Robert Browning.

Gibson, Mary Ellis

Recent months have brought forth various studies of Robert Browning, ranging from pleasing and careful popularization; to examinations of language, tropes, and gender; to notes and reference works. Those texts aimed at the general reader vary widely in quality, while treatments aimed at a more scholarly audience occasionally caused me to wonder whether their authors were, indeed, reading the same poems.

To begin with the pleasing. Martin Garrett has once again provided a bio-critical study of the Brownings, to accompany his Interviews and Recollections and his A Browning Chronology (both from Macmillan, 2000, and reviewed here in that year). Garrett's Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning appears in the British Library Writers' Lives series (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001). Garrett has essentially provided a lovely picture book with sensible and scrupulous text outlining the two writers' lives and work. The fine illustrations include reproduction of many manuscript and first edition pages, the best-known portraits of both writers, portraits of their associates, and scenes from London and Italy. Garrett's rendition of the poets' lives is written in a lively style with carefully chosen passages from their letters and from their friends' writing and correspondence. His commentary on Robert Browning's poems emphasizes Men and Women, particularly the painters' monologues, "Bishop Blougram's Apology," and "Childe Roland." In this selection Garrett has anticipated the essays published this year, which testify, like Garrett's volume, to the persistent appeal of the dramatic monologues.

Aimed at scholarly rather than general readers, three of this year's most theoretically sophisticated treatments of Browning's poetry focus at least in part on the complex gendering of his work. Both E. Warwick Slinn and Catherine Maxwell wish to correct a tendency in cultural studies to subsume the literary in thematics or in discussions of material culture. Both Slinn and Maxwell enable us to attend to literary convention and language. As Slinn puts it, "I do not wish to deny the cultural and political significance of what texts may do as material commodities ... but I analyze what poems are doing in terms of their internalized dynamic of verbal process, and how that doing connects to cultural contexts and ideological practices" (Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique: The Politics of Performative Language [Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2003], p. 2). Maxwell, too, argues for the dynamic of verbal process, particularly as represented by the handing down of tropes in poetic tradition. She argues, "The form of reading advocated by my study calls on a range of literary historical perspectives that can make particular cultural studies look narrowly historicist--mistaken in their notions of thoroughness where literary objects are concerned. In my analysis the issue of gender in poetry is important not as a virtue of enlightened contemporary consciousness ... but because gender is understood as inextricably implicated in the way poetry represents itself' (The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness [Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2001], p. 4). Though privileging language, neither critic loses sight of cultural dynamics.

Slinn discusses Barrett Browning, Clough, D.G. Rossetti, and Webster in addition to Robert Browning. I have not the space here to detail his notion of performativity, drawn from speech act theory and also from Judith Butler's work. As it is applied to "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church" the notion of the performative allows Slinn to say a number of new things about this much-discussed poem. Slinn points to the highly performative dimension of dramatic monologues which both "reproduce verbal social behavior" and "foreground constitutive language through intensive poetic devices" (p. 28). He situates Browning's poem in the context of the aesthetic theories of Pugin, Ruskin, and the Camden Society and argues that the poem critiques their aesthetic equation of sepulchral style with faith and moral conviction. Browning's bishop is considerably more complex than Ruskin recognized in his famous praise for the monologue, Slinn argues, for, unlike Ruskin, the bishop in ordering his tomb stands quite outside Protestant dualism. Slinn shows that the bishop's failure to order a tomb, his thorough materialization of death and of art, and the ineluctable political role of sepulchral art force the question of how or whether the "aesthetic and the political can ever be satisfactorily separated" (p. 45). Slinn connects the bishop's sensual language with the gross and the grotesque, with the Bakhtinian festive or grotesque body. The desires of the physical body threaten to overwhelm "the discriminations and control of spiritual and aesthetic values," and the bishop's failure to attain his aesthetic end exposes the "politics of such a system"--specifically its sexual politics. Slinn is especially canny in his discussion of the ways the bishop's performative language fails--and succeeds--and the homosocial dimension of both success and failure. It is Gandolf who constitutes the driving force of the poem--the bishop's "homosocial rivalry" with Gandolf sustains him in death, even though his patriarchal status (including his paternity) fails. In the end, the bishop retains, or attempts to retain, his patriarchal identity by blessing his sons; in this performance he assumes his place, "effectively authorizing his own failure" by enacting the socially (and liturgically) authorized role of the one entitled to bless (p. 53). Though Slinn's performative reading is not startlingly new--all sensitive readers have recognized the performative element of the monologue, without necessarily calling it so--his theoretical structure allows Slinn to give us a deeper and more nuanced reading of the poem. The performative speech acts of the bishop, ordering and blessing, are read in the details of grammar and in the grammar of gender. The combination demonstrates new dimensions in the poem's language and cultural activity.

Like Slinn, Catherine Maxwell also attends to the "intensive poetic devices" of Browning's texts as part of her argument that the lyric tradition in English poetry since Milton relies for much of its power on the female sublime. In her argument for a female sublime--and feminization of the lyric poet--Maxwell revises the common eighteenth-century (and Burkean) equation of sublimity with masculinity. In chapters on Milton and Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne, she traces the tropes and cultural myths that manifest the psychic energy these poets found essential to poetic creativity. In forty-five pages of small type, Maxwell creates an argument dense enough to require a monograph for its full elucidation (not that even so good a single-author monograph would be easy to place these days). Here I will point to several of her most interesting readings.

In Browning's work Maxwell locates transformations of the Pygmalion and Galatea story with particular nuance. Especially noteworthy are her readings of "My Last Duchess" and the late, and often ignored, "Beatrice Signorini." She traces the importance of Shelley in Browning's female sublime, arguing that the feminized Shelley and the Shelleyan protagonist in "Pauline" define the lyrical mode as "interiority and identification" (p. 133). She traces the gendering of the Victorian dualist aesthetic--subjective and objective poetry--but unlike the other critics of Browning this year she does not reify this dualism. Nor does she read Browning as shifting from a so-called feminine/subjective to masculine/objective mode. She proves that "things aren't quite so tidy as this schematizing would imply" (p. 133). The power of the female sublime, though later channeled through an image (imago?) of Elizabeth Barrett, is "potentially disruptive of the dramatic" and never safely domesticated. (Indeed, I would argue that The Ring and the Book is the greatest nineteenth-century poem about the dangers of domestication, even as it does its own domestic work through idealizing Pompilia and the muse.) The keenest reading of the disruptive power associated with the female sublime comes in Maxwell's treatment of "My Last Duchess." Maxwell demonstrates that the portrait unveils the duke as much as the duke unveils the portrait. The duke's gaps and lapses, his rhetorical questions, and ellipses, mark the ways the duchess exceeds the duke's control. Her glance, the spot of joy on her cheek, the remembered smile continue to project the disruptive energy of the duchess. Her spirit "breaks out of the supposed enclosure of her painted sepulchre" (p. 146). If we return to Slinn's reading of "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," we have another case where sepulchral art is also a performance sexual politics, where the one who is supposedly dead--Gandolf, the duchess--manages to become the poem's center of energy. Neither is contained by death any more than the bishop can imagine his physical body will be contained by a gritstone tomb. Little wonder, then, that Maxwell emphasizes Santayana's metaphor: Browning's poems are like broken torsos. Browning's muse, she emphasizes, both inspires and disfigures.

Unlike Maxwell, Robert Sawyer in Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare rests content with a traditional and uncomplicated picture of Browning's turn from subjective to objective poetry, read here as a turn from Shelley to Shakespeare (Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2003). This leads Sawyer to the curious claim that "Childe Roland" is a work, influenced by Shakespeare, in Browning's "objective" mode while in "Caliban Upon Setebos" Browning returns "to the agonistic stance of the romantic or subjective poetry, competing with Shakespeare even as he empathizes with Shakespeare's maligned character" (p. 95). It seems curious to categorize a so-called dream poem as non-subjective. It is equally curious to read Caliban's tortuous monologue as Browning's agonistic and thoroughly subjective rewriting of Shakespeare. "Childe Roland" could as easily be read agonistically with Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" or any number of Coleridge poems from "Kubla Khan" to "Christabel." More to the point, though, is the inadequacy of Victorian dualist aesthetics taken from Browning's essay on Shelley. Such dualism cannot provide a theoretical paradigm adequate to so complex a topic as Browning's appropriation of Shakespeare.

In the end, Sawyer turns to biographical issues--Browning's management of his own literary reputation and his fostering of the comparisons to Shakespeare made in his lifetime, especially by the Browning Society. Browning, Sawyer argues, became in his later life a more "decorous, less coarse Shakespeare": "unlike Shakespeare and his 'unwholesome' sonnets, Browning and his works began to symbolize the perfect, 'normal' heterosexual poet." Thus, Sawyer argues, Browning was seen as an antidote to the femininity of Swinburne and of French writers (p. 112).

A very different reading of "Childe Roland" is provided by Virginia Blain in "Browning's Men: Childe Roland, Homophobia and Thomas Lovell Beddoes" (Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 7 (2001): 1-11). Unlike Sawyer, who argues that Roland's journey is a kind of moral pilgrimage to "complete empathy" with his old peers, Blain acknowledges the poem's resistance to interpretation. She reads the poem as a "paranoid fantasy," one with a "nightmare quality of entrapment in an all-male world which insists upon homosocial bonding as a condition for successful achievement" (p. 2). Blain was led to this reading, she says, by examining the connection between Browning and T. L. Beddoes. Though Blain traces similarities between Beddoes' grotesques and Browning's, she is not out to establish a direct influence of one poem on another. Rather Blain reads Browning's connection to Beddoes as a symptomatic case of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called homosexual panic. When Browning was entrusted with Beddoes' literary remains, he also came to discover that Beddoes died from complications of a particularly grisly suicide attempt after being left by his male lover. Browning, for all his great admiration for Beddoes' poems, viewed the box of his literary remains with great aversion--"that dismal box" he called it. Another sepulchre perhaps?

Blain argues that Browning was much more comfortable with Elizabeth's lesbian friends than with male homosexuality or even with what he characterized as "effeminacy." She quotes Browning's remarks about Swinburne's "florid impotence" and the "effeminacy" of Rossetti's school and its "men that dress up like women"; and this Blain contrasts with Browning's own susceptibility to charges of effeminacy. She adduces a liability to charges of effeminacy--or that he was living off his wife's income--to account for Browning's surprising conventionality about gender demarcation, despite his other more liberal views. A great deal of Blain's biographical argument is highly speculative--certainly the overall judgment that Browning was "not strongly sexed himself' is difficult of proof, it being impossible accurately to measure sexual desire among one's own acquaintance let alone through printed words of persons long dead.

Nevertheless, Blain's speculations lead to a very interesting reading of "Childe Roland." Unlike Sawyer (or Harold Bloom for that matter) Blain sees Roland's relationship to his band of brothers in the quest as one of disgust, "even a horror." In fact like Isobel Armstrong, she notes Roland's world is an "all-male landscape." The hoary cripple at the poem's outset is Roland's sinister double, the same kind of double Sedgwick finds characteristic of the "paranoid Gothic." In a sense the other questers and the hoary cripple serve as terrifying others. Potentially homosexual, they become the locus of psychic conflict created in intense homosocial bonds. Blain argues that "in this deeply paranoid context Roland's reluctant quest takes on a necrophiliac flavour" (p. 9). If we return to Slinn's reading of "The Bishop," a necrophiliac flavor--"clammy squares which sweat as if the corpse they keep were oozing through"--is not uncommon in Browning's explorations of masculinity.

Yet another of this year's articles that treats relations between men is Jean-Charles Perquin's "L'Eveque et le journaliste: questions de poetique et d'ironie dans 'Bishop Blougram's Apology' de Browning" (Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 55 [2002]: 131-141). Perquin notes the ways Blougram's monologue exceeds its occasion. The bishop's argument exceeds the necessity presented by Gigadibs, and his language exceeds any need the bishop has for communication. It is no accident, Perquin argues, that the bishop compares himself to Shakespeare. Metaphors, for Blougram, are everything. And a metaphor, like Blougram's argument itself, resides "on the dangerous edge of things," the edge between sense and non-sense. Likewise, irony is always on the edge between lies pure and simple and contradiction (p. 136). Blougram's irony, Perquin argues like others before him, is a good example of the irony endemic to Browning's monologues, for the monologues depend upon the distrust of the listener within the poem and the distrust of the reader toward speaker and listener alike. Fool or knave, Blougram says to Gigadibs, you choose. Perquin's bishop is caught between excess of speech and silence. What is not said can be more significant than what is. While Perquin's reading of Browning's ironies is not entirely novel, it is both elegant and eloquent.

Like Perquin, C. D. Blanton also emphasizes "mefiance," distrust. Blanton begins an essay on "Impostures: Robert Browning and the Poetics of Forgery," with a quotation from "The Statue and the Bust": "The true has no value beyond the sham / As well the counter as coin, I submit." Blanton traces Browning's "history among forgers," from the "Essay on Shelley," to the essay on Chatterton, to T. J. Wise's forgeries of Browning's poems "Cleon," "Gold Hair," "The Statue and the Bust"--which themselves trace "the form of a pretense" (SLitI 35 [2002]: 4, 1-21). Like Maxwell, Blanton offers a subtle reading of the Shelley essay, arguing that Browning's own line of reasoning in the essay "entails a practical destruction ... an implicit effacement of the terms that previously have governed his argument: of subject and object, presentation and representation" (p. 8). As a consequence, "the figure of the poet is progressively undefined, rendered obscure by the collapse of the very antinomy first deployed in Shelley's defense" (p. 8). A different kind of effacement occurs in Browning's Chatterton essay, in which the "forger" takes over the review of Tasso, and in which Chatterton himself is effaced by eschewing forgery (effacing Rowley). Blanton writes that the "instinct toward imitation ends with the reinvention of artistic freedom in death, in a moment of self-effacement that reconfirms the original nullity of Rowley as its source" (p. 14). So one thinks back to Beddoes' suicide as well as Chatteron's. In Beddoes' case Browning encountered not the preface or postscript to forgery, but self-inscription, artistic freedom in death, the grisly work on his own body of Beddoes' knife. Blanton's essay performs an intricate meditation on forgery, the chimera of origins (after all, the forgery marks the original as an original), and the process by which antiquarian forgery becomes the field of the modern.

Slinn, Maxwell, Blain, Perquin, and Blanton all make important contributions to our understanding of Browning's poetry and to the complex historical and intertextual connections that subtended Browning's readings of Shelley or Beddoes or Chatterton--and that still subtend our reading of Browning. In addition to their substantial contributions, the year brought a clutch of texts of more limited interest. Nick De Marco's short study, Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book: A Critical Appraisal (Pescara, Italy: Edizioni Campus, 2003), covers the territory familiar to critics of Browning's major work in discussing subjective and objective poetics and the ring metaphor and truth. De Marco also returns to familiar concerns about Browning and history. Rather than situating Browning in the context of the tensions within nineteenth-century historicism as others (including myself) have done, he draws parallels with New Historicism. This leads him to claim--wrongly, I think--that "Browning, unlike Carlyle, was not aware of the fact that he was bound and conditioned by his subjective perception of history. He was convinced that his perspective was free of any bias or interested concern" (p. 26). De Marco makes this claim in the face of Browning's explicit statement that facts look "to the eye as the eye likes the look." No New Historicist could put it more succinctly. Equally problematic is De Marco's notion that because the reader always "re-fashions" the text under analysis the "reader cannot criticize" the text, "he can only criticize his 'version.'" (This observation falls into the true but trivial category--of course readers criticize their own versions of texts as there are no others; presumably readers can reach some agreement on frequent occasions about their differing versions.) De Marco's Berkleyan radicalism leads to a still more nonsensical claim that, pace Isobel Armstrong's argument that shoddy ideas make for shoddy poems, "the content of the poem, 'idea' or 'feeling' that it contains, has absolutely nothing to do with the poet" or the poem. Thus we can not judge "Rabbi Ben Ezra" as a large expenditure of metrical talent on a shoddy idea--its beauty, De Marco claims, lies in the fact that it "mimics a shoddy idea" (pp. 114-115). Such reasoning makes one wonder how critics can make any judgments at all. De Marco is surely right that readers construct widely variable versions of Browning's texts, his own among them.

A number of shorter essays this year offer brief readings of Browning's poems. Catherine Ross speculates that Porphyria's lover is not killed but engaged in an "erotic asphyxiation" (Expl 60 [2002]: 68-73). Robert Inglesfield reads biblical allusion in "A Death in the Desert" (VN 102 [2002]: 26-28). Nathan Cervo offers another source for the "great text in Galatians" alluded to by Browning's monk in the "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" (Expl 61 [2003]: 81-85). Two chapters in new reference books present an overview of Browning's career and an approach to The Ring and the Book. Julie Hearn has the unenviable first task in British Writers: Retrospective Supplement II (ed. Jay Parini [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003], pp. 17-32). Hearn's summary of Browning's life and works is clear and lucid, with thematic sections on love, religion, and art, and sections treating various periods of the author's career. My only wishes are that Hearn had not repeated at such length--in a reference book to be consulted by high school and undergraduate students--the charges of Browning's obscurity, and that she had, in situating the poet and the monologue, mentioned some of the women poets of the period among the genre's practitioners. A tenth-grader beginning to write a paper might think Browning too difficult, given the emphasis on obscurity, and might be justified in thinking only Victorian men wrote monologues. N. S. Thompson's essay on The Ring and the Book appears in British Writers: Classics (Vol. 2, ed. Jay Parini. [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004]). Thompson's treatment of Browning's long poem provides an excellent starting place for students and will be especially useful to teachers who want to use one or two monologues in the classroom without assigning the whole poem. Thompson's summaries of the monologues are admirable and her interpretations clear. Although one might quibble about whether Guido is actually "insane" by the time of his second monologue, Thompson's discussion of the poem's comic and tragic effects provides a useful starting place for critical reflection and for comparison to other nineteenth-century texts. On a completely different note Stephen Brown reflects on Pound's Cantos and Sordello ("Preparing the Palette" Paideuma 30 [2001]: 217-221), describing Pound's notion of writing as "displacement," an attempt to show what has been said before, an effort to "illustrate the impossibility of originality" (p. 220). What's left for Pound, Brown argues, is to "say it's all been said before" (p. 220).

No less than successive poets are critics faced with the prospect of saying what has been said before.

As I look back over the last decade of Browning criticism, most of it reviewed in these pages, I am struck by two themes about which the less said the better. We have heard enough, I think, about truth and history or the ring metaphor and truth in The Ring and the Book. And I at least have had enough of subjective and objective poetry as an adequate paradigm for understanding Browning's art. If students and critics sidestepped these themes perhaps they might reach conclusions inviting more paradox and contradiction, less resolution and tidy thematic unity. We might have more criticism on "the dangerous edge of things."

To end on a more positive, even perhaps a prescriptive note, the past decade of critical work suggests areas where there is still much left to do. Browning's difficult prosody still has not met a critical match. Much is left to say about Browning and Victorian culture, particularly with respect to religion and to gender. Much also could be done reflecting on the delights and difficulties of teaching Browning and other Victorian poets to inexperienced readers of poetry.

MARY ELLIS GIBSON, Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is author of History and the Prism of Art: Browning's Poetic Experiments (1987), editor of Critical Essays on Robert Browning (1992), and author of Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians (1995).