I, writing thus: Victorian women poets write the dramatic monologue.

Abstract

This dissertation extends recent feminist literary scholarship to argue that nineteenth-century British women poets played a formative role in the emergence and development of the dramatic monologue as an important Victorian poetic genre. Until recently, the work of women poets has been largely excluded from scholarship on the dramatic monologue, which traces its origins to the poetry of Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. This study is not only a revaluation of poetry by women poets, but a reconsideration of the literary criticism on and history of the dramatic monologue. In addition to its historical argument, this dissertation considers the ways in which readings of lyric are predicated on the assumption of a speaker. It theorizes the poetic assumption of the first-person pronoun I to re-situate the sentimental lyric as a dramatic form. After an introduction surveying critical debates on the dramatic monologue, chapter one examines early-nineteenth-century dramatic monologues by Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon in relation to William Wordsworth's Essay Upon Epitaphs. By reading two volumes of poetry alongside each other---Hemans' <italic>Records of Woman</italic> (1828) and L.E.L.'s <italic> The Improvisatrice</italic> (1824)---this chapter demonstrates how the epitaphic dramatic monologue of Hemans and Landon reworks the conventions of epitaph to put a dead persona into circulation. Chapter two places Webster's dramatic monologue A Castaway within the context of the mid-century debates about the Contagious Diseases Acts and Webster's essay Poets and Personal Pronouns. Webster develops the dramatic monologue as an important form for circulating a female poetic voice in the public sphere, and her poem A Castaway figures the circulation of women's texts within the literary tradition. Chapter three considers two poems by Amy Levy, Felo De Se and A Minor Poet, and argues that Levy extends the possibility for a non-anthropomorphic reading of the lyric I by dismantling the first-person pronoun as a figure for voice within the poem. The epilogue concludes that the transmission of nineteenth-century women's poetry occurs through the personification of dead figures. It approaches the problem of canon formation as a function of the process of literary transmission.