Your first close reading assignment of the semester is on our poems for Thursday; please post it as a comment on this thread.
The previous dramatic monologues we have examined have all been spoken by seemingly powerful figure while a relatively disempowered figure listens and is silenced: the duke for example is landed gentry and thus holds political, social, and economic sway over many around him, including the lowly envoy to whom he speaks. As a husband, he also owned his duchesses as if she were property. As readers, we hear nothing from either the envoy or the woman in the scenario.
The dramatic monologues for Thursday all reverse this position: the speaker is a disempowered figure, a woman, a slave, a prostitute ("castaway" and "Magdalen" were both terms for prostitutes or fallen women), etc.
Gustav Dore's illustration for Thomas Hood's "The Bridge of Sighs" depicts the common fate of a fallen woman in Victorian literature: premature death.
The only exception is "The Farmer's Wife," in which the husband speaks the poem. However, its author is a woman-- a woman who dressed and presented as male throughout her adult life-- and so ventriloquizing a male character may mean something different to her than it did to Tennyson and Browning.
Happy reading,
Prof. M.
The Farmer's Wife
ReplyDeleteThe first thing that really stands out to me is the meter and rhyme scheme of this poem. The lines are all more or less 8 syllables apiece, but differ in the rhyme placement. For example, the first paragraph is (forgive me if I am not writing this out properly) A B B A C D C D D. Yet, in the third paragraph for example the rhyme is: A A B B B C C D D D. In addition, this poem differs from that of Browning, in that Browning's poems were very conversational, as if there were another person in that room at that moment. Instead, this poem seems to be speaking to a person, or some form of audience, yet that audience is left unspecified. There is also this ambiguous ending of a proclamation about "the brown of her." Could this just be some sort of longing of the Farmer stemming from the fact that he never sees his wife and misses these aspects of her: her hair and eyes? Also, just something to note in the tone of the poem: the Farmer does not give any indication that he is helping or hurting his wife in any way, he is basically lamenting at the reality of the situation and asking what has this woman done for me besides for acting unstable.
A Castaway:
ReplyDeleteGod this is a compelling poem!
Right from the beginning of the poem it seems the subject is bit at odds with the form. The dramatic monologue allows the speaker to express their thoughts and in that way show their character and identity. However the speaker in “A Castaway” doesn’t seem to want to reveal her identity. She give us clues but only through outside symbols of herself, she looks in a mirror and reveals to us what she sees, she reacts her childhood diary, and defends herself from the way other people view her. Even when we finally get her name it seems to be a fake name used by those who she interacts with in her…trade, “What! Eulalie, when she refused us all…” This name Eulalie, this flowery sensual name, seems to be another way for the speaker to hide herself from her customers, and her audience, never giving them quite enough.
The tone of the poem is heavily and amazingly ironic. She scorns both men and their wives,
“But, if they can, let them just take the pains
to keep them: 'tis not such a mighty task
to pin an idiot to your apron-string;”
Yet at the same time she cuts herself down at every chance. Interjecting into her defense of her life and saying, “I, I who should not dare take the name of wife.” This may seem confusing until the reader realizes that this is in fact a dramatic monologue. This is how Eulalie views herself, she defends herself to those outside her, (and in fact much of the poem is dedicated towards defending her profession) but her own mind is full of self-loathing.
In yet another series of defense and then offense, Eulalie calls herself modest and puts herself in dialogue with those who would disagree. However shortly after she says, rather dejectedly, “who do I play the hypocrite alone, who am no hypocrite with others by?” this again shows a disconnect in her sense of self. She, on the one hand, will defend herself, even to those whom she is consorting with, and yet she cannot hide from herself.
The title itself also is a means for the speaker to hide her identity. “A Castaway” is a euphemism for prostitute, because rather than acknowledge, Eulalie peppers her monologue with a show for society, and then, in her own head, she cuts herself down.
"A Castaway": It's repetition of "but yet, but yet" across the poem not only binds the ends of the lengthy piece together, providing a sense of carry through in emotion and tone. The poem works in a sort of U shape, the lowest point/halfway point being, perhaps, at the stanza beginning "And yet, who knows?" as it comes after the ending of the previous stanza being a double dash "--I!," an almost grand pronouncement of personhood and identity which is then immediately dashed with the most mournful tune of "And yet, who knows?" The subject matter shifts as well, from a tone of indictment and almost self-righteous (at moments) disgust with the outside world, towards the depressed and depressing realities of her existence as woman, prostitute, erstwhile sister and wife. The "but yet, but yet"-- longing, resigned, somehow simultaneously hopeful and hopeless --is brought up soon at the beginning of the poem (no line numbers...) and then again in the latter third. At the beginning, it comes after the diary and modest; later, it comes after the existence and death has been revealed. The harkening back to the beginning with "but yet, but yet" serves to show how both these events - when she kept a diary and when she had a baby - were moments when she was or might have been normalized into society, potentially, but either refused/was refused/incapable of accepting that sort of role. Repetition is used so many times in the poetry, "No help, no help, no help" and then "No help! No help! No help!" -- the same exact words, but one, the first, is soft, trodden upon - the line is even interrupted and forced into enjambment, weakening any sort of strength the words may hold, and instead being deeply, painfully sorrowful. But the second time, "no help" is a literal exclamation at the top of a stanza. It is anger, still pain -- so much pain -- but now with emotion. It beats out the intention of a stanza that goes on a rampage of rhetorical questioning, "Whose blame is that?....but what can they do?....Cry out for help?" This stanza is the final one in which the "Castaway" addresses any charges/suggestions one may potentially throw at her feet for why and how she doesn't change the life of which she is keenly aware. It is because of "No help!" --help that she goes on to end the poem by admitting that she has rejected on multiple occasions, which she explains away with a logic that clearly makes good, strong sense to her. Because, when is crying for this "help" that she is so lacking, she is asking for real help, the help her society refuses women -- not only "women like her," but women. And that statement deserves repeating, and it deserves lamentation, as it in its first instance, and it deserves anger, as in its second use.
ReplyDelete“Castaway”... I must admit that I got bored of it after the first three pages. I realize that it’s meant to be lengthy, sort of shuddering in quality because the speaker is trying not to admit how they truly feel and it comes out in fits and starts, but it’s so long.
ReplyDeleteStill, it is a piece that interests me, because it is a blatant social commentary of the likes we haven’t seen yet in this course, and because the speaker doesn’t narrate a single moment in time rather their entire life. In this way, the dramatic monologue seems a bit unnatural, because there is no listener here-- it’s just the speaker and the contents of her own head. To me, at least, it would make more sense for this to be written as a stream-of-consciousness poem (but that technique hadn’t been invented yet, so I suppose that this one had to do). The dramatic monologues we have read previously are all actually spoken-- I have my doubts about this one.
There seems to be only a single instance when the speaker actually talks aloud: “Oh, is it you?/Most welcome, dear: one gets so moped alone.” But that listener has presumably not been in the vicinity for the rest of the poem, hence “monologue” is still an odd fit.
“Runaway Slave,” however, seems to hold… the entire world as its audience. Again, I don’t think that there’s a direct reference to another presence in the poem, and yet the speaker is constantly referring to a “you”: “O pilgrim-souls, I speak to you!” “Your fine white angels,” “I see you staring at my face--/I know you staring, shrinking back,” “Your white men.” I wonder if the Pilgrims refer to Americans in general, and not necessarily to a specific place called Pilgrim’s Point. “Ye are born of the Washington-race:/And this land is the free America:” would be a good proof of this, as well as the (very obviously capitalized) “For in this UNION, you have set/Two kinds of men in adverse rows.” This is the only other stressed word in the poem; the second one is “HE,” presumably referring to god (?). If such is the case, then we have yet another glaringly socio-political poem, where there is finger-pointing and blaming for a deep, dark problem that isn’t limited to the individual speaker, but in which the speaker is the mouthpiece for their entire subset of society. These aren’t psychological studies of noblemen, they’re about feminine microcosms representing national or global problems.
The structure of “Castaway” by Augusta Weber was really interesting to me. When I first began the poem, I didn’t understand why it was considered a poem at all – it seemed to be a monologue with interesting line breaks. There were no evenly spaced stanzas, the lines seemed to be of varying length, and many lines broke off midsentence. But due to our experience with “The Last Duchess,” I checked the meter, and it turned out to be iambic pentameter. The enjambments and frequent line breaks obscure the rigid structure hiding beneath the seemingly natural flow of speech. This structure enriches the poem in numerous ways. First of all, the structure echoes the subject of the poem – mundanity hiding sophistication. Like the poem itself, the woman in the poem seems on first glance to be something ordinary, even drab, but on closer look there is a lot of thought and beauty beneath the surface. The line breaks also serve a pointed purpose of conveying the subject’s train of thought. Each break shows where the speaker pauses in her speech, her mind carrying her in a new direction. Often, the break tells us that the speaker is caught up in emotion. Where the line breaks are frequent, new paragraphs beginning and ending rapidly, one sees the speaker’s vacillation, her racing mind and contradictory feelings. For example, in lines 58 through 60, the line breaks four times, showing the speaker’s indecisiveness. Even though the meter is kept consistent, these breaks make the poem feel more natural and real, and makes the reader feel like he or she is listening to a real person’s speech. In the case of the break between lines 168 and 169, the pause between “And so we earn our living,” and “Well lit, tract!” is all that’s needed to convey that the speaker did something during her break in speech – in this case, cast the holy tract into the fire. A purposeful pause followed with that exclamation conveys that whole image.
ReplyDelete