CORNELIA D.J. PEARSALLslave, the speaker of the dramatic monologue, presents an appalling
indictment of the system of slavery, one in part attempting to account for
her murder of her own child, offspring of her rape by her master. Other
dramatic monologues, such as Webster's "Medea in Athens" (1870) and
Levy's "Medea" (1884), probe the dynamics of maternal destructiveness.
The spectacle these works contemplate is that of a creator destroying
what she has herself generated and produced, of destruction constituting
an act of responsive innovation. These poems present as speakers mothers
whose profoundest act is laying waste to their children, a devastation
figured as a form of radical protest. Barrett Browning's "Runaway Slave"
exhibits the extended enactment of a child's murder at the center of the
poem (possibly an influence for and certainly a precursor to Toni
Morrison's acclaimed novel Beloved [1987]). She uses the genre's tendency
to feature speakers i n extremity to powerful dramatic effect, seeking for a
multiplicity of transformations to take place not only in the course of the
poem but also in the world beyond it. In such works we may trace the
creative transformation of violence, as destructive acts mutate into
inventive ones through the very medium of the monologue.
As in these other monologues featuring speakers who seek transforma-
tions of selves and situations through emotional depredation, Webster's
"Circe" especially interests itself in the ruinous effects that one sex can
wreak upon the other. Circe, the woman who holds Ulysses in an
enervating thrall when we first see him in Homer's Odyssey, is in both
writers' works an overseer of masculine transfigurations. Hard-laboring
mariners shipwrecked on the speaker's island are seduced by their sudden
luxurious leisure into drinking from her charmed cup, and as a result are
transformed into animals. Webster finds Circe mistress of a menagerie of
former men, the only human speaker among a community of grunting
animals "who wallow in their styes, .../... or munch in pens and byres, /
or snarl and filch behind their wattled coops" (18). 31 Like other dramatic
monologists who are catalysts for distressing alterations in other people,
however, Circe claims that the modifications she causes could not occur
were the seeds of change not already dormant in her victims. She insists
that drinking from her cup only "revealed them to themselves / and to each
other" (21). Indeed, she denies, in spite of the howling and barking of her
companions, that any alteration occurred: "Change? there was no change; /
only disguise gone from them unawares" (21).
For Circe, the problem with her domain is that in fact change of any sort
is so unaccustomed; the dilemma that she confronts is wholesale stagna-
tion. At the start of her monologue, she calls for a powerful storm to wrack
her island: "let it come and bring me change, / breaking the sickly sweet
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