Victorian Poetry

Tricia Lootens has recently described the difficult but rewarding experience of teaching "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point." Her account was occasioned by its inclusion in the "Poems in Process" section of the eighth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Lootens focuses on the emotional difficulty of discussing the infanticide stanzas in class, and what the raw emotions and disagreements they provoke among students mean for the relation between scholarly study of Victorian literature and the teaching of it.¹ I certainly agree that this poem can be difficult to teach, but in my experience students are unlikely to argue about whether the infanticide is "justified"; they accept it relatively easily as a terrible thing that should be blamed on the condition of slavery rather than on the speaker. The phrase "I couldn't judge her without being in her shoes" recurs frequently in the Women's Literature class in which I usually teach this poem, and infanticide is just the most extreme action my students refuse to judge. In fact, class discussion of this poem usually goes well. Only in papers do I see the problem that is, ironically, the very source of the poem's success: the poetic power of the speaker's language and the intensity of emotion lead students to believe the poem is autobiographical. There is always a danger, of course, that students might believe that the author is the speaker of any first-person poem. We all know how often we repeat the mantra "the author is not the speaker." Generally, students have more trouble keeping this in mind with lyrics than they do with narrative poems. Every semester that I teach "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," however, I receive at least one paper (and sometimes more than one) that refers to the speaker of the poem as if she were the poet, not merely in the careless confusion of pronouns and referents that can happen with lyric poems, but in an explicit and biographical way. These students are [End Page 557] convinced that Elizabeth Barrett Browning was gang-raped and killed her own baby, even after class discussion of the historical context of the poem and being give the information that the author was a prominent white British author. Why do students make this error more frequently and persistently with this poem than with any other that I teach?

I have come to the conclusion that it is a revelation of the nature of the dramatic monologue itself: the students are engaging in a strong misreading. In this poem we see that the formula for a dramatic monologue is not "a supposed person" (to borrow Emily Dickinson's phrasing)² but rather, "suppose I were this person?" All dramatic monologues require the author and reader to imagine being the person depicted, and doing so successfully leaves traces that cannot be erased by one's knowledge of the "rules" of poetry. Because "Runaway Slave" is historically contemporaneous with the author rather than set in the dim past, the cues of setting that prevent confusing the author with the speaker are not as apparent in this poem as in other dramatic monologues like "My Last Duchess" or "Ulysses." An even more important factor, however, is the way that Barrett Browning stretches the conventions of the form in this poem. Other dramatic monologues force a reader into a critical attitude toward the speaker—as Robert Langbaum says, "the genius of the dramatic monologue" is "the effect created by the tension between sympathy and moral judgment."³ In "Runaway Slave," however, the judgment function is assigned to the intradiegetic audience (first pilgrim-ghosts, then slave hunters), and the speaker herself preemptively closes off the possibility of judging her actions in her addresses to these audiences. Thus the irony that is a hallmark of the dramatic monologue is not present in the poem. This is obviously a consequence of Barrett Browning's abolitionist agenda; if we judge the slave, we will not want as passionately to end slavery. By contrast, then, this poem defines the contours of the genre, and shows us how essential each element of it is. If the poem succeeds politically, it does so by violating its own form, and it succeeds precisely because it is written so passionately that it exceeds the margins of fiction and begins to seem like biography.

That sort of success through passion may lead to a greater degree of confusion in less-well-prepared modern students, however, and it has apparently been an issue in the reception of the poem by earlier generations of critics as well. Biographies or single-author studies of Barrett Browning (especially earlier ones) often do not mention "Runaway Slave" at all, or only in passing; Gardner B. Taplin, who did mention the poem briefly in his 1957 biography, said that it was "too blunt and shocking to have any enduring artistic worth."⁴ Only in the late 1980s did the poem begin to see wider discussion among critics, and it has still not been one of Barrett Browning's more commonly studied texts. Those discussions of the poem that do exist have frequently focused on the psychological significance of the poem in the author's own life. In the [End Page 558] 1980s Angela Leighton and Dorothy Mermin read the poem in the context of Browning's relationship with her father; the slave's killing of her child is a symbolic rebellion against the oppression of all fathers.⁵ The circumstances of the writing of the poem, as described by Mermin, certainly authorize this view up to a point—Barrett had prevented his daughter from writing a poem requested by the Anti Corn Law League, and she wrote "Runaway Slave" a few years later after her own marriage made it possible to defy his preferences about women not "exposing" themselves by writing politically. Mermin makes much of Barrett Browning's desire to expose herself for the good of the people, like a Godiva (pp. 155-58)—and clearly that is the inspiration for the title of her later work, Godiva's Ride. For these critics, the obvious political theme of the poem is secondary to its meaning for the poet's own life—which is really a very similar move to that made by my students. Leighton and Mermin see Barrett Browning as succeeding in the poem because she identifies with the slave:⁶ in the formulation I began with, "suppose I were this person?" It is a short step for a student to miss the "suppose" part.

Later critical readings of the poem have focused more and more on the political aspect of the poetry; Leighton herself, in a book six years after the reading I described above, expanded the same themes she had discussed earlier, but reversed the priority. In 1992, she saw the political aspects of the poem as being not only about slavery but about the moral nature of good and evil themselves, and the personal connection of the poet to familial oppression is discussed only secondarily.⁷ Ann Parry's 1988 article about "Runaway Slave" begins precisely by protesting against the biographical focus of other critics in reading Barrett Browning in general and this poem in particular,⁸ and promising to examine the poem in its historical context, although she is only partially successful at this task. Later critics engage more intensely with the politics of representing infanticide⁹ or the slave experience itself,¹⁰ but always repeat the biographical motivations Barrett Browning might have had, even if only as a sort of required preface to their main argument. In "Between Ethics and Anguish" Marjorie Stone adds personal fears of miscarriage and death in childbirth to the mix (p. 140)—but only a year later she instead laments the tendency of critics to read the poem biographically ("EBB and the Garrisonians," pp. 36-38). Because so many professional critics have persisted in linking the life of the fictional slave to the life of the real poet, it is probably not a surprise that my students take the next step. It is important, therefore, to examine in more detail the factors in the poem that cause this effect.

The first feature of "The Runaway Slave" that often causes students to be confused about the biographical nature of the poem is the power and intensity of its poetic diction. The character who speaks the poem is a female slave who has been raped by white men after they kill her black lover; she has subsequently murdered the resulting infant and fled north to the place [End Page 559] the pilgrims first landed in Massachusetts (Pilgrim's Point). The poem opens with her statement "I stand on the mark beside the shore / Of the first white pilgrim's bended knee."¹¹ The speaker frequently identifies herself and the pilgrims, as here, by race: the phrase "I am black" is a frequent motif, but the spirits are "pale as dew" (l. 10). The speaker uses the words black or dark to describe herself in countless other locations in the poem. Despite the constant repetition of her racial identity, her language does not attempt to sound like "slave speech" from the deep South—deep enough that mango trees could thrive and the "hut" (l. 75) be threatened by "hurricanes" (l. 77). Her syntax and diction are more than just free of accent and dialect. After reading plenty of slave narratives and later nineteenth century "local color" works featuring dialect-speaking characters, that alone might seem strange to us—but as E. Warwick Slinn notes, "few slave narratives were published before 1848, so there was little precedent for actual slave speech in print."¹² However, this slave also talks like a poet in other ways. She frequently slips into the archaic forms common to highly wrought poetic and biblical diction of this period, such as "nothing didst Thou say" (l. 88) addressed to God, or "The free sun rideth gloriously" (l. 199) as she describes the day breaking and the pilgrim ghosts leaving.

The slave speaker's imagery and metaphors are beautiful, even when they are surreal. When she describes how she finally found some emotional resolution after carrying her child's body with her for days, she achieves perfect emotional realism but complete linguistic unrealism. The images in Stanzas XXVI through XXVIII express lyrically and logically the emotions a person in such a situation might experience. The slave, in her distress, projects her own exhaustion onto the corpse ("it was tired"), finds peace by making the body as dark as her own using earth, and expresses this peace by singing the song (her lover's name) that she had been repressing up until this point. The surreal touches of the "sharp" fingers of the white angel, and the dead baby singing her song back to her, but less wildly and more melodiously, add the weight of detail to a picture of a mind hovering on the brink of insanity. The vocabulary choices would add intensity for a contemporary reader: "strewed," "ensued," the archaic spellings of "sate" and "'twixt," and the poetic "Did point and mock" are not uncommon in nineteenth-century poems, especially those about tortured emotional states.¹³

This powerful language violates the conventions of the dramatic monologue in one sense but fulfills them in another, since the reader of such a poem is supposed to identify strongly with the speaker and become immersed in his or her perspective. Today's readers generally require linguistic realism to get this effect—the Bedford Introduction to Literature uses Katharyn Howd Machan's "Hazel Tells Laverne," a poem in which one janitor speaks to another in extremely colloquial modern language, as an example of the dramatic [End Page 560] monologue for today's students.¹⁴ But nineteenth-century readers must not have required this sort of literal realism; classic dramatic monologues of this period employ the poetic language of their own day rather than anything historically accurate. In that sense, Barrett Browning here gives Victorian readers what they would expect, and the emotional intensity of the language would aid in a reader's identification with the character because the convention of poetic diction would probably be transparent to a contemporary reader. But my less-well-prepared students, who expect more extensive realism even in poetry, are confused by it and assume that the language of the speaker must have meant she herself was a real, literal poet. One semester, I received a paper that assured me that Barrett Browning wrote her poems to tell the reader what she was thinking at the moment she was writing. This reaction on the student's part can only come from Barrett Browning having succeeded in creating a sense of passionate immediacy about the emotional experiences of the character—without having sufficiently achieved linguistic realism that would differentiate the author from the character.

This effect is even more prominent in the most frequently examined section of this poem, the one in which the speaker narrates her infanticide. This section is the one Lootens singles out as the most difficult to teach; it is the most emotionally raw and most directly challenging to a student's ethics. It is the section that most violates the dramatic monologue's convention that a reader must sympathize with the speaker but simultaneously judge her as well, or as Lootens writes, it "cracks open the dramatic monologue" (p. 499). Because Barrett Browning achieves the same emotional intensity as in the earlier section I discussed, a reader becomes sufficiently immersed to sympathize but generally does not judge. Certainly, my students have always had this reaction. Perhaps because in the twenty-first century Americans are trained from childhood to see slavery as the ultimate evil, almost reflexively, any other evil seems smaller by comparison. The moral logic for a modern reader, as expressed by my students over the years, runs something like this: Slavery caused this woman to be raped and to bear a child; the child looked like her master and that reminded her of her pain; that drove her crazy; she snapped and killed it out of either hatred of the man who raped her or desire to save the child from the same life of slavery she had led; either way, it's slavery's fault and not the speaker's. The most difficult part of this moral chain of reasoning is the step where one tries to decide whether she kills the child out of vengeance or love, which is primarily decided by stanzas XVIII and XXI. Many commentators on the poem have parsed these lines differently, coming to varying conclusions about what exactly the speaker claims her motivation to be.¹⁵

My students, on the other hand, generally indicate during class discussion that they don't actually care what the speaker's motivation was. Either [End Page 561] way, they feel her pain and are on her side. Everything about the writing of this section is designed to make a reader experience the slave's situation as much as possible as if it were real, and it is successful. These techniques include, first, the way that the killing seems to start as an accident in stanza XVIII: the slave covers up the infant's face to avoid looking at it, and then just keeps pulling the kerchief tighter and tighter without realizing it. Second, the way the infant's motions are described in XIX and XXII in concrete detail tends to produce extreme sensation in many readers. Third, the recursiveness of the description reinforces the emotional intensity, as she narrates the initial covering, the infant's reactions, and her own motivations twice—as if she has to start over in the pain of recalling it for the ghosts or can't make up her own mind even now about why exactly she did it. Finally, the tortured syntax and punctuation of all the sections, especially XXI -XXIII, with pauses, parentheses, and confusing shifts, both mimic and produce in the reader the stuttering and mental confusion found in moments of extreme emotional crisis. Some of the physical details are so wrenching for the mother of a small child to read that I myself have often had to stop, take a break, and start over; and this reaction is clearly common, judging by Lootens' description of her class's readings, in which students frequently try to speed up or skim over the difficult parts (p. 496). Elizabeth Battles uses the almost physical pain of the infanticide section as a key element in her argument that the slave mother kills her infant out of love, not vengeance.¹⁶ Battles argues that "the killing of the child is . . . a strengthening of the bond" (p. 99) between mother and infant, and that this is Barrett Browning's ultimate commentary on the immorality of slavery.

A confounding factor is the question of whether or not the speaker is mad in any literal sense. She says the child's look "made me mad" (l. 144), but later in the poem she insists to the slave-takers "I am not mad: I am black" (l. 218). In the infanticide section and immediately afterward the speaker certainly seems mad (the interpolated "ha, ha"s and the hallucinations about the angels are the most obvious signs), and yet she tries to insist that she is not, even after having spoken to pilgrim-ghosts all night. She insists on this point because she wants to make her agony and her ethically questionable action part of the very condition of blackness under slavery—not the action of one weak woman who couldn't take it.¹⁷ The idea that slavery is so terrible that it inevitably produces madness is compatible with an abolitionist position; that move is almost too easy for today's students. Readers of Barrett Browning's own day, however, might have been more persuaded of the evil of slavery by seeing it as responsible not for the speaker's suffering but for her terrible and immoral action—for making her "reprehensible," to use Robert Langbaum's word for the quality all the most successful dramatic monologue protagonists share (p. 85). In that case, we might theorize that Barrett Browning, in her own day, was hoping to achieve a stronger effect through the shock of moral [End Page 562] reversal. If the reader gets all the way to the end of the poem and still sympathizes with the runaway slave, then realizes "I just accepted infanticide!" the anti-slavery message will be stronger. Such a sequence is essentially similar to what Langbaum says all dramatic monologues do: "the sympathy which we give the speaker for the sake of the poem and apart from judgment makes it possible for the reader to participate in a position, to see what it feels like to believe that way, without having finally to agree" (p. 105). In other words, "suppose I were this person?"—but with the assurance that at the end one will still be oneself and not give in to the fictional viewpoint or morals of the speaker.

To posit such a desired Victorian reaction would turn on the accepted idea both then and now that, in the end, in a dramatic monologue, one judges. To complicate matters, it seems that Victorian readers did not judge the slave or feel any such fraught emotions as I have described. Angela Leighton says that "the English reading public . . . seems not to have been troubled by the murder, rape and infanticide" in this poem (Writing Against the Heart, p. 100), and Marjorie Stone discusses the positive reactions of certain nineteenth-century readers, both white and black ("Between Ethics and Anguish," p. 144). Marjorie Stone also shows convincingly that "neither the chain of curses nor the call for insurrection seemed out of place" in the context of the rest of the material in the abolitionist publication in which it first appeared ("EBB and the Garrisonians," p. 34). It is difficult to tell whether that means my theory is correct, and Victorian readers found the greater moral purpose of being surprised by their sympathy with sin to make up for the dramatization of infanticide, or whether Barrett Browning simply succeeded in immersing readers of her own day in the speaker's perspective as well as she does with today's readers, and the moment of judgment never came for them either.

If Victorians did not judge any more than my students do, it is probably because "Runaway Slave" completely lacks the dramatic irony that often carries the judgment function of a dramatic monologue, which is the second feature that I believe causes my students' confusion. The poem is set up as an explicit apologia by the runaway slave to the pilgrim-ghosts—who do not get to speak. The slave begins the poem by stating that she has fled the slave-takers to Pilgrim's Point (when presumably she would have been better off continuing north to Canada) for the purpose of cursing the whites of America in return for what they have done to her; she feels her curse will be more effective if she does it there, where she can take advantage of the ghosts' presence: "in your names, to curse this land / Ye blessed in freedom's, evermore" (ll. 20-21). Thus the pilgrims are there, from the beginning, as her supporters or tools, at best witnesses to her vengeance upon their descendants—not as authority figures. She is aggressive in her tone throughout her recital of her story to the ghosts, and they leave the stage before the end of the poem as the dawn breaks, chased off by shame: "My face is black, but it glares with a [End Page 563] scorn / Which they dare not meet by day" (ll. 202-2033). We might expect that the morally upright pilgrims would be the stand-ins for the reader's own judgment, but in fact they are routed and replaced by "their hunter sons" (l. 204) in stanza XXX, and the rest of the poem is spoken directly to these slave hunters, as they surround and threaten her with violence and recapture. In the end, the slave forgoes the option to curse America after all, leaving them "curse-free / In my broken heart's disdain" (ll. 252-3) but also in the name of "the white child waiting for me / In the death-dark where we may kiss and agree" (ll. 250-251). In death, the slave takes the high road and assures the morally inferior auditors that her child will forgive her. We are left with nothing but her feelings and her opinions about "the Washington-race" (l. 221). She is not even necessarily killed by the slavers themselves, but possibly through nothing more than the excess of her own emotion—"as if I should die / Of liberty's exquisite pain" (ll. 248-249)—so that they fail to defeat her even on a purely physical level.¹⁸

Because the slave displays an awareness of the opinions of others and addresses herself to them, she violates the pattern of the dramatic monologue, in which the morally questionable speaker inadvertently reveals things about himself to the reader. There is no dramatic irony in this poem, because, aside from the question of whether the speaker is legally insane, there is no issue the slave is unaware of or incompetent to judge and therefore no way for the reader's point of view to be substantially different from hers. As a consequence, the speaker and reader are on the same epistemological plane, just as they are in most lyric poems. We do not judge her, only slavery.

I make this argument at some length, because one critique of "Runaway Slave," by Sarah Brophy, contends that Barrett Browning "limits the degree of agency allowed to the black female speaker's voice in the poem" (p. 281), rendering her a "spectacle" rather than a "subject" (p. 280). Brophy is concerned to show that Barrett Browning was not as radical a feminist as some of her 1990s readers made her out to be. But Brophy does not do enough to situate the poem within the genre of the dramatic monologue or to consider what it means to have the speaker of such a poem triumph over the patriarchal authority figures (the pilgrim-ghosts) that Brophy sees as representatives of Barrett Browning's "androcentric ideals" (p. 275). To claim that a poet can limit the agency or "inscrib[e] and delet[e]" (Brophy, p. 284) the voice of the speaker of a 253-line first person poem seems strained at best. Marjorie Stone argues, in contradiction, that "the dramatic form" of the poem "generates some of its most subversive effects" ("Between Ethics and Anguish," p. 143), although she is not necessarily discussing the dramatic monologue form, only the dramatic presentation of plot. E. Warwick Slinn, however, gives a far more detailed account of the radical nature of Barrett Browning's decision to allow the slave to speak for herself and to perform speech acts within the poem by [End Page 564] contextualizing "Runaway Slave" within the history of abolitionist literature (pp. 63-66), and indeed it seems unarguable that the slave speaking for herself is one of the most revolutionary features of the poem.

The lack of dramatic irony in the poem might, however, justifiably cause one to question whether it is a dramatic monologue at all. Almost all commentators discuss it as one, even though dramatic irony and the split between reader and speaker are felt by many scholars to be constitutive of the genre. However, Barrett Browning herself described it as "a rather long ballad" (qtd. in Parry, p. 120), and Ann Parry follows that cue in discussing the poem as an example of the ballad form rather than the dramatic monologue. This dovetails with her desire to strip the poem of psychological resonances with Barrett Browning's own biography and focus on its political agenda. "In a traditional ballad," she says, "circumstances and action are given baldly; cause and motivation are left to the imagination. Interest is in the type and not the individual" (p. 120). However, this description of the ballad form is exactly the inverse of what "Runaway Slave" actually does. In this poem, the emphasis is entirely on the individual character of the speaker and her complicated motivations, which are explored in intense detail. Moreover, the poem fits the genre of the dramatic monologue in every conceivable other way aside from the lack of dramatic irony. Ekbert Fass describes the sudden rise of the genre after 1855 and its astonishingly quick reification into a set of "encoded" features which critics lambasted authors for violating. The list of these encoded features that he gives fits "Runaway Slave" quite exactly.¹⁹ Cornelia Pearsall discusses "Runaway Slave" in her chapter on the dramatic monologue for The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry without in any way questioning its fitness to be included in the genre;²⁰ she notes its "powerful polemical effect" (p. 79) but does not see that political agenda as atypical of the dramatic monologue. It is also worth noting that the poem was written in 1846, during the period that Browning and Tennyson were beginning to establish the genre, but before its first peak of enormous popularity. One might then imagine that Barrett Browning is here attempting to experiment with a form not yet set in stone, modifying one feature of the genre that we now think of as distinctive because it suited her political purpose to do so—but before that feature could yet be thought of as an orthodoxy.

Of course, even the most famous theory about the dramatic monologue, Robert Langbaum's, is not as monolithic as I began this essay by making it appear, and perhaps the judgment function is not absolutely required. Langbaum does place the most emphasis on the way the poem splits one's sympathy and judgment, and says that "the split must in fact be at work to some degree, if the poem is to generate the effect which makes it a dramatic monologue" (p. 105). But he also, anticipating Marjorie Stone's insistence on reading infanticide through a "feminist ethics" of "embodied experience" [End Page 565] ("Between Ethics and Anguish," p. 149), concedes that the judgment function itself is relative and conditioned by historical circumstances. Thus dramatic monologues are even more appropriate for us than for Victorians: "For such an age judgment can never be final, it has changed and will change again; it must be perpetually checked against fact, which comes before judgment and remains always more certain" (Langbaum, p. 108). By this reckoning, then, "The Runaway Slave" is a completely successful modern poem, because the historicized facts of slavery supersede the absolutes of Victorian moral judgment, rendering my students—and also its original Victorian readers, as far as the evidence exists—relativists. They condemn only slavery, not the slave.

This, of course, was Barrett Browning's desired result, as the poem was explicitly written for the abolitionist press. But the poem achieves that result in a different way from what a Victorian reader would expect. Barrett Browning would no doubt be overjoyed that modern readers take the evil of slavery as a given. But she might not be so thrilled that we accept her speaker's infanticide as easily as my students do, even if they do it only by skimming past it. She seems to have intended her poem to be a difficult, wrenching moral experience, one that (relatively early in the history of the genre) pushed to the very margins of what a dramatic monologue could do. The realization that one had accepted infanticide, even if only fictionally and temporarily, should be a galvanizing experience for her reader. Instead, the poem becomes one more exercise in "Why I'm glad I live in the twenty-first century." That's a valuable General Education experience as well but probably not quite the one Barrett Browning was looking for. Modern scholars, who know a great deal more about the literary and historical context of the poem, can see how the author's use of the dramatic monologue to give the slave a voice is truly revolutionary. But without that context, the poem reduces all too easily to a simple lyric that cannot transform a relativist reader.