Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue

Abstract

Many of the best dramatic monologues are sustained exercises in what W. H. Empson calls double irony, the simultaneous endorsement of contradictory codes.' Because the speakers in such monologues are pulled two ways at once, their incapacity to pursue wholeheartedly any single course of action makes them unsuited for their roles. Far from alienating us, however, the indecision and vulnerability of Browning's Andrea del Sarto or his lover in Two in the Campagna often make us oddly intimate with them. Since the essence of a deception is to mask the truth, a liar has to possess the truth he is hiding before he can lie. In bad faith, by contrast, the truth is hidden from the liar himself: his deception is no longer grounded in a consciously embraced truth. anguish of Browning's Andrea del Sarto or his austere Victorian Prufrock in A Toccata of may merely be a mask of anguish. In order to escape the genuine anguish of acknowledging his guilt for crimes against King Francis and his parents, Andrea may only pretend to be disturbed by Lucrezia's refusal to stay at home with him. And in order to avoid the despair of facing his own mortality, the chilly moralist in A Toccata of may merely pretend to be distressed by Galuppi's failure to commemorate a less frivolous beauty in his music. In each case bad faith takes the form of unconsciously lying to oneself. Though a lie posits the duality of deceiver and deceived, bad faith implies the unity of a single consciousness. Whereas the priest lies to the woman in Browning's Andrea del Sarto lies to himself. In bad faith the deceiver and the dupe are one and the same person. As Jean-Paul Sartre explains, to be in bad faith I know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived . . . Better yet I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully.2 Chaucer's Pardoner, Andrea del Sarto, and many of Browning's casuists both know and do not know they are liars. As self-deceivers they are more dangerous than a simple liar like the priest in Browning's monologue, The Confessional, because if