Tag Archives: genre

The Dramatic Monologues of Robert Browning

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Robert Browning is the man who first taught me to love poetry my freshman year of high school with, “My Last Duchess,” and then again, despite having not seen each other for a while, with “The Laboratory,” and very recently with “Porphryia’s Lover.” He may have died a century before I was born and is said to have had one of the most celebrated literary romances with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who is just simply untalented and an invalid and really not worth mentioning here at all, but I still entertain the hope that I might win him back with my devotion of his poetry via research paper.

Dramatic introductions aside (including the completely facetious remarks about Elizabeth Barrett Browning), Robert Browning is revered as a master of the dramatic monologue as poetic genre, which I intend to explore further in my research. Browning was by no means the first to produce poetry of this kind, but he holds his place in the canon today because of his perfected execution of character development. Browning’s poetic audiences can psychoanalyze his characters with depth due to his close attention to personal nuances and detail. The characters in question give themselves away such that their psychoses are inescapable and unconscious, rendering them seductively captivating to readers. This brings my other areas of interest regarding Browning’s poetry to light: his typically murderous characters, his contribution to Victorian Gothic poetry, and his use of abnormal psychology in literature.

I would like to keep my analysis of Browning’s poetry to the three poems mentioned previously: “My Last Duchess,” “The Laboratory,” and “Porphyria’s Lover.” This might change as research commences, however, I think the common murderous leanings of the three characters will connect the poems nicely. I would also like to give more focus and connection to my broad areas of interest, and this will hopefully come with research.

Finally, I am particularly drawn to these subjects and the man in question because of my own day to day interactions with monologues, character analysis, and character development as a Theatre major, but also because they bridge the gap to my English major – offering further study as a way to further both majors.

“The Effects of Genre”

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“Throughout much of literary history, readers have found it helpful to be able to approach a new work with certain preconceived notions about what would be found there and what would be expected of the person who chose to read it” (Dobie, 20).
I fully support the study of genre when examining any story whether it be told orally, read in a book, or viewed on the silver screen. In fact, Dobie’s mentioning of Aristotle’s Poetics was rather exciting because a screenwriting class I had once been enrolled in used that very text. When discussing movies, people will often ask each other, “So what kind of movies do you like?” and often the responses will be something along the lines of, “I like dramas, comedies, or action films…” The answers one may receive are endless, and I think that is what’s so great about genre. When analyzing literature we can look over the trends of similarity and difference. There is a balance that comes from using genre as a means of analysis. Although Dobie points out that a text can be entirely misread, I think each reader should be able to establish what the text means to them personally anyway. That’s what endears texts to its readers. I don’t see any weaknesses with genre because as people we like to describe. Although it might seem prescriptive, we just need to acknowledge that anything can be a hybrid of sorts or a separate entity.