Charlotte Brontë and the dramatic monologue: tracing the emergence of the woman poet in the development of a dramatic poetics of the self and its fictions

Abstract

This paper intends to examine the poetry that Charlotte Brontë wrote in the 1830s and 40s, in order to find out how this major Victorian novelist encountered her own voice through the voices of fictional male and female characters, in a particular set of dramatic monologues. Before she successfully ventured into the more popular genre of the novel, Brontë both consciously and unconsciously experimented with different forms of narrating the self – the ballad, the long narrative in verse, the soliloquy and the dramatic monologue. Indeed, her interest in drama was a precocious one, as can easily be seen in her juvenilia; but her interest in contemporary history (namely, the Napoleonic Wars) was equally determining in providing her with a significant background for her poetic fictions. Brontë’s initial option for the ventriloquised male lyrical voice, Wellesley, Zamorna or even Crimsworth, would settle into her more definitive female ones, Marian Hume, Mary Percy, Frances and Jane, under different degrees of assertive utterance. In her choice of poetic form, Brontë may have been influenced by earlier women poets, such as Hemans and Landon, as she is known to have been a reader of the ‘lady’s magazines’. But the impact of male poets, namely Byron, cannot be discarded and in particular his poetic persona or the speaker other than the poet. Furthermore, as will be discussed, Brontë had her own personal reasons for using this disguise or mask for her female voice. In poems like “Mementos”, “The Teacher’s Monologue”, “Frances”, “Pilate’s Wife’s Dream”, “The Wife’s Will”, “The Missionary” and “The Orphan Child”, Brontë skilfully uses the dramatic monologue and related forms to explore issues of gender, identity, agency, creativity and expression, crucial to herself and the Victorian period. Though she did not pursue a career as a poet, her contribution to the rise and development of the genre (as well as those of her sisters, Emily and Anne) should not be overlooked, and she ought to be compared to both Tennyson and the Brownings.