Robert Browning.

Martens, Britta

For a while now, research on the Victorian period has been informed by a shift in emphasis to cultural studies and material culture. In relation to poetry, which relies so much for its effect on close attention to textual details, this changing fashion has not always been advantageous. Robert Browning with his mission to make real men and women speak-even if they are seemingly distanced from his Victorian readers through their historical settings-has perhaps fared rather better than some of his contemporaries. The thorough research on his personal experiences and broader cultural context conducted over the past two and a half decades for the Brownings' Correspondence and the three ongoing critical editions may also have facilitated critical work which assesses him in the light of his Victorian culture. Approaches through various kinds of context are evident in this year's publications on the poet, alongside perspectives from other disciplines, such as cultural anthropology, law, and psychology.

I will begin, though, with the most substantial publication in Browning studies this year, Volume XI of The Complete Works of Robert Browning by Ohio University Press, which comprises Fifine at the Fair (1872), edited by Michael Bright, and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), edited by the late Susan E. Dooley and Allan C. Dooley with notes by Bright. These two works share their setting in the French seaside resorts where Browning spent his summer holidays in the 1870s, and both take the format of recording one side of a conversation during an extended walk. However, they are diametrically opposed in their subjects and degree of difficulty. While Fifine with its speaker's casuistical defense of adultery is often considered on a par with Sordello's obscurity, Red Cotton Night-Cap Country with its protagonist's conflict between carnal sin and religious fervor received critical praise for its relative lucidity. Nevertheless, it is this poetic rendition of a contemporary legal cause celebre which is supported by the bigger apparatus of notes. Drawing on work by Nathaniel Hart, Bright has compiled over fifty pages of research on the poem.

Notes range from botanical descriptions of sea-weeds to incidental information about the location of St. Aubin (Saint-Rambert in the poem) in relation to the D-Day beaches. Twelve photographs bring to life the main locations of the poem and also show the traditional Norman white caps to which the poem's title alludes. The edition thus provides a valuable complement to Mark Siegchrist's Rough in Brutal Print: The Legal Sources of Browning's Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1981). Browning's treatment of sources and his research for this critically neglected poem offer an intriguing parallel to the much discussed Ring and the Book, and the detailed notes here show the potential for broader scholarship on his conversion of facts into poetic fiction.

The notes on Fifine are less ample and often comparable to those in Pettigrew and Collins's Yale/Penguin edition, the only other critical edition of these two poems to date. Both poems are presented with meticulously edited textual variants. In the case of Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, this includes a good number of variants on four different sets of proof sheets. The short period between the completion of the poem's first draft and its typesetting means that the reader is given a rare opportunity to observe Browning's process of textual revision on these proofs. The full notes about composition, sources, publication, and reception of both poems make the volume an essential resource.

Also very notable is The Browning Ancestors: Setting the Record Straight (Pulborough, UK: Wyndham & Chilters, 2008). This book with its many illustrations, family trees, and appendixes is the result of years of loving research into the Browning family history by Robert F. Browning, the great-great grandson of the poet's half-uncle William Shergold Browning. In the early sections of the book, the author investigates some of the oral traditions about the Brownings' ancestors as they are recorded by Mrs. Orr. Delving into the early history of heraldry, he also considers the Brownings' claim to a coat of arms. The facts here are difficult to establish definitively, but these chapters clear up some misunderstandings and provide a useful overview of possibilities. While the book's second half about the family of the poet's half-uncles is of limited interest to the student of his work, the discussions of the family's apparent Rosicrucian tradition and their connections with the financial empire of the Rothschilds contribute to a more rounded picture of the poet's experience and social context, adding to the thorough work of John Maynard in Browning's Youth (1977).

A fine article which situates a poem within broader cultural contexts is Jonathan Loesberg's "Darwin, Natural Theology and Slavery: A Justification of Browning's 'Caliban'" (ELH 75, no. 4 [2008]: 871-898). Loesberg positions himself in opposition to the frequent reading of this poem as a satire designed to promote Browning's own optimistic faith. He argues that Caliban's natural theology is not a mere reflection of his character but a logical argument based on Caliban's empirical observation of his environment. In a first step, Loesberg demonstrates that Caliban not only shows the flaws of William Paley's argument against creation from design and Joseph Butler's recourse to the natural world as evidence for Christian revelation; he also echoes Immanuel Kant's conclusion that the argument from design cannot account for an omnipotent, ex nihilo creator, and he rehearses David Hume's reflections on flawed or failed design which suggests an imperfect creator. However, unlike those two philosophers, Caliban does not proceed to reject the argument for creation from design but instead creates the capricious god Setebos. In the second part of his article, Loesberg traces how Caliban's conceptualization of his world and his god is determined by his condition as Prosper's slave, which can be read in terms of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Caliban's cruelty toward other creatures now appears as an understandable projection of the cruelty that he experiences at the hands of his slave master, and his vacillation between transgression and submissiveness becomes plausible as the slave's way of expressing resistance in his position of subordination. This full and lucid article makes a convincing case for the poem not as a vehicle of Browning's theology but as an exploration of how a speaker arrives at his beliefs.

A less satisfactory balance for the Browning scholar between poem and context is struck in articles by Christopher MacKenna and Paul Ardoin. In "Childe Roland and the Mystic's Quest: Analytic Faith in a World of Lost Meanings" (British Journal of Psychotherapy 24, no. 4 [2008]: 472-487), MacKenna develops an argument about the spirituality of psychoanalysis. He uses Browning's poem as an expression of the nineteenth-century sense of a godless universe that results from the privileging of Enlightenment rationalism over intuition. While MacKenna only considers poetry as a reflection of, rather than a participating element in, culture, Ardoin's recourse to New Criticism disregards context altogether. In "Within the Text of Browning's 'The Guardian-Angel'" (Explicator 66, no. 2 [Winter 2008]: 91-93), he holds that this poem can be read without any contextual information, dismissing even evidence for the identification of the speaker's "angel at [his] side" as Elizabeth. In limiting himself to this method, Ardoin produces a generalized interpretation of the poem as a means to demonstrate "the power of great art" (p. 93).

By contrast, Linda M. Shires argues for a close connection between Browning's personal experience and his poetry. Her "Browning's Grafts" (SEL 48, no. 4 [2008]: 769-778) is one of two articles which consider early, less studied texts by Browning to trace in them the features that distinguish his dramatic monologues. Shires examines letters which the poet wrote to Euphrasia Fanny Haworth between 1837 and 1842, detecting in them a hybrid of the lyrical and the dramatic that also characterizes his poetry. She suggests that in these letters with their many shifts, ellipses, quotations, and allusion Browning "adopts a multitude of male roles and voices ... that encircle his female recipient with a dizzying succession of different dramatic contexts" (p. 774), while he expects her to respond by revealing a lyric identity that is gendered as feminine. Yann Tholoniat's "De la voix au theatre au theatre de la voix: l'envers du decor poetique de Robert Browning" (Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 67 [2008]: 421-438) considers the frequency and technique of some asides and soliloquies in Browning's plays to confirm the established reading of these as tending toward the dramatic monologue rather than stage drama.

Ross Wilson concentrates on an aspect of Browning's writing technique that is focused on an even smaller scale. His short article "Robert Browning's Compounds" (Literature Compass 6, no. 2 [2009]: 524-531) forms part of a cluster of papers from a conference on prosody in the long nineteenth century. Wilson considers Browning's trademark use of compound words and their relation to meter. He challenges the view that compounds create concision, pointing to Browning's frequent use of semantically redundant compounds such as "ring-thing." Taking issue with the suggestion that such a compound is a mere contrivance to fit words into the meter, he argues that in these cases meter and meaning are closely linked. The more extended study of the poet's versification which Wilson plans could yield valuable insights into his linguistic and prosodic idiosyncrasies and add to the research of Donald Hair and Yopie Prins.

The impact of Browning's stylistic innovation on a lesser contemporary and a famous successor forms the subject of Andrew M. Stauffer's and Matthew Bolton's articles. In "'The King is Cold,' by Stoddard, Not Browning" (VLC 36, no. 2 [2008]: 361-362), Stauffer resolves a mystery to which he drew attention a decade ago. He reveals that a poem published in two New York periodicals which was falsely attributed to Browning was in fact by Richard Henry Stoddard. Stauffer's article coincides with Joseph Phelan's fuller article in BSN on the same subject (covered in last year's review) which offers the kind of discussion of Browning's American reception for which Stauffer calls.

Contributing to the body of criticism about Browning's impact on modernist poets, Matthew Bolton's "'Not Known Because Not Looked For': Eliot's Debt to Browning" (Yeats Eliot Review 25, no. 2 [2008]: 10-19) examines the tension between Eliot's apparent denigration of Browning in his criticism and a debt in his poetry, which is even more noticeable in Eliot's drafts. Key influences that Bolton considers include the transformation of Browning's dramatic address to a silent listener into Eliot's internal monologue, the connection of landscape and psychology on the model of "Childe Roland," and Browning's use of complementary poems which Eliot develops into a juxtaposition of different voices within the same poem. Bolton takes a rather conservative view of the implicit statements about authoritative perspective in The Ring and the Book, and this allows him to portray The Wasteland with its "lack of a governing vatic consciousness" (p. 17) as a radical break with the Victorian long poem. If he had engaged with readings of Browning's poem which see it as challenging the authority of both the poet-speaker and the Pope, Bolton might have concluded that in this respect, too, Eliot builds on, rather than rejects, his predecessor.

An approach that is quite different from Bolton's textual comparison is taken by David Sassian, who has recourse to concepts from cultural anthropology. In "The Ritual in 'The Novel in The Ring and the Book': Browning, Henry James, Eric Gans" (VP 46, no. 3 12008]: 233-248), he reads Browning's poem through James's famous critique and the cultural anthropologist Gans. Gans draws on Rene Girard's thesis that communities purge themselves of destructive forces through the infliction of violence on a scapegoat figure and that this ritual marks the origin of language. Going beyond Girard, he postulates that language derives from an "abortive gesture of appropriation" (p. 237) which designates the desired object as sacred. He holds that the scapegoat ritual creates a positive dynamic of solidarity within the community. Sassian detects this pattern in The Ring and the Book, which presents Pompilia as "the victim whose murder allows the establishment of a communal presence through a renunciatory linguistic act that consecrates the body" (p. 241). This is an interesting new perspective on the poem, although the heavy use of Gans's terminology and the rather compressed application to Browning's poem do not make the article an easy read.

Laura Struve's "'This Is No Way to Tell a Story': Robert Browning's Attack on the Law in The Ring and the Book" (Law and Literature 20, no. 3 [2008]: 423-443) takes us back to realms that are more familiar to the student of Victorian literature, especially the novel. Struve considers this poem in the context of Jeremy Bentham's condemnation of legal fictions and of legal reforms in nineteenth-century Britain, which anticipated today's adversarial trial system. She sees Browning's technique of multiple narratives that recreate the interventions by lawyers and others made possible by the adversarial principle not as a means of apprehending truth but as a device which exposes the courts' inability to establish truth and justice. Browning's two lawyers in particular prioritize the creation of narratives and the display of rhetorical brilliance over the pursuit of truth. This echoes contemporary criticism of adversarial trials by Bentham and others. Struve concludes that the poem's narrative set-up and the pivotal presence of the Pope, who takes on the role of the paternalistic judge in the style of eighteenth-century courts, express Browning's reactionary critique of the adversarial principle and his nostalgia for eighteenth-century judicial procedures. This is convincingly argued, but might have been balanced by an appreciation of Browning's delight in the creative possibilities which this kind of legal procedure offered him as a poet. After all, his impersonal poetics derives much of its appeal from the impossibility of establishing unambiguous meaning.

Ellen L. O'Brien's Crime in Verse: The Poetics of Murder in the Victorian Era (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 2008) also relates Browning's work to legal practice. Building on readings of Victorian poetry as a means of cultural critique by Isobel Armstrong, Antony Harrison, and E. Warwick Slinn, O'Brien examines how poetic form (especially in the popular ballad and the dramatic monologue) is used to problematize Victorian discourse about crime. One chapter consists of close readings of "Porphyria's Lover," "My Last Duchess," "The Laboratory," and Rossetti's "A Last Confession." O'Brien situates these texts in relation to the conflicting discourses of the law and mental science, drawing like Ekbert Faas (Retreat into the Mind, 1988) on contemporary medical publications, but also adding interesting sources about insanity defenses in murder trials. She suggests that readers experience the dilemma of trying to determine whether Browning's monologists should be understood through the objectifying categories of insanity, such as moral insanity ("Porphyria"), monomania ("My Last Duchess"), or mania ("The Laboratory"), or whether they should be judged according to the rational categories of criminal and moral responsibility. She entitles this chapter "The Murderous Subject and the Criminal Sublime," but this concept of the criminal sublime remains rather vague.

Another chapter examines The Ring and the Book alongside Bulwer Lytton's Clytemnestra and Levy's Medusa in relation to mid-century debates about marriage, domestic abuse, and divorce proceedings. These historically distanced representations of domestic murder articulate in O'Brien's view an indictment of marriage and of the ideology that opposes divorce even after the setting up of divorce courts. Focusing on Guido's unsuccessful attempt to divorce Pompilia, which leads to his determination to re-impose his patriarchal authority through murder, O'Brien argues that his and Pompilia's accounts of their marriage resemble each other in their acknowledgement that the impossibility of divorce forces their relationship to end through violence. She also discusses an interesting contrast between Guido and his defense lawyer Archangelis, who is obsessed with his own domestic idyll but defends Guido's violation of domestic peace.

Browning's exploration of violent death in a different setting is the subject of my own "Death as Spectacle: The Paris Morgue in Dickens and Browning" (Dickens Studies Annual 39 [2008]: 223-248). The article reads "Apparent Failure" and Dickens' repeated references to the morgue in his journalism in the light of a developing sensational culture. Tracing the resemblance between these texts and contemporary sensational narratives and criticism about the sensation novel, I argue that both authors present textual representatives of the Victorian middle-class tourist trying to come to terms with an extreme expression of the sensational that has no direct equivalent in Britain. Both Dickens' and Browning's tourists attempt to overcome their unease at the spread of the taste for sensationalism among the British middle classes by projecting these base desires onto a foreign, lower-class crowd.

Finally, Browning features prominently in three monographs. In Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2007), Maureen Moran devotes half of her chapter on "Sensations of the Cloister" to an analysis of Browning's monologues on Catholic clerics and The Ring and the Book. She argues that these texts act as critiques not only of Catholicism but also of Victorian middle-class gender politics, propriety, and social conventions. For instance, she reads Bishop Blougram as a caricature of the Victorian individualist and successful self-fashioned man and the Bishop of Saint Praxed as "the dark side of the Victorian paterfamilias" (p. 117).

Sophie Ratcliffe's On Sympathy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008) analyzes some of Browning's major poems alongside works by W. H. Auden and Samuel Beckett. Challenging Langbaum's influential notion of sympathy in the dramatic monologue from an innovative philosophical perspective, she offers reflections on the modes of the reader's engagement with fictional characters. The overarching argument in the Browning chapter occasionally gets lost, but some interesting points on the details of individual poems are retained.

Herbert Tucker's masterly Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), itself of epic proportions, contains longer discussions of Sordello and The Ring and the Book. Tucker draws astutely on major critical sources about these two central works and develops them into a dense and eloquent analysis of the poems' salient features. The reading of Sordello revisits some issues he explored in his first monograph, Browning's Beginnings (1980), such as the use of similes and the poem's self-conscious play with narrative structure and language. It also stresses how Browning turns the Romantics' use of irony against their own sacrosanct confidence in the subjective self. The narrative structure of The Ring of the Book is compared to similar devices in its exact contemporary, Morris' Earthly Paradise. Yet, as Tucker points out, this is only a formal similarity, since Browning's recherche subject matter and his undermining of narrative authority contrast with Morris' more conventional aesthetics. Tucker holds that the in propria persona speaker of Browning's framing books lacks the epoist's absolute insight precisely because he makes such confident claims for his superior vision of Pompilia's innocence. This undermining of narrative authority can be attributed to two causes: Browning's lifelong liberal suspicion of authority, which is also manifest in Sordello and the relativist dramatic monologue, and his awareness of the impact of historical circumstance on the genesis of texts, which includes the "admission of the historicity of his own artistic practice" (p. 439). Tucker finally considers the role of myths in the poem, ranging from the debunking of the myth of infallible authority to the celebration of paradoxically liberating self-sacrifice which is informed by Browning's "evangelical-grained, progress-inflected protestantism" (p. 444)--a typically condensed statement with shades of Browning himself.

I would like to thank Cynthia Burgess of the Armstrong Browning Library for alerting me to some of the publications covered in this review.