Table Of ContentBROWNING AND THE FICTIONS OF IDENTITY
BROWNING AND
THE FICTIONS OF
IDENTITY
E. Warwick Slinn
© E. Warwick Slinn 1982
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For my parents
Eric and Vera Slinn
v
Contents
Priface lX
The Repudiation of Experience
2 'God a tame confederate': Irony in Pippa Passes 20
3 The Drama of Self-Conception 37
4 The Function of Illusion 76
5 Histrionic Action in The Ring and the Book I I o
6 Experience as Pageant: Subjectivism in Fifine at the Fair I 34
7 The Self as Subject I 5 I
Nutes I64
Index I70
Vll
Preface
This book arises out of the simple aim of explaining what Browning
meant by 'action in character', although the explanation itself is at
times not so simple. Browning seems to me to be a psychological
dramatist who used monologues to explore man as the product of a
self-reflexive use oflanguage. Consequently my concern is with the
nature of the histrionic in his poetry, with the way characters are
engaged in verbal acts which dramatise themselves, and with the
way Browning considers the multiplicity and complexity of human
personality, re-examining its nature and suggesting the richness of
its possibilities. The dramatic monologue is a form which almost
invariably raises questions about personality and reflexive
consciousness, so that dramatic tension becomes focused on conflicts
about self-conception. In this, Browning is clearly a nineteenth
century subjectivist, although at the same time he challenges a
Romantic epistemology which assumed a continuity between
experience and reality. 'To reach reality we must first repudiate
experience', wrote Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques (New York,
1961), and Browning questions the truth of experience by exposing
the ironies of conceptualising and the fallibility of his speakers. He
emphasises therefore not the speaker's subject, but the speaker as
subject. While the raw data of material existence remains, its
meaning may be transformed or redefined through linguistic
artifice. For Browning this process is the ironic drama which lies at
the heart of all human consciousness; and it means that in his poetry
the elusive suggestiveness of metaphoric and aesthetic language
coincides with the ambiguous reality of a subject-determined view
of experience.
Life for Browning's characters is frequently a tightrope walk
between a multitudinousness which threatens to fragment and
diffuse experience on the one hand, and the self-determined fiction
of a controlled solipsism on the other. As they confront the
impositions of a world which would absorb them into its own
shaping processes, speakers are engaged in defence of their very
IX
Priface
X
existence as individuals, and they often retaliate through acts of
verbal aggression which attempt instead to subsume the world into
their web of understanding. Out of this flux emerge the fictions
which form a basis for personal identity.
In examining Browning's portrayal of this drama, I have
endeavoured to avoid the inflexibility of clinical terms taken from
modern personality theory. While this may at times seem to lead to
some imprecision of analysis, his poetry is not a system, and I think
the variety of his characterisation and form requires an openness of
approach which avoids the restrictions of distinguishing between
conflict models, fulfilment models or consistency models. I have
used terms, then, mainly in their ordinary dictionary sense:
personality as 'being a person', 'having the distinctiveness of an
individual human being'; and identity as 'oneness', 'the quality of
being the same', 'the condition of being a specified person', or
simply 'individuality'. It should also be noted that I use the words
'illusion' and 'fiction' descriptively, not pejoratively.
All quotations from Browning's poetry, except where otherwise
indicated, are taken from Browning: Poetical Works I833-I864, ed.
Ian Jack (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). Two of my
chapters have been previously published: Chapter 6 appeared in
Journal of English Literary History, 42 (1975), 651--68 (I have made
minor revisions to this article), and Chapter 2 appeared under the
title '"God a Tame Confederate": the Reader's Dual Vision in
Pippa Passes', in Universiry of Toronto Quarter()', 45 (1976), 158-73. I
am grateful to the Johns Hopkins University Press and to the
University of Toronto Press for permission to reprint these essays
here.
My first serious attempt to work on Browning was supervised by
Professor William E. Fredeman at the University of British
Columbia and if it were not for his disciplined training and friendly
encouragement I might never have proceeded this far. It will be
apparent from other acknowledgements in the course of my
discussion that the main influences on my reading of Browning have
been the writings of Robert Langbaum, Morse Peckham and Isobel
Armstrong, and in a real sense this study could not have been
written without their work. For their publications, and for those by
Roma King and David Shaw, I am indeed grateful. I am indebted
also to the Victorian Studies Centre at Leicester University for
providing me with facilities that greatly assisted my writing, and to
Massey University for granting me sabbatical leave and therefore
Preface
Xl
the time to write. Finally I should mention Suzann Olsson, since her
refusal to indulge my tantrums or to sustain my petty triumphs
combined with her scepticism to provoke a ruefully acknowledged
impetus towards continued explanation.
E.W.S.
Massey Universiry
New Zealand
May 1!}80
The Repudiation of
1
Experience
Browning's poetry is characteristically mimetic, not in the older
pre-Romantic sense of imitating an order believed to be inherent in
the natural world, some independently created reality, but in the
more modern sense of imitating ways of thinking and speaking
about the world. With the growing nineteenth-century anxiety
about publicly shared beliefs, poets were increasingly required to
examine the assumptions underlying their creativity, in particular
the relationship between poetic language and its referential world.
Shelley, for instance, argues that poetry could free men from the
tyrannical deception of a contingent and habitual reality: poetry, he
says, 'creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our
minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration' .1
Shelley still refers to 'the' universe, a transcendent realm which
sense impressions veil or distort and which it is the poet's task to
reveal, but by suggesting that poetic language may order the world,
he detaches words from a strict representation of things and raises
the possibility of a new series of created realities, a different order of
mimetic art characterised by metaphoric relationships rather than
direct imitation. Clearly such a possibility questions the objective
nature of reality, and in this context poetry becomes increasingly
dramatic, shifting the emphasis from what is perceived to the
processes of perception, from the structure of an external world to
the structuring powers of individual minds.2
The natural conclusion to this trend is solipsism, and later in the
century Pater's description of the mind imprisoned within its own
impressions of the world follows naturally from Coleridge's pro
position that 'we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone
does nature live', from Shelley, and from Tennyson's decision to
dream his dream and 'hold it true' .3 However, the dangers of such a
self-circumscribed view were recognised from the start: in Shelley's
'Alas tor', for instance, where the hero-poet dies through pursuing
