The dramatic monologuemore fully distinguish the dramatic monologue from other genres, and
more fully follow its own internal workings, "what the form is essentially
doing" (78).
Distinguishing what he considers to be "an effect peculiarly the genius of
the dramatic monologue," Langbaum argues for the necessary presence in
the poems of "the tension between sympathy and moral judgment" (85).
Encountering Browning's paradigmatic "My Last Duchess," for example, a
reader is divided, understanding and even identifying with the speaker's
position, and yet drawn to render moral judgment about what the speaker
appears to reveal. Langbaum's focus, therefore, is chiefly on reception, and
he is surely right to recognize the centrality of the effects of these words on
auditors or readers. I shall argue here, however, that these effects of
reception are broader and still more complex than the dichotomy that he
suggests. These effects, moreover, are everywhere bound to the equally
compelling issue of anticipated production, which we might define as the
alteration the monologue is laboring to perform or cause. Dramatic
monologues, especially the most vital examples of the genre, are distin-
guished by their transformative effects. The genre might ultimately be
defined less by its technical elements than by the processes it initiates and
unfolds. My larger claim regarding the dramatic monologue is that a
speaker seeks a host of transformations - of his or her circumstances, o f his
or her auditor, of his or her self, and possibly all these together - in the
course of the monologue, and ultimately attains these, if they can be
attained, by way of the monologue.
One of the most expressive examples of this genre's performance of
thoughts is Browning's "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's
Church" (1845), which Fuson calls an example of the form at "its highest
technical virtuosity." 21 Even the title indicates the monologue's intention to
be efficacious. When first published, the poem was titled simply "The Tomb
at St. Praxed's"; the revised specification of the speaker and his particular
verbal activity points to the speaker's intention to attain this object, his
own monument, by way of his speech. Certainly, he also "orders" his tomb
in the sense of designing and imaginatively arranging all its components,
from the building materials to the decorations at its base to its crowning
effigy of himself. There has always been debate over whether the sons
whom he addresses will actually undertake his commission; the Bishop
himself suspects they will not. But I would argue that the question is to
some extent irrelevant, since the tomb takes definitive shape in the course
of the monologue, by way of the monologue. As I have argued elsewhere,
the terms that he uses to conjure the image of the mistresses with which he
would reward his sons, objects possessed of "great smooth marbly limbs"