In
this blog, I will be summarizing and analyzing an essay : “The Pragmatics of
Silence, and the Figuration of the reader in Browning’s Dramatic Monologues” by
Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor who is professor at the Pennsylvania State
University.
Summary
In
her essay, Wagner-Lawlor analyses the silence and its effect in Robert Browning’s
dramatic monologues. She argues that because of the speaker’s behavior the
listener has to be a silent figure. Indeed, the speaker seems to be superior to
the auditor. He can be an aggressive and narcissistic character and the listener
seems to have no choice but listening to him. But this silent from the listener
can lead to this ambiguity : is his silence a kind of approval or is it the
opposite ? In a second part, Wagner-Lawlor argues that the reader must be set apart
from the listener. According to her, the reader is not submitted to the speaker
of the dramatic monologue and he has more freedom. Moreover, the meaning of the
silence can be interpreted differently. The listener’s silence can be perceived
as an agreement whereas the reader’s silence can be interpreted as a disagreement.
Analysis
I
agree with Wagner-Lawlor’s idea concerning the meaning of the auditor’s
silence. “The aggressive narcissism of the speaker, who does not let the
auditor speak, sets up a violation of “access rights” to discourse” wrote
Wagner-Lawlor. Indeed, the listener is deprived of his right to respond to the
speaker and that could explain his silence. If it is true that the speaker puts
himself in the foreground of his monologue, the silence of the auditor does not
necessarily means that he agrees with him. If we can interpret it in this way
as readers, we can also interpret it differently. The silence does not always
means approval even from a submitted character.
In her essay, Wagner-Lawlor also wrote : “ Whereas the auditor’s silence may represent an involuntary consensus, the silence of the actual reader, who is forced to step out of the place of the noninterpretive auditor, may signify the opposite”. I agree that the reader may be opposed to the speaker. As we can read in Robert Langbaum’s essay “The Dramatic Monologue: Sympathy versus Judgment”, the reader is shared between sympathy toward the speaker of the dramatic monologue and moral concerns. But the reader tends to be more sympathetic than ready to condemn the speaker’s action. I believe that even if the reader, through his silence, has more freedom to express his opposition to the speaker, it must not be necessarily interpreted in this way.
I agree with your analysis about the relative freedom of the listener/readers in Browning's poetry. It's important to try to put ourselves in the shoes of the literal listener, in order to sympathize with his position in relation to the speaker and figure out his silence, but it's also important to engage actively with the text as readers, something that Browning's literal listeners don't get to do.
ReplyDelete