Skepticism and the Dramatic Monologue: Webster against Browning

After a century of neglect, Augusta Webster’s poetry has undergone a well-deserved revival. The renewed appearance of her poetry in our current sense of Victorian literature is, as Melissa Valiska Gregory has noted, a “feminist success story”; her work is now commonly included in anthologies of Victorian poetry and has been the frequent topic of recent scholarship.¹ And for many readers, Webster achieves her most noteworthy poetic accomplishments when writing the dramatic monologue. Angela Leighton, for instance, claims that her “most successful poetic expression” can be found “in the conversational immediacy and contemporary reference of the dramatic monologue.”² And the anthologists who have brought Webster’s poetry to new readers have tended to agree. Valentine Cunningham has declared that Webster’s work “came truly alive … when she adapted the dramatic monologue of Tennyson and Browning to women’s voices and personae,” Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds that “Webster’s best poetry consists of the dramatic monologues in her two major volumes of 1866 and 1870,” and Isobel Armstrong, Joseph Bristow, and Cath Sharrock that “those poems on which her reputation mainly rests” are those in which Webster “exploited the dramatic monologue to empower female personae.”³ With the exception of her Mother and Daughter Sonnets, in fact, virtually all of the Webster poems to have seen a wider recent readership are dramatic monologues. They are the generally acknowledged heart of her body of work.

And yet, despite this widespread and justified praise of Webster’s achievement, scholars have not fully explored just how unusual these monologues are. For Webster makes a bold choice to abandon the epistemological problems so famous in Robert Browning’s monologues, which have often been considered a defining element of the genre. The dramatic monologue calls our attention to the particular situation and context of a given speaker, often leading to a wealth of skepticism about the utterance that is often omitted from lyric poetry. The genre, ever since Robert Langbaum’s groundbreaking work, has been viewed as a form that challenges our understanding of a speaker’s self-presentation, forcing us into an unceasing “tension between sympathy and moral judgment.”⁴ Isobel Armstrong, for instance, has described the dramatic monologue as “an infinite regress of possible interpretive instability” where no assertion or belief goes unchallenged.⁵ Angela Leighton, in her discussion of Webster’s dramatic monologues, argues that the form shows that “the self is a thing of inner strata and differences, of overlaid repressions and deceptions” (p. 177). And Linda K. Hughes defines the dramatic monologue as a form that “operates within a problematical epistemology and demands that readers negotiate a range of ambiguities.”⁶ By contrast, Webster’s work, as Patricia Rigg has shown, downplays the “conventions of paradox and irony” often found in the dramatic monologue; her speakers are reliable and trustworthy observers of the world.⁷ Consequently, her poems offer a variant of the dramatic monologue that leaves readers “with the sense that the basic position proposed by the speaker is fully endorsed by the poet.”⁸ Rather than emphasize the “tension between sympathy and moral judgment” or a speaker’s “unconscious self-revelations,” Webster pushes the dramatic monologue into what Adena Rosmarin terms the “Mask Lyric” and “confute[s] rather than reward[s] the reader’s attempts to distinguish the speaker’s meaning from the poem’s.”⁹

Webster, then, writes widely admired dramatic monologues that violate what many critics have seen as the central aim of the form. This puzzle could be solved by abandoning these definitions of the genre for another, such as Cornelia Pearsall’s claim that the genre’s major function is to present speakers who desire “to achieve some purpose … through the medium of their monologues.”¹⁰ But I propose, instead, that Webster’s dramatic monologues are best seen as a deliberate challenge to Browning’s. His monologues are skeptical about human motives and knowledge but surprisingly sympathetic to religious belief; they explore how faith can survive when its epistemological foundations crumble. Webster challenges both of these tendencies, rejecting the persona that frequently appears when Browning turns...