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Quiet Is Hell, I Say Quiet is hell, I say The Role of Women Poets in the Development of the Victorian Dramatic Monologue Cecilie Berg Myhre A Thesis Presented to The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages UNIVERSITY OF OSLO In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements of the MA Degree Spring 2016 II ‘Quiet is hell, I say’ The Role of Women Poets in the Development of the Victorian Dramatic Monologue Cecilie Berg Myhre III © Cecilie Berg Myhre 2016 ‘Quiet is hell, I say’: The Role of Women Poets in the Development of the Victorian Dramatic Monologue Cecilie Berg Myhre http://www.duo.uio.no/ Print: Reprosentralen, University of Oslo IV Abstract This thesis explores the claim that the Victorian dramatic monologue developed into two distinct traditions – the traditional, predominantly male tradition represented by writers such as Browning and Tennyson, and a separate women’s tradition. Focusing on three elements believed to be characteristic of women’s monologues, the thesis tries to explain why the main critical discussions on the genre excluded women for most of the twentieth century. The first element is the claim that we can better understand the monologues of Victorian women in light of monologues written by other women poets, such as Felicia Hemans, than in light of male writers such as Browning. The second is that women poets largely used the dramatic monologue as a mask to conceal their own social criticism. The third is that women blurred the lines between the lyric and the dramatic by writing speakers that were vaguer and more stereotypical than the speakers written by male poets. My argument is that the problem with a separate women’s tradition is that it excludes women from the contextual developments of the Victorian age. Instead, the thesis traces an alternative line from Browning’s early efforts in the 1830s to Amy Levy’s almost Modernist monologues in the 1880s, and claims that what all these poets had in common was the ways in which they used the dramatic monologue to explore the instabilities of the speaking self against an objectified other. V VI Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful to my supervisor Professor Juan Christian Pellicer for his continued encouragement and invaluable feedback, and for believing in my project from the very beginning. Thank you to my family for all your love and support, and for cheering me on during the past year. Finally, thank you to my friends and fellow students for giving me a break from writing from time to time, especially Stine and Benedikte for the countless evenings spent in our ‘sofa fort’. VII VIII Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 The Term ‘Dramatic Monologue’ ............................................................................... 9 A Comment on the Selection of Poems ..................................................................... 12 Origins .............................................................................................................................. 15 Monologue and Monomania: Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ ................................ 18 Anticipating Monologue: Hemans’ ‘Arabella Stuart’ ............................................... 18 Woman as Object and as Subject .............................................................................. 19 Speaking in Another Voice ........................................................................................ 27 Social Criticism ................................................................................................................ 41 Negation of Monologue: D.G. Rossetti’s ‘Jenny’ ..................................................... 44 Monologues In Dialogue: Webster’s ‘A Castaway’ .................................................. 44 Confronting the Fallen ............................................................................................... 45 Inner Standing-points ................................................................................................ 55 Particularised Speakers .................................................................................................... 61 Monologue as Transgression: Swinburne’s ‘The Leper’ .......................................... 63 The Breakdown of Monologue: Levy’s ‘Magdalen’ ................................................. 64 Who Speaks? ............................................................................................................. 65 Revisiting Sympathy and Judgement ........................................................................ 72 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 84 Works Cited .............................................................................................................................. 88 IX X Introduction As soon as the word “genre” is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one tries to conceive it, a limit is drawn. (Derrida 56) While the Victorian dramatic monologue is widely recognised as ‘the most significant poetic invention of the age’ (Slinn ‘Dramatic Monologue’ 80), after more than seventy years of critical scrutiny, no one seems to agree on what defines it. Robert Browning, alongside Tennyson, is often described as the master and creator of the genre.1 While Browning is undoubtedly the poet who has come to represent the genre, many of the most prominent writers of the Victorian age were also prolific writers of dramatic monologues. In the middle of the twentieth century developed an interest in defining, categorising and separating the dramatic monologue from other kinds of poetry. Out of this emerged the idea of the Victorian dramatic monologue as a separate poetic genre. This eventually led to an exclusion of several poets from the canon of Victorian dramatic poetry, especially many women writers, who, although they were prolific writers of monologues, often did not fit into the strict definitions created by Browning-scholars. However, a recent surge of new interest in these women poets has led to a call for new definitions, and a reassessment of the role Victorian women writers played in the genre’s development. Those interested in gender and feminist issues have found the dramatic monologue to be especially intriguing, because so many of the poems explore questions surrounding sexuality, agency and the suppression of the female voice. The dramatic monologue is significant because, as Glennis Byron puts it, it questions ‘the authority, integrity and autonomy of the isolated lyric voice’ (‘Rethinking’ 81). By doing this it shows us how historical and social contexts, as well as psychological factors, shape the speakers in these poems. In turn, this leads to a more ‘complex, fragmented and contextualised representation of the subject’ (‘Rethinking’ 81). It follows, then, that the dramatic monologue is a genre that concerns itself with subjectivity, and the construction of identity. In the chapter ‘The Politics of Dramatic Form’ in her Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993), Isobel Armstrong points to an element that has become the central focus for studies on the Victorian dramatic monologue: the relationship between subjectivity and context. 1 Although Tennyson’s poetry does not feature prominently in this thesis, he undoubtedly played a major part in developing the genre. For an in-depth analysis of Tennyson’s dramatic monologues and the ways in which he developed dramatic poetry, see Cornelia Pearsall’s Tennyson’s Rapture: Transformation in the Victorian Dramatic Monologue (2008). 1 Using Browning’s monologues ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘Johannes Agricola’ as examples, Armstrong claims that these poems differ from for instance soliloquy because they are simultaneously about ‘acting and taking action, the construction of roles and their connection with volition and agency which relates people to the world’ (138). This tension between internal and external forces, which Armstrong further develops into a theory about what she calls the ‘double poem’, is at least partly responsible for the modern critical attention these poems have received. This duality is also inherent in another feature present in countless dramatic monologues, namely the fact that for the speakers to see themselves as subjects and claim agency for themselves, they need to define and separate themselves from an other. This other, as U.C. Knoepflmacher has demonstrated in his influential essay ‘Projection and the Female Other: Romanticism, Browning, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue’ (1984), is usually female. In several of the most acclaimed monologues the speakers’ need to assert themselves often leads to a literal or more figurative suppression of the other’s voice. This suppression is often linked to traditional gender dynamics in poetry, which show the man as an active subject turning the woman into a passive object. This tendency, Knoepflmacher argues, has proved to be one of Browning’s longest lasting legacies, and it has proved highly influential in the writings of later poets such as D.G. Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne (141). Yet, as more and more women poets are introduced to the study of dramatic monologues, one question presents itself: what happens when women become the subjects? Moreover, who becomes the object? According criticism on dramatic poetry, by critics such as Glennis Byron and Dorothy Mermin, one key difference between men and women writers
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