CORNELIA D.J. PEARSALLliterary production that was for some time unnamable. Significantly, the
best-known title of a collection made up chiefly of dramatic monologues,
Browning's Men and Women (1855), names not the generic form but the
subject matter, identifying social interaction, and especially gender rela-
tions, as constitutive of the form. In the aggregate, these titles seem to
indicate significant shifts in the conception of the precise nature of this
poetic mode. Can it finally be said that at the moment of composition there
was for the majority of Victorian poets the assumption of a fixed and
discernible genre, with clearly established rules? Hovering as it does among
other generic kinds that it resembles but forcefully deviates from, such as
lyric or drama, the dramatic monologue eluded classification even by its
makers.
In their desire to define at least some unifying principle, critics most
often seem to waver between definitions so restrictive as to discount many
dramatic monologues, and definitions so expansive as to include any
number of poems. For example, in summarizing a reigning critical assump-
tion Elisabeth A. Howe observes, "Only one feature is common [to
dramatic monologues]... namely, their identification of the speaker as
someone other than the poet, whether a mythical figure ... a historical
one ... or a fictional [one]." 17 This viewpoint would appear to be
supported by no less an authority than Browning, who in his prefatory
Advertisement to Dramatic Lyrics (1842) provides one of his few formal
statements regarding the genre, calling the poems, "though for the most
part Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many
utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine." 18 And yet even so
focused and credible a distinction as Howe's is open to challenge.
Langbaum warns that if our definition of this genre involves "every lyric in
which the speaker seems to be someone other than the poet," then the
category can include innumerable epistles, laments, love songs, orations,
soliloquies, and "first person narratives," including such works as Geoffrey
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. 19 Alan Sinfield defends precisely this line of
"historical continuity," positing that such forms as the complaint and the
epistle are in fact early examples of the dramatic monologue, as are "all
first-person poems where the speaker is indicated not to be the poet." 20
Nevertheless, Langbaum's resistance to any definitions grounded in "me-
chanical resemblance" remains instructive. He urges that instead we "look
inside the dramatic monologue... [to] consider its effect, its way of
meaning"; by doing so, we shall see that "the dramatic monologue is
unprecedented in its effect, that its effect distinguishes it, in spite of
mechanical resemblance, from the monologues of traditional poetry"
(J6-JJ). Through focusing on its "effect," Langbaum insists, we may
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