• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.3
• /
• pp.519-541
• /
• 2010

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.

• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.17 no.2
• /
• pp.1-27
• /
• 2017

My aim in this paper is to provide a clear view of Victorian gender ideology and highlight the role played by Browning's dramatic monologues in the challenge against the strict patriarchal codes of the era. Laura Mulvey's Male Gaze theory in cinema is especially useful for understanding Browning's most well-known dramatic monologues, "Porphyria's Lover," and "My Last Duchess," because these poems are structured by polarities of looking and being looked at, the active and the passive. In her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Mulvey introduced the second-wave feminist concept of "male gaze" as a feature of gender power asymmetry in film. To gaze implies more than to look at – it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze. She declares that in patriarchal society pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. Browning's women are subject to the male gaze, but they refuse to become the objects of a scopophilic pleasure-in-looking. Porphyria and the Duchess don't exist in order to satisfy the desires and pleasures of men. They reveal themselves as an autonomous being - reserved in Victorian gender dynamics for men. Mulvey advocates 'an alternative cinema' which can challenges the male-dominated Hollywood ideology. It is possible to say that Browning's dramatic monologues correspond to Mulvey's 'alternative cinema' because they show a counterview in terms of the representation of woman against the Victorian patriarchal ideology.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.55 no.2
• /
• pp.359-382
• /
• 2009

Eliot's The Waste Land represents the last century in many respects. While working on the poem in cooperation with Pound, Eliot intended to make "Gerontion" a prelude in The Waste Land. But, as we read in his letter to Eliot, Pound advised him against it. As a result, Eliot had excluded it from The Waste Land. "Gerontion" was published separately, as an independent poem. Between "Gerontion" and The Waste Land, we find that the theme and the techniques are very much alike. However, for this very reason Eliot and Pound must have had thought differently. Eliot must have thought that "Gerontion" would serve well as a preface to the long poem, The Waste Land. It will provide a good introduction to the long poem, he may have thought. In the meantime, Pound must have thought that such similarities in theme and techniques would weaken both works, which would be redundant. To Pound, it would be too much to have the summary of everything that is to be repeated in The Waste Land. Eliot intuitively followed Pound's judgment. Both "Gerontion" and The Waste Land have similarities in theme and techniques. The theme of both works is "aimlessness, spiritual sterility, barrenness" in modern man living in the waste land. For example, in "Gerontion," there appear an old man Gerontion, Mr. Silvero, Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, Fraulein von Kulp, who are representative of spiritual barrenness of modern world; in the same context, in The Waste Land those who are most representative of modern world are the Typist, clerk, Thames's daughters, Madamn Sosostris, Tiresias, Phelabas. And in terms of techniques, "Gerontion" and The Waste Land both use dramatic monologues, allusions, and the techniques of modern art, such as montage and mosaic. Here in these works Eliot in fact practises his theory of the "Objective Correlative" that he has invented.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.32
• /
• pp.29-61
• /
• 2013

When turning to determining a subject position for the digital age, one may look beyond the invention of its technologies and instead begin with the development of its aesthetic of networked communities, nodal expression, and collaborative identity. Virginia Woolf's The Waves demonstrates this aesthetic in both form and content. In this paper, I will examine the role of collaboration in the form of interdisciplinary composition, arguing that Woolf's use of musical form and dramatic monologue and dialogue structurally secure an investment in collaborative models of expression. Digital texts taut their inherent multimodality, but such compositions are also evident in pre-digital texts. In addition, I will decipher the subject position Woolf puts forward in The Waves by looking closely at how the characters determine their own identity and existence when they are alone, when they interact with one individual, and when they congregate as a group. These are exemplified more specifically in the representations of Rhoda and Bernard as equally refusing to collaborate between a self-defined identity and a group defined identity; Bernard's channeling of Lord Byron while writing a love letter; and Woolf's use of the red carnation as a repeated image of the intertwined nature of the characters' collaborative identity and mutual dependence on one another.