The dramatic monologuebut it functions nevertheless to provide a climate for the potent perfor-
mance of her patron's thoughts. Her discursive absence, amid his silent
prolixity, leads to the attainment for the monologist of a pointed goal. He
refers, as he prepares to leave, to "Jenny's flattering sleep" (42). He has
noted throughout how appealing she is in repose, and it is this visual
pleasure that helped prompt the monologue. But this term also refers, in
some sense, t o how "flattering" her sleep has been to him. While slumbering
in the company of a client hardly appears complimentary, in doing so she
has enabled him to formulate an opinion of himself as different from her
other customers, and in the end, as radically altered by this encounter.
Early in the monologue he admits that rooms like hers were more familiar
to him "Not long ago" (36), but now he needs to see this night as different
from all the others. He needs, moreover, to have a sense that, for all her
other patrons (and her other "double-pillowed" mornings [42]), this night
with him will be memorable for her also: "Why, Jenny, waking here alone /
May help you to remember [me]" (42).
For all the speaker's assessment of Jenny, which comprises the body of
the monologue, it is her voiceless judgment of him that preoccupies his own
unspoken words, in their titillating conjunction of illicit sexuality and
covert discursivity. He speculates, "I wonder what you're thinking of" (37),
and he is especially curious about her estimation of him: "If of myself you
think at all, / What is the thought?" (37). Ultimately, his concern is less
with his "reading" of her ("You know not what a book you seem," he tells
her [37]), than hers of him: "What if to her all this were said?" (39). He
imagines that when she wakes she will remember him not only because he
left in so timely a manner, but because all he has indulged in is a
monologue, one she was not even obliged to hear. And this is of course
what he pays her for so handsomely: he has acquired through her the
opportunity to develop this voiceless monologue, with its overt claims of
having both marked and caused some transformation in himself, and
perhaps in her.
Jenny's lack of alertness or comprehension might have been seen as
enviable by the speaker of Dora Greenwell's "Christina" (composed 1851,
published 1867), a dramatic monologue of which Dante Gabriel Rossetti
may have been aware, since his sister Christina Rossetti was a friend of the
author's and interested in her work. 26 The speaker, a fallen woman,
describes seeking imaginative refuge in the life of her childhood friend
Christina, in order "to lose / The bitter consciousness of self, to be / Ought
other e'en in thought than that what I was" (109-11). 27 So powerful is this
desire for annihilation that she admits, "I sought not death, for that were
but a change / Of being" (175-76) but rather "to cease utterly to be" (178).
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