continues Arcangeli’s pattern of anticipation, providing a detailed agenda for the next day’s work. This passage is also representative of the monologue’s emphasis on acts of composition: book 8 constantly draws the reader’s attention to the production of discourse, rather than the content of the story. Perhaps the most acutely self-reflexive passage occurs when Arcangeli begins to pen his defense of Guido:

. . . —with fresh-cut quill we ink the white,— P-r-o-pro Guidone et Sociis. There!

Count Guido married—or, in Latin due, What? Duxit in uxorem?—commonplace! Tœdas jugales iniit, subiit,—ha! He underwent the matrimonial torch? Connubio stabili sibi junxit,—hum! In stable bond of marriage bound his own? That’s clear of any modern taint: and yet . . .

Virgil is little help to who writes prose. (8.124–33)

Arcangeli makes the act of writing tangible and concrete by describing the material implements he uses—knife, quill, ink, and paper. The 1 ~ C h A p t e r

spelling of the first word is called to our attention by the dashes between the letters. The passage gives not only different ways to phrase the idea that Guido was married, but also Latin and English versions of each phrase, and Arcangeli’s commentary on each phrase’s connotations. Such an emphasis on the time of discourse rather than the time of story usually indicates the lyric mode. Indeed, Arcangeli’s specific combination of anticipating hypothetical future events, and self-reflexively commenting on his act of composition, resembles the lyrical features of Don Juan, discussed in chapter 1. There are, however, some important differences between the two texts, which minimize the potential lyricality of Arcangeli’s monologue. In Don Juan, when multiple alternatives are given, they have a sense of simultaneity. Byron lets all the possible vehicles for a simile stand as equal alternatives, making no final selection among them. They are simultaneously present for the reader, and the reader is left to make a selection, or more likely, keep them all in mind. In Arcangeli’s monologue, different choices of phrasing are presented consecutively, not concurrently. He considers a phrase, rejects it, considers another, and eventually chooses one version to be included in his legal argument. Even this choice is provisional, and today’s process of composition is put in the larger temporal sequence of revision: “But the version afterward! / Curb we this ardour! Notes alone, to-day, / The speech to-morrow and the Latin last” (8.142–44). The process of translation also clearly unfolds in time; as Donald Hair notes, “The layering of English and Latin has a temporal sequence.”51 Browning presents the writing process as unfolding in time, rather than suspended in time. Even the communication of a single word requires the passage of time, as is indicated by the labored spelling, letter by letter, of the first word of Arcangeli’s document (8.125). Such an acute awareness of development in time precludes the sense of timelessness necessary for purely lyrical effects. There are also important differences between Byron’s and Brown- ing’s presentations of hypothetical future scenarios. When Don Juan’s narrator describes hypothetical plot paths, he seems to control whether or not his fiction will actually follow that path, and the emphasis is on the author’s choice among many simultaneous options. Arcangeli certainly has some influence over the evening’s festivities and the progress of the court case, but he does not have complete control, because he is simply one person interacting among many others within his (fictional-

51. Donald Hair, Robert Browning’s Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 203. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1 ized to us, but real to him) world. Arcangeli occupies the same level of existence as the story’s other characters, but Byron’s narrator operates on a different level of existence than the other characters.52 Arcangeli does not share the poet’s complete artistic control over the story’s progress, and hence his musings on hypothetical plot paths do not carry the same valence of artistic composition, and the same lyrical focus on the moment of discourse, as the hypothetical plots of Don Juan. The most important difference between the self-reflexivity of Don Juan, and that of Arcangeli’s monologue, is that Byron’s narrator reflects upon his composition of the very document we are reading, whereas Arcangeli reflects upon a legal document separate from the text in front of the reader. In book 8 of Browning’s poem, two texts overlap, but they are not identical: Arcangeli’s monologue contains only fragments of his draft of Guido’s defense, and the monologue contains much material that is not in the legal document, and is wholly unrelated to Guido’s defense. For instance, Arcangeli muses on the preparations for tonight’s dinner:

(There is a porcupine to barbacue; Gigia can jug a rabbit well enough, With sour-sweet sauce and pine pips; but, good Lord, Suppose the devil instigate the wench To stew, not roast, him? Stew my porcupine? (8.1368–72)

This parenthetical aside certainly would not be written down by Arcan- geli. Rather, the passage represents either what he mutters to himself, or his silent thought process. In this respect, book 8 is “an interior monologue which borders on true stream-of-consciousness.”53 As a consequence of the disjunction between the text in front of us as readers, and the text Arcangeli composes, we have only limited access to the product

52. In narratological terms, Arcangeli is a homodiegetic narrator, and Byron’s narrator is predominantly heterodiegetic. (The narrator of Don Juan does sometimes describe himself as inhabiting the same world as the characters, and occasionally claims to have interacted with them, but more dominant are the narrator’s references to himself as an artist in control over the fictional story he is penning. For a fuller discussion of this issue, see pages 38–41 of chapter 1.) Succinct definitions of “homodiegetic” and “heterodiegetic” narrators can be found in the glossaries of: James Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1996), and Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman, eds., New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 53. Altick and Loucks, 62. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

of his composition, and we are more aware of the gap between Arcange- li’s composition of his argument, and the composition (by Browning) of Arcangeli’s monologue. This gap, which is not present in Don Juan, disrupts the lyrical immediacy that might otherwise have been created by the emphasis on Arcangeli’s process of composition. Since Arcangeli’s document is written in the nonfictional mode of legal argument, we have a further barrier to treating its composition as a lyric outpouring. Browning’s stream-of-consciousness technique, however, creates its own sense of immediacy, of being in the room to overhear Arcangeli, or in his mind to think with him. But again, this lyric immediacy is blended with a narrative sense of progressing through a specific interval of time. The two modes are inextricably blended.

caponsacchI

Caponsacchi’s speech also clearly shows the temporal progression in the discourse which marks dramatic monologues. The occasion of Caponsacchi’s deposition is explicitly positioned in relation to important story events, providing specificity to the time of discourse. He begins by directly addressing the judges, and expresses his disbelief that he must:

Tell over twice what I, the first time, told Six months ago: ’twas here, I do believe, Fronting you same three in this very room, I stood and told you . . . (6.6–9)

He thus not only calls attention to the specific location of the interview and the presence of three auditors, but also locates this interview in time, six months after his attempted escape with Pompilia and the subsequent legal proceedings. Caponsacchi provides an even more specific temporal context through other comments: he says that Guido’s attack on Pompilia and the Comparini occurred two days prior to this statement to the judges (6.1606–7), and he is painfully aware that “Pompilia is . . . dying while [he] speak[s]” (6.47).54

54. As Ross Posnock notes, “The terrible fact that ‘Pompilia is bleeding out her life . . .’ is the agonizing reality that exerts a continuous pressure and intensity upon Caponsacchi’s monologue.” “‘The Novel in The Ring and the Book’: Henry James’s Energetic ‘Appropria- tion’ of Browning,” The Centennial Review 25.3 (Summer 1981): 289. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1

Pompilia’s waning life goads Caponsacchi into an acute awareness of the passage of time as he speaks, and his auditors (and Browning’s readers) share this awareness due to periodic comments on the progress of his narrative. Almost two hundred lines into his monologue, Caponsacchi notes that his tale is just beginning, and not beginning well: “This is a foolish outset” (6.180). He collects himself and then marks a more official start to his story: “I begin” (6.216).55 He also clearly marks the point at which he ended his story during his first recitation to the judges:

Have told my tale to the end,—nay, not the end— For, wait—I’ll end—not leave you that excuse! When we were parted,—shall I go on there? (6.1611–13)

Caponsacchi wishes to go on with his story, to discuss the time between his first interview and this one, in order to diminish the judges’ chances of misapprehending Pompilia. His remark reminds us of the place of this interview in the sequence of events comprised by the ten monologues, and their connection to the previous events described within the monologues—the marriage and murders. It also draws attention to the sequencing, the ordering in time, of this particular piece of discourse.56 His audience, both within and outside the poem, is also aware of the passage of time during his monologue due to changes in their emotional and intellectual reactions to Caponsacchi. At least one of his interlocu- tors experiences a change of heart during Caponsacchi’s speech, since the latter remarks, “Why, there’s a Judge weeping!” (6.1855). And relatively late in the monologue, we as readers are given an important and surprising insight into Caponsacchi’s personal motive for speaking—he wants the judges’ permission to see Pompilia (6.1594–96). This late revelation forces readers to readjust their understanding of Caponsacchi

55. This is a later instance of the “false starts” Herbert Tucker frequently finds in Browning’s early poetry. Tucker suggests, “No matter how assuredly they may trumpet their opening announcements, Browning’s speakers soon begin to regret or qualify them. The need for repentant, secondary beginning is Browning’s dramatic lyric inspiration. It leads him to imagine speakers for whom the commanding lyric power of interpretation is most revealing when exerted over their own previous utterances.” Tucker, Browning’s Beginnings, 109, 153. 56. Similar effects result from two other pauses in the middle of his story: “You of the Court! / When I stood question here and reached this point / O’ the narrative . . .” (6.649–51), and, “Here is another point / I bid you pause at. When I told thus far, / Some- one said, subtly, . . .” (6.882–84). 10 ~ C h A p t e r

and his monologue long after it has begun, and makes them aware of the progression through time of their reading experience. In these ways, Caponsacchi’s monologue fits the temporal characteristics of a dramatic monologue, lyrically calling attention to the time of discourse, but giving it a sense of narrative progression. Moving to a consideration of the particular balance of lyric and narrative elements within this monologue, we can rightly infer, from Caponsacchi’s description of his speech as a “tale” with a beginning and an end, that its content is often narrative in mode. His description of the exchange of letters, in particular, is best labeled as a narrative. When Caponsacchi declares, “. . . Each incident / Proves, I maintain, that action of the flight / For the true thing it was” (6.1147–49), his language of “incident” and “action” reinforces his speech’s status as narrative. But when Caponsacchi describes his meeting and flight with Pompilia, the nature of his experience and language radically change. In the words of Isobel Armstrong, he “sees his experience in terms of climactic breaks, sharp changes, and definitive ends and beginnings,” and “describe[s] his experiences in terms of sudden, apocalyptic, revelatory events.”57 He also describes Pompilia as desirous of a sudden change: Pompilia tells him that life with Guido is a bad dream, “And the way to end dreams is to break them, stand, / Walk, go: then help me to stand, walk and go!” (6.807–8) During their flight, however, she fears another abrupt change:

No more o’ the journey: if it might but last! Always, my life-long, thus to journey still! It is the interruption that I dread,— (6.1290–92)

Pompilia hopes to prolong her current state indefinitely, to suspend this moment and free herself from the changes of time. She wishes to continue in the atemporality which characterizes her flight, and Browning’s lyric description of it. Although Caponsacchi’s monologue begins as a narrative, Caponsacchi’s meeting with Pompilia is revelatory of a different mode of experience, and he describes his interactions with her in explicitly lyrical terms, as experiences out of, and above, time. The shift to a more lyrical mode occurs when Caponsacchi sees Pompilia appear at the terrace, and he stands “as still as stone, all eye,

57. Armstrong, “Note,” 273, 274. Armstrong argues that the experience itself is much more gradual, and hence mismatched to his language (274). I believe that the change in Caponsacchi’s character and behavior may be more gradual than he represents, but the change in his perception of experience as more lyrical is quite sudden. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 11 all ear” (6.711). This stillness and receptivity indicates his detachment from time, since between being asked to rescue her and actually doing so, Caponsacchi “sat stone-still, let time run over [him]” (6.1008).58 He reiterates his oblivion to temporal progression when he claims, “I know not how the night passed: morning broke” (6.1090). The content of these lines indicates a shift away from narrative and toward lyric, and in this monologue, as Armstrong notes, “the lulled, quiet rhythms of the lines . . . indicate a tender, lyrical sympathy which is always sustained by Browning.”59 Both the shift away from the constraints of time, and the lulled rhythms of Caponsacchi’s lines, are manifest in his description of the day before the flight:

Through each familiar hindrance of the day Did I make steadily for its hour and end,— Felt time’s old barrier-growth of right and fit Give way through all its twines, and let me go. (6.1107–10)

These lines feature the gentle assonance of “old,” “growth,” and “go,” and the consonance of “right” and “fit.” The rhythm is generally lilting because there are only four polysyllabic words, and the lines can be read as perfectly iambic. But to do so, three of the polysyllables (“familiar,” “steadily,” and “barrier”) require an elision of the two ending unstressed syllables. The last line is free from such elision and completely monosyllabic—the “barrier” to smooth scansion has been removed. By the end of this passage, time has let go of Caponsacchi. In his subsequent description of their flight, both time and place seem lost or irrelevant to this lyric interlude; he feels as though years have passed since their journey started (6.1186–87), and he “forget[s] the names” of locations along the way (6.1188). Caponsacchi feels that his lyric revelation should be clear to his auditors, that Pompilia’s character should be intuitively obvious, but that the judges may be incapable of such a direct apprehension of the case. Caponsacchi attempts to translate his experience into a less exalted medium for the judges:

But you may want it lower set ’i the scale,— Too vast, too close it clangs in the ear, perhaps;

58. Samuel Chell reads this line differently; he thinks Caponsacchi becomes “a helpless victim of chronological time.” Chell, 110. 59. Armstrong, “Note,” 274. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

You’d stand back just to comprehend it more. Well then, let me, the hollow rock, condense The voice ’o the sea and wind, interpret you The mystery of this murder. (6.69–74)

Caponsacchi later implies what is involved in such a translation of the vast and intangible into the small and hollow, when he metaphorically describes how he records the attempted escape:

So it began, our flight thro’ dusk to clear, Through day and night and day again to night Once more, and to last dreadful dawn of all. Sirs, how should I lie quiet in my grave Unless you suffer me wring, drop by drop, My brain dry, make a riddance of the drench Of minutes with a memory in each, Recorded motion, breath or look of hers, Which poured forth would present you one pure glass, Mirror you plain,—as God’s sea, glassed in gold, His saints,—the perfect soul Pompilia? (6.1134–44)

Caponsacchi can, in broad terms, tell the number of days and nights spent on their journey, but that is not where its meaning lies. Rather, meaning has condensed and intensified into “minutes with a memory in each.” Caponsacchi’s mind is “drench[ed]” with the memories; the minutes are not distinct from each other but coalesce and suffuse his thoughts. In order for his audience to understand properly his experience and Pompilia’s character, he must externalize those memories and present the “drench of minutes” as a “glass” of pure liquid. They, too, must see the moments as fused into one whole. But the process of communication requires Caponsacchi to “wring” the moments “drop by drop,” to convey them discretely and consecutively. The metaphor suggests that Caponsacchi must resort to narrative and its temporal sequencing as a means to convey lyric fullness and simultaneity of meaning. The effort is likely to fail, at least in communicating to the judges, if not to Browning’s readers, because Caponsacchi’s revelation “cannot be adequately expressed in temporal terms,” as Altick and Loucks have rightly noted.60 Since he thinks the judges require their communication

60. Altick and Loucks, 54. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1

“lower set ’i the scale,” Caponsacchi’s monologue may imply that narrative is a more debased medium than lyric. pompILIa

Pompilia’s monologue largely recapitulates Caponsacchi’s in its use of narrative and lyric, but some features of Pompilia’s speech are even more heavily weighted toward lyric. As does Caponsacchi, Pompilia begins in the narrative mode; she describes the events prior to her marriage, and her story is simple, direct, and sincere.61 She lists her age, where she was born, and her full name, quickly mentions that she was married, and asks that when she dies the church register will say that two weeks ago she gave birth to a son named Gaetano. She thus encap- sulates her life story through birth, marriage, giving birth, and death. Pompilia then goes on to narrate her life with her parents, up to the point of her marriage. Just as Caponsacchi does, Pompilia shifts to the lyrical mode when describing their flight together, and some of the details of their descriptions bear striking resemblances. She, too, forgets the names of locations along their journey: “Each place must have a name, though I forget” (7.1515). And she loses track of time:

. . . he caught me, and, you say, Carried me in, that tragical red eve, And laid me where I next returned to life In the other red of morning, two red plates That crushed together, crushed the time between, And are since then a solid fire to me,— (7.1563–68)

Whereas Caponsacchi felt time to be distended (days seemed like years to him), Pompilia feels time compressed. The night she sleeps, dusk and dawn seem blended to her, and even now recounting the story, she

61. In fact, it seems so unrealistically simple, direct, and sincere that Alison Case has called it “a fantasy of linguistic transparency, an imagined escape from the difficulties involved in the project of constructing powerful fictions in order to tell ‘the truth.’” Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Char- lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 187. Ivan Kreilkamp agrees that Pompilia’s speech is represented “as entirely full and transparent communication,” but he describes it as a “lyric poem,” which is more in keeping with my reading of the monologue. Kreilkamp, 169, 167. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

feels that time had been annihilated. In general, she feels time to be insignificant when in Caponsacchi’s company. During her first meeting with him, she associates him with timelessness:

The first word I ever heard from his lips, All himself in it,—an eternity Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth O’ the soul that then broke silence—“I am yours.” (7.1430–33)

Caponsacchi embodies eternity, and instantly conveys a fullness of meaning; his speech is the ideal toward which lyric utterances strive. Pompilia also describes Caponsacchi’s devotion to her as eternal; she declares, “He was mine, he is mine, he will be mine” (7.1443). She experiences her interactions with Caponsacchi as unchanging and timeless, and her description of these experiences is appropriately lyrical.62 Pompilia’s motivation in speaking also resembles Caponsacchi’s. Just as the priest wishes to show Pompilia’s purity, she wishes to clear his name. She tells her rapt audience, “I will remember once more for his sake / The sorrow: for he lives and is belied” (7.937–38). Pompilia also struggles, like Caponsacchi, to find a suitable medium to convey her meaning. She asks, “Is all told? There’s the journey: and where’s time / To tell you how that heart burst out in shine?” (7.1512–23). Narrative would seem to be an impossible vehicle for displaying her rescuer’s heart, since narrative unfolds in time, but there is not time enough to tell. Caponsacchi may struggle to distill his picture of Pompilia into drops, to relate his experience in the consecutive events of narrative, but Pompilia cannot divide her experience of the journey into discrete events. Instead, the experience blurs together but becomes even more meaningful:

As I look back, all is one milky way; Still bettered more, the more remembered, so Do new stars bud while I but search for old,

62. This assessment of the journey as lyrical is in tension with Matthew Campbell’s rather surprising assertion that Pompilia’s grasping of Guido’s sword to fend him off is the only adequate, heroic action in the whole of the poem. Matthew Campbell, Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, ed. Gillian Beer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 120–22. If we do give such emphasis to Pompilia’s action at the end of the journey, then perhaps we can attribute her shift from lyrical stasis to narrative action to Guido’s threatening and unwelcome interruption of her idyllic flight with Caponsacchi. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1

And fill all gaps ’i the glory, and grow him— Him I now see make the shine everywhere. (7.1550–54)

Caponsacchi sees the journey as a drench of minutes which he must pour into a glass; Pompilia sees it as “one milky way” with “all gaps ’i the glory” filled. The experience has become one unified, seamless whole. For Pompilia its meaning—Caponsacchi’s goodness—shines forth, and she makes no mention of trying to translate the experience into a less exalted medium.63 For her, the flight with her rescuer can be conveyed only by a lyric utterance; she believes its meaning is instantaneously grasped, and the vividness of her recollection elides the gap between her experience and her discourse. Through the act of remembering Capon- sacchi “new stars bud . . . and grow him.” There are two important differences between the balance of lyric and narrative in Pompilia’s monologue and in Caponsacchi’s. First, Pompil- ia’s speech includes what could be labeled as a perversion of lyric: her oblique discussion of her marriage to Guido. She says remarkably little about the four years she spent with him. Her only disclosures about the marriage are that she initially refused to sleep with Guido until the Archbishop advised her otherwise, and that Guido’s brother Girolamo made sexual advances toward her. She says virtually nothing about Guido himself, because she does not want to incriminate him further: “I leave my husband out! / It is not to do him more hurt, I speak.” (7.1125–26).64 When Pompilia reaches the point in her narrative when Violante led her to her new husband, she stops abruptly:

And so an end! Because a blank begins From when, at the word, she kissed me hard and hot,

63. Pompilia has an implicit faith that her auditors are “Listening, and understanding, I am sure!” (7.901) But she does not self-consciously make an effort to force her audience to understand. In this rhetorical unselfconsciousness, Sue Lonoff finds a sign of Pompilia’s goodness: “One way of assessing the moral worth or worthlessness of Browning’s speakers is to weigh the effect of public opinion upon their words and actions. The saintly Pompilia is unconcerned with the impression she makes on the world.” “Multiple Narratives and Relative Truths: A Study of The Ring and the Book, The Woman in White, and The Moonstone,” Browning Institute Studies 10 (1982): 157. If we agree, then Caponsacchi is less saintly, because he consciously struggles to find a verbal medium the judges will understand. 64. As Melissa Valiska Gregory observes, “Instead of writing Pompilia’s testimony as a chronicle of the individual wrongs against her, Browning fills her monologue with metaphors and ellipses, blank spaces, and oblique references where the reader must imagine violence rather than (as in so much of Browning’s early work) experience its painfully intimate details.” “Robert Browning and the Lure of the Violent Lyric Voice: Domestic Violence and the Dramatic Monologue,” Victorian Poetry 38.4 (Winter 2000): 503. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

And took me back to where my father leaned Opposite Guido . . . (7.570–73)

For Pompilia, her marriage is unnarratable.65 She reiterates this when she says that since moving to Guido’s home, “All since is one blank, / Over and ended; a terrific dream” (7.579–80). If the marriage was a terrible dream, an unmarked blank, then time would have no meaning, and we may be tempted to call her description of this period lyric in its timelessness.66 But Pompilia makes an important distinction when she exclaims, “Blank, I say! / This is the note of evil: for good lasts” (7.589–90). Her time with Guido has been annihilated and is devoid of meaning; her time with Caponsacchi has expanded into the eternal and is suffused with meaning. Pompilia does not explicitly condemn Guido, but instead implies he is evil by describing him in terms opposite to those used for Caponsacchi. Hence, her marriage to Guido is presented as a horrific inversion of lyric, as a timeless void instead of an intensified, suspended moment. A second difference in Pompilia’s balance of lyric and narrative sep- arates her monologue from the other nine. She does not call as much attention to the passage of time as she speaks, compared to the other narrators. She very rarely comments on the progress she makes through her story, or specifically locates the time of her speech in relation to the time of events,67 and the only events she anticipates are ones too distant for her to live to see. As a result, the temporal feature characteristic of dramatic monologues—the noticeable forward motion of the time of discourse—is so muted as to be almost unnoticeable. Instead, the moment of discourse seems to be suspended out of time, and hence Pompilia’s monologue is given a more purely lyrical framework than the others. This lyricism is largely the result of Pompilia’s confused sense of

65. I mean that it is “unnarratable” due to the trauma Pompilia experienced, not “non- narratable” in D. A. Miller’s sense of textual elements that “serve to supply the specified narrative lack, or to answer the specified narrative question,” and hence end the need for narrative. D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 5. 66. Samuel Chell also notes Pompilia’s sense of timelessness during her marriage: “Pompilia is threatened because she has lost all sense of the past. She lives completely out of time, and she cannot awaken from her ‘terrific dream’ (585) until she has been placed back in time.” Chell, 113. 67. The one exception is her providing her exact age, and her son’s exact age (both to the day), in her opening remarks (7.1–2, 13–14). t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1 time. Much of her experience seems to recede away from her, and grow so distant in time that it no longer seems real. She says of her newborn son:

. . . I hope he will regard The history of me as what someone dreamed, And get to disbelieve it at the last: Since to myself it dwindles fast to that, Sheer dreaming and impossibility,— (7.107–11)

She reiterates her sense of unreality and her distortion of time when she recalls being separated from her son:

. . . I thought, when he was born, Something began for once that would not end, Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay For evermore, eternally quite mine. Well, so he is,—but yet they bore him off, . . . Yet thence comes such confusion of what was With what will be,—that late seems long ago, And, what years should bring round, already come, Till even he withdraws into a dream. (7.199–210)

Both her own life and her son’s have begun to seem like dreams, with the sense of temporal dislocation that often accompanies dreams. She once again claims that recent events have receded so that they seem long ago, but here she also claims that the distant future seems immanent. Past and future have merged into a “confusion of what was / With what will be.” Pompilia has lost her grasp on time, and hence she cannot reliably mark the passage of time in her discourse. We can infer that the reason for her confusion is her nearness to death, and that she is already making the transition out of time and into eternity. Indeed, the only strong marker of temporal change in her discourse is her last line: “And I rise” (7.1828). This quiet suggestion of her ascension to heaven brings her already immanent death even nearer, reminding the reader of how little time Pompilia had left and how quickly it passed. Ironically, although this line is the monologue’s most explicit sign of the peculiar temporality of the dramatic monologue, it is the moment at 1 ~ C h A p t e r

which Pompilia achieves true lyric timelessness, and it hence marks the unbridgeable distance between the reader and the sanctified heroine.

Larger structures In The ring anD The Book

Because Pompilia’s character is so highly valued by Browning, it becomes tempting to read other prominent elements of her monologue as posi- tively valued as well, including her monologue’s lyricism. Indeed, the overall structure and framing of The Ring and the Book reinforces this interpretation of Browning as idealizing the lyric. Caponsacchi and Pom- pilia’s monologues are placed as the central two books of the text,68 and report the speech of two of the three sympathetic and morally upright characters (the Pope being the third). These two monologues are also the most lyrical in content, suggesting the centrality of lyric in Browning’s enterprise. Narrative repetition and alliteration also make some typically lyric qualities more prominent, but before turning to an extended discussion of these features, I will first address previous commentaries on the large structuring principles of Browning’s poem. The first and final books of The Ring and the Book are written in Browning’s own voice, with no discernible distinction between the poet and the speaker. Between these are ten books spoken (or written) by participants in the events, some historical, some composite figures imagined by Browning. As I have suggested, each of these ten dramatic monologues has its own distinct character, and its own balance of lyric and narrative modes. Many attempts have been made to find organizational patterns within the books. The most influential has been Richard Altick and James Louck’s division of books 2–10 into three triads. (Browning’s two frame monologues in books 1 and 12, as well as Guido’s second monologue in book 11, are outside of the triadic structure.) According to their scheme, the first triad (books 2–4) is focused on events, the second (books 5–7) on character, and the third (books 8–10) on theme, and in each triad the third speaker has more social or moral authority than the other two.69 Boyd Litzinger appropriates this general scheme, but

68. Boyd Litzinger notes that these two books, plus Guido’s monologue in book 5, constitute the poem’s section of direct testimony, and “these three books, organically central, are also as nearly physically central as is possible in a twelve-part arrangement.” “The Structural Logic of The Ring and the Book,” in Nineteenth-Century Literary Perspectives: Essays in Honor of Lionel Stevenson, ed. Clyde de L. Ryals (Durham: Duke University Press, 1974), 110. 69. Altick and Loucks, 39–40. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1 applies new labels to the triads, and argues for even greater dynamism within and among them: he sees each triad functioning as a dialectic, and the three triads themselves forming a larger dialectic.70 David Bedell revisits The Ring and the Book’s triadic structure, and I agree with him that the first triad concerns “the superficialities of time and appearance, chronicling of events” and is transparently in a narrative mode.71 The speakers present events in a clear sequence, and argue for a specific set of causal relationships connecting these events.72 According to Bedell, in the second triad Caponsacchi and Pompilia “partak[e] of both narrative and philosophy” and “transition between time and eternity,” but I argue that they do so by incorporating lyric, rather than philosophy. Capon- sacchi and Pompilia each make a transition from the narrative mode to the lyric mode when shifting from a description of their earlier lives to their meeting each other. The third triad is neither dominantly lyric nor dominantly narrative in content,73 but instead emphasizes nonfictional modes. At least as important as the distinctions among different triads, however, are the features common to all twelve books. One key element of continuity is the repetition of the same basic narrative material in each of the twelve monologues, and this repetition has important consequences for the reader’s experience of plot within the poem, and for generic affinities between the poem and other literary forms. The Ring and the Book does not create much, if any, readerly interest through narrative suspense. Indeed, “Browning divulges the outcome of his case in the first 364 lines of a poem that runs to more than 21,000 lines.”74 The chief events of the story are all revealed in book 1, and then retold ten more times in the monologues that follow. There are, of course, variations

70. Litzinger, 113. He calls the divisions the “Triad of Rumor,” the “Triad of Testimony,” and the “Triad of Judgment.” 71. David D. Bedell, “Paring The Ring and the Book: A Note on the Poem’s Narrative Organization,” Studies in Browning and His Circle 11.1 (Spring, 1983): 63. Bedell chooses the layers of an apple, the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, as emblematic of the triads’ organization. 72. Tertium Quid differs from the two halves of Rome in that he seems to present more than one plausible cause for any given event. But as Altick and Loucks have demonstrated in detail, Tertium Quid only feigns neutrality and clearly sides with Guido. See Altick and Loucks, 130–50. 73. In this respect, I agree with Bedell that “the final triad of books (VIII, IX, X) nearly abandons narrative altogether except for literary allusions, ‘instant stories.’” Bedell, 65. But Bedell associates this triad with “the convictions of faith and philosophy.” Bedell, 63. Only the Pope, in my view, is consistently philosophical in his meditations. Philosophy is absent in the speeches of the two lawyers, who engage in the rhetorical conventions of legal argument. 74. Lonoff, 144. 10 ~ C h A p t e r

in what is omitted and what is emphasized by the different speakers. And there are subsidiary plot points which are first revealed in the later books.75 But for the most part, the suspense is eliminated by the end of book 1, and books 2–11 repeat the same basic narrative material, cycling and recycling through the same events. One of the overall effects of the multiple retellings is to emphasize the particular context of each narrator, since the context is always an obvious difference among the various versions of the story. This draws attention to the creation of discourse, but throughout Browning’s poem, the moment of composition is not purely lyrical, because it is not a static, suspended moment. As Altick and Loucks note, The Ring and the Book has “two narrative sequences—the events leading up to the murder (the past) and the events subsequent to it (the occasion of the poem).”76 The occasion of the poem, the time of discourse, is itself part of a narrative progression moving in time. Indeed, the poem’s structure is suffused by “the subtle impressions given of the passage of time.”77 Just as there is temporal progression within each monologue’s occasion, there is also temporal progression between the end of one monologue and the beginning of the next. The first three monologues begin the day after the attacks and present variants on the Roman populace’s gossip about the case. The next three monologues are told by key participants, in the days following the attacks. The murderer Guido is interrogated first, and we are given frequent reminders of what has occurred between the assault and Guido’s speech—he has been tortured. The day after Guido’s monologue, judges depose the priest Caponsacchi. Next, Pompilia gives her version of events just before dying of the wounds inflicted four days earlier. Then follow three monologues by representatives of the legal process. Guido’s lawyer uses the preexisting statements made in the three previous monologues, as well as various legal precedents, to write a rough draft of his case. We then hear Pompilia’s lawyer further along in the judicial process; he reads a final, polished version of his argument, ready for submission to the court. Later, after the court has ruled and Guido has appealed to the Pope, we overhear the Pope’s meditations

75. For example, the judgment against Pompilia by the Arezzo court is first mentioned in book 4 (4.1501–9). The coachman’s report, given after weeks of imprisonment, that he saw Pompilia and Caponsacchi kissing during their journey, is first mentioned in book 6 (6.1668–72). Rumors of Guido’s affair with the maid, Margherita, are first reported in book 7 (7.1044–45). The existence of a letter in which Pompilia claims she learned to write is revealed in book 9 (9.455–61). The convent’s suit for Pompilia’s property is revealed in book 10 (10.1506–13). 76. Altick and Loucks, 8. They later claim that a third layer of action is provided by the allusions, metaphors, and parables that the speakers use. Ibid., 33. 77. Litzinger, 114. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 11 just before he pronounces Guido’s guilt. The final monologue consists of Guido’s bitter vituperations to two priests in the hours just before his execution—the final key story event. Clearly, the occasion of the poem, the time of discourse, changes from monologue to monologue, and is itself part of a narrative progression moving in time. The temporal movement across monologues, from the composition of one to the next, mimics on a larger scale the motion of the time of discourse within a single dramatic monologue. The dynamism of the poem as a whole derives in part from the story events that happen between monologues. Often the poem implies events happened just before of just after an individual monologue, as sometimes happens in stand-alone dramatic monologues like “Andrea del Sarto.” The technique of weaving story events between distinct bouts of discourse, which Gerald Prince labels “intercalated narration,” also appears in epistolary novels and in Aurora Leigh.78 In The Ring and the Book, however, story and discourse not only alternate but also blur together.79 In Browning’s poem, pieces of discourse both report prior events and themselves become story events. Pompilia’s speech is her dying confession, Caponsacchi gives testimony in the trial that condemns Guido, and the lawyers’ monologues become the substance of the trial. Browning also puts intercalated narration to a different use than in most epistolary novels. He does not create narrative suspense or surprise about the story events that occur between bouts of discourse, since those events are revealed in book 1 of the poem. Rather, Browning draws attention to the placement in time, and the progression through time, of each section of discourse. The Ring and the Book as a whole, then, creates a peculiar mixture of lyric and narrative temporality similar to that of the dramatic monologue.

78. Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Berlin: Mouton, 1982), 27. 79. Vivienne J. Rundle says of poem, “the traditional separation of story and discourse is replaced by an unsettling dissolution of categories.” “‘Will you let them murder me?’: Guido and the Reader in The Ring and the Book,” Victorian Poetry 27.3–4 (Autumn–Winter 1989): 99. While I suggest that layers of discourse become story events, Rundle claims the inverse is true: “Repeatedly, the ‘story’ component of the narrative turns out to be itself a layer of ‘discourse,’ as the originating events recede farther and farther away from the reader’s experience of The Ring and the Book.” Rundle, 100. Rundle does seem to acknowledge the movement of discourse to event in Guido’s case; she argues that Guido’s life depends on his convincing the judges of the merit of his version of the events, and “to accomplish this, he substitutes ‘discourse’ for ‘story’—making his narrative about the events the ‘story,’ the action by which the reader will judge him.” Rundle, 104. I agree with this assessment of the reader’s judgment of Guido, but I fail to see how it differs from a reader’s response to any other dramatic monologue. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

epIc repetItIon

The poem’s repetitive presentation of the same basic story events has other important consequences. The multiple retellings diminish the suspense we expect from many narrative forms, but the retellings also mimic the audience experience of a specific narrative form: epic myth.80 As we saw in chapter 2, an epic allows the audience to hear a familiar story with familiar episodes, and analyze each episode for the ways in which it demonstrates the hero’s exemplarity, and the ways in which it leads to (or delays) the story’s ultimate end. As Paul Ricoeur describes it: “As soon as a story is well known—and such is the case with most traditional and popular narratives as well as with the national chronicles of the founding events of a given community—retelling takes the place of telling. Then following the story is less important than apprehending the well-known end as implied in the beginning and the well-known episodes as leading to this end.”81 In national epics, then, the audience’s task is to understand how the early events in the tale inevitably led to (or at least foreshadowed) the ending. The emphasis is not on what happened but on how it happened. Wolfgang Iser describes a similar situation for the readers of Pilgrim’s Progress, another story in which the ending is known from the very beginning. There are many moments in the story at which the reader “is aware of the end result, and so his interest lies not in whether the pilgrim will arrive, but in what the pilgrim has to do in order to get there. This latter form of tension is epic, since the outcome of the adventures is already known.”82 Again, the emphasis is on how the already-known ending will come about, although in this case the specific episodes leading up to the ending are not known by a first-time reader.83 Such is not the case for the reader of The Ring and the Book, who knows all the key events by the close of book 1. Browning’s audience does not quite align with Ricoeur’s description of the epic experience, either. Certainly in Browning’s work, “retelling takes the place of telling,” and “following the story” is not our chief concern. But neither are

80. I therefore disagree with Altick and Loucks when they claim that the poem’s resemblances to epic are merely superficial. See Altick and Loucks, 7. 81. Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980–81), 175. 82. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 9. 83. In this respect, Iser’s description of Pilgrim’s Progress resembles my description of The Prelude. There are, however, important differences (The Prelude’s associational, rather than linearly causal, structure, for instance) which make The Prelude a more lyrical, rather than epic, work. For a detailed discussion of this issue, see chapter 2. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1 we focused on seeing the end as implied in the beginning, or on the relationship of episodes to the end. Browning’s reader must concentrate not on the how of the narrative’s action, but on the why, and Brown- ing locates the explanation for the story in an understanding of the participants’ characters. Traditionally, the function of character in epic is to provide an exemplar, to embody one particular trait, or a related set of traits, highly valued in the author’s culture. When epic tension is emphasized in Pilgrim’s Progress, and the ending is certain for both the narrator and reader, then “events and characters are relevant only insofar as they bring out the exemplariness of the road to salvation.”84 Indeed, “in the epic . . . everything [is] subsidiary to the idea.”85 Some readers argue that characters in The Ring and the Book function as exemplars. According to Sue Lonoff, “While [the speakers] are highly particularized they are also exemplars of moral qualities—of good and evil, foolishness and wisdom.”86 Certainly the absolute purity of Pompilia and the unmitigated cruelty of Guido encourage readers to view them as models of good and evil, and their exemplary status is reinforced by the Pope’s and Browning’s unambiguous judgments of them. Browning’s characters, however, are much more particularized, rounder, more vital, than in most epics. They also manifest their essential natures through a medium that significantly differs from epics. The reader of The Ring and the Book searches for a character’s essence, not in the actions of the narrative, but rather in representations of the character’s motivations and thought processes.87 The importance of these internal, subjective states suggests that the core of the poem’s meaning is lyrical. As Langbaum aptly declares, “By their motives shall ye know them! This is Browning’s injunction throughout.”88 The degree to which the events themselves are de-emphasized is apparent very early in the work. Less than four hundred lines into the poem, Browning declares:

You know the tale already: I may ask, Rather than think to tell you, more thereof,— Ask you not merely who were he and she, Husband and wife, what manner of mankind, But how you hold concerning this and that

84. Iser, 8. 85. Ibid., 28. 86. Lonoff, 152. 87. Ross Posnock also finds that “[b]y eliminating any element of surprise or suspense [Browning] makes the reader attend to the elaboration . . . of the characters’ thoughts and feelings,” but sees this technique’s significance as showing “the poem’s affinities to James and modernism.” Posnock, 287. 88. Langbaum, 120. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

Other yet-unnamed actor in the piece. (1.372–77)

His readers “know the tale already,” remarkably early in the poem, but merely knowing the bare events is not sufficient knowledge. The reaction Browning desires from his readers is their judgment of the participants’ characters, “what manner of mankind” they are. Events and their accompanying temporal change are neither the center of attention, nor a sufficient vehicle for conveying character. Instead, the nature of a person’s discourse is used to convey the static, internal nature of the person him- or herself.89 The poem’s core of meaning, then, lies in the atemporal characteristics of lyric.90 And in this respect, through the repetition of narrative to produce a focus on lyrical elements, “Browning’s effort . . . is to reveal the timeless in the temporal.”91 The interplay of means and ends is even more complex in The Ring and the Book, however. The lyrical element of motivation reveals each speaker’s character, and hence serves the rhetorical purpose of the dramatic monologue. Finally, characters’ motives are the basis on which the Pope and Browning’s readers ethically judge the characters and their actions; motives also serve the rhetorical purpose of narrative. Narrative means serve lyric ends, which are themselves means to serve the ends of narrative and portraiture.

aLLIteratIon as characterIzatIon

Telling the same basic plot is certainly not the only feature common to

89. Indeed, all but one of the characters are static in their personalities. The one exception is Caponsacchi: “Caponsacchi is the only character in the poem shown to be capable of change—the only character, indeed, who is shown undergoing the process of change.” Armstrong, “Note,” 271. 90. This is consistent with Langbaum’s claim that in the end, “the dramatic monologue is resolved not dramatically but lyrically, not by the completeness of the situation but by a completeness that resides within the speaker.” Langbaum, 200–201. In this respect, I disagree with Melissa Valiska Gregory’s argument that “throughout The Ring and the Book, the rhetorical force of lyric violence demands a social response: consideration and likely condemnation.” Gregory, 503. To my mind, though the reader is asked to make judgments, the poem strongly suggests that social institutions are ill-equipped to judge this case properly. 91. Altick and Loucks, 35. In contrast, Herbert Tucker argues that The Ring and the Book’s underlying “premise is the inescapability of the historical condition,” and the poem suggests that cultural and historical conditions shape the characters’ motives and desires. Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 442. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1 all the speakers. They also share a proclivity for the same metaphors and allusions, a frequent use of alliteration, and the mere fact that their speeches are divided into lines of blank verse. All of these commonali- ties emphasize Browning’s hand in the story. This in turn creates a triple vision of time: the reader is simultaneously aware of the time being narrated, the time of each character’s narration, and the time of Browning’s writing, making the reader more cognizant of the lyric moment of composition than is usual in epic and many other narratives.92 Alliteration, however, does more than just lend textural unity to The Ring and the Book as a whole.93 This should not be surprising, since it is one of the prominent features of Browning’s style throughout his oeuvre, and Browning uses it quite deliberately.94 Although Browning’s alliteration is sporadic, it is also very noticeable.95 In The Ring and the Book, however, alliteration becomes especially appropriate for emphasizing Browning’s technique and purpose. It is a poetic device which quite obviously uses repetition, and this echoes, on a much smaller scale, the poem’s larger structure based on repetition. One of Browning’s chief goals is to present vividly but indirectly the participants’ characters, and here, too, alliteration is helpful. The poem frequently clusters characteristics around a person’s name, joining them through alliteration. The sonic echoes emphasize the person’s reputed attributes, and this

92. Other critics have noted these multiple demands on the reader. Donald Hair claims, “We must keep in mind three generic points of view: the narrative, in which the facts of the story are presented simply as facts susceptible of varying interpretations (only one of which is right); the dramatic, in which each character interprets the story according to his own approach to life; and the lyric, in which the poet applies his moral and artistic insight to both the story he tells and the characters he creates.” Hair, Browning’s Experiments, 126. Samuel Chell suggests the poem highlights not just the psychological moment of an individual speaker, but also the reader’s present moment of engagement with the poem, which is made more vibrant through the reader’s engagement with the past. Chell, 94. And W. David Shaw notes, “[T]he action of The Ring and the Book . . . constitute[s] a series of revelations . . . which have the effect of shifting attention to the reader’s own experience.” Shaw, Dialectical, 313. 93. A common definition of alliteration is “the repetition of the sound of an initial consonant or consonant cluster in stressed syllables close enough to each other for the ear to be affected, perhaps unconsciously, by the repetition.” Percy G. Adams, Graces of Har- mony: Alliteration, Assonance, and Consonance in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 3. I agree with Adams that alliteration can be loosened to include repetitions of only parts of consonant clusters; for instance, I would say t and tr alliterate with each other. I depart from Adams in including unstressed syllables in alliteration, but only when they echo nearby stressed syllables. 94. As Donald Hair notes, Browning tends to “lin[k] words with alliteration,” frequently using “the link [as] metaphorical as well as alliterative.” Hair, Language, 185. 95. As Percy Adams describes it, “in the famous dramatic monologues, . . . Browning could go for lines without apparently feeling the need to appeal in any way to the ear. And then . . . would come a burst of echoes, especially of alliteration.” Adams, 171. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

alliterative emphasis can be used either to strengthen an accurate characterization, or to undermine ironically an inaccurate one.96 Seymour Chatman makes a useful distinction between two common relationships of alliterative syllables to a line’s meter. If alliteration is used with two immediately contiguous syllables, it opposes the meter; such alliteration either creates a stress cluster, or draws disproportionate attention to an unstressed syllable. If, instead, an unstressed syllable is placed between the alliterating ones, then the alliteration is cooperating with the meter, adding extra emphasis to the regular metrical stress pattern. Chatman refers to the former case as “ametrical” alliteration.97 For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to the latter case as “metrical alliteration.” Both patterns are common in The Ring and the Book, and we occasionally find both in the same line, as when a fountain of Triton “Puffs up steel sleet which breaks to diamond dust” (1.892). “Diamond dust” is an example of metrical alliteration, and contains assonance in the latter two syllables. The phrase “steel sleet” contains ametrical alliteration with the repeated s, assonance with the hard e sound, and a chiasmus of the words’ final two consonants—t and l. In general, ametrical alliteration is more noticeable in Browning’s poem, and is consistent with his tendency to roughen the meter with dense stress clusters.98 Occasionally, Browning uses ametrical alliteration for more than two consecutive syllables, as in “frayed flesh free” (2.630), “cur-cast creature” (2.632), “first fool’s-flurry” (3.499), and a series of four stressed and alliterative syllables in Guido’s complaint that he is “whealed, one wide wound all of me”99 (5.135). Browning’s alliterative patterns are by no means limited to single lines. He often carries several intertwined patterns of alliteration, assonance, and consonance through a substantial passage, as when Capon- sacchi is incredulous that he must tell his tale again to the same three judges:

96. This is consistent with Roma A. King, Jr.’s analysis of alliteration in “Fra Lippo Lippi”: “Alliteration serves . . . as one means of portraying character,” and “often alliteration heightens satiric meaning.” King, 38, 37. 97. Seymour Chatman, “Comparing Metrical Styles,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: The Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960), 156–57. 98. I agree with Elisabeth Howe that “effects of alliteration, repetition, or rhythm in Browning’s monologues usually are aimed at creating dramatic suspense or emphasizing some aspect of character or situation, rather than producing a musical effect.” Howe, 54. 99. Of course, since alliteration is based on sound, rather than spelling, “whealed,” “one,” “wide,” and “wound” share the same initial w sound, and hence are alliterative, despite the fact that the w sound is spelled three different ways (‘w,’ ‘wh,’ and not explicitly indicated by spelling at all). t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1

. . . yet now no one laughs, Who then . . . nay, dear my lords, but laugh you did, As good as laugh, what in a judge we style Laughter—no levity, nothing indecorous, lords! Only,—I think I apprehend the mood: There was the blameless shrug, permissible smirk, The pen’s pretence at play with the pursed mouth, The titter stifled in the hollow palm.100 (6.9–16)

The alliteration of “laugh” with “lords” is especially obvious since the entire words are repeated; “laugh” or “laughter” appears four times, and “lords” twice. Five other consonants are alliterated, including the use of p four times in a single line. The passage also contains more subtle effects. There are two almost unnoticeable combinations of assonance and consonance: the first syllable of “permissible” with “smirk” and “pursed,” and the second syllable of “pretence” with “pen.” Were it not for the presence of an additional consonant at the end of “smirk” and “pretence,” they would both be mild internal rhymes. And the first two syllables of “levity” and “indecorous” have a chiastic pattern of assonance. Finally, we have examples of metrical alliteration in “lords, but laugh,” and ametrical alliteration in “now no.” A special subcategory of metrical alliterations are “epithet-noun” combinations, consisting of a “bisyllabic modifier plus [a] monosyllabic head.”101 Some examples are Half-Rome’s claim that Pompilia’s was a “bestial birth” (2.604), and the Other Half-Rome’s labeling the Arch- bishop as a “mighty man” (3.1000) and Guido as a “sleeping spouse” (3.1071). Such combinations draw particular attention to the attribute given to the noun, and the sonic repetition in the words suggests an especially close relationship between them, tightening their lexical connection. The emphasis provided by alliteration can be used either to make common connections seem even more natural and forceful, or to heighten the irony of an uncommon connection. It is generally accepted that “rhymes can be used to emphasize serious similarities or dissimi- larities, to effect ironies by association”; similar effects are possible by the use of alliteration, assonance, or consonance.102 To return to our

100. Alliterative consonants are marked in boldface, and italics indicate assonance or a combination of assonance with consonance. 101. Chatman, “Composing,” 157. 102. Adams, 28. One of the central arguments of Adams’s book is that alliteration, assonance, and consonance can be just as effective as rhyme in producing such results. 1 ~ C h A p t e r

examples, the alliteration in “mighty man” may lead us to pause and consider the Archbishop’s misuse of power and his fleshliness, characteristics that might otherwise have been overlooked in this quick phrase. “Bestial birth” is especially effective because the sonic compatibility of the words highlights both their applicability to Pompilia’s descent from a prostitute, and their inapplicability to a character who is often compared to the Virgin Mary. Alliteration’s power to emphasize characterization is not limited to phrases that are precise epithet-noun combinations, and this power has a strong appeal for Browning. When the court sentences Guido to death, they also pronounce, “His wife Pompilia in thought, word and deed, / Was perfect pure” (1.245–46). The metrical alliteration of the phrase “perfect pure,” combined with its consonance in its first and last syllables, creates a sense of the orderliness and harmony the phrase implies, and the fact that the phrase alliterates with Pompilia’s name makes the attachment of purity to her seem irrevocable.103 Browning often uses alliteration for characterization, usually choosing the letter that begins either the character’s name, or a noun describing his social status. For instance, the prosecution claims that Count Guido’s guilt is clear, and that there are five circumstances increasing his culpability: “Crest over crest crowning the cockatrice” (1.168). The c in “count” is repeated four times in one line, and the sense of “crest over crest” conveys the repetition, the piling one on top of the other, that the line enacts. It all culminates in a label for Guido as an evil beast. Similar techniques can be used ironically, to argue a viewpoint with which Browning himself would not agree. In fact, the same play on the letter of a name or title can be used to produce opposite characteriza- tions. Guido’s defense lawyer also uses the repetition of the c in “count” to paint Guido’s disposition:

All conscience and all courage,—there’s our Count Charactered in a word; and, what’s more strange, He had companions in privilege, Found four courageous conscientious friends. (1.185–88)

This passage contains many sonic echoes. “Found four” contains ametrical alliteration. The last syllable of “charactered” rhymes with

103. Park Honan claims that p alliteration shows Pompilia’s true nature even as Guido denies it. Park Honan, Browning’s Characters: A Study in Poetic Technique (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 300. t e m p o r A l h y b r I d I t y I n T h e r i n g a n D T h e B o o k ~ 1

“word,” highlighting the vehicle Browning uses to effect his purpose of understanding character. Most prominent, however, is the repetition of c through all four lines. Arcangeli tries to affix the abstract qualities of “conscience” and “courage” more firmly and naturally to “Count” Guido through the sonic link among the traits and his title. By calling Guido’s accomplices “companions,” Arcangeli lets them partake of the characteristics conferred by his already-established sequence of alliteration, which he repeats in adjectival form (“courageous conscientious”) for greater emphasis. This passage paints Guido precisely as he is not, and if we realize that, we learn much about Arcangeli’s character. These lines also illustrate another common feature of Browning’s use of alliteration—the obvious repetition not only of initial consonant clusters, but also of entire words. Although Herbert Tucker sees, elsewhere in Browning’s poetry, a fear of endless repetition embodied in the poet’s use of alliteration,104 I believe that in The Ring and the Book Browning embraces repetition as productive of both subtle and glaring distinctions. This poem conveys its meaning, and encourages the reader’s use of moral judgment, precisely through its use, on large and small scales, of repetition with a difference. The Ring and the Book unveils character, and invites the reader’s judgment of characters, throughout its ten dramatic monologues. The framework of each of the books seamlessly blends lyric and narrative temporalities, emphasizing the lyric time of discourse but conferring to it a narrative progression in time. This feature, common to all dramatic monologues, is mimicked in the overarching structure of the poem: there is also temporal progression from one monologue to the next. The repetition of the same story elements mimics an epic reading experience, but also creates a triple awareness of time—the time of the story, the time of the characters’ discourse, and the time of Browning’s composition. The characters’ epic exemplarity is found not in their actions, but rather in their motives and personalities, traits that are further emphasized through Browning’s pervasive use of alliteration. In essence, The Ring and the Book repeats its narrative in order to convey lyrical internal states. But if temporally the poem uses narrative means to serve lyric ends, rhetorically it uses lyric means to serve narrative ends, by making these internal states the basis of the reader’s judgments.

104. For example, Tucker says of Sordello, “Trapped in repetition, the poet can find ‘more to say’ only by saying more of the same thing, even of the same sound.” Tucker, Browning’s Beginnings, 22. In reference to Pauline, Tucker claims, “Browning embodies the threat of repetitive sameness in an alliterative near-tautology.” Ibid., 42. Po s T s C r I p T LegacIes and Lapses of LyrIc narratIve

The preceding four chapters have focused on mode in order to avoid the constraints of more narrow definitions of particular genres. Each chapter has tried to reach a better understanding of the unique structure of each poem, seeing its innovations and experiments as positive attributes, rather than as impediments to fitting the poem within a preexisting genre. In the course of this study, I have also drawn out the implications of these four poems for current critical assumptions. Using Byron as an example, I have suggested that self-reflexivity can produce lyrical effects, as well as ironic playfulness. Aurora Leigh shows that lyric does not always have to be brief, nor does it have to be ahistorical. Narrative is not necessarily a retrospective experience for the reader, at least not for the reader of The Prelude. And although the two modes are often described as antithetical, Browning’s dramatic monologues seamlessly blend lyric and narrative temporalities. Despite these varied experiments and effects, all four poems paradoxically employ temporal progression to imply the static and atemporal, and use narrative means

200 l e g ACI e s A n d l A p s e s o f ly r IC n A r r At I v e ~ 01

to achieve lyric ends. In closing this study, I want to make two final gestures. First, I reflect on the influences of these four poems on the literature that followed them. Second, I consider two nineteenth-century poems that suffer from an overabundance of lyricism, an inability to mix lyric and narrative with complete success. I will take as my examples a long poem indebted to epic and romance and a not-quite-sonnet sequence of a distinctly modern cast. U

Karl Kroeber traces two strands of Romantic narrative poetry, with separate influences on subsequent literary history: Byron develops “the adventurous narrative: a story poem concerned with physical action o s T s C r I p T and adventure,” while Wordsworth “developed narrative poetically” to become a “medium for the expression of personal, visionary experience.”1 I agree that Wordsworth lyricizes narrative poetry, and that such lyricization has an important influence on nineteenth-century poetry. I also agree that specifically narrative forms of interest, centered on plot and action, are more important in Byron’s poetry than in other Romantic poems, and that Byron influences the novel tradition. But Byron’s fixation on adventure is not his only influence on the novel. Sections of Don Juan do fit the pattern of adventure narrative (namely, the first half of canto 2, and cantos 7–8), but as we’ve seen, many other narrative patterns are incorporated into the poem. Byron is almost encyclopedic in his invocation of different narrative genres, and each is ironically undermined, calling attention to its very conventionality. Byron’s encyclopedia of narrative conventions, and his satiric attitude toward them, may have had a belated descendant in the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses—a tour de force parody of prominent styles in English literary history. And the self-reflexivity which permeates Don Juan, although it certainly had prominent predecessors like Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, later became much more commonplace in the twentieth-century novel. Wordsworth’s Prelude was also an important influence on some prominent twentieth-century novels, through its episodic nature and its focus on the development of character. In modern literature an “episodic pattern allows for free and full character development without interference from the requirements of a tightly-knit plot.”2 More specifi-

1. Karl Kroeber, Romantic Narrative Art (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 84. 2. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 236. 0 ~ p o s t s C r I p t

cally, Wordsworth’s poem on the growth of his own mind influenced later histories of an author’s artistic development. A. D. Nuttall claims, “The greatest successor of The Prelude is not a poem but a novel, and so it begins, very quietly, in prose: ‘Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure. . . .’”3 Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is not the poem’s only successor, however. Herbert Lindenberger has aptly observed, “It seems no mere accident of literary history that The Prelude’s greatness was first generally recognized by the age that produced introspective fiction—deriving as it does from the double stream of poetry and the novel—of Proust, Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf.”4 Joyce should also be added to this list, since his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shares The Prelude’s introspection, lyrical association, and musing about an artist’s development. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh reacts against the confidence about future developments and the isolation of the artist from society we see in The Prelude. Instead, she places the artist, and lyric poetry, in specific social contexts, and mixes the confidence of retrospective narration with the immediacy of epistolary forms. She juxtaposes fragments of multiple literary forms in order to expose the limitations of each genre in isolation, and she overcomes the limitations of one genre with the strengths of another. Since Aurora Leigh advocates the erosion of generic boundaries and the avoidance of slavish imitation, it was unlikely to produce any recognizable literary heirs. But the poem’s aggressive juxtaposition of contradictory forms is an early precursor to modernist fragmentation. Aurora Leigh’s earnestness and didacticism, however, occlude its formal connection to twentieth-century works that do not share its faith in literature’s ability to communicate truth directly and sincerely. In The Ring and the Book, Robert Browning unifies, rather than fragments, lyric and narrative time through his use of the dramatic monologue. Browning’s techniques, especially the primacy of point of view, had a profound influence on subsequent novelists. As Lindenberger remarks of The Ring and the Book, “Its affinities are less with any other long poem, past or present, than with the modern experimental novel, as Henry James was perhaps the first to point out.”5 James, in his focal-

3. A. D. Nuttall, Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 150. 4. Herbert Lindenberger, “The Reception of The Prelude,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 64 (1960): 205. 5. Herbert Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s Prelude (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 1963), 125. l e g ACI e s A n d l A p s e s o f ly r IC n A r r At I v e ~ 0 ization of stories through the consciousness of an imperfectly aware character, adopts Browning’s use of narrative perspective as central to the text’s meaning.6 But whereas Browning has faith that point of view is capable of reliably, if indirectly, communicating inner motivations, James uses point of view to emphasize problems of communication. In James’s works, a particular narrative perspective is capable of not only making motives inscrutable, but also obscuring such basic information as whether or not an event actually happened. (In The Turn of the Screw, for example, there is significant tension about whether or not the ghosts exist outside the mind of the governess who narrates most of the tale.) Nineteenth-century long poems have had a profound and lasting influence on the novel, and we would do well to recognize that influence. U

Not all experiments in mixing lyric and narrative are unqualified suc- cesses, though. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King is surely a narrative poem, a blend of epic and romance. Yet Idylls employs narrative techniques in a manner that undermines their narrative interest. As we have seen, epics assume their audiences are already familiar with their basic plots, and the reader wonders “How did it happen?” rather than “What happened?” Tennyson’s audience may be familiar with other versions of Arthurian legend, most notably Malory’s. Even if they are not, Ten- nyson sometimes forces an epic reader response by giving away key plot events early in the text. The first book of Idylls describes Modred as “the same that afterward / Struck for the throne, and striking found his doom,” giving away the revolt discussed in the penultimate book and a death discussed in the final idyll.7 The poem not only minimizes the narrative interest of suspense; it also renders unnecessary the typical rhetorical response to narrative: judgment. Many of the characters feel uncertain, misjudge, or fall prey to deception, but the reader does not, because Tennyson judges for us. When Vivien tells Balin that she heard an eyewitness account of Guinevere declaring her love to Lancelot, Balin believes the tale is true. The reader already knows of Guinevere’s love

6. Ross Posnock also finds that Browning’s focus on “the characters’ thoughts and feelings” shows “the poem’s affinities to James and modernism.” Ross Posnock, “‘The Novel in The Ring and the Book’: Henry James’s Energetic ‘Appropriation’ of Browning,” The Centennial Review 25.3 (Summer 1981): 287. 7. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, in The Poems of Tennyson, vol. 3, edited by Christopher Ricks (Harlow: Longman, 1987), “The Coming of Arthur” lines 323–34. Subsequent citations will provide the idyll name and line numbers in parentheses. 0 ~ p o s t s C r I p t

for Lancelot,8 but the narrator is careful to expose this specific story as false: he says of Vivien, “She lied with ease” (“Balin and Balan” 517). The narrator also imposes his judgment of characters on the reader through a stylistic defect that Christopher Ricks calls “overinsistencies.” Ricks gives as an example the lines: “Eyes of pure women, wholesome stars of love; / And all about a healthful people stept / As in the presence of a gracious king.”9 Here the narrator piles on one descriptive adjective after another, rather than allowing the reader to infer these characteristics from the characters’ actions and speech. Villains also draw unambiguous epithets from the narrator: Vivien is described as “wily” at the beginning of her idyll, and at the end the narrator echoes Merlin in labeling her a “harlot” (“Merlin and Vivien” 5, 970). In its large-scale temporal progression, Idylls moves roughly chronologically, opening with “The Coming of Arthur” and closing with “The Passing of Arthur.” Many of the individual books, however, seem to adopt the epic convention of opening in medias res, then backtracking to earlier events. The technique is perhaps most obvious in “Lancelot and Elaine.” The first 55 lines feature three separate movements backward in time, with the promise of a satisfactory explanation receding further into the past with each analepsis. John R. Reed makes a case for the narrative efficacy of this opening, suggesting that it arouses the reader’s interest in clues, in order for the reader to see through the fantasies of the title characters.10 In other books, however, the opening in medias res fails to create narrative suspense or dramatic irony. “Merlin and Vivien” starts with five lines describing Vivien at Merlin’s feet, then flashes back to a conversation which prompted Vivien to go to Arthur’s court and undermine it through gossip. The opening time frame is not developed enough to create substantial resonance, foreshadowing, or dread; no clear purpose justifies the nonchronological narration of events. Simi- larly, “Pelleas and Ettarre” opens with fifteen lines on Arthur knighting Pelleas, then flashes back to his meeting Ettarre “a day or twain before”

8. In the earlier-placed idyll “The Marriage of Geraint” we learn that “Guinevere lay late into the morn, / Lost in sweet dreams, and dreaming of her love / For Lancelot” (157–59). 9. Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 269. The emphasis is Ricks’s, and the quotation is “Gareth and Lynette,” 307–9. Ricks claims overinsistencies are especially common “in those areas of the poem where Tennyson knew he had failed to create a sense of what the Round Table was in its living vigor.” Ricks, 269. 10. John R. Reed, “Tennyson’s Narrative on Narration,” Victorian Poetry 24.2 (Summer 1986): 199. Reed also finds the anachrony that opens “The Holy Grail” fitting: “The poem begins at the very end of its action, requiring an extensive flashback, an appropriate technique for a poem in which there is no future.” Reed, 200. l e g ACI e s A n d l A p s e s o f ly r IC n A r r At I v e ~ 0

(19). The opening does not add much to the reader’s investment in the tale. In addition, there is no clear motive for the narrator’s inexactness about how much time elapsed between the two events. A different sort of temporal imprecision accompanies the analepsis in “The Marriage of Geraint.” The book shifts from Geraint’s suspicion that Enid is unfaith- ful, to an event at Arthur’s court that spurred the quest that led to Geraint’s meeting Enid. The narrator does not clearly mark the shift back in time, however. The only initial indication that we have entered a flashback is a reference to Arthur’s “court” just after Enid thinks about her first “coming to the court” (146, 144). We only definitively learn eighty lines later that we have moved back to a period when Geraint is unmarried (227). Tennyson’s opening anachronies, then, can push narrative explanation further and further into the past, can defy the reader’s expectation that the anachronies create narrative interest, and can blur time even as they leap across it. Idylls of the King further reduces its narrative interest by sometimes summarizing heroic action in so short a space that it seems trivialized. “Pelleas and Ettarre” summarizes a tournament in three lines (161–63),11 and “The Coming of Arthur” concludes with this stunning narrative condensation:

And Arthur and his knighthood for a space Were all one will, and through that strength the King Drew in the petty princedoms under him, Fought, and in twelve great battles overcame The heathen hordes, and made a realm and reign’d. (514–18)

By distilling twelve battles and the foundation of a kingdom into five lines, Tennyson indicates that action of a truly epic scope will not be the focus of the poem. Instead, many episodes feature the individual quests, digression, and repetition of romance, “a form which simultaneously quests for and postpones a particular end, objective, or object.”12 Rep- etition is not limited, however, to the romance plots of Gareth fighting

11. “The Last Tournament” describes the title event in somewhat greater detail, but it focuses on Lancelot’s mental state, his inattention to the foul words and foul deeds of the competitors, and his desire to shake off his foul mood by fighting Tristram (151–89). 12. Patricia A. Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 4. Christopher Ricks claims, “Tennyson’s awed sense of time lent itself not to narrative, not to charting events and outcomes, but to waiting, to suspense.” Ricks, 275. I claim it lent itself not to suspense but to suspension, to the dilation and repetition of romance and lyric. 0 ~ p o s t s C r I p t

each of four knights, or Sir Bedivere attempting to cast Excalibur into the lake three times. Rather, John R. Reed’s comment on “Gareth and Lynette” is true for the Idylls generally: “Repeated lines, images, and phrases create a sense of continuity and stasis.”13 On occasion, Tenny- son takes repetition too far, to the point of belabored redundancy, even absurdity. Lancelot competes “For the great diamond in the diamond jousts, / Which Arthur had ordained, and by that name / Had named them, since a diamond was the prize” (“Lancelot and Elaine” 31–33). Surely the first line makes clear what the prize, and why the name. To this reader, at least, the repetition falls flat, and the phrase “by that name / Had named them” seems included only for metrical reasons. To my mind, the most absurd instance of repetition appears, appropriately enough, in “Balin and Balan”: “And on the right of Balin Balin’s horse / Was fast beside an alder, on the left / Of Balan Balan’s near a poplartree” (26–28). Tennyson’s decisions to reduce the poem’s narrative interest, blur some of its temporal shifts, and create a sense of stasis through repetition are in keeping with Arthur’s (and Tennyson’s) war against time. Nowhere is this allegorical battle against time clearer than in Gareth’s quest to defeat four knights who insist on being called Morning-Star, Noon-Sun, Evening-Star, and Night or Death (“Gareth and Lynette” 619– 23). When Gareth approaches Camelot he sees the city’s gates depicting “. . . Arthur’s wars in weird devices done, / New things and old co-twisted, as if Time / Were nothing” (“Gareth and Lynette” 221–23). Time is made nothing not only on the city gates, but also in the city’s making. Merlin tells Gareth:

For an ye heard a music, like enow They are building still, seeing the city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built for ever. (“Gareth and Lynette” 271–74)

It would seem Camelot, like The Prelude, is “something evermore about to be.” It will never be complete, for it is an eternally dilated process. In this, and in its accompaniment by music, the city resembles lyric poetry. While the Idylls valorize Arthur’s lyric agenda of overcoming time, they condemn other character’s narrative projects. Mark is described as “cra- ven—a man of plots, / Craft, poisonous counsels, wayside ambushings,”

13. Reed, 194. l e g ACI e s A n d l A p s e s o f ly r IC n A r r At I v e ~ 0 suggesting the alignment of narrative “plots” with villainous schemes (“Gareth and Lynette” 423–24). And after Vivien slanders Lancelot and Guinevere, Balin then “cursed the tale, / The told-of, and the teller” (“Balin and Balan” 534–35). Arthur eventually falls prey to plots and gossip (that is, to storytelling), and succumbs to time and death.14 Tennyson’s war against time also fails. Seven months before publishing the first group of Idylls, Ten- nyson wrote to his American publisher that he was not writing “an Epic of King Arthur. I should be crazed to attempt such a thing in the heart of the 19th Century.”15 Obviously, Tennyson did make the attempt, and tried to bridge the temporal gulf between Arthurian legend and the nineteenth century. The dedication to Prince Albert portrays him as a reincarnation of Arthurian virtues, drawing a contemporary resonance for the tale. Conversely, Tennyson depicts Arthurian society as suffering from the nostalgia and sense of belatedness that afflicted the Victorians. Bedivere’s lament, “For now I see the true old times are dead,” might also express Tennyson’s fear (“The Passing of Arthur” 397).16 In his attempts to recapture the true old times, Tennyson diminishes the poem’s narrative interest and creates an elegiac tone and lyric sense of stasis. In one respect, Tennyson may push the poem’s lyricism too far. Christopher Ricks complains that in the Idylls, Tennyson “has not creatively solved the problem of accommodating his style (what Arnold called his ‘curious elaborateness of expression’) to the simple exigencies of narrative, of the humble essential which would permit his story to move.”17 Certainly Tennyson’s heavy repetitions qualify as a curiously elaborate style. Tennyson’s most notable stylistic device is the epic simile. As we have seen, similes carefully divide the tenor and vehicle, and can allow for lyric elaboration that is distinct from yet tied to a narrative element. Tennyson is even more careful than Barrett Browning in dividing the literal from metaphoric, and the narrative from the lyric. He most often begins a simile with “as,” offers an elaborate vehicle, and

14. In Herbert Tucker’s reading of the Idylls, political authority depends upon public perception created through language, vows, stories, and even gossip. Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 447–61. 15. Quoted in Ricks, 264. 16. My reading is decidedly less optimistic than John R. Reed’s. He claims, “Narrative itself becomes a genuine means of solving the problem of dissolution and decay” since past deeds are recorded in words that may inspire future deeds. Reed, 193. 17. Ricks, 270–71. In his analysis of “Morte d’Arthur” as vehicle of cultural transmission, Herbert Tucker sees similar dangers of “[n]arrative arrest” and “sensory overload” in Tennyson’s style. Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 329. 0 ~ p o s t s C r I p t

then uses “so” to announce the tenor. Yet Christopher Ricks is right to say the similes “seldom relate intimately to the poem’s real concerns.”18 Their lyric elaboration overpowers the narrative drive. In another sense, however, Tennyson does not push the lyricism far enough, does not create sufficient lyrical interest to fill the void left by the diminishment of narrative interest. The poem sometimes focuses on lyrical subject matter by depicting the mental states of characters. But occasionally the narrator oddly externalizes these lyric musings by cast- ing them as muttered dialogue partly overheard by another character. In “The Marriage of Geraint” this device creates irony and drives later events, but in “Merlin and Vivien” it seems mostly extraneous. The narrator does not focus at all on his own mental state, the subject that, in very different ways, proved so fruitful for Wordsworth and Byron. On several occasions, the narrator indirectly intrudes himself in the third person as “he that tells the tale.” Twice he intrudes to clarify that a choice about an idyll’s outcome was his. He notes his departure from Malory by saying, “And he that told the tale in older times / Says that Sir Gareth wedded Lyonors, / But he, that told it later, says Lynette” (“Gareth and Lynette” 1392–94). He later says of Ettarre, “he that tells the tale / Says that her ever-veering fancy turn’d / To Pelleas” though in vain (“Pelleas and Ettarre” 482–84). In both cases, he notes a deviation from or elaboration on earlier legend. Because the admissions are overt and infrequent, he builds trust in the reader that the rest of his story is faithful to earlier sources. While the changes reflect the narrator’s tastes about fit endings for love stories, they primarily focus attention on the reliability of the story, not on the personality of the narrator. In two other cases, “he that tells the tale” intrudes to claim he saw an event used as a simile’s vehicle, and to assert his agency in crafting a simile (“Geraint and Enid” 161–66, “The Last Tournament” 226–27). While this may draw attention to the level of discourse, it does so for no discernable purpose, and the narrator remains a hollow figure. U

As a final example of the complex interactions of lyric and narrative in nineteenth-century poetry, I turn to George Meredith’s Modern Love. The poem clearly participates in the tradition of the sonnet sequence, yet its departures from that tradition are striking. The narrative content differs. Meredith’s speaker does not suffer the trials of courtly love and

18. Ricks, 274. l e g ACI e s A n d l A p s e s o f ly r IC n A r r At I v e ~ 0 its unrequited adoration. Rather, his mistress “yields” to him (39.1), and he considers the possibility that the “familiar sight” of his wife may be “[m]ore keenly tempting than new loveliness” (5.8–9) even as his marriage disintegrates in suspicion, jealousy, and pain.19 Meredith also departs from traditional sonnet form, writing iambic pentameter poems of 16 lines, rather than 14. The greater length allows both more intricate narrative developments and a longer lyric dilation of time. The rhyme scheme (abbacddceffeghhg) itself can create a lyric sense of static repetition, constantly circling back rather than moving forward. In addition, the rhyme scheme gives no indication of where the volta would fall, and dulls the expectation of a clear narrative turn within an individual sonnet.20 These further lyricizations of the sonnet structure aptly convey the speaker’s anguished obsession as he is unable fully to understand his situation or to break free of it. Of what use is narrative to the speaker when he claims his wife’s suspected infidelity has destroyed the future, flattened the present, and worst of all tarnished the past (12.1–16)? And yet Modern Love features a more strongly developed narrative line, and more fully realized narrative settings, than most sonnet sequences. I have been referring to the husband as the “speaker” of the sonnets, but Meredith’s poem alternates between first person and third person reporting, sometimes within a single sonnet. It also alternates between the present tense and the past tense, and while the use of the present tense often correlates with the use of the first person, they do not always correspond. Sonnet 6 offers an especially complex example of these alternations:

It chanced his lips did meet her forehead cool. She had no blush, but slanted down her eye. Shamed nature, then, confesses love can die: And most she punishes the tender fool Who will believe what honours her the most! Dead! is it dead? She has a pulse, and flow Of tears, the price of blood-drops, as I know, For whom the midnight sobs around Love’s ghost,

19. George Meredith, Modern Love, in The Poems of George Meredith, vol. 1, edited by Phyllis B. Bartlett (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). Subsequent citations will provide the sonnet and line numbers in parentheses. 20. Arline Golden discusses at length the poem’s departure from courtly love, and mentions the stanza’s lack of a turn and more open-ended form. Arline Golden, “‘The Game of Sentiment’: Tradition and Innovation in Meredith’s Modern Love,” ELH 40.2 (Sum- mer 1973): 265, 266. 10 ~ p o s t s C r I p t

Since then I heard her, and so will sob on. The love is here; it has but changed its aim. O bitter barren woman! what’s the name? The name, the name, the new name thou hast won? Behold me striking the world’s coward stroke! That will I not do, though the sting is dire. —Beneath the surface this, while by the fire They sat, she laughing at a quiet joke. (6.1–16)

This sonnet obviously begins in the third person and the past tense. But while the verb tense shifts to the present in line 3, the point of view changes later when the first person appears in line 7. The last two lines reintroduce the past tense and third person. Although they do not form a rhyming pair, the last two lines act as a closing couplet following a volta: they reframe the preceding lines, placing the present-tense emotional eruption in a sedate past-tense context. The closing frame reveals that the husband’s demand to know her lover’s name was thought but never spoken aloud, justifying Isobel Armstrong’s description of Modern Love’s sonnets as “internal monologues.”21 Taken as a whole, the rapid shifts in tense and point of view both within and between sonnets generate productive tension and deep ambiguity. Armstrong claims that “bringing together the ‘now’ of immediate perception and analysis with the ‘then’ of retrospect . . . lead[s] to a form of narrative in which the speaker is ambiguously ‘inside’ experiences and events and yet external to them, never fully in possession of an analysis yet always seeking the detachment which would enable him to ‘know that he knows.’”22 The reader likely shares this mixed sense of immersion and detachment, aligning Modern Love with the combined subjective expression and objective critique of Armstrong’s double poems, and the combined sympathy and judgment of Langbaum’s dramatic monologues or Phelan’s lyric-narrative hybrids. If the husband is taken as the source of the sonnets, the narrator of events, then the frequent shifts in temporal perspective raise the question of when the husband writes the poems, before or after his wife’s suicide. If his narration runs nearly concurrent with events and most of the sonnets are written before her death, then how does he know to drop hints of her

21. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1993), 441. 22. Ibid., 444. l e g ACI e s A n d l A p s e s o f ly r IC n A r r At I v e ~ 11 suicide? If all the sonnets are written retrospectively after the last of the story events, then why does he invite his (now dead) wife to read one of the sonnets? In sonnet 33 after recording words he spoke to his mistress, the husband writes, “If the spy you play, / My wife, read this! Strange love talk, is it not?” (33.15–16) If he writes this after her death, the words are not only a moot invitation but also remarkably callous. Some readers may be tempted to treat Modern Love as an example of the nonmimetic technique of simultaneous present-tense narration. Two features interfere with this interpretation: the intermittent use of the past tense, and more importantly, the husband’s explicit comments on composing the poems. Not only does he invite his wife to read one of his compositions, but he also labels another as a sonnet when he addresses his mistress: “Lady, this is my sonnet to your eyes” (30.16). The ambiguous temporal relation between discourse and story in Modern Love may be better understood as a mixture of lyric and narrative conventions rather than as a purely narrative conundrum. In this respect, Meredith’s poem bears some similarities to the last two books of Aurora Leigh. In sections written in the past tense the narrator may withhold key information to create a sense of immersion in the experience, and this sense of immersion is heightened in sections using the present tense. Sonnet 15 demonstrates this sense of present experience, as well as its tensions with the poem’s narrative material:

I think she sleeps: it must be sleep, when low Hangs that abandoned arm toward the floor; The face turned with it. Now make fast the door. Sleep on: it is your husband, not your foe. The Poet’s black stage-lion of wronged love, Frights not our modern dames:—well if he did! Now will I pour new light upon that lid, Full-sloping like the breasts beneath. ‘Sweet dove, Your sleep is pure. Nay, pardon: I disturb. I do not? good!’ Her waking infant-stare Grows woman to the burden my hands bear: Her own handwriting to me when no curb Was left on Passion’s tongue. She trembles through; A woman’s tremble—the whole instrument:— I show another letter lately sent. The words are very like: the name is new. (15.1–16) 1 ~ p o s t s C r I p t

The use of the first person and the present tense creates a lyric sense that the experience and the discourse are simultaneous. Yet this sonnet contains narrative material and clear changes over time: the husband wakes his wife to show her two love letters, and she both changes from sleeping to waking, and from incomprehension to understanding as she recognizes the import of the letters. The narrator has knowledge of the letters before the sonnet starts and deliberately, vindictively plans their use against her. The reader learns the letters’ significance only at the end, however, and experiences a revelation similar to the wife’s. The closer alignment of our knowledge with the wife’s, combined with our likely condemnation of the husband’s cruelty, may cause us to shift our sympathetic identification from the husband to the wife in this sonnet, going against the sequence’s usual procedure of aligning us closely with the husband’s perception. The dominant alignment with the husband’s perception has raised questions for some of Meredith’s readers. George Stevenson asked Mer- edith to explain whether or not the husband’s suspicions of his wife’s infidelity were accurate, and Meredith replied, “As to the Lady in ‘Mod- ern Love,’ her husband never accurately knew; therefore we ought not to inquire.”23 While some readers may inquire anyway, irritably reaching after the facts of the case, the indeterminacy of the answer does produce some positive aesthetic effects. The husband’s uncertainty heightens the psychological realism of his portrait,24 and the possibility that the wife was less guilty than she seemed heightens the pathos of her death. For this reader, however, the wife’s suicide is less ably rendered. The event is not indeterminate, but it is partially occluded, and at the poem’s close its lyricism interferes with the narrative’s clarity and closure. The suicide is revealed at the end of the penultimate sonnet: “Lethe had passed those lips, and he knew all” (49.16). Isobel Armstrong claims, “The shock of the wife’s suicide after a seeming reconciliation is registered with tragic pathos.”25 For some readers the suicide does not register at all; when I have taught Modern Love, some students overlook or misinterpret this crucial event. The line’s lyrical qualities—its mytho-

23. Phyllis Bartlett quotes Meredith’s letter to Stevenson in her introductory note to Modern Love in The Poems of George Meredith. 24. For a psychological reading of the narrator, see Stephen Watt, “Neurotic Responses to a Failed Marriage: Meredith’s Modern Love,” Mosaic 17.1 (Winter 1984): 49–63. Cathy Comstock acknowledges the temptation to read the poem’s fragmentariness through psychological realism, but claims the poem exposes character as an artificial construct. Cathy Comstock, “‘Speak, and I see the side-lie of a truth’: The Problematics of Truth in Mere- dith’s Modern Love,” Victorian Poetry 25.2 (Summer 1987): 135–39. 25. Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 446. l e g ACI e s A n d l A p s e s o f ly r IC n A r r At I v e ~ 1 logical allusion, lilting rhythm, and brevity of the disclosure—belie its staggering narrative content. The language sounds as if the wife has broken the opening interdiction of Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” rather than having died in Meredith’s distinctly modern setting. Naomi Levine suggests the language is not only obscure but also ambiguous: “The elegiac quality of the last several sonnets suggests a parting, but the language is too ambiguous to make suicide the definitive cause.”26 Instead, she proposes the possibility that the death is a metaphoric repetition of the traumatic loss of love, a loss frequently figured in Modern Love through the language of death. Even if we agree that the suicide is a literal event, not a metaphor, the event is curiously both too abrupt and too strongly foreshadowed. After the suicide is disclosed at the end of sonnet 49, readers have only one sonnet left to help them process its significance. Sonnet 50 gestures towards closure and objective distance, but the personified “Love” may feel too aloof (50.1). The contrast of “our life” with the reference to the spouses as “they” suddenly opens a gap between the third-person narrator and the husband, further confusing the already vexed issue of point of view, and dampening the emotional impact of the death on the husband (50.12, 6). Yet if we have too little time to process the death after it is revealed, we may also have too many hints of her death before its disclosure. The poem strongly foreshadows her death at least as early as sonnet 35. After describing his wife’s secret suffering, the speaker warns, “O have a care of natures that are mute! / They punish you in acts: their steps are brief” (35.7–8). He even foreshadows an overdose as her cause of death: “She is not one / Long to endure this torpidly, and shun / The drugs that crowd about a woman’s hand” (35.10–12). When sonnet 49 opens with, “He found her by the ocean’s moaning verge, / Nor any wicked change in her discerned,” the reader might assume he finds her corpse but does not immediately register her sinful death by suicide (49.1–2). This temptation is especially strong because the previous sonnet describes “honest speech” as a “fatal draught” (48.7,8), and the ocean’s shore has been described as “a fitting spot to dig Love’s grave; / Here where the ponderous breakers plunge and strike” (43.3–4). Yet the husband discovers her suicide not on the beach at the start of sonnet 49, but rather in her bed at the sonnet’s end. This phantom death and the difficulty of reconstructing the chronology of events in the last ten sonnets blur the temporal location of her actual death. Modern Love

26. Naomi Levine, “‘Terrible Love’: Amatory Trauma in Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love” (master’s research paper, McGill University, 2006), 45. 1 ~ p o s t s C r I p t

is a powerful poem, and largely successful in its experiments with lyric and narrative. But in its handling of this crucial event it diminishes its narrative resonance, and the lyrical language and dislocation from time veil, rather than highlight, the event. In this case, lyrical means interfere with narrative ends. W o r k s C IT e d

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Abrams, M. H., 12n31, 72, 73n11, 80, erature, 106; of lyric, 4, 19, 63–64, 80n22, 85, 89–90, 96n58, 101, 107, 68–69, 80, 91–92, 192n83, 202 115n98 Augustine, Saint, 105, 107 Adams, Percy G., 195n93, 195n95, 197 Aurora Leigh (Barrett Browning), 1–2, Adorno, Theodor, 128n18 19–20, 119, 120–39, 141–54, 155, allegory, 141n52 191, 200, 202, 211; and author- alliteration, 20, 156, 188, 195–99 ity, 138–39, 142, 145, 202; Barrett Altick, Richard D., 16n46, 155, 177, Browning’s goals for, 1–2; and 182, 188, 189n72, 190, 192n80, 194 conventions, exposure of generic, Amours de Voyage (Clough), 121n3 120–21, 132, 149–50, 153, 154, analepsis, 204–5 202; dialogue in, 133; digression Anderson, Amanda, 122n8, 131n24 in, 151; and discourse, changing “Andrea del Sarto” (Browning), 166, time of, 20, 122–28; and discourse, 191 temporal progression in, 135; Angel in the House, The (Patmore), 169 dramatic monologue in, 129–30; anticipation, 92–93, 173–76 and epic, 121–22; epistolary or apostrophe, 8–10, 11, 157n4 diaristic narration in, 20, 122–23, Aristotle, 4–5, 82n31 127, 134–35, 137, 138, 139, 145, Armstrong, Isobel, 3n3, 13n33, 157, 149, 153, 202; and figurative 159n14, 180, 181, 194n89, 210, 212 language, 19–20; fragmentation associative logic: of confessional lit- in, 152–53, 154; and gender, 20,

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121–22, 123, 131, 135–37, 152; and Medical Experience of Karshish, generic hybridity, 120–22, 153, the Arab Physician”; “Johannes 154; historical setting of, 128–29, Agricola in Meditation”; “The 200; immediacy of, 127–35, 202; Laboratory”; “My Last Duchess”; judgment in, 129–30; as Künstler- “Porphyria’s Lover”; The Ring and roman, 123, 125, 138; length of, the Book 150, 200; and lyric, 19–20, 121–22, Bunyan, John, 192, 193 123–24, 129, 130–32, 134–37, 139, Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 143, 145, 146–48, 149, 152–53, 201, 208. See also Childe Harold’s 154, 200; and narrative, 121, Pilgrimage; Don Juan 139, 143, 146–48, 154; and novel, Byron, Glennis, 158n8, 169, 169n39, 121–22; and organic form, 150–52; 170n42, 171n46 paradoxical paralipsis in, 133–34; retrospective narration in, 20, Cameron, Sharon, 10 122–27, 128, 132–34, 137–39, 145, Campbell, Matthew, 184n62 149, 153, 202; reviews of, 137–38, Carlyle, Thomas, 99, 148 148–49, 150, 151; romance plot in, Case, Alison, 121, 123, 126, 133, 134, 123, 125, 138; similes in, 19–20, 135n31, 137, 138, 146, 149, 153, 136, 139, 141–49; and social con- 183n61 texts, 130–32, 148, 202; sonnet in, Case, Neko, 173n50 147, 151–52; sympathy in, 129–30; causation: in Don Juan, 33–34, 36, 38, verisimilitude in, 125, 127, 133, 40, 54, 64–69; in narrative, 4, 7–8, 134–35, 138 26, 64–69, 81–82; in The Prelude, 73, 79–80, 108–9, 110; in The Ring Baker, Jeffrey, 88n43 and the Book, 189. See also chance; Bakhtin, Mikhail, 11 choice; contingency; teleology Barthes, Roland, 7, 26n13, 65 chance, 35–37, 40, 42, 54 Beatty, Bernard, 66n75 Chandler, James, 34n27, 38n33 Bedell, David, 189 character: in dramatic monologue, Beer, John, 80n22 158–59, 160–61, 164–67, 170–73, “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” 175, 179–80, 194; in epic, 105, (Browning), 163 192, 193, 199; in The Prelude, 79, Bloom, Harold, 68 87, 108–18, 201; in The Ring and Bone, J. Drummond, 48, 63–64 the Book, 156, 161, 175, 179–80, Booth, Wayne, 40n36 181–82, 184–85, 188, 193–99 Bridgeman, Teresa, 101–2, 104 Chatman, Seymour, 6, 26, 29, 81, Bridget Jones’s Diary (Fielding), 135n31 106n84, 196, 197 Brinton, Laurel, 85n38 Chell, Samuel L., 162n26, 163n27, Bromwich, David, 72n6, 86n39 167n36, 168n37, 181n58, 186n66, Brooks, Peter, 6, 10, 33n23, 41n40, 195n92 65n73, 66n76, 81, 82–83, 104, 106 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron), 61, Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 4; letter 63 to Mary Russell Mitford, 1, 151; “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower letter to Robert Browning, 121. Came” (Browning), 162–63, 165–66 See also Aurora Leigh choice: authorial, 34–35, 40–42, 45–46, Browning, Robert, 4, 129n20. See also 51, 64, 66, 68, 176; by characters, “Andrea del Sarto”; “Bishop Blou- 36–38 gram’s Apology”; “Childe Roland Christ, Carol, 3n3 to the Dark Tower Came”; “An Christensen, Jerome, 29n19, 34n27, Epistle Containing the Strange 41n39 I n d e x ~

“Circe” (Webster), 168–70 54, 64–69; chance in, 35–37, 40, Clough, Arthur Hugh, 121n3 42, 54; and choice, 34–35, 36–38, Cohn, Dorrit, 81–82 40–42, 45–46, 51, 64, 66, 68, 176; coincidence. See chance; contingency and constructedness, exposure Comstock, Cathy, 212n24 of, 29–30, 41–42, 52; contingency concurrent narration, 81, 101, 210–11. in, 33–34, 37, 39–40, 41n39, 63–64, See also epistolary narration 65–66, 68; and conventions, expo- confessional literature, 19, 73, 79n21, sure of generic, 21, 25, 68; cyclical 105–8, 118 time in, 56, 57–58; death in, 59–60; Confessions (Augustine), 105, 107 debts in, 59–60; dialogue in, Confessions (Rousseau), 106 43–46; digression in, 30, 63–64, contingency: in Don Juan, 33–34, 37, 68; discourse, focus on, 19, 40–42, 39–40, 41n39, 63–64, 65–66, 68; of 46, 52, 64, 67; disnarrated in, 18, narrative, 15–16 27–29, 31, 32–33, 39–42, 53, 64, Cooke, Michael G., 24, 45 176; and ennui, 19, 52–55, 57–58; Culler, Jonathan, 8–9, 10, 11, 40, 135, as epic, 24, 30; episodes in, 64, 157n4 65, 67–68; intoxication in, 55–59; Curran, Stuart, 23n1, 25 irony in, 42, 44–45, 200, 201; and labyrinth, as metaphor for plot David, Deirdre, 121 of, 29–32, 67–68; length of, 63, 69; Decemberists, The, 173n50 and lyric, 19, 21, 24, 41–42, 46, 52, de Man, Paul, 9n25, 10n26, 140–41, 60, 63–64, 67, 68–69, 200; motives 146 in, 42–45, 54, 64; multiplicity in, dialogue: in Aurora Leigh, 133; in Don 25–26, 31, 32, 40, 46, 51, 53–54; Juan, 43–46; in Idylls of the King, and narrative, 21, 41–42, 63–69, 208; in The Prelude, 108, 111–13, 201; narrator as author of, 34–35, 117–18 38–41, 177; narrator as character diaristic narration. See epistolary nar- in, 34, 36, 38–39, 177n52; and nov- ration el, 24–25, 201; as passing the time, Dickens, Charles, 17 52, 55, 59, 60; passivity of Juan, digression, 30, 63–64, 68, 151 38, 43; and picaresque, 67–68; discourse: changing time of, 20, retrospection in, 33–34, 64–67, 69; 122–28, 156, 190–91, 199; in satire in, 24, 201; self-reflexivity dramatic monologue, 20, 163–76, of, 176–78, 200, 201; similes in, 18, 178–80, 186–87, 191, 199, 200, 202; 46–52, 53, 176; stylistic craft of, lyric focus on, 9–11, 19, 40–42, 46, 49–51, 55–57; teleology, lack of, 52, 61–62, 64, 67, 86–87, 101–2, 55, 69 116, 156, 159, 162, 167, 168, 176, drama, 12–13, 195n92; defined rhetori- 180, 190–91, 194, 195, 199, 200, cally, 4–5; and dramatic mono- 202, 208; and story, 6, 11; tempo- logue, 157, 159, 179n55 ral progression in, 20, 135, 159, dramatic monologue: in Aurora Leigh, 163–76, 178–80, 186–87, 191, 199, 129–30; character in, 158–59, 200, 202 160–61, 164–67, 170–73, 175, disnarrated, 18, 27–29, 31, 32–33, 179–80, 194; defined rhetori- 39–42, 53, 64, 176 cally, 156–60; discourse, temporal Don Juan (Byron): 1, 2, 4, 11, 18–19, progression of, 20, 159, 163–76, 23–26, 27–69, 131, 151, 176–78, 178–80, 186–87, 191, 199, 200, 202; 200, 201; atemporality in, 41–42, and drama, 157, 159, 179n55; lyric 52, 60, 63–64, 69; Byronic hero in, in, 156–61, 162–63, 167, 168, 173, 58; causation in, 33–34, 36, 38, 40, 174, 179n55, 200, 202; narrative ~ I n d e x

in, 156–63, 167, 168, 173, 174–75, gender, 169–70, 171; and genre, 20, 178, 200, 202; and novel, 157n4, 121–22, 123, 131, 135–37, 152 161n22, 168n38; in The Ring and Genette, Gérard, 6, 73, 85n37, 99, 101–2 the Book, 155–56, 173–76, 178–80, genre: conventions of, exposed, 21, 186–87, 199, 202; sympathy and 25, 68, 120–21, 132, 149–50, 153, judgment in, 129–30, 157–59, 160, 154; and gender, 20, 121–22, 123, 164, 168, 169–73, 191n79, 194, 210 131, 135–37, 152; and hybrid- Dubrow, Heather, 14–15, 100 ity, 12, 17–18, 120–22, 153, 154. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 131n24 See also confessional literature; Dyer, Gary, 35 drama; dramatic monologue; epic, epistolary and diaristic narra- Eliot, T. S., 49, 57, 63n68 tion; Künstlerroman; lyric; mask Eminem, 173n50 lyric; narrative; novel; prospective ennui, 19, 52–55, 57–58 narration; retrospective narration; epic, 18, 24, 30, 71–72, 155, 201, 207; romance; sonnet character in, 20–21, 105, 192, 193, Gilbert, Sandra, 136 199; and gender, 121–22; opening Golden, Arline, 209n20 in medias res, 204–5; prestige of, Gray, Erik, 47n45 16; and retelling, 20, 105, 156, 199, Gregory, Melissa Valiska, 129n20, 203; teleology of, 105, 192–93 185n64, 194n90 “An Epistle Containing the Strange Gubar, Susan, 136 Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician” (Browning), Hair, Donald S., 162n26, 165, 176, 161 195n92, 195n94 epistolary narration, 81, 122–23, 138, Hamilton, Edith, 38n32 139, 145, 149, 191; gender and, Hartman, Geoffrey, 72–73, 80n22, 85, 20, 123, 153; immediacy of, 127, 88n44, 90, 97–98, 107n85, 115n97 134–35, 137, 202 Hirtle, W. H., 85n38 Esterhammer, Angela, 66n75 Hold Steady, The, 173 Honan, Park, 198n103 Felluga, Dino Franco, 15n40, 17n47, Howe, Elisabeth, 161n22, 170n43, 55n53, 136 196n98 Fielding, Helen, 135n31 Hühn, Peter, 14 Fielding, Henry, 134–35 figurative language: blurring of Idylls of the King (Tennyson), 203–8; figurative and literal, 114, 116, analepsis in, 204–5; atemporality 139–41; and lyric, 4, 19–20, 115, in, 206–7; dialogue in, 208; dis- 118, 207–8. See also allegory; apos- course, focus on, 208; epic in, 203, trophe; imagery; personification; 204–5, 207; irony in, 208; judg- simile; symbol ment in, 203–4; lyric in, 205n12, Fleishman, Suzanne, 81, 82n29 206–8; narrative in, 203–8; narra- Fludernik, Monika, 14 tor of, 208; openings in medias res, formalism, 3n2, 13–14 204–5; repetition in, 205–6, 207; Freccero, John, 106, 107–8 retelling in, 203; romance in, 203, free will. See choice 205; simile in, 207–8; suspense in, Friedman, Susan Stanford, 10, 121–22, 203, 204–5; temporality, hostility 136 towards, 206–7 imagery, Romantic, 139–41, 146 Gallagher, Catherine, 3n2 immediacy: in Aurora Leigh, 127–35; of Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, 148n66 epistolary and diaristic narration, I n d e x ~

134–35; of lyric, 62, 129, 130, 132, Litzinger, Boyd, 188n68, 188–89, 190 134–35 Liu, Alan, 80n22 intercalated narration, 191. See also Lonoff, Sue, 185n63, 189, 193 epistolary narration Loucks, James F., II, 155, 177, 182, 188, irony: in Don Juan, 42, 44–45, 200, 201; 189n72, 190, 192n80, 194 in Idylls of the King, 208; in narra- lyric, 24, 71–72, 123–24, 145, 149, 188, tive, 5n10 189, 193–94, 201, 211–14; associa- Iser, Wolfgang, 192, 193 tive logic of, 4, 19, 63–64, 68–69, 80, 91–92, 192n83, 202; atemporal- Jacobus, Mary, 72n6 ity of, 4, 8–12, 41–42, 52, 60, 62– James, Henry, 193n87, 202–3 64, 69, 86–87, 88, 92, 118, 128–29, “Johannes Agricola in Meditation” 162, 176, 180–88, 194, 205n12, (Browning), 162, 165 206–7, 209; defined rhetorically, Johnson, Barbara, 8n23 4–5; defined temporally, 8–11; Johnston, Kenneth, 79n21, 80n22, discourse as focus of, 9–11, 19, 89n47 40–42, 46, 52, 61–62, 64, 67, 86–87, Joyce, James, 105, 201, 202 101–2, 116, 156, 159, 162, 167, 168, judgment: in Aurora Leigh, 129–30; 176, 180, 190–91, 194, 195, 199, in dramatic monologue, 129–30, 200, 202, 208; in dramatic mono- 157–59, 160, 164, 168, 169–73, logue, 156–61, 162–63, 167, 168, 191n79, 194, 210; in Idylls of the 173, 174, 176, 179n55, 200, 202; King, 203–4; in Modern Love, 210; emotional intensity of, 12, 15–16, in narrative, 158, 194, 203–4; in 84–85, 86–87, 88, 91, 108, 115, The Ring and the Book, 181, 191n79, 152–53; and figurative language, 194, 199 4, 19–20, 115, 118, 207–8; and gender, 121–22, 135–37; as genre, Keats, John, 10, 213 12, 200; and history, 128, 200; hy- Kellogg, Robert, 5, 83, 201 bridity with narrative, 10, 14–15, King, Roma A., Jr., 168n37, 196n96 73, 100, 156, 160, 210; immediacy Kneale, J. Douglas, 8n23 of, 62, 129, 130, 132, 134–35, 163, Knoepflmacher, U. C., 164 178; length of, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, Kreilkamp, Ivan, 157n4, 183n61 61, 62–63, 69, 200; mask lyric, 170, Kroeber, Karl, 72n6, 94, 201 172; as mode, 11, 12, 17–18, 200; Künstlerroman: Aurora Leigh as, 123, and music, 5; narrative as means 125, 138; and The Prelude, 105–7, to, 2, 41–42, 61, 69, 87–88, 92, 202; teleology of, 106, 123 121, 154, 156, 194, 199, 200–201; prestige of, 3, 15–16, 17, 135–36; “Laboratory, The” (Browning), 166–67 in similes, 139, 143, 146–48; and labyrinth, as metaphor for plot, 29–32, social contexts, 130–32, 148; sub- 67–68 jectivity of, 3, 9–10, 12, 21, 87–88, Laird, Holly, 129n19, 148 115, 118, 148, 193; sympathy in, Langbaum, Robert, 130n21, 157–58, 158 158–59, 160, 168, 169n39, 193, lyricality, 10 194n90, 210 Lawrence, D. H., 202 Malory, Sir Thomas, 203, 208 Levine, Caroline, 13 Manning, Peter J., 24, 34n26, 35n29, Levine, Naomi, 213 39n35, 42n42, 49n49, 53n52, 61 Levinson, Marjorie, 13 Margolin, Uri, 81, 86n40, 100 Lindenberger, Herbert, 71, 72n6, Martin, Loy D., 166n35, 167n36, 86–87, 91, 93n54, 115n97, 202 168n37, 172n48 0 ~ I n d e x

mask lyric, 170, 172 means to lyric ends, 2, 41–42, 61, Maynard, John, 165n32, 168n37 69, 87–88, 92, 121, 154, 156, 194, McConnell, Frank, 79n21 199, 200–201; as mode, 17–18, 200; McGann, Jerome, 24–25, 33–36, 37, 39, and retelling, 20, 105, 156, 189–90, 40–41, 45, 50, 58, 62n64, 65–66, 192–94; in similes, 51–52, 139, 67n78, 68–69 143, 146–48; suspense in, 7, 203, McSweeney, Kerry, 149 204–5; teleology of, 104; temporal- Mellor, Anne K., 41n41, 57n55, 64n70 ity of, 3–4, 6–8, 11, 63–64, 69, 167, Meredith, George, 208–14 168, 180, 182, 184, 186, 190–91, Mermin, Dorothy, 12, 121n3, 122n8, 199, 200, 202. See also concurrent 134, 136, 146–47, 152–53, 169 narration; epistolary narration; Mill, John Stuart, 12n31, 16, 62, 89n47, intercalated narration; plot; point 130 of view; prospective narration; Miller, Christopher, 88n43 prospective reading; retrospective Miller, D. A., 186n65 narration; retrospective reading; Miller, J. Hillis, 29n20, 82n30 simultaneous narration mode: lyric as, 11, 12, 17–18; narrative narrativity, 8, 10 as, 17–18 nature, 72–77, 85, 88–89, 95, 97–98, Modern Love (Meredith), 208–14; atem- 102–3, 114, 117 porality in, 209; closure in, 213; Nellist, Brian, 24, 45–46, 60, 61–63 concurrent narration in, 210–11; New Criticism, 128 immediacy of, 210–12; judgment novel, 24–25; and Aurora Leigh, in, 210; lyric in, 209, 211–14; nar- 121–22; and dramatic monologue, rative in, 208–9, 211–14; objec- 157n4, 161n22, 168n38; influence tivity of, 210; point of view in, on narratology, 2, 11, 82–83; influ- 209–12, 213; retrospective narra- ence of poetry on, 201–3; objection in, 210–11; and sonnet tradi- tivity of, 3; popularity of, 3, 15, tion, 208–9; subjectivity of, 210; 16–17; and The Ring and the Book, sympathy in, 210, 212; temporal 155, 193n87 blurring in, 213–14; verb tenses in, Nuttall, A. D., 74n15, 202 209–12; wife’s suicide in, 212–14 Nystrom, Derek, 173n50 Mole, Tom, 43n42 Mook, Lorne, 76n18, 80n22 objectivity, 3, 210 motives, 42–45, 54, 64, 193–94, 199, “Ode on Melancholy” (Keats), 213 203 O’Neill, Michael, 35n30, 57n55, 59n58 Murray, Roger N., 114n97 Onorato, Richard, 73, 80n22, 98n64, “My Last Duchess” (Browning), 103n75, 103n76 158n8, 164n29, 167, 168n37 paradoxical paralipsis, 133–34 narrative, 70–71, 108–14, 179–80, 183, Parker, Patricia A., 205 188, 195n92, 201, 208–9, 211–14; Patmore, Coventry, 150n71, 169 causation in, 4, 7–8, 26, 64–69, Peckham, Morse, 156n3 81–82; and contingency, 15–16; personification, 75–76, 114–18 defined rhetorically, 4–5; defined Phelan, James, 8n22, 14, 81–82, temporally, 6–8; in dramatic 133n27, 158–59, 160, 161, 168n37, monologue, 156–63, 167, 168, 173, 172, 210 174–75, 178, 200, 202; hybrid- Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan), 192, ity with lyric, 10, 14–15, 73, 100, 193 156, 160, 210; irony in, 5n10; plot: forking path as metaphor for, judgment in, 158, 194, 203–4; as 26–27, 29, 32, 54, 64–65, 80–81, 83; I n d e x ~ 1

labyrinth as metaphor for, 29–32, 85, 88–89, 95, 97–98, 102–3, 114, 67–68; river as metaphor for, 73, 117; personification in, 75–76, 78–80, 83, 95, 110–11; temporality 114–18; prolepsis in, 73, 99–102, of, 6 104, 105; prospective narration Poe, Edgar Allan, 16 in, 100; and prospective reading, point of view, 202–3, 209–12, 213. 19, 73, 74–80, 83, 91–92, 93, 96, See also concurrent narration; 102–4, 105, 106–7, 108, 110–11, epistolary narration; intercalated 114, 118–19; and reader’s poetic narration; paradoxical paralipsis; potential, 89–90; and The Recluse, prospective narration; retrospec- 79n21, 89n47, 99–101, 102, 103, tive narration; simultaneous 104; retrospective narration in, narration 79n21, 85–87, 94–97, 98, 99, 107, “Porphyria’s Lover” (Browning), 161, 108–9; and retrospective reading, 164–65 19, 73, 75, 80, 83, 200; reviews of, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A 70–71, 80n22; river, as metaphor (Joyce), 105, 202 for plot of, 73, 78–80, 83, 95, Posnock, Ross, 178n54, 193n87, 203n6 110–11; scansion of, 95–96; subjec- Prelude, The (1850) (Wordsworth), 2, 4, tivity of, 87–88, 111, 112–14, 115, 11, 19, 69, 70–80, 83–119, 131n24, 118; suspense in, 105; teleology 139, 171n45, 192n83, 201–2, 206; of, 69, 72–78, 79–80, 83, 88–92, 1799 Prelude, 102; 1805 Prelude, 95–104, 106–7, 118–19; temporal 94–96, 102, 108–16; anticipation blurring in, 85–87; temporal struc- in, 92–93; associative logic in, ture of, 72–73; title and subtitle 19, 69, 80, 91–92, 192n83, 202; of, 77–78; Vaudracour and Julia, atemporality of, 86–87, 88, 92, 118; 109–11; verb tenses in, 85–86; and causation in, 73, 79–80, 108–9, Wordsworth’s poetic potential, 110; characters in, 79, 87, 108–18, 72–78, 88–92, 95–99, 102–3, 104 201; concurrent narration in, 101; Prince, Gerald, 27, 29, 191 and confessional literature, 19, prolepsis, 73, 99–102, 104, 105 73, 79n21, 105–8, 118; dialogue in, prospective narration, 81, 100 108, 111–13, 117–18; Discharged prospective reading, 19, 73, 74–80, 83, Soldier, 108, 109; discourse, focus 91–92, 93, 96, 102–4, 105, 106–7, on, 86–87, 101–2, 116; doubt in, 108, 110–11, 114, 118–19 73–74, 97–98, 102–3; Dream of Proust, Marcel, 105, 202 the Arab, 111, 112–14; emotional intensity in, 84–85, 86–87, 88, Rader, Ralph, 164n29, 164n30, 170 91, 108, 115; endpoint of, 72, 80, Radiohead, 173n50 98–102, 103–4; and epic, 71–72, Rajan, Tilottama, 73–74 192n83; and figurative language, Recluse, The (Wordsworth), 79n21, 114, 115, 116, 118; genre of, 70–72; 89n47, 99–101, 102, 103, 104 ice-skating episode in, 83–88, Reed, John R., 204, 206, 207n16 90; as involuted, 72, 101–2; and Remembrance of Things Past (Proust), Künstlerroman, 105–7, 202; length 105, 202 of, 91, 93; and lyric, 19, 69, 71–72, retrospective narration, 81–82; in 73, 80, 84–85, 86–88, 91–92, 100, Aurora Leigh, 20, 122–27, 128, 101–2, 108, 115, 116, 118, 192n83, 132–34, 137–39, 145, 149, 153, 202; 202; Maid of Buttermere, 108, in confessional literature, 107; in 109; Matron’s Tale, 108, 109, 111, Don Juan, 33–34; in Modern Love, 112n94; and narrative, 70–71, 73, 210–11; in The Prelude, 79n21, 92, 100, 108–14; nature in, 72–77, 85–87, 94–97, 98, 99, 107, 108–9 ~ I n d e x

retrospective reading, 81, 82–83, 104, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 106 119, 163; in Don Juan, 64–67, 69; in Rundle, Vivienne J., 191n79 The Prelude, 19, 73, 75, 80, 83, 200 Ruskin, John, 114 Reynolds, Margaret, 126, 132–33, 154 Ricks, Christopher, 171n47, 204, Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), 99 205n12, 207, 208 satire, 24, 201 Ricoeur, Paul, 7–8, 65, 104, 105, 192 scansion, 95–96, 181, 196–98 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 8, 10–11 Scheinberg, Cynthia, 158n8, 168n38 Ring and the Book, The (Browning) 2, Scholes, Robert, 5, 6, 83, 201 20–21, 121n3, 154, 155–56, 168, Scott, Sir Walter, 16–17, 25 173–99, 202–3; alliteration in, 20, Sessions, Ina Beth, 157n4 156, 188, 195–99; anticipation in, Shamela (Fielding), 134–35 173–76; Arcangeli’s monologue, Shaw, W. David, 157n4, 167n36, 173–78, 190, 191; atemporality in, 168n37, 171, 195n92 176, 180–88, 194; Caponsacchi’s Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 15–16 monologue, 161, 178–83, 185n63, simile, 18, 19–20, 136, 141–49, 176; 188, 189, 190, 191, 194n89, 196–97; constructedness, focus on, 46–47, causation in, 189; character in, 143; as hypothetical, 145–46; lists 20–21, 156, 161, 173, 175, 179–80, of, 46–52, 53; lyric content of, 139, 181–82, 184–85, 188, 193–99; 143, 146–48; narrative content of, discourse, changing time of, 156, 51–52, 139, 143, 146–48; as pro- 190–91, 199; discourse, temporal visional, 142; separation of tenor progression in, 20, 173–76, 178–80, and vehicle in, 146, 207–8 186–87, 199, 202; and drama, simultaneous narration, 81–82, 195n92; and dramatic mono- 133n26, 211 logue, 20, 155–56, 173–76, 178–80, Sinfield, Alan, 161n22, 170n43 186–87, 199, 202; and epic, 20, 155, Siskin, Clifford, 90n48, 108n88 156, 192–94, 199; genre of, 155–56; Sitterson, Joseph C., Jr., 74n15 immediacy of, 178; judgment in, “Slumber Did My Spirit Seal, A” 156, 181, 191n79, 194, 199; lyric (Wordsworth), 10 in, 21, 156, 174, 176, 178, 180–83, Smiths, The, 173n50 188, 189, 190–91, 193–94, 195, 199, Smyser, Jane Worthington, 113n95 202; motives in, 193–94, 199, 203; sonnet, 147, 151–52, 201, 208–14 narrative in, 156, 174–75, 178, Southey, Robert, 103 179–80, 182, 183, 184, 186, 188, Stabler, Jane, 30n21, 34n27, 49n49 189–91, 192–94, 195n92, 199, 202; Stendhal, 41n40, 66n76 and novel, 155, 193n87, 202–3; Sternberg, Meir, 7, 33n23, 105 Pompilia’s monologue, 183–88, Sterne, Laurence, 79n21, 201 189, 190, 191; retelling in, 20, 156, Stone, Marjorie, 122n8, 138–39, 188, 189–90, 192–94, 199; scansion 143n57, 149, 152 of, 181, 196–98; self-reflexivity story. See discourse in, 175–77; structure of, 188–89; Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 17 and subjectivity, 21, 193; and subjectivity: of lyric, 3, 9–10, 21, suspense, 189–90, 191, 193n87; 87–88, 115, 118, 148, 193; of sympathy in, 181 Modern Love, 210; of The Prelude, river, as metaphor for plot, 73, 78–80, 87–88, 111, 112–14, 115, 118; of The 83, 95, 110–11 Ring and the Book, 21, 193 romance, 201, 205 suspense, 7, 105, 189–90, 191, 193n87, Rouge et le noir, Le (Stendhal), 41n40, 203, 204–5 66n76 symbol, 9n25, 139–41, 145, 146 I n d e x ~ sympathy: in Aurora Leigh, 129–30; Tucker, Herbert, 13, 18, 62n64, 121, in dramatic monologue, 129–30, 124, 125, 127–28, 129n20, 139, 157–59, 160, 164, 168, 169–73, 210; 157n5, 160, 162n25, 163n28, in lyric, 158; in Modern Love, 210, 165n33, 166n35, 167n36, 168n37, 212; in The Ring and the Book, 181 170n43, 179n55, 194n91, 199, 207n14, 207n17 Talking Heads, 173n50 Turn of the Screw, The (James), 203 teleology: of confessional literature, 106; in Don Juan, 55, 69; of epic, Ulysses (Joyce), 201 105, 192–93; of Künstlerroman, 106, “Ulysses” (Tennyson), 168–69, 170–72 123; of narrative, 104; in The Pre- Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 17 lude, 69, 72–78, 79–80, 83, 88–92, 95–104, 106–7, 118–19 Vallon, Annette, 111n90 temporality: blurring of, 85–87, Vendler, Helen, 10n26 213–14; as cyclical, 56, 57–58; of verb tenses, 85–86, 209–12 discourse, as changing, 20, 122–28, verisimilitude, 125, 127, 133, 134–35, 190–91, 199; of discourse, pro- 138 gression in, 20, 135, 159, 163–76, 178–80, 186–87, 191, 199, 200, 202; Ward, Geoffrey, 67, 69 of dramatic monologue, 20, 159, Watt, Stephen, 212n24 163–76, 178–80, 186–87, 191, 199, Webster, Augusta, 168–70 200, 202; hostility toward, 206–7; Wimsatt, William K., Jr., 139–40, 146 and lyric atemporality, 8–12, Wolfson, Susan J., 13, 14n35, 49n48, 41–42, 52, 60, 62–64, 69, 86–87, 88, 58n56, 73n11, 75, 90, 97, 103n75, 92, 118, 128–29, 162, 176, 180–88, 107n85, 107n87, 136, 140n48, 143, 194, 205n12, 206–7, 209; of narra- 144n58, 144–45, 145n60 tive, 3–4, 6–8, 11, 63–64, 69, 167, Woolf, Virginia, 120, 153, 202 168, 180, 182, 184, 186, 190–91, Wordsworth, William, 69, 148, 201, 199, 200, 202; of plot, 6; of symbol, 208; genre as defined by, 5; letter 9n25. See also analepsis; concurrent to Richard Sharp, 102; “Preface of narration; epistolary narration; 1815,” 5; “Preface to The Excur- intercalated narration; prolepsis; sion,” 77; “Preface to Lyrical Bal- prospective narration; prospective lads,” 15, 87, 89, 116. See also The reading; retrospective narration; Prelude; The Recluse; “A Slumber retrospective reading; simultane- Did My Spirit Steal” ous narration; verb tenses Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 17, 129n20. “You Can Make Him Like You” (The See also Idylls of the King; Hold Steady), 173 “Ulysses” “To Autumn” (Keats), 10 Zimmerman, Sarah M., 12n31, 89n47, Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 79n21, 201 108n88, 130n23

T h e o R y a n d I n T e R p R e TaTI o n o f n a RR aTI v e J a m e s p h e l a n a n d p e T e r J . r a b I n o w IT z , s e r I e s e d IT o r s

Because the series editors believe that the most significant work in narrative studies today contributes both to our knowledge of specific narratives and to our understanding of narrative in general, studies in the series typically offer interpretations of individual narratives and address significant theoretical issues underlying those interpretations. The series does not privilege one critical perspective but is open to work from any strong theoretical position.

Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity Patrick Colm Hogan Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre Edited by Jakob Lothe, Jeremy Hawthorn, James Phelan The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction Richard Walsh Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative James Phelan Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction Brian Richardson Narrative Causalities Emma Kafalenos Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel Lisa Zunshine I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie George Butte Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject Elana Gomel Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure Deborah A. Martinsen Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms Robyn R. Warhol Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction Ellen Peel Telling Tales: Gender and Narrative Form in Victorian Literature and Culture Elizabeth Langland Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames Edited by Brian Richardson Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject Debra Malina Invisible Author: Last Essays Christine Brooke-Rose Ordinary Pleasures: Couples, Conversation, and Comedy Kay Young Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis Edited by David Herman Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation Peter J. Rabinowitz Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge Daniel W. Lehman The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel David H. Richter A Glance Beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology James Phelan Misreading Jane Eyre: A Postformalist Paradigm Jerome Beaty Psychological Politics of the American Dream: The Commodification of Subjectivity in Twentieth-Century American Literature Lois Tyson Understanding Narrative Edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel Amy Mandelker Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel Robyn R. Warhol Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative James Phelan