Quiet is hell, I say: The Role of Women Poets in the Development of the Victorian Dramatic Monologue

Abstract

This thesis explores the claim that the Victorian dramatic monologue developed into two distinct traditions – the traditional, predominantly male tradition represented by writers such as Browning and Tennyson, and a separate women’s tradition. Focusing on three elements believed to be characteristic of women’s monologues, the thesis tries to explain why the main critical discussions on the genre excluded women for most of the twentieth century. The first element is the claim that we can better understand the monologues of Victorian women in light of monologues written by other women poets, such as Felicia Hemans, than in light of male writers such as Browning. The second is that women poets largely used the dramatic monologue as a mask to conceal their own social criticism. The third is that women blurred the lines between the lyric and the dramatic by writing speakers that were vaguer and more stereotypical than the speakers written by male poets. My argument is that the problem with a separate women’s tradition is that it excludes women from the contextual developments of the Victorian age. Instead, the thesis traces an alternative line from Browning’s early efforts in the 1830s to Amy Levy’s almost Modernist monologues in the 1880s, and claims that what all these poets had in common was the ways in which they used the dramatic monologue to explore the instabilities of the speaking self against an objectified other.