CORNELIA D.J. PEARSALLThe genre of the dramatic monologue, however, is eminently one that
requires and therefore affirms a speaking self, working always toward
creation rather than destruction of identity, imagining always further
changes "Of being." The speaker's salvation, deriving in religious terms
from the aptly named Christina and subsequent spiritual retreat, might be
seen to draw also from the very medium of her speaking.
In Webster's "A Castaway" (1870), the speaker Eulalie's wide-ranging
review of her own past is prompted by her having dipped into a previous
exercise in recording the details of her life, her "Poor little diary" (35) which
we might consider a precursor to her present monologue. 28 The diary's
pathos for her is largely in its record of her naive efforts and plans, her
"good resolves" (35). But she also calls these by a sharper name, "ambition":
"(was there ever life / that could forego that?) to improve my mind / And
know French better and sing harder songs" (36). Ambition has not been
entirely forsaken; the speaker muses throughout her monologue on the
potential financial advantages her profession has presented her. And yet the
diary's girlish ambition for self-improvement, pitied and mocked here, is
seen as a kind of lost ideal, one that, because lost, contributed to the chain
of circumstances that has led to her current position as a high-level
prostitute. The speaker in "Jenny" refers to his own "cherished work" (36)
among his "serried ranks" of books (36), while the Castaway presents a life
in which the possibilities of such work are early blighted. After "teaching
myself out of my borrowed books" (56), a strained and inadequate tutelage,
Eulalie loses a post as governess because, she regretfully recalls, "I... must
blurt out / my great discovery of my ignorance!" (50). Set on her present
course because of withheld or castaway education, her monologue is itself
an exercise in prismatic autodidacticism, in "teaching myself."
Rossetti's speaker imagines Jenny "waking alone," and thinking of him,
but the speaker in "A Castaway" provides a different, and perhaps
surprising, sense of the line of thought that Jenny might pursue in solitude.
Indeed, Eulalie suggests such a woman might not be entirely grateful for
being left to her own devices; she herself finds solitude abhorrent. An
earlier attempt to leave her profession fails because of the enforced
seclusion at a refuge: "as if a woman / could bear to sit alone, quiet all day"
(45). Her wide-ranging autobiographical review is peppered with exasper-
ated variations on the question "Will no one come?" (43), while the poem
ends with the arrival of friend she calls a "cackling goose" who is never-
theless received warmly in the poem's final line: "Most welcome, dear: one
gets so moped alone" (62). Part of what her monologue accomplishes is
that it engages her in conversation with a range of other monologues by
fallen women, thus acknowledging her solitude while breaking her silence.
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