Skepticism and the Dramatic Monologue: Webster against Browning

Abstract

After a century of neglect, Augusta poetry has undergone a well-deserved revival. The renewed appearance of her poetry our current sense of Victorian literature is, as Melissa Valiska Gregory has noted, a feminist success story; her work is now commonly included anthologies of Victorian poetry and has been frequent topic of recent scholarship. (1) And for many readers, Webster achieves her noteworthy poetic accomplishments when writing dramatic Angela Leighton, for instance, claims that her most successful poetic expression can be found in conversational immediacy and contemporary reference of dramatic monologue. (2) And anthologists who have brought poetry new readers have tended agree. Valentine Cunningham has declared that work came truly alive ... when she adapted dramatic monologue of Tennyson and Browning women's voices and personae, Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds that Webster's best poetry consists of dramatic monologues her two major volumes of 1866 and 1870, and Isobel Armstrong, Joseph Bristow, and Cath Sharrock that poems on which her reputation mainly rests are those which Webster exploited dramatic monologue empower female personae. (3) With exception of her Mother and Daughter Sonnets, fact, virtually all of Webster poems have seen a wider recent readership are dramatic They are generally acknowledged heart of her body of work. And yet, despite this widespread and justified praise of achievement, scholars have not fully explored just how unusual these monologues are. For Webster makes a bold choice abandon epistemological problems so famous Robert Browning's monologues, which have often been considered a defining element of genre. The dramatic monologue calls our attention particular situation and context of a given speaker, often leading a wealth of skepticism about utterance that is often omitted from lyric poetry. The genre, ever since Robert Langbaum's groundbreaking work, has been viewed as a form that challenges our understanding of a speaker's self-presentation, forcing us into unceasing tension between sympathy and moral judgment. (4) Isobel Armstrong, for instance, has described dramatic monologue as an infinite regress of possible interpretive instability where no assertion or belief goes unchallenged. (5) Angela Leighton, her discussion of dramatic monologues, argues that form shows that the self is a thing of inner strata and differences, of overlaid repressions and deceptions (p. 177). And Linda K. Hughes defines dramatic monologue as a form that operates within a problematical epistemology and demands that readers negotiate a range of ambiguities. (6) By contrast, work, as Patricia Rigg has shown, downplays conventions of paradox and irony often found dramatic monologue; her speakers are reliable and trustworthy observers of world. (7) Consequently, her poems offer a variant of dramatic monologue that leaves readers with sense that basic position proposed by speaker is fully endorsed by poet. (8) Rather than emphasize tension between sympathy and moral judgment or a speaker's unconscious self-revelations, Webster pushes dramatic monologue into what Adena Rosmarin terms Mask Lyric and confute[s] rather than reward[s] reader's attempts distinguish speaker's meaning from poem's. (9) Webster, then, writes widely admired dramatic monologues that violate what many critics have seen as central aim of form. This puzzle could be solved by abandoning these definitions of genre for another, such as Cornelia Pearsall's claim that genre's major function is present speakers who desire to achieve some purpose ... through medium of their monologues. (10) But I propose, instead, that dramatic monologues are best seen as a deliberate challenge Browning's. …