some thinking.

Dramatic monologue as screen and optic: Browning and Tennyson

Much as many Victorian dramatic monologues occupy a blank verse that owes much to Shakespearean drama, the genre itself is not defined by similarity in verse-form, but rather the shared quality among dramatic monologues is their representation of a single voice speaking in verse. This essay will examine the concerns and patterns further to this minimum requirement that many early dramatic monologues share. In doing so, it appropriates Simon Jarvis’ dichotomy of screen and optic [Mock as Screen and Optic] to articulate the difference between dramatic monologue as a way of writing poetry, a historically inflected way of constructing poetic artifices, the screen, and as a way of seeing a voice emerge through poetry with its own concerns, the optic. Carol Christ [T.S. Eliot and the Victorians] argues that, due to an example of the anxiety of influence (c.f. Harold Bloom),

Victorians sought through... the dramatic monologue an impersonality which distances and controls an increasingly burdensome romantic selfconsciousness... The kind of subjectivity that offered the Romantics a source of self-discovery became for the Victorians a burden that posed the threat of self-imprisonment... dramatic monologues reveal the dangers which the Victorians associated with the romantic ego - the alienation, solipsism, or madness that self-consciousness seemed to entail. The Victorians responded to these dangers in part by seeking a greater objectivity in poetry.

The innovative quality of dramatic monologue is its representation of a single voice speaking in verse whilst present in a dramatic setting, an artifice by comparison to, and an abstraction from, a romantic naturalism that collapses the distance between poet’s voice and that of a lyric persona. Representing voicing itself in metre is intrinsically problematic as the act draws attention to the artificiality of poetic form The paradox is that through this greater abstraction dramatic monologue achieves a greater psychological mimesis of subjective experience - how a stream of consciousness feels and the kinds of discourse that inhabit it - than the poet’s own ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ [Wordsworth Preface to the Lyrical Ballads] and filtered through that poet’s own voice. Hence, dramatic monologues engage in new ways with their readers’ notions of honesty or sincerity in poetry; the poet abdicates his poetic authority and objectivity in one sense in order to present subjective experience, which cannot be neatly compassed in literature, in a manner appropriate to the incomplete and provisional way we view the world. the poet not expressing his own views, but another’s, and not explicitly commenting on them, but leaving it to the voice to provide both point and counterpoint, and the reader to eke out the drama. As Browning writes to Elizabeth Barrett - ‘I only make men and women speak - give you truth broken in prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me’, and to Ruskin ‘all poetry being a putting the infinite within the finite. You would have me paint it all plain out, which can’t be’.

As Eric Griffiths argues, ‘doubts and difficulties attach to all print just because of the constitutive relation of print to voicing. Print does not give conclusive evidence of a voice; this raises doubts about what we hear in writing.’ [The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry] Dramatic monologues preserve and revel in the ambiguities that other dramatic texts, such as plays, often resolve in the form of metatextual directions. This ambiguity or ambivalence allows or encourages multiple alternative readings to be held in suspension at the same time.

For instance, notions of address in Ulysses - that the speaker is ostensibly orating to ‘my mariners... you and I are old’ on a public occasion presents the question of how much these characters, as pre-existing cultural artefacts given new voice by their monologues, are determined intertextually by their prefigurings in fictional or historical texts. In Homer he mariners of the Odyssey all died in the return journey to Ithaca; in Dante’s redaction , Ulisse drowned off the coast of Mount Purgatory in the Atlantic while attempting to sail beyond the edge of the world, as represented by the Straits of Gibraltar. Should Ulysses be asking the bishop’s question: ‘"Do I live, am I dead?" Peace, peace seems all’? He may be trying to address his dead mariners while he is still alive in derangement or senility, or projecting his ‘Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me’ onto a new crew standing before him on the point of setting off on the last voyage from Dante. He may also be dead, the poem leaving suspended the possibility that this is an address from beyond the grave - he refers to himself as ‘this gray spirit’ - speaking to his mariners, who are before him, as if they were all still alive. Different readings reveal ironies or pathos or bathos to the reader depending upon the disjoint between what they can see and what Ulysses can. For instance, ‘I am become a name’ and the apparently solipsistic ‘I am a part of all that I have met’ could be read as reflexions on his fame and memory in the public consciousness in line with his self-centred rhetoric throughout the address ‘and know not me... with those | That loved me, and alone... Myself not least, but honour’d of them all’. Alternatively, if Ulysses is contemplating his demise, they could be euphemisms for the loss of a body and its disintegration back into the environment he once inhabited.

Many of these disembodied voices take the form of old men quite possibly dying, certainly coming to terms with impotence in the face of change, eminently stranded between the past and the future, the living and the dead, failing to exist in the present: Ulysses resolves to strive against that change while Tithonus quietly laments it. Each has their own set of obsessive talismans that organise their experience; Ulysses repeats 1 image of distance 3 times - an unconquerably vast expanse stretching out before him which he must attempt to cross - with slightly differing emphases in each, indicating a changing state of mind:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
...
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
...
my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

The first reads in an abstract sense, glimpsing what is possible through a portal as a tantalising but inaccessible horizon - the actual horizon to explore, the horizon as a metaphor for death or the vistas of possibility within his imagination. The second addresses his passion, and his passivity, wishing to reach out to a beacon beyond his reach. The third expresses firmness of resolve, and a sort of joyous, quixotic fatalism.

Nevertheless, between Tennyson and Browning a shift can be seen away from rhetorical crutches or signposts to the reader towards a dramatic mimesis that presents only what an eavesdropper or one of the silent interlocutors would hear. The changing ways in which these texts introduce their addresses show how the form uses these changes to move away from rumination and recollection towards a more immediate apprehension of surface, resembling the experience of experience. Tennyson’s poems are more rehearsed and managed than Browning’s, having a more static quality in narrative terms and a more polished rhetorical structure - nothing happens in Ulysses or Tithonus , the personae reflect on their situations, advertised at the beginnings of the poems by rhetorical introductions conjuring a scene around the voice:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,

Browning’s monologues realise more fully the possibilities attendant to the two kinds of time at work in a fictional text - the length of the performance or reading and the duration that is represented in the text, and how in dramatic monologues these two values can collapse into one another as the reader is witness to a performance, or an experience of selfhood in time. Dramatic monologues play with these conceptions of time by leaving open the possibility that these poems end, unannounced as such, in the deaths of their aged speakers. Part of the conceit here is that the reader’s experience is of that fading into non-existence of a voice as suddenly as it came to exist since the poems have no internal frame to the monologue - when these voices stop telling, they cease to be.

Poems such as The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church, Rome, 15-- read as if a reflexive scene torn from a play and use their metre as a code to demonstrate the characters’ inarticulacy of expression. This allows the poem to imply a further halo of ideas and information touched on glancingly which in a play would have been elucidated elsewhere, leading the reader to fill in the gaps, generating more of an illusion that the monologue shows a snatch of a life, full of obscure references, clear to the protagonists; they play with readers’ senses of certainty, excluding them from certain details. Whether the colon in the second line represents time passing is a matter of voicing in a performance. Even where choices, such as these about pauses, are made, the text still leaves obscured why the pauses exist - does the break imply action - the men drawing near Anselm not responding to the request, or is it entirely rhetorical? does the ellipsis and the exclamation that breaks up the following line relate to the bishop’s frustrations at Anselm? or what his reticence represents?

This persona particularly is obsessed with rehearsal, of his experience in life to the current company and of the experience of his life in waking death - rehearsing the same concerns in a circular motion. Small details give cues as to why their obsessions are insurmountable or absorbing. So what the voicing leaves out in terms of explanation in The Bishop suggests some unspoken and unresolved tension between the dead - Gandolf and the mother - and the dying bishop. Many dramatic monologues end in circularity. Progress is not made. Here, the he monologue expresses a wish for an idealised dialogue that cannot be achieved, often because the personae are not talking to the people they wish they were talking to. Those audiences are themselves often dead, beyond audience, so the personae explain themselves imperfectly, or have no one at all to talk to - their empty performatives forming testimony or witness to some loss or sorrow that the persona cannot surmount.