THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE

 THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE

        The dramatic monologue’s primary advantage lies in its masking of the author through the subjective speaker. As Ralph W. Rader points out, the mask lyric resolves the poet’s sophisticated attempt to express, while at the same time objectifying and limiting, an aspect of his own subjective situation” . Because the poet’s voice is “masked,” he cannot be accused of making repugnant statements, hence in “Porphyria’s Lover,” the reader is drawn into the speaker’s mind and even fascinated by the rationale of his madness. At no time does it occur to the reader’s conscious mind that Browning is speaking (or even writing), yet there is an awareness that this text is a written poem, created by a specific individual. The merging of the poet and the speaker in the mind of the reader occurs without any conscious effort on the part of the reader. Rader explains this merging of duality: “this dual effect is based on our in-built capacity to empathize with the innerness of another person when we stand as the uninvolved external observer of his speech and bodily action, at the same time that we necessarily retain the anchoring perspective of our mind in our own body” (112-13). Characters in extreme positions (such as the Duke of Ferrara or Porphyria’s lover) prevent the readers from applying their own standards of “normal” to the views being presented.

        As Robert Langbaum explains, “We understand the speaker of the dramatic monologue by sympathizing with him, and yet by remaining aware of the moral judgment we have suspended for the sake of understanding” (Experience 96). This feeling of sympathy permits the reader “the widest possible range of experience, while the critical reservation keeps us aware of how far we are departing” (96). 2 The break with the speaker occurs only when the reader has reached a point of recognition of the speaker’s moral reprehensibility. That judgment is based on the implication of the speaker’s own monologue, not just upon the words themselves, as the reader historicizes the context of the speech. The reader’s judgment is also aided by the distant setting of the dramatic monologue.

        This distance of time and place also eases the reader’s initial suspension of moral judgment about the speaker. Because of the distance, the reader brings to the poem radically different values, thereby creating a clash of values with the speaker. Yet the reader attempts to weigh these conflicting values and scrutinize the speaker’s situation before making a conscious break with that speaker. There may even be an attempt to excuse the reprehensible actions of the speaker because the reader accepts (through “sympathy”) the standards of the specific time and place evoked in the poem. For instance, when Browning first introduces the Duke of Ferrara in “My Last Duchess,” the readers are placed in Renaissance Italy, a time and place of luxurious wealth, aesthetic pleasures and powerful nobles. Therefore, the Duke’s nonchalant dismissal of the entire subject of his dead (and murdered) wife does not appear as shocking initially as it would have if Browning had set the poem in Renaissance England. Besides, Browning realizes that individuals find it far easier to judge “others” than to judge “themselves”; therefore, for the poet who desires that his readers evaluate moral stands and create new moral systems, it is imperative to provide aesthetic distancing that allows the reader to stand back and make pronouncements of right and wrong.

        The effect of this localized setting contributes to the reader’s ability to make those “proper’ moral judgments about the speaker and his actions in the poem. The idea that morality may be relative and not absolute is a concept new to the Victorians. Prior to the upheavals in science and religion in the nineteenth-century, morality was based upon religion, then viewed as absolute in its strictures upon human conduct.

       However, with the new discoveries in natural science and geology, the absolutes of the providential, teleological universe were fast disappearing. In addition, the advent of railroads placed English men and women into contact with many different classes of individuals, and the rise of British colonialism put England into contact with a myriad of other cultures and religions. The Victorian hold on the foundation of morality shook as their world expanded into domains never possible before.

        The dramatic monologue fit perfectly into this new world of upheaval with its distancing in time and place. These distant settings help Browning to raise the issue of moral and cultural relativity within the human realm and to permit the Victorian society to contemplate such dramatic changes in their own world by viewing these changes first in another distant world.Another important facet of the dramatic monologue is its concentration upon one individual character. Despite this focus, the poem does not complete a thorough study of that individual. Instead, the dramatic monologue focuses only upon one moment in time. Despite the constraint of time, the poet must provide some sort of key to the character so that the reader can appreciate, even sympathize, with the strange “other” being depicted. 3 (Insert Rader’s discussion of “other” in modern sense). This development of reader sympathy lies at the heart of the dramatic monologue.

     The dramatic monologue provides the scope (like a novel) for the exploration of individual character while it provides the dramatic touch of the individual speaker, the immediacy of “now” so essential to stage drama. As K.P. Saradhi points out, the dramatic monologue occurs in a “specific action-context” (327). This “action-context” involves the fictional subject in an “engagement with himself, or with other persons or circumstances” that produce “dynamic behavior” (327). This behavior, however, is “particularized” and “localized” so that the subject’s peculiar, idiosyncratic traits are revealed to the reader.

    Even in “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” (where action is obviously limited), the reader is presented the peculiar vanity of Johannes: “I have God’s warrant, could I blend/All hideous sins, as in a cup,/To drink the mingled venoms up;/Secure my nature will convert/The draught to blossoming gladness fast” (170:33-35). Johannes’ security is obvious in this passage, and his setting in the distant past allows the readers to more clearly judge the speaker. Although Johannes is engaged primarily in dialogue with himself (and the silent auditor), the language is dynamic as he condemns all those who have done good works to attain salvation, while he, “lie[s] smiled on, full-fed” (41), looking down upon “hell’s fierce bed”.

    Although the reader may be drawn into the pre-destination argument of Johannes, there is an inescapable moral judgment made against the speaker, whose vanity and pride dominate the poem. As Langbaum has demonstrated, in the dramatic monologue there is both “sympathy and judgment” on the part of the speaker. As the reader makes a critical judgment about Johannes, he also becomes aware of just how far both he and Johannes have departed from the accepted social and moral norms of society.

    As Robert Langbaum points out, the dramatic monologue’s treatment of a wide range of experiences corresponds to the Victorian penchant for scientific pursuit of knowledge. The reader’s willingness to understand everything for its own sake, subject to specific time and place is the expression of “empiricism in literature” (Poetry of Experience 96). In the dramatic monologues, men and women are the subjects of investigation; the readers take into account as many facts as possible and make judgments about these individuals based upon specific historical, psychological, and personal facts available to them in the text or implied by the text. In applying a scientific attitude to the dramatic monologue, the reader makes judgment relative and limited in applicability to the case at hand.

    This relativity makes the dramatic monologue a particularly appropriate poetic form for the modern age. In modern society, values are always evolving; they are never final. Values are constantly checked against new facts and new situations in the same way that readers must constantly judge the monologue’s characters based on particular facts and situations limited to their time and place. Browning’s poetry is, thus, “a poetry of becoming rather than of being”.

    His poetic ambiguity opens up the possibilities of meaning instead of forcing meaning upon the reader. For instance, when Browning was asked for information on the fate of the Duchess, he responded, “Yes, I meant that the commands were that she be put to death.’ And then, after a pause, he added, with a characteristic dash of expression, and as if the thought had just started up in his mind, ‘Or he might have had her shut up in a convent’” (qtd. in Langbaum, DM 42). Browning is not being deliberately obtuse; instead, he simply recognizes that final judgment is left to the reader.

    The dramatic monologue’s single speaker also permits the poet to explore the individual psyche while maintaining the dramatic touch of the individual speaker, the “I” of the poem. As M.W. MacCallum makes clear, “A certain dramatic understanding of the person speaking, which implies a certain dramatic sympathy with him is not only the essential condition, but the final cause of the whole species” (Warton Lecture 12). The speaker “states the case in his own way from his own point of view” (12). This “point of view” ranges from the insanity of Porphyria’s lover to the ineffectual langour of Andrea del Sarto, yet both extremes fascinate the Victorians. As MacCallum points out, during the nineteenth-century, there was a great curiosity and desire to “explore not only the broad expanse but the unsuspected nooks and crannies of individual life” (MacCallum 10). The dramatic monologue provided the vehicle to explore not only human foibles like vanity and hypocrisy but also dangerous mental states like insanity, fanaticism, and even evil.

    This Victorian fascination with character may be related to the loss of absolutes in religion and science. When the foundation of belief in Truth and moral absolutes began to disappear, determining right and wrong became far more problematic than before. Therefore, the Victorians had more interest in understanding individual motivation, even in those who appear strange and incomprehensible. The dramatic monologue also served as an important means to explore the expression of differing moral viewpoints. This attempt to understand or to justify the individual in the expression of his or her own moral viewpoint does not occur in stage drama. In the best dramas, the closing usually provides a balance, a restoration of harmony. However, in the dramatic monologue, there is no restoration, no unifying vision, only the speaker, justified in his time and place. Such individual justification suited the Victorian Age perfectly as it struggled with the loss of absolutes and tried to create a new value system without the benefit of the traditional cosmic harmonies once assumed to exist.

        The dramatic monologue also has advantages in its presentation of the speaker and its treatment of the role of speech and poetic idiom. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth comments upon the problem of poetic speech: “I have proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men; . . . There will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction; I have taken as much pains to avoid it as others ordinarily take to produce it; this I have done. . . to bring my language near to the language of men” (244, Norton ). In similar fashion, Browning uses the dramatic monologue to create a discourse in which the language of the subjective speaker is common to the particular time and place of the poem, while remaining fully comprehensible to the distant readers. Within the dramatic monologue, the subjective self directly speaks to the silent auditor; however, the language also fuses the speaker with the world outside himself—the readers in other distant times and places.

        Language as both revealing and concealing constitutes a theme which Browning explores in depth throughout many of his poems and dramatic monologues. The presence of the dramatic and subjective self, present as the “I” in the dramatic monologue, presents a fascinating study of the modern concept of speech act theory and its role in fictional discourse. Speech act theory recognizes an utterance as “an act performed by a speaker in a context with respect to an addressee” (Traugott & Pratt 229). There are two types of act distinguished: (1) a locutionary act and (2) an illocutionary act. The dramatic monologue concerns itself with the illocutionary act, “the attempt to accomplish some communicative purpose” (229). The three primary types of illocutionary acts contained in dramatic monologue are representative, expressive, and verdictive, each of which intends to affect the addresses’ mental sets. Browning’s genius in the dramatic monologue is his ability to combine the power of the direct utterance while still maintaining that power in fictional discourse.

        An essential element of all illocutionary acts is appropriateness. For instance, differentiation among illocutionary acts rests upon the listener’s (or in this case the reader’s) understanding of the “appropriateness conditions” presented. In Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” the reader ‘understands’ the Duke’s illocutionary acts as resting upon his power and authority so that when he says, “I gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped together” (194:45-46), the reader knows that the Duchess is dead. However, in reading “Andrea del Sarto” the reader is aware that Andrea’s illocutionary acts are more pleading than directive or instructive: “But do not let us quarrel any more, No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once;/Sit down and all shall happen as you wish”.