CORNELIA D.J. PEARSALLmost extreme examples of the performance of thoughts that this genre
presents to us. The prevalence of so much seemingly random devastation
would appear to run counter to the work of construction, innovation, or
revision in which, in one way or another, we see so many dramatic
monologists engaged. And yet destruction, even to the point of self-
annihilation, can be a creative act, providing the means to advance
ambitions or effect desired alterations in persons or situations. In tracking
this phenomenon in examples from a few well-known dramatic mono-
logues and in two lesser known works, Webster's "Circe" (1870) and Levy's
"A Minor Poet" (1884), we can witness this inventive genre's complex
commitment to varieties of spoliation and ruin.
If the speaker of "Jenny" is finally preoccupied less with his apprehension
of Jenny than hers of him, then he intersects with another community of
dramatic speakers with a similar fascination. The dramatic monologue
from the start, in such foundational works as Browning's "Porphyria's
Lover" and "My Last Duchess" concerned itself with female subjectivity,
including and perhaps especially the modes of consciousness of women
whom we do not hear speak. The speaker of "Porphyria's Lover" not only
draws his name from his intimate relationship to her but also claims that
the actions he describes, including that of murdering her, are based on his
apprehension of her desires, her "one wish" (RB 57). He surmises,
"Porphyria worshipped me" (33); it is this insight that leads him to find "a
thing to do" (38), to render his houseguest a permanent fixture. He
represents both her "struggling passion" (23), which prompts her to come
to him, and the corresponding lack of struggle or feeling with which she
acceded, or so he believes, to his inspiration to strangle her: "No pain felt
she; /1 am quite sure she felt no pain" (41-42).
Porphyria's lover finds his most immediate confrere later in the century,
in Swinburne's "The Leper" (1866), featuring another monologist who still
more ecstatically eroticizes a corpse, in this case that of his leprous love-
object: a highborn woman whose trysts with lovers he had watched
surreptitiously. Now diseased and rejected, she is taken in by the speaker,
who exalts in an obsessive lovemaking that only intensifies with her death.
While he reviews his increasing ardor we gain glimpses of her appalled
exhaustion and dismay (even he recognizes her "sad wonder" [ACS I,
123]), reactions all the more distressing for their confinement within his
impassioned account. These monologues serve to elucidate their speakers'
actions, but still more to prolong them, to detain these men and their lovers
forever in the present tense. Although Browning's original heading "Mad-
house Cells" indicates the solitary incarceration of the Lover, the murderer's
monologue insists in closing, "we sit together now" (58), while the now
78