Negation, Selection and Substitution: Charlotte Brontë's Feminist Poetics

Abstract

This article examines an early dramatic monologue by Charlotte Brontë and finds that Brontë pre-dates Victorian women poets in use of the form. Her early practice makes her a contemporary of Robert Browning and gives her precedence over Alfred Tennyson. The study investigates both how Brontë developed the form and why she introduced it into poetry. Without denying her childhood training in depiction of fictional figures, the findings point in the direction of Brontë's readings in seventeenth-century drama and her earlier writing of a short play as a more directly relevant background that made the monologue possible. Her personal motive for using it in poetry is initially a reaction to Robert Southey's discouraging response to her experience of poetry writing. The poem complains of literary marginalisation and asserts female poetic potentials. It embodies Brontë's culturally forbidden dream in an objective manner. However, the dramatic form proves to be more than a personal mask. It allows Brontë to contradict Romantic ideology and challenge patriarchal culture. Brontë's experience with the dramatic monologue in this poem on both formal and contextual levels should grant her better recognition in the poetic canon than that assigned to her so far.