Robert Browning and the Lure of the Violent Lyric Voice: Domestic Violence and the Dramatic Monologue

Although the study of Victorian poetry may not be teetering on the brink of extinction, contemporary literary scholars have tended to work through their primary concerns in novels rather than poetry when it comes to questions of nineteenth-century domestic ideology. Like Nancy Armstrong, who argues in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) that "the gender of representation is . . . bound . . . to the institution of the novel," academic critics repeatedly position the novel as the most effective testing ground for hypotheses regarding Victorian culture and domesticity. ¹ This essay, by contrast, situates Victorian poetry, and Robert Browning's dramatic monologues in particular, within the analysis of domestic and sexual dynamics that has dominated literary and cultural criticism over the past two decades.

More specifically, I suggest that Browning's dramatic monologues shed new light on a domestic problem of considerable importance to the Victorian period: the psychology of sexual violence. I will argue that Browning's focus on sexual violence paradoxically lies at the heart of both the fierce public rejection of his early work and the suddenly enthusiastic and widespread approval of The Ring and the Book (1868-69), which, after its publication, was "praised to the far side of idolatry." ² This abrupt reversal of critical opinion seems weirdly contradictory, given that the subject matter of The Ring and the Book shares the same transgressive resonances that Victorian readers repudiated in Browning's early work. A violent wife murder is, as Mary Ellis Gibson remarks, "hardly . . . within the conventional bounds of subject matter for a poem of epic proportions" (p. 74). Academic critics, however, have generally neglected to probe the competing Victorian responses to Browning's early and later representations of sexual violence. This oversight not only glosses over important nuances in Browning's formal treatment of the subject, it also obscures the larger implications of the important relation between Victorian representations of sexual conflict and poetic authority. The changing public response to Browning's work stems from a tangled convergence of Victorian literary and social concerns, as Browning questions both the fate of the lyric voice and the traditional power dynamics inherent in the Victorian domestic ideal. Browning at once intervenes in a Victorian debate about domestic violence (a debate which struck at the heart of nineteenth-century domestic ideology and heterosexual norms), and, moreover, implicitly argues that this cultural problem is best explored through poetic representation.

This project, which emulates Isobel Armstrong's efforts to relate "both formal and cultural problems, . . . to see these things as inseparable from one another," first demands a brief and general consideration of literary representations of sexual violence in the Victorian period. ³ Next, I will investigate the representations of domestic violence in Browning's early work, comparing it to representations of sexual conflict in novels and speculating as to why Victorian readers found it so profoundly unsettling. Finally, I will consider how The Ring and the Book's reconfiguration of the lyric voice as testimony accounts for its great public success.

Sexual Violence (Un)represented

Historical work on the subject of sexual violence within the Victorian home suggests that it was a relatively common feature of domestic life, and occurred within families from a wide range of economic and social positions. ⁴ Marital conflict was so prevalent that "until the nineteenth century wife-beaters had been punishable on indictment only," remarks Maeve Dogget, noting further that the punishment for spousal abuse was augmented only marginally in the 1853 Act for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults upon Women and Children. ⁵ More generally, in the decades following the 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act, the Divorce Court proceedings reported in the daily papers effectively exposed the reality of marital violence with some regularity. Real-life accounts of domestic violence--such as Caroline Norton's public condemnation of her abusive husband--also gained national recognition...