The Margins of the Dramatic Monologue: Teaching Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point"

Abstract

Tricia Lootens has recently described difficult but rewarding experience f teaching at Pilgrim s Point. Her account was occasioned by its inclusion in Poems in Process section of eighth edition of Norton Anthology of English Literature. Lootens focuses on emotional difficulty of discussing infanticide stanzas in class, and what raw emotions and disagreements they provoke among students mean for relation between scholarly study of Victorian literature and teaching of it. (1) certainly agree that this poem can be difficult to teach, but in my experience students are unlikely to argue about whether infanticide is justified; they accept it relatively easily as terrible thing that should be blamed on condition of slavery rather than on phrase I couldn't judge her without being in her shoes recurs frequently in Women's Literature class in which usually teach this poem, and infanticide is just most extreme action my students refuse to judge. In fact, class discussion of this poem usually goes well. Only in papers do see problem that is, ironically, very source of poem's success: poetic power of speaker's language and intensity of emotion lead students to believe poem is autobiographical. There is always danger, of course, that students might believe that author is speaker of any first-person poem. We all know how often we repeat mantra the author is not speaker. Generally, students have more trouble keeping this in mind with lyrics than they do with narrative poems. Every semester that teach The at Pilgrim's Point, however, receive at least one paper (and sometimes more than one) that refers to speaker of poem as if she were poet, not merely in careless confusion of pronouns and referents that can happen with lyric poems, but in an explicit and biographical way. These students are convinced that Elizabeth Barrett Browning was gang-raped and killed her own baby, even after class discussion of historical context of poem and being give information that author was prominent white British author. Why do students make this error more frequently and persistently with this poem than with any other that teach? have come to conclusion that it is revelation of nature of dramatic itself: students are engaging in strong misreading. In this poem we see that formula for dramatic is not a supposed (to borrow Emily Dickinson's phrasing) (2) but rather, suppose were this person? All dramatic monologues require author and reader to imagine being person depicted, and doing so successfully leaves traces that cannot be erased by one's knowledge of rules of poetry. Because Runaway Slave is historically contemporaneous with author rather than set in dim past, cues of setting that prevent confusing author with speaker are not as apparent in this poem as in other dramatic monologues like My Last Duchess or Ulysses. An even more important factor, however, is way that Barrett Browning stretches conventions of form in this poem. Other dramatic monologues force reader into critical attitude toward speaker-as Robert Langbaum says, the genius of dramatic monologue is the effect created by tension between sympathy and moral judgment. (3) In Runaway Slave, however, judgment function is assigned to intradiegetic audience (first pilgrim-ghosts, then slave hunters), and speaker herself preemptively closes off possibility of judging her actions in her addresses to these audiences. Thus irony that is hallmark of dramatic is not present in poem. This is obviously consequence of Barrett Browning's abolitionist agenda; if we judge slave, we will not want as passionately to end slavery. …