The dramatic monologuediseased speaker of "The Leper" claims that in spite of his beloved's death,
and his own impending demise, "I sit still and hold / In two cold palms her
two cold feet" (I, 122).
The monologue of Porphyria's lover makes faint suggestion that it is only
with him, at "That moment" that she was "Perfectly pure and good"
(36-37; emphasis mine). Her "soiled gloves," (12) "vainer ties" (24), and
attendance at "to-night's gay feast" (27) may point, he hints, to other lovers
of Porphyria. Such conjecture attends the Duchess in "My Last Duchess,"
who may be the victim either of excess fidelity or imprudent infidelity. That
the Duchess "liked whate'er / She looked on, and her looks went every-
where" (RB 23-24), and that she "thanked men" (31) rather too profli-
gately, may indicate that she was either charming or promiscuous; in either
case, the speaker claims that her passions led to her removal, not his. The
Duke's monologue begins with the question that he knows any viewer of
her portrait will have, regarding "How such a glance came there"; he
assures the envoy, "not the first / Are you to turn and ask thus" (12-13). In
a sense, the monologue is an attempt to answer that question, to explain
the glance, the "spot / Of joy" (14-15) on her cheek, the "faint / Half-
flush" now perpetually dying "along her throat" (18-19). One might argue,
indeed, that the enigmatic and potentially wayward nature of her sub-
jectivity as well as her expression is part of what prompted the Duke to fix
a single image of her. In these and other dramatic monologues, female
desire (linked, as it is, to complex and perhaps indefinable sexualities) is
viewed as causative, as tending toward some effect. In pursuing a woman
even unto death, each speaker is himself altered by an elusive female
consciousness, although he often avers that it is her thought that he is
performing.
I have been arguing that the dramatic monologue seeks to dramatize, as
well as to cause, performative effects. This tendency makes the genre
especially useful in cases where both the speaker and the poet are
attempting to create reactions and larger social transformations in the
world outside the poem. We noted that one of the Castaway's explana-
tions for her current position stressed that had her education been stronger
her profession might have been different. While this is only one of the
critiques that the speaker brings to society's failings and her own, we
know that Webster was a passionate advocate of women's education, and
that the monologue obliquely but firmly reflects the poet's external social
commitments. Perhaps no Victorian poet used the genre of the dramatic
monologue to more powerful polemical effect than Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, whose poem "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" first
appeared in an American anti-slavery publication in 1848. The runaway
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