Angry Women and the Dramatic Monologue

Abstract

Angry Women and the Dramatic Monologue Melissa Valiska Gregory (bio) and Emily Harrington (bio) "I was actually, to be honest, angry with him, and you know, I hate to say it, but often when women show anger, it's not fully appreciated. It's often, you know, pushed onto emotional issues perhaps, or deflected onto other people." ("Transcript: Fiona Hill") Fiona Hill, former Russia expert for the National Security Council, uttered these words while testifying before the U. S. Congress in public impeachment hearings. It was startling to hear these words while working on this introduction, not only because each of these essays attests to the longstanding truth of Hill's insight, but also because the event that inspired us to organize this roundtable over a year ago was another congressional hearing: Christine Blasey Ford's testimony about her sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh, who was later confirmed to the U. S. Supreme Court. As Lesley Goodman points out in her essay in this cluster, while Kavanaugh erupted in anger in his own testimony in response to the accusations, Ford was careful, measured, and considered in her speech. She must have known that were she to express anger at Kavanaugh, it would not have been, in Hill's word, "appreciated." As we watched these hearings, we were angry. Angry on Dr. Ford's behalf, on behalf of all victims of sexual violence, and against the culture that underwrites such violence and invalidates women's emotional responses to it. At the same time, we had been hearing Rebecca Traister promote her new book Good and Mad: The [End Page 178] Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger, which argues that women's public expressions of anger have led to social change in the last half-century in the U. S. We began to ask: how does the legacy of poetic expressions of women's anger in the nineteenth century resonate with these contemporary women, speaking publicly now, narrating an expression of anger from the past? Or with women who are hiding anger? Or subsuming it to fear? How can Victorian poetry illuminate the appeals that these expressions make to their listeners? To answer these questions, the women participating in this roundtable turn to the dramatic monologue, the nineteenth-century genre famous for its rendering of heightened emotions and extreme psychology. Anger is arguably the dramatic monologue's quintessential emotion. By relocating the lyric "I" within a specific historical or fictional context, authors can experiment with subjectivities that are—or at least appear to be—radically different from their own, embodying stances that are unconventional, transgressive, or severely anti-social. Nineteenth-century women poets offer particularly compelling examples of psychologically extreme characters in monologues that perform bitter critiques of gender-based double standards, often insisting on the psyche in extremis as a product of social conditions, rather than as a study in idiosyncrasy. But, as the diversity of authors and poems addressed in this roundtable suggests, in order to recognize and work through the nuances of these critiques, we need to view genre formation not as an inanimate taxonomic object but as an ongoing, dynamic process of engagement between reader and text. As Wai Chee Dimock observes, "far from being clear-cut slices of the literary pie, genres have … an on-demand spatial occupancy. They can be brought forth or sent back as the user chooses, switched on or off, or scaled up or down" (1379). The essays in this roundtable scale up the dramatic monologue, expanding its chronological, national, and formal boundaries in order to explore the complexities of its engagement with women's anger. Collectively, our more inclusive vision of the history of this genre, so often associated with Victorian Britain, welcomes American and Canadian authors, and Romantic-era and modernist poets, and even engages conversation and verse narrative poems. Creating a broader vision of the monologue helps us, as Monique Morgan argues, "to see more clearly the polemical content, and the range of rhetorical goals and techniques" that the genre deploys (201). It also invites new questions about one of the dramatic monologue's most central conventions: the use of a speaker who is established as someone other than the...