The dramatic monologuerelevant forum for a range of voices. The monologic speakers in Richard
Howard's Untitled Subjects (1969) are the Victorians themselves, while
W.D. Snodgrass's The Vuhrer Bunker (1995) features monologues of Hitler
and his circle. The panoply of speakers in Anna Deavere Smith's Vires in the
Mirror (1993) and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (1994) intensively explore
recent events of racial violence and civic chaos. The Victorians' relentless
but constantly shifting focus on the variables of human longing and
frustration continues in such recent works as Eve Ensler's The Vagina
Monologues (1998), a series of vocalizations concerning that female body
part. Like Smith, Ensler draws her voices from numerous interviews, and
she performs the monologues on stage. The linked monologues that make
up each of these late-twentieth-century collections are all involved in
conversation with one another, in some ways more direct than in Victorian
examples we have considered, and in others still more oblique. The
audience frequently gains a distinct sense of how little speakers are willing
to listen to each other, and therefore how difficult any transformation,
whether of a self or of a society, might be. These speakers appear strikingly
different from their Victorian forebears, and yet they might be seen as
engaging in conversation with these previous monologic performances, and
therefore viewed less as deviating from than extending the tradition. The
form of the dramatic monologue from the start dealt in transformations
involving myriad sexualities, controversial contemporary and historical
figures, and tangled affiliations and prejudices. Attending to so vast an
array of speakers, we might hear these works finally build less to a
conversation than an orchestration; they announce how much the dramatic
monologue still has to say to us.
NOTES
1 Quotations from Augusta Webster's poetry are taken from Webster, Portraits
(London: Macmillan, 1870); page references appear in parentheses.
2 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "performance" derives
from "parfournir," an Old French word signifying "to complete" or "to carry
out thoroughly."
3 Dorothy Mermin has explored the genre's emphasis on communication, obser-
ving that a "dramatic monologue with or without an auditor is a performance:
it requires an audience." But she does not read the performative element as also
causative, seeking transformations. In her view, the "monologue lacks the
resources to develop the temporal dimension, the notion of life as a continuing
process of growth and change": The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 11, 10.
4 A. Dwight Culler, "Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue," PMLA 90
(i975), 368.