Victorian Poetry

CORNELIA D.J. PEARSALL

monologue, claims in The Poetry of Experience (1957) that these mono-
logues are superfluous and unnecessary; he hears in these works "a super-
abundance of expression, more words, ingenuity and argument than seem
necessary for the purpose." He adds that the "impression of gratuitousness
is heightened by the fact that the speakers never accomplish anything by
their utterance, and seem to know from the start that they will not." 6
Critics have long joined him in this claim, the primary corollary of which is
that dramatic monologists invariably reveal far more than they intend.
Referring specifically to the paradigmatic monologues of Robert Browning,
Herbert F. Tucker argues, "What... speakers say gains ascendancy over
what they set out to mean." 7 A monologist such as the Duke i n Browning's
"My Last Duchess" (1842) "simply gets carried away," according to Clyde
de L. Ryals, speaking "simply because... one utterance... engenders
another." 8

Countering Langbaum's perspective on the dramatic monologue, my
discussion will suggest that a major feature of this poetic genre is its
assumption of rhetorical efficacy. Speakers desire to achieve some purpose,
looking toward goals that they not only describe in the course of their
monologues but also labor steadily to achieve through the medium of their
monologues. In reading dramatic monologues, I propose, we must ask
what each poem seeks to perform, what processes it seeks to set in motion
or ends it seeks to attain. 9

The transformation of the monologue

In large measure a Victorian invention, the dramatic monologue is a central
genre in a period rich with an extraordinary array of generic experimenta-
tion. We identify a genre by its differentiation from other kinds, and part of
the way this genre distinguishes itself is its discursive, even conversational,
nature. Classical epic and lyric forms (themselves profoundly altered by
Victorian practitioners) have their origins in song, while the dramatic
monologue emphatically represents speech (even if presented as an interior
monologue or written letter), sometimes though not always addressed to an
auditor. 10 This discursiveness is part of what allies these poems so
assiduously with drama. But the contexts and modes of these discourses are
so radically varied that the question of generic uniformity has from the
start attended this type of poetry. The significant body of criticism
occasioned by the dramatic monologue has often attempted to establish
this poetic form's defining characteristics, the signs by which the genre
announces itself. Some critics have debated classifications and intricately
argued distinctions among such terms as "dramatic lyrics," "lyrical

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