CORNELIA D.J. PEARSALLbeing mastered by another person. In response to her central monological
question, "why am I who I am?" (18), her answer is, "for the sake of him
whom fate will send / one day to be my master utterly" (18). While she
imagines this fateful man standing "unchanged" in her presence, she wants
for him to "[look] me in the eyes, / abashing me before him" (22). She
proves and values this man by his adamant ability to withstand change, to
be a self less mutable than any other. Yet even as she disdains radical
transmutation in other individuals, she seeks it for herself. In harboring this
desire she comes in the course of the monologue, by way of the monologue,
to resemble all too closely her feral men wracked by storm. We can now see
that this ambition was announced at the opening of the monologue, in
which she calls for a violent storm, "though it rend my bowers" (14),
precisely because it will shatter every aspect of her existence. Their
sensuous delight in her hospitality changes her guests into (or rather, as she
claims, reveals them as) beasts. For her, too, self-pleasuring transmutes into
self-abasement and submission. A dramatic monologue like "Circe" de-
monstrates the complexity of the genre's figurations of "men and women"
(as the title of Browning's well-known collection has it). In a dazzling
display of the possibilities and dangers of gendered transfiguration, the
speaker desires to become "mastered," like the storm-riven subjugated men
whom she oversees. More than any narcissistic pool, the men whom she
derides as inhuman (calling them "these bestial things" [18]), provide the
image that she chooses to see herself as reflecting.
We have noted some of the ways that this genre, while founded on the
primacy of the speaking subject, is drawn to the representation of various
forms of self-annihilation. With these examples in mind, it is useful to close
with a poem in which such self-destruction is still more direct, and indeed
stands as the premise of the monologue. Levy's "A Minor Poet" intersects
with aspects of the dramatic speakers of the two major poets of this genre.
Readers have long heard in the speakers of Tennyson's "Ulysses" and
"Tithonus" an urge toward release from existence, a yearning toward
death. This is a desire sought as intensely by Levy's male speaker. He is also
linked to a line of Browning monologists convinced of and yet resistant to
the notion of their own failure, including the speakers of "Pictor Ignotus"
(1845), "Andrea del Sarto" (1855), and "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
Came." What Levy's speaker is determined not to fail in, despite a lifetime
of shortcomings and frustrations, is his own suicide. 34 The poem begins
with the speaker locking himself into his rooms; later he notes of his earlier
botched attempts, "I wrought before in heat .../... scarcely under-
standing; now I know / What thing I do" (AL 158-60). The monologue
maintains, then, a clear sense of deliberation; equally decisive is his sense of
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