CORNELIA D.J. PEARSALLwhat criticism of this genre has only begun to explore: namely, the range
of conversations that engage these highly individual, even alienated
monologists.
The Victorian workings of this genre present to us an apparent contra-
diction: namely, that these criminals, iconoclasts, individualists, misfits,
and rebels themselves form what we might term a community. For all their
removal from any norm, they collectively present adherence to certain
patterns, constituting a conformation of nonconformists. Individual
speakers, moreover, can gather into still more focused groupings. One such
community is a loose coalition of "fallen women," populated by female
figures whose sexual history is a governing concern, who either are spoken
of or speak themselves. Prostitution was a predominant social issue of mid-
Victorian Britain, the subject of numerous debates, sermons, periodical
articles, and parliamentary bills. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic Aurora
Leigh (1856) gave the subject significant literary expression but the topic
seems to have been especially suited to the medium of the monologue. A
work such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Jenny" (1870), in which a man
considers a silent, sleeping prostitute, unconscious of the implications of
her life as she is of his commentary, is countered by a number of
monologues spoken by "fallen women" themselves, including poems by
Dora Greenwell, Augusta Webster, and Amy Levy, in which speakers assert
thoroughgoing understanding of their situations.
Rossetti's "Jenny" - originally drafted in 1848, then revised and pub-
lished after he retrieved the manuscript some years later from his wife
Elizabeth Siddall's exhumed grave - is punctuated by the monologist's sense
of the prostitute's relative states of consciousness. His words are posited on
the assumption that Jenny is his subject and not his auditor; the poem is an
especially notable example of an "interior monologue," defined by Daniel
A. Harris as "unsounded self-questioning" or "silent thought." 25 Jenny is so
far from functioning as an interlocutor or respondent that she is portrayed
initially as a "thoughtless queen / Of kisses" (DGR 36) and later as a
"cipher" (41). Her comprehensive incomprehension is dramatized by the
fact of her unshakable drowsiness. The speaker repeatedly attempts to
rouse her, urging "handsome Jenny mine, sit up: / I've filled our glasses, let
us sup" (37). Failing to stir her, he concedes, "What, still so tired? Well,
well then, keep / Your head there, so [long as] you do not sleep" (37). She
does sleep, as he comes to exclaim ("Why Jenny, you're asleep at last!"
[39]), resisting his final attempt at arousal: "Jenny, wake up ... Why,
there's the dawn!" (41). Reflecting on the world outside her window, he
finally grants, "Let her sleep" (42).
Jenny's wavering unconsciousness prevents various modes of interaction,74