The Mechanics of the Victorian Dramatic Monologue and Its Theoretical Implications for the Novel

Abstract

A number of recent Victorian studies have participated in a renewed focus on form. E. Warwick Slinn and Monique R. Morgan, for instance,have contributed to enhancing our understanding of the Victorian dramatic monologue. This paper aims to expand what they have addressed by revisiting the mechanics of the dramatic form as a form, in particular addressing two types of dramatic monologue represented with supreme adroitness by Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, both of whom successfully attempted to widen our epistemology through a large act of the poetic imagination and great intellectual power. To this end,this paper lays particular attention to the role of the reader who is regarded as a key element of the dramatic aspect of the genre. In the dramatic monologue proper, real readers are actively brought into dialogic relation with the speaker or the poet, or both, whereby it seeks to represent an act of play among the poet, the speaker, and the reader. What the genre achieves in this fashion is twofold. For one thing, it pushes itself sufficiently to the very centre of the complex of apparently various narrative motives that animate the genre; for another, it honours the world of multiple viewpoints more than any other previous form of literature, all the more so as readers’ views vary across their own time,space, and socio-cultural contexts. Incidentally, in one way and another,the dramatic monologue is of kinship with a Jamesian type of fiction,which is noted for its exterior impersonality. So this paper concludes by suggesting some theoretical implications that the dramatic genre assumes for, not only the naturalist novel, but also the (post-)modernist one.