W2 Flashcards
Cambell
argues speakers in Dramatic Monologues suffer from an ‘unwilling powerlessness’
speakers employ voiceless subjects and auditors
to generate power of speaker’s role
Ulysses
- unspecific soldiers are objects, Ulysses refers to ‘my mariners’ = sense of ownership
- mariners in fact dead; disembodied language e.g. ‘souls’ obscures view of auditors as actual characters –> Ulysses appears sole character
Browning continuous motif of absent subject
although the women in ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Poryphria’s Lover’ are the primary concerns of the poems - they are absent from the direct narrative!
The Last Duchess (1842) posthumous absent women
- ‘my last’ = plurality , possessiveness
2. metrical emphasis on ‘my’ = objectification
Porphyria’s Lover (1836) absent
shift in subject/object syntax from her as active to speaker active (‘she put my arm’ –> I wound/Three times her little throat around, /And strangled her.’ + caesura; perfunctory and simplicity suggests control
Differing methods of exerting/exhibiting power
PL = brute physical force vs MLD = social hierarchy (emissary)
Linda K Hughes
argues that the mariners are in fact dead; the very men who were killed on their previous journey back to Ithaca
Duke’s character
wide critical consensus that his character alludes to Alfonso II, the fifth Duke of Ferrara, an aristocratic figure in the Italian Renaissance
Duke’s thinly veiled rhetorical request ‘Will’t please you rise?’
posing imperative statement within question format; social control
Ulysses name precedes him
as a canonical character in Greek and Roman mythology (As Hayley E. Tartell notes)
Ulysses’ hubris
Tennyson’s ironic “I am a part of all that I have met”; the speaker assumes his overarching effect on those he has encountered during his travels, rather than him being affected by others
Browning and Tennyson both construct their speakers’ supposed power…
in order to discredit it
Duke transforms wife into object; but objects hold power in preoccupation
“none puts buy/ The curtain I have drawn for you, but I”.
Earl G. Ingersoll
through literal objectification of lovers, the love / power can never be lost
The fractured anecdotal sentences seen in ‘My Last Duchess’ strain against the rigid form
This forces readers to either deviate from the rhythm and rhyme, ignoring the masculine endings of the heroic couplets or ignore the punctuation, leading to an overall lack of clarity
In ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, the meter is rigid and regular, until
the mention of the woman, whose very name ‘Porphyria’ contradicts the iambic rhythm established.
Cornelia DJ Persall
views dramatic monologues as being characterized by an “ironic discrepancy” between the speaker’s self-description, and the author’s intended portrayal
Tennyson Maud form (FIRST FOUR CANTOS- bewildering array of forms and meters)
rushed and impulsive rhythms of first four cantos (series of hexameter stanzas; initated by famous opening lines ‘I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood’; lawless hexameter of poem begins in these iambs
rhythmic restlessness suggests symptomatic preoocupation with sensation…
accompanied by a hypochondriac consciousness or morbidity
Describing Tennyson’s use of meter as a means of embodying lack of control seems….
a contradiction in terms, for the very nature of meter is measure; act of measuring as a kind of mania, a Prufrockian dilemma whereby one is fixed, formulated, endlessly spinning…
morbidity
unrestrained indulgence in the pleasures of dark moods, frenetic outbursts and introspective brooding
morbidity emerges not just from monodrama’s speaker but from forms and rhythms of poem ‘Maud’ itself
morbidity emerges not just from monodrama’s speaker but from forms and rhythms of poem ‘Maud’ itself
the poetic voice of Maud is divided between
lyric subjectivity and dramatic objectivity; crucial difference between poet and speaker, as well as speaker and audience
