Name: Jasleen Kaur

Roll No.- 22/0168

Course- B.A. Honours English
Year and Section- 2 B
Paper- Victorian Literature

ROBERT BROWNING AS A VICTORIAN POET

The Victorian age was characterised by optimism and a sense that everything would continue to
expand and improve. Beneath the public optimism and positivism, however, the nineteenth century
was also a century of paradoxes and uncertainties. For this age, the novel was the dominant literary
form- a reversal of the situation in the Romantic Age. The biggest breakthrough of the nineteenth
century realist novel was that it made possible the exploration of personal voices and material realities
of ordinary individuals. However, Browning’s dramatic monologues show that poetry is equally
capable of the exploration of character. There was also a great variety in the types of poems being
written- Tennyson has written exquisite narrative and descriptive verse famed for its verbal music.
Browning is well- known for his dramatic monologues, which in the space of few lines, creates a
whole scenario before our eyes. Arnold is well-known for his poetry as well as for his criticism of the
society of his time. He is the poet of loss and separation who laments the passing of innocence of the
earlier days of humankind. But, unlike lyric poetry, where the speaker’s point of view often coincided
with that of the poet, Browning is able to decisively separate the voice of the poet from that of the
poet persona. Adding a further layer of theatricality to Browning’s poems is his use of incident and
historical material.
The dramatic monologue form was “certainly taken up and fully exploited for the first time” by
nineteenth century poets, perfected by Robert Browning. The central spotlight is often focused upon
the figure of the speaker and the critics have studied in detail how ‘a typically eloquent rhetorician’
manipulates his auditor, “...the typical speaker of Browning’s monologue is aggressive, often
threatening, nearly always superior, socially and/or intentionally, to the auditor”. The auditor is
compelled rather forced to hear, and act as “an absolutely silent, a passive receptor of a verbal tour de
force that leaves him no opportunity for response”. In fact, the second person’s ‘silence’ in
monologues “highlights the tension between consensus and resistance”. This tension is “central
characteristic” of a dramatic monologue - the reader is able to see and understand the speaker through
the shadowy figure of the auditor. The reader is often silent’ in the beginning, but as the utterance
progresses, he begins to interpret the speech and the relationship between the speaker and the listener
and their interaction and thus the reader establishes his superiority over both the speaker and the
auditor.
Robert Langbaum in his article on ‘Dramatic Monologue — Sympathy vs. Judgement’ explores the
tensions between sympathy and judgement in all dramatic monologues. “The reader’s own response to
the speaker swings between a sympathetic identification with him, no matter how strange or disturbed
that speaker may be and a more objective, distanced judgement.” Many critics are concerned with the
speaker’s “verbal delineation” how the speaker is able to force himself upon the listener and the real
reader by luring them into his verbal webs; and also, with the irony that “springs the verbal traps that
have been set”. The reader does sympathise with the speaker to a great extent, but he is also aware of
the role of the silent auditor. The reader realises that the poem’s listener ‘you’ is intentionally
overwhelmed by the speaker, whose only aim is “an often-narcissistic self-delineation.” The Duke of
My Last Duchess and the charismatic title scoundrel of Fra Lippo Lippi are the greatest narcissists
created by Browning.
“The listener in the typical Browning monologue recognises the speaker’s position of power, given
the latter’s aggressive, sometimes even menacing nature, the apparent passivity of the silent listener
seems at once more remarkable, and yet the more understandable.” We are not surprised at the silence
of the envoy in My Last Duchess. The Duke is superior to him in rank and then his intimidating
generosity is more frightening, the reader is able to penetrate the imposed silence of the envoy. This
code of silence is grounded in fear. Because of fear the intimidated auditor is compelled to keep quiet
and not to express his feelings in any way — through facial expression or some gesture. It does not
necessarily imply “consent’ and yet hostile circumstances make him lose his identity. “The silence of
the addressee is perceptibly an offensive one, particularly as by generic definition he is unable to
break the situational silence, whether in agreement or disagreement, whether in comprehension or
misunderstanding”. Since the reader has no ‘clearly discernible response from the textual auditor he
has to turn toward the speaker—his self-portraiture. “The very silence of the passive, listening figure’
induces the reader to interpretation. This is what Browning expected from ‘an ideal reader,’ he said ‘a
work like mine depends more immediately (than an acted drama) on the intelligence and sympathy of
the reader for its success—indeed were my scenes stars it must be his co-operating fancy which,
supplying all charm, shall connect the scattered lights into a constellation—a lyre or a Crown. “So
many of Browning’s monologues are self reflexively about art itself, the poems are pointing as
precisely towards the paradigmatic structure of their own ‘correct’ interpretation”. “The hierarchy set
up by the speaker himself is undermined by the poem’s own status as the text; in that which it would
be difficult in some poems to know that anything had been communicated to the auditor at all.” The
speaker gains or losses at the same time by silencing the listener, he tries to fulfill his demand for
identity’ but this demand is “accomplished at his own expenses” and his history is “undermined by
something or someone not in his control”, the subjectivity of the reader.
Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett in 1845. “A dramatic poet has to make you love or admire his
men and women - they must do or say all that you are to see and hear - really do it in your face, say
into your ears, and it is wholly for you, in your power to blame what is so said and done.”
Thus, Browning insists on the reader’s awareness of himself or herself as a figure both as a subjective
self and as a trope. ‘The imposed silence of the painted figure of the last Duchess (in My Last
Duchess) does not coincide with oblivious’—she is both silent and dead. She is literally oblivious but
figuratively she is not, for who knows for certain that her death may not have been exaggerated. She
looks ‘as if she were alive (line 2) and then ‘never read/Strangers like you that pictured countenance
without (seeming) to want to ask if you they durst/How such a glance came there’ (6-12). The Duke is
irritated to realise that the portrait has so beautifully captured through the ‘half-flush’ the essential
generosity of the Duchess’s spirit—and this generosity has been a source of annoyance when she was
alive and it is still troubling him after her death.
The portrait presents the Duchess so strikingly alive and yet so ‘silent’ in her very presence. Her
image tells a story which the strangers read. The Duke must control the interpretation of the visual
text since he knows the viewer’s interpretation must already have begun. The Duke, who is a
possessor of property and person, is “finally possessed” by the life-like figure of the Duchess “with its
immortalised glance’ over which he has no more control now than he did before, the sympathetic
glance that ‘went everywhere’ (L.24). and the blush that favoured all continue to do so. The resistance
to the Duke’s narcissistic dalliance, to put it in another way, comes from the “liveliness of the painting
itself, her life- in-death” haunts him and provokes him to acknowledge “the beauty and candour of her
painted face, epitomised by the heightened colour of her blushing cheek”, his behaviour “belies his
story of her supposed betrayal of the Duke himself”.
The image of the Duchess enables the reader to probe the character of the Duke “The glance that sees
the joy of the world, and the spot of joy” that marks the spirit that animated her countenance
undermine the ‘authoritative version’ which intends to reduce her from subject to object, a mere piece
of art. The portrait is both the subject and the object of the story, “Far from being effaced the Duchess
is time and time again brought back to life by the Duke’s pathological sensitivity to an unguided and
therefore, free reading of the text”—the portrait of his last Duchess.
The portrait is an ironical figuration of the actual reader-the Duchess in the portrait is a living
presence as she is beyond the control of the Duke’s attempted rhetorical, similarly the reader is at
once inside and outside the frame of the Duke’s self-portrait. The Duke’s demand for self-identity, and
his effort to change the Duchess into an object are resisted by the Duchess’s presence in the portrait—
'Stands as if alive’, her ‘spot of joy’ ‘half-flush’, ‘her passionate glance’, ‘her smiles’ all seem to point
to the Duke’s failure to “tame her”. And the reader’s objective study of the Duke’s manner of
utterance asserts his supremacy over the Duke—the Duke thus becomes both the subject and object of
his study, the Duchess tropes into the reader’s interpretation. Browning’s poems are akin to
Whitman’s. Their poems highlight the rhetorical or persuasive nature of literature. The I of the listener
may appear to be effaced in the dramatic monologue, but the you used for the listener by the speaker
is never effaced / you the reader is more powerful than I the speaker.
The poem compels the reader not only to understand the motive of the speaker, but also evaluate him,
how far he is able to judge himself. This dramatic monologue is an attempt at self-justification, the
Duke is justifying his action not only to the listener and the reader, but also to himself. He is able to
self-convince himself that the Duchess deserved the death and he can marry again. He is not guilty.
He is all powerful–a God Neptune. We pity the Duke because he fails to realise what a cold blooded
murderer he is. In spite of his being a great appreciator of art, a man of authority, he is a base person,
possessive, greedy, jealous, vain, proud, arrogant, autocrat and boastful, while the Duchess was
innocent, cheerful, friendly and simple minded. Perhaps he has no human feelings—he gets her killed.
He is a skilfully created detestable character, like Porphyria’s lover. In My Last Duchess we also
observe that the male protagonist is the manipulator in so far as he has provided the portrait with a
meaning that it did not maintain at the time that it was painted. In this sense, the Duke asserts power.
However, he demonstrates his weaknesses as he addresses the portrait, confusing the once-living
woman with her painted image. His animation of the Duchess reflects his own anxiety of dealing with
the changing identity he can’t control.
Browning's monologues are frequently narrative, a point made clear by contrasting them with the
monologues of his contemporaries, such as Tennyson's "Ulysses" or Arnold's "Dover Beach," which
are often involved in abstracting and conceptualizing experience. At the same time, "Porphyria's
Lover" and "My Last Duchess" are much more concerned with observing or being seen than other
Browning monologues, say, "Andrea del Sarto." The two elements of speaking and looking are
dramatically inter- connected in "Porphyria's Lover." The Lover's "speech" comprising the manifest
content of this text stands in sharp contrast to his silence within the scene he describes to an
unidentified, phantom listener. The persona's function as silent observer within the episode he is
narrating is confirmed by his detailed description of Porphyria's appearance on this night she has
come to him through the rain. He tells us: "she sat down by my side / And called me. When no voice
replied" (11. 14-15; my emphasis) apparently, she continues to speak to him. As he silently watches
her speaking to him, he becomes the mastered object to be petted and "loved." It is she who is
reported as "Murmuring how she loved me" (1. 21), while he remains the silent watcher. When he
looks into her eyes, however, he (mis)reads a kind of romantic idolatry - "at last I knew / Porphyria
worshipped me" (11. 32-33) - and he rouses himself from watching to strangle her in a ritualistic
sacrifice commensurate with her "worship."
The punchline in this funereal joke is, of course, the claim that "she guessed not how / Her darling one
wish would be heard" (11. 56-57). This assertion focuses attention upon the most prominent "gap" or
"lapse" in this narrative. The surprise of our discovering that we have been "listening" to a murderer is
paralleled by this "gap" in the logic of sequential events. How are we to understand a man who
murders the woman he supposedly loves? That gap in the narrative or the logic of events resulting
from the suppression of Porphyria's "darling one wish" can be filled only through speculation about
what that "wish" was. Given the romantic setting in which she has come to him out of a world from
which he is foreclosed, it seems most likely that she probably said something like "I wish I could stay
here with you forever." In his own mad fashion, the Lover has (mis)read that text in order to escape
being positioned as "feminine," i.e., a loved object to be abandoned again as she may have many
times before. He reaffirms her "feminine" position as one too weak to break those "vainer ties" to a
world in which he can have no presence. Torn between moments of passionate possession of her and
inevitable abandonment or "loss," he has murdered her in order to turn her into a fetishist object
which can never leave.
That fear of object loss, Lacan would suggest, is a metaphor of a repressed fear of a greater loss, the
loss of life itself. It may well have been the Lover's fear of death - the ultimate menace to the self -
which urged him to sacrifice her to his own uncontrolled desire to stave off extinction. Narrating the
manifest text which his unconscious has generated as a misreading of her "darling one wish," the
Lover confirms that he is now the masterful subject. He is the observer; she, the silenced object. "And
yet God has not said a word!" (1. 60) he proclaims. Even God has been rendered silent, mastered, in
the face of the narrating of this masterful subject. Through the power of his narrating, Porphyria's
Lover projects an image of the Promethean rebel defying even God and remaking Porphyria in the
image of the silent, eternally faithful object of love. In this way Browning is deconstructing romance
as a narrative framework. The title of the poem suggests an intertextual relationship to Keats's "The
Eve of St. Agnes,"5 and the connection of texts is confirmed by the setting and situation in the
Browning poem; that is, the context of lovers meeting at night despite wretched weather. Romance,
with its rhetoric of "dying for love," is shown to be narcissistic at its centre. "Loss" and the fear of
abandonment function as metaphors for the fear of the ultimate loss - death itself. Unable to live
without the object of his love, the narcissistic lover turns the loved one into an object which represents
the deadliness of such "love." In these ways "Porphyria's Lover" rehearses issues of positioning
evident in the poem which has perhaps provoked more interest in Browning's readers than any other-
"My Last Duchess." Most of the controversy involves attempts to decide definitively what the Duke
did to his former wife, but futile attempts to resolve that issue merely draw our attention away from
the discourse of the Other. That discourse clarifies what this monologue involves, for like "Porphyria's
Lover" this poem is structured by polarities of seeing and being seen, the active and the passive,
narrating and listening.
The habit of concluding a monologue with a brief restatement of the speaker's most radical limitations
is a recurrent one in Browning. One explanation is that the conflict between flesh and spirit has its
intriguing parallel in Browning's own artistic practice- in the inter- action between the concrete
elements of dramatic personality, which are the "flesh" of Browning's poem, and the ideas they
support. Fra Lippo's philosophy is also an account of Browning's poetic method- a dialectical play of
opposites, brought together at their climax, like body and soul, in a synthetic union of personality and
ideas. But if the "philosophy" solves the problem that the speaker raises- if, in this case, the dialectic
of flesh and spirit is resolved, as it almost is- then the poem will cease to be a dramatic monologue
and degenerate into a mere lecture by the poet.
According to a critic “Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi is an interesting poem because takes on questions
of identity, artistic expression, institution of religion, the connection between mind and body,
obedience, and ongoing search for the meaning of life and escapism (granted they are all inter-
related). From the very start of the poem, Browning presents the narrator as a man in search of his
identity for the monk questions “who am I?” The monk did not choose the life, for it was his aunt, a
nun, who found him as a homeless child and brought him to the convent. The narrator was hardened
by his experiences on the street, and it was these experiences which nurtured his artistic vision. He
was reproached by his fellow-monks (senior) for his portrayal of humans for the narrator presented
the intimate details of human action and body—the monks merely wanted the narrator to present the
human soul on canvas. They did not understand the connection between body and soul; they basically
mistook external beauty being representative of human emotion— ‘Take the prettiest face...you can’t
discover if it means hope, fear, sorrow or joy? Won’t beauty go with these?” (Lines 208- 211)”.
Fra Lippo Lippi seems to criticise the hypocrisy of religion, and the senior monks, perhaps makes an
effort to establish that the institution of religion is concerned with the surface details of the soul’ and
not ‘with delving into the souls of human in order to be the guide to the soul’, Lippo defends not only
style of his painting, and its close link with the universe created by God and to life, also his escapades.
“He finds some sort of escape from the world around him through his affairs with women, through
‘sin’—the last few lines of the poem imply as long as he is not caught, it is all good.’ Lippo thinks that
the church and other institutions are concerned with appearances, and not with harsh realities of life.
Fra Lippo Lippi was a personal favourite of Browning. William De Vane, a great Browning scholar,
finds a close relationship of Fra Lippo to his creator. Browning, he says could not have chosen a better
poem with which to challenge the orthodox conception of poetry in mid-nineteenth century, or one
that better expresses the new elements in poetry which he was to introduce. Browning found in the
Renaissance painter a very sympathetic character like himself highly individualistic, suffering from
the tyranny of artistic convention, and like himself energetic and instinct with seemingly well thought
out aesthetic and religious opinions which chimed with Browning’s own.
Thus, more than any other writer, Browning used his verse to go beneath the surface appearance given
by his speakers. He examines ‘between the lines’ a wide range of moral scruples and problems,
characters and attitudes.
References:

1. Carter, Ronald, and John McRae. “Victorian Poetry.” The Routledge History of Literature in
English Britain and Ireland, 3rd ed., Routledge, London, 2017, pp. 289–292.
2. Langbaum, Robert. “Sympathy vs Judgement.” The Dramatic Monologue: Sympathy
vs Judgement.
3. Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A. “The Pragmatics of Silence, and the Figuration of the Reader in
Browning’s Dramatic Monologues.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 35, no. 3, 1997, pp. 287–302.
JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40003053. Accessed 1 Nov. 2023.
4. Ingersoll, Earl G. “Lacan, Browning, and the Murderous Voyeur: ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and
‘My Last Duchess.’” Victorian Poetry, vol. 28, no. 2, 1990, pp. 151–57. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40002164. Accessed 1 Nov. 2023.
5. Shaw, W. David. “Character and Philosophy in ‘Fra Lippo Lippi.’” Victorian Poetry, vol. 2,
no. 2, 1964, pp. 127–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40001259. Accessed 1 Nov.
2023.