Experimental form in Victorian poetrycomponent parts - separate lyrics or sonnets, differing stanzas and various
sections, scenes, cantos, letters, and interspersed lyrics. The obvious nine-
teenth-century paradigm for such structures, particularly those that employ
lyrics of varying stanzas and length, is the monodrama. This genre
developed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century as a flexibly
structured work that represented sequential phases of varying feelings -
usually those of a distracted female character who is torn by conflicting
passions and who shifts rapidly between moods. 22 For most monodramas
the sequence is determined by formal considerations, as in music, whereas
the narrative dimensions of these more sophisticated Victorian forms
develop ethical, political, and psychological significances that extend
beyond those required by pure form or merely oscillating moods. I t is the
narrative implications of these lyric sequences that develop modes of
cultural experimentation, even more than the dramatic analogies that
applications of monodrama tend to emphasize - such as when Tennyson
famously remarked that in Maud he substituted "different phases of
passion in one person" for "different characters." 23
Narrative adds a political dimension to lyrical formalism. Lyricism tends
to reflect back on itself, on the expressive quality of the moment - the
feeling states and verbal display of the lyrical voice. The result is frequently
the portrayal of an experience that is formally aestheticized or ideologically
homogenized. By contrast, narrative modes, insofar as they are often
associated with realist fiction, tend to encourage a relationship with
referential contexts, whether explicit (as in Amours de Voyage) or implicit
(as in Modern Love). As a result, the addition of narrative to lyric forms
reinforces a move toward social connections and ideological contextualiza-
tion. It locates otherwise solitary speakers within cultural and therefore
political circumstances. In doing so, the addition of narrative creates two
effects in Victorian poems. First, narrative induces a sense in which the
speech acts of separate speakers are commensurate with the historical
contexts of other social discourses. In these terms, the hybrid tendencies of
Victorian poetry anticipate principles of dialogism that have been argued
by the twentieth-century Soviet theorists, V.N. Voloshinov and Mikhail
Bakhtin. In their influential work, individual speech is always simulta-
neously social; any single utterance is always contaminated by the already
preceding cultural use of the terms and phrases. 24 Second, narrative
elements invoke a concern with cause and effect relationships. Such
relationships provide the ideological grounding on which most narrative
proceeds: they promote the difference between events that are merely
sequential and events that are integrated with one another, or the difference
between random action and motivated behavior. Both of these effects allow