CORNELIA D.J. PEARSALL"sketches on the wall / Done rough in charcoal" and "Large schemes of
undone work. Poems half-writ / Wild drafts of symphonies; big plans of
fugues" (183-84). These abortive works themselves constitute a lucid
account of his motivation for suicide; the speaker believes that his thoughts
can find no performance, can neither be voiced by him nor heard by any
public. On the one hand, the monologue is itself the completed work, the
pain and the poem fully voiced, the "big plan" accomplished. On the other
hand, he now remains forever mute, since his monologue's only auditor is a
self engaged in its own overthrow. In the course of destroying himself, he
has produced another oxymoronic discursive situation, one akin to the
"melody unutterable" that he only faintly discerned; he has performed an
unspeakable monologue.
The absolute annihilation of Levy's monologist is unusual - though this
is a genre that is often interested in the concurrence of creativity and
destruction, the simultaneous representation and termination of a speaking
self. Unlike the Minor Poet, however, the speaker of Webster's "An
Inventor" - the dramatic monologue with which this essay began - resolves,
"I'll not die with my work unfulfilled" (13). He notes, as do so many
dramatic speakers, that for some people the path to accomplishment is
easy, for others hard: "each of his kind; / but can you change your kind?"
(65-66). None of the speakers we have considered - however dire,
disturbing, frustrating, or comical their situations are - would change their
kinds. The Bishop perpetually ordering his tomb, the prostitutes and their
clients, the lovers and their doomed beloveds, the poets and the inventors:
many of these speakers might desire to change their situations but never,
finally, the selves they may even consider extinguishing. So aware is he of
the complexity of identifying, let alone changing, one's kind that the
Inventor goes on to ask: "who would pray (say such a prayer could serve) /
'Let me be some other, not myself?" (72-73). Prayer is of course also a
kind of discourse through which an individual may seek transformative
effects, clearly a more sanctified mode of address but one perhaps allied to
aspects of the dramatic monologue. The form of the dramatic monologue
itself represents speech seeking to be efficacious, to cause a variety of
transformations. The act of the dramatic monologue, its performance of
thoughts, simultaneously creates a self and alters that self, and may perhaps
ultimately destroy the self it held so dear.
The works of Tennyson, Browning, Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, Swinburne, Webster, Levy, and other Victorian poets demonstrate
that the dramatic monologue has long wrestled with the intricacies of
desire, sexual or otherwise. While Modernist poets such as T.S. Eliot and
Ezra Pound put the form to rich use, it continues to provide a vital and
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