Victorian Poetry

The dramatic monologue

Eulalie has not, however, been entirely alone in the course of the
monologue, but rather flanked by past and future selves. Angela Leighton
writes of this speaker: "For all her clarity of perception, the Castaway
cannot see herself." 19 It may be, though, that this speaker observes too
many selves, each of which is potentially self-destructive. Like many of
Webster's dramatic monologists, the speaker of "A Castaway" is well
aware of her own self-division; referring to the author of the diary, her
younger avatar, she declares: "it seems a jest to talk of me / as if I could be
one with her" (36). In thinking of her future self as "Old," she concludes,
"that's to be nothing," only to modify this nihilistic prediction: "or to be at
best / a blurred memorial that in better days / there was a woman once with
such a name" (43). The Castaway derisively mimics prevalent social theory
that argued that there are, as she puts it, "too many women in the world"
(48). 30 And yet while she is bitterly mocking in her attribution of the cause
of her own situation to "woman's superfluity" (48), the medium of the
monologue itself allows her at once to resist and entertain the theory of a
superfluous self.

The Castaway's adopted moniker refers not only to a woman flung aside
but also to one who is herself adept at abandoning other people, including
what she represents as her various past and potential selves. With her
monologue, she can cast away and yet rescue an identity straining against
itself. Her searching self-examination may help to show that the prostitute
whom the speaker of "Jenny" was addressing was far beyond his discursive
reach. Before he leaves, Rossetti's monologist arranges gold coins in Jenny's
hair, for visual and presumably psychological effect. What might Jenny say
when she does finally awaken, amid a shower of coins? We learn from
Greenwell's and Webster's speakers that this community of "fallen women"
shares an impulse toward self-annihilation, one that the medium of the
dramatic monologue at once indulges and forestalls. But these speakers
also express an instinct and indeed hunger for self-possession, one that
undercuts the most basic premise of their profession. When Jenny the
"fallen" woman rises she might anticipate the statement that the ruined and
dying speaker of Amy Levy's "Magdalen" (1884) imagines making to her
seducer: "I am free; / [And] you, through all eternity, / Have neither part
nor lot in me" (AL 83-85).

Monologic ends

The final section of this chapter examines the relation of the form of the
dramatic monologue to emotional and sometimes actual destruction,
whether of another person or of the speaking self; these are among the

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