The enticements of the dramatic monologue upon contemporary poets are pretty easy to pin down. The poet is given the prose writer’s luxury of “character,” allowing the author to distance him or herself a bit from the words written while intimately engaging a set of personality traits created within the character which often make the poem seem to write itself. By donning a mask of “persona,” the poet is freed a bit from the “cans” and “cannots” of subject matter. It’s no wonder these monologues often end up spoken by some pretty despicable characters. A considerable amount of craft must be employed when dealing with the Antihero in such poems, for they can easily turn a reader off to the piece. Skillfully written, the dramatic monologue will keep the reader engaged in the poem by its crafting of the character, and its playing upon the reader’s sympathies.
In Robert Browning’s "Porphyria’s Lover," a man in a chair quietly watches his lover start to undress, sit on his lap, and kiss him before he winds her hair around her neck and chokes her. As long as there’s a glimmer of insight into the motivation of the killer, the reader may find him or herself sympathizing and, consequently, struggling desperately for definition.
It is this sympathy that makes Browning’s monologues unsettling, and their success largely depends upon how easily our sympathies rise without our realizing. The dramatic monologue achieves this through its point of view, giving (as M. W. MacCallum said) “facts from within,” and forcing us to draw our meaning from the matter of the poem itself without inflicting judgments based in anything outside of the piece (Langbaum 78).
The suspension of judgment is another essential to the monologue’s effectiveness. In his book on the genre, Robert Langbaum writes “When we have said all the objective things about Browning’s 'My Last Duchess,' we will not have arrived at the meaning until we point at what can only be substantiated by an appeal to effect—that moral judgment does not figure importantly in our response to the duke, that we even identify ourselves with him” (Langbaum 82). The simple fact that the poem is in the duke’s voice and is spoken (essentially) to us is not enough to create the effects of sympathy. One cannot write a poem simply describing a murder in the first person and expect the audience to forgive. It is the style and charisma of the character that draws us in and makes his actions, in some strange way, seem actually logical. He shows us exactly who he is and what he has done, as well as the fact that he’s going to get away with it; has worked his charm on us just as easily as the envoy he is speaking to in the poem. As Langbaum writes, “The duke reveals all…about himself, grows to his full stature, because we allow him to have his way with us; we subordinate all other considerations to the business of understanding him” (Langbaum 85).
A similar kind of manipulation occurs in "Porphyria’s Lover." It lingers for almost 40 of its 60 lines on giving the setup for its action. The Porphyria comes home, tries to get her lover’s attention (he sits quietly and does not respond), eventually performs a minor striptease before coming closer and speaking of her love for him. The poetic description of all of this abruptly halts, momentarily when the speaker says “I found/ A thing to do, and all her hair / In one long yellow string I wound / Three times her little throat around / and strangled her” (Lines 37-41). The statement is brief and, though the stripping of the poetic language that comes before makes it stand out a bit, the speaker moves along without describing the murder in greater detail. He quickly returns to a more poetic diction and attempts to cast himself as a caring lover, saying in the next line “No pain felt she; / I am quite sure she felt no pain” (41-2). For the rest of the poem, their encounter is described much as before, and, were it not for the single sentence confessing his murder, we would likely not even notice her death.
The truth of the speaker’s villainy is greatly downplayed. The rest of his argument describes how he simply wanted to be sure she truly loved him, and would continue to, which is easy enough an anxiety for any reader to relate to. Langbaum’s assessment of the poem states that in it, Browning “is relying upon an extraordinary complication of what still remains a rationally understandable motive” (Langbaum 88).
Though we are moved to sympathize, at least in some degree, with the villainous speakers in the Monologues, there is always an understanding of their faults. We do not believe, for instance, that Browning is attempting to actually convince us that killing one’s wife or lover truly is a logical way to preserve her love or beauty. The speakers are not heroes but antiheroes, meant to force us to approach the situation from an alternative path in order to see a situation and gain knowledge of it from a different perspective.
The antihero, then, is not the typical villain, but rather is a much more deliberate and crafted character. By telling their side of the story (or the narrator’s focusing on it), they effectively replace the hero and our attentions are focused on what is happening to them rather than what they are doing to others. The envoy’s account of duke, for example, would surely point out details that would change our perception of him. Our sympathies for the antihero make him a paradox, representing an opposition to the accepted ways of thinking. Victor Brombert in his study In Praise of Antiheroes writes that, “Implicitly or explicitly, they cast doubt on values that have been taken for granted, or were assumed to be unshakable,” concluding, “This may indeed be the principal significance of such antimodels, of their secret strengths and hidden victories. The negative hero, more keenly perhaps than the traditional hero, challenges our assumptions, raising new questions of how we see, or wish to see ourselves” (Brombert 2). We have, it seems, worn the hero out, learning almost all that we can from him. The antihero, by subverting our notions of the hero, provides a new way to enter many of the same stories and see what else is there.
Sources
Brombert, Victor. In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, 1830-1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Browning, Robert. “Porphyria’s Lover.” Robert Browning’s Poetry: A Norton Critical Edition. Loucks, James F., Editor. W.W. Norton & Company, 1979. 74-75.
Langbaum, Robert. “The Dramatic Monologue: Sympathy and Judgment.” The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1963. 75-108.
Robin Marx - Robin Marx holds a Ph.D. in English with concentrations in contemporary poetry and creative writing. His interests also range to Romantic ...
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