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5  Carving the mask of language Self and Otherness in Dramatic Monologues 109 Adopting a mask, or inventing a speaker through language, is often a helpful device for poets who wish to explore the conflicted aspects of their own personalities. The dramatic persona covertly expresses something the poet could not express from within his or her own consistent identity. As the monologue emerges, the poet immerses himself or herself into the flow of speech uttered by a speaker who is, in some fashion, differentiated from the writer’s own self. This fictional speaker expresses emotions that are not directly attributable to the author himself or herself. Such dramatization, or “play,” can be a therapeutic aid to self-understanding and self-reconciliation . Freud, for example, in discussing creative writers and daydreaming, used the term Spiel or play to describe the forms of imaginative writing that actually carry out the unrealized wishes of the players or writers themselves and provide a necessary outlet for bearing such wishes. Hence, a dramatic persona is as much of an invention that facilitates a writer’s need to act out a certain role in life, because it is a rhetorical genre. Creating a persona and using it as a vehicle for airing volatile or disturbing emotions can also remedy the kinds of repression that researchers have attributed to illness. As Freud suggests: the unreality of the writer’s imaginative world . . . has important consequences for the technique of his art; for many things which, if they were real, could give no enjoyment, can do so in the play of phantasy, and [sic] many excitements which, in themselves are actually distressing, can become a source of pleasure for the hearers and spectators at the performance of a writer’s work.1 Indeed, the “unreality” of the writer’s imaginative world may include the creation of a persona or self-surrogate who evinces a character through a style of unfamiliar speech. The writer feels as if this creation of character is an “other” separable from the self. However, this character may actually be closer to the core identity of the writer than the writer himself or herself realizes. Like the apparent inchoate nature of the unconscious and its 110 manifest symbols, the dramatic monologue may be an insistent vernacular of the buried self trying to emerge through symbolization and self-extravagation , much like a dream. Such poems often cost their writers an extravagant effort. Indeed, writers may displace emotional conflict to fictional characters to put them safely outside the mind. But the convenient distinction between inside and out is always collapsing. And frightening or not, the collapse responds to a need. We need to acknowledge the old splits and their latest reiterations; using such divisions, even creating with them is possible. Yet such complexities are not what we want, not at all. As Wallace Stevens wrote: “He had to choose. But it was not a choice / between excluding things. It was not a choice / Between, but of.”2 Perhaps it is right to say that the dramatic monologue allows the poet to keep the safety of a distance, however illusory or fatuous that distinction is, in check at the same time the poet can bear the slippage of things from inside to outside without acknowledging that these things were always kept within. Attributing our negative feelings to an invented self, a play-actor, can help to both to acknowledge and to refute the difficult conflicts that bear directly on being. Allowing the awful words to rise from within takes courage, perhaps even a mordant humor to express what is most painful within. Some narratives fade slowly or fly away at the close, some are varied and unpredictable, and bear many readings. Let us begin with a definition. What is the dramatic monologue? As Browning used it, the form shifts the usual positions of poet, speaker, and reader by situating the poet at a distance from the speaker. The reader is then invited to work through the rhetorical “mask” of the poem toward the inferences of the poet who stands behind the speaker’s mask. In discussing the relation between poet and speaker, David St. John observes that every poem is, in a sense, a dramatic monologue. The “voice” we attribute to the poet’s “persona” is yet another created mask “carved of language.”3 If every poem is a dramatic monologue, and every dramatic monologue is a “mask carved out of language,” then every text is both a self...

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