브라우닝 극적 독백시의 정치성

The Politics of Robert Browning’s Dramatic Monologue

Browning’s dramatic monologue as an objective form has its root in the despair of the political liberal who has lost his belief in his mentor Shelley’s romantic ideology. However, the very sense of loss, paradoxically, drives him to find out the harder, safer, and more reliable lyric form that could be a model for the later modernist poets. Emerging as parodies of Mill’s aesthetics and politics, Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover”constitute a running dialogue with Mill’s ideas. This monologue narrates a fictional episode in which a sexual murder takes place. Alone with a lover, the cold and greedy violence of this monologue establishes a privacy in which the public world disappears. Taking the sexuality as a test case, this monologue parodies Mill’s closet poetics. Browning’s objective form both as a cultural critique of the poetics of exclusion and as a construct of the authoring self comes to its summit with “My Last Duchess.” Presenting the marriage agent as the auditor, this monologue is consisted of the manifold readings, and the complex act of readings can be the ground of the dialogue between the private self and the world. If a direct, working-class-based political poetry was closed to Browning by virtue of his middle-class status, he could write poetry which became cultural critique by presenting and dramatizing a politics of poetics.