Victorian Poetry

Experimental form in Victorian poetry

already begun with her childhood move from the masculine world of her
father's books ("Which taught her all the ignorance of men" [I. 190]) to the
feminine world of her aunt's passive renunciation ("she had lived / A sort of
cage-bird life" [I. 304-05]). But it continues through several crucial
interactions with the disturbing social events relating to the working-class
character Marian Erie (such as rape [VI. 1219-34] and single parenting
[VI. 566-81]). The resulting interplay of constitutive discourse (the affec-
tive power of figurative language) with referential discourse (narrative or
historical description) becomes particularly arresting in its presentation of
female images and their relationship to patriarchal convention. Ultimately,
Aurora Leigh remains consistent with other Victorian narrative poems -
like Amours de Voyage, Maud, and Modern Love - because it makes the
protagonist's self-consciousness the focus of dramatic action. Yet Barrett
Browning's grand experiment produces a more distinct embodiment of the
intermingling constructions of private and public processes. It extends
social reference into a greater variety of class and political contexts - such
as "drawing-rooms" (V 206) and "Fleet Street" (V 213). And it achieves a
more intensive mixing of discursive elements. Gothic ("Ghost, fiend" [I.
154]), classical ("A loving Psyche" [I. 156]) and Christian ("Our Lady of
the Passion" [I. 160]) images mingle with what Aurora calls "the woman's
figures" (VIII. 1131): "Her... forehead braided tight" (I. 273); "behold the
paps we all have sucked!" (V 219); "puckerings in the silk / By clever
stitches" (VIII. 1129-30).

A decade later, Browning's The Ring and the Book takes the dramatic
monologue's potential to direct an ironic and discursive gaze on that same
mutual construction of self and world to an altogether new extreme.
Browning selects a Renaissance historical event concerning a middle-aged
husband's murder of his fourteen-year-old spouse, and turns it into a series
of monologues representing various perspectives: the three protagonists
(husband, wife, and the priest who tried to rescue her), members of the
public, the lawyers from the trial, and the Pope who acted as an ecclesias-
tical court of appeal. These ten monologues are framed by two from the
poet, thus constructing a twelve-book form of epic status. If the formalist
methods of Aurora Leigh ask questions about gender, then the epic
structure of The Ring and the Book raises urgent questions about episte-
mology - on the production of knowledge, the search for the truth, and the
evidence that supports them. Does the addition of each monologue add a
further perspective that eventually completes a circular whole, a ring of
truth? Or does the addition of each account simply obfuscate events,
dissipating the truth? If we expect a conventional narrative conclusion or a
teleological climactic moment, then the "generic indeterminacy" of this

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