Origins of the Monologue: The Hidden God by W. David Shaw (review)

272 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 black woman convicted of arson in Montreal in 1734. Slave narratives are not necessarily absent from Canadian literature; rather, their presence goes undetected because they assume an un-American form. To return to Smallwood, that ex-African-American slave and Underground Railroad operative, his text is striking for its >public intellectual= guise. Indeed, Smallwood damns slavery because it has >robbed the world of the intellectual part that God designed [Africans] should perform in creation.= His larger concern is fraud: plagiarism, deceit, embezzlement. So the Narrative is a j=accuse, charging principally other blacks with >treason.= Its recurrent words are >treachery= and its cognates, and the account reminds us of the grave dangers that Underground Railroad slave liberators faced from both without and within their ranks. Smallwood=s Narrative is, again, not >the sole example of a slave narrative written and published in Canada,= but it is a vital species of Victorian Era CanLit. Almonte is to be commended for his superb annotations and his >reconstructive surgery= of Smallwood=s biography. His introduction, however, should be rethought. (GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE) W. David Shaw. Origins of the Monologue: The Hidden God University of Toronto Press 1999. xii, 252. $50.00 In Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993), Isobel Armstrong critiques the tendency to treat the Victorian period as an age of mere transition between Romanticism and modernism. Focusing more on poetics than politics, W. David Shaw has countered the same critical elision through a series of major studies charting the connections between nineteenth-century poetry and developments in religion, philosophy, rhetoric, and aesthetic theory. In Origins of the Monologue he addresses the cultural traditions and transformations shaping the most innovative Victorian poetical form, the dramatic monologue. Shaw attributes >the ascendency of the monologue to three neglected causes=: >the agnostic thought of Kant, Sir William Hamilton, and H.L. Mansell=; new theories of the unconscious >associated with John Keble, Thomas Carlyle, and E.S. Dallas=; and nineteenth-century adaptations of >three legacies,= including the >dialogues of Socrates, the conversation poems of Coleridge,= and the Keatsian poet=s proliferation of identities through >self-created masks.= His investigations of these intertwined >legacies= yield particularly fruitful results. Analysing Socratic irony in Victorian monologues, he distinguishes between deconstructive irony and the constructive irony of monologues like >Saul= that explore an >unnameable Other= analogous to Socrates= >Unknown God.= Investigating the >swerves of voice= created through apostrophe or aversio in monologues, he emphasizes not the Romantic precedent of Wordsworth=s >poetry of experience,= as HUMANITIES 273 Robert Langbaum does, but the dialogical vocatives of Coleridge=s conversation poems. The focus on structures of address produces striking readings of Tennyson=s and especially Browning=s monologues as >ghostly conjurings= involving the >fictive raising of the historical or legendary dead= by means of >deictics, apostrophes, or other words of power.= Shaw also illuminates the terrible beauty of poems like >The Defence of Guenevere= by showing how William Morris >hollow[s] out ... the referential soul of words= to create an art more haunting than Browning=s resurrection of >energetic historical ghosts.= Shaw=s treatment of the Keatsian proliferation of identities in dramatic monologues generates a nuanced exploration of intimacy rather than sympathy as integral to their effect. >We often feel closer to the speaker in a dramatic monologue than we anticipate or even desire,= he suggests; the >trespass of intimacy= can turn >the reader, like the speaker, into a male voyeur.= The poet too, in exercising a godlike power of impersonation, may turn into >the ultimate voyeur,= democratically intimate with the >lowliest incarnations.= In >gaining the whole world,= he >may lose his own soul.= Origins of the Monologue is a major contribution to the study of dramatic monologues, including works by Chaucer, Donne, Rochester, Richard Howard, and Randall Jarrell, as well as by Browning, Tennyson and Morris. Yet there are conspicuous omissions, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Aside from a brief discussion of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a passing reference to what he sees as Amy Levy=s >caricature= of Socrates in >Xantippe,= Shaw also does not discuss Victorian women poets. His final chapter investigates how assumptions about gender and genre are >broken down= in dramatic monologues...