His Word Was Still: Gothicism, Silence, and the Isolation of Self In Browning's Poetry

Of Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest, Chloe Chard writes, "Like all works of Gothic fiction, the novel constantly raises the expectation of future horrors, suggesting that dreadful secrets are soon to be revealed, and threatening the eruption of extreme - though often, unspecified - forms of violence." (1) This description of Gothic fiction also aptly fits the poetry of Robert Browning, who displays in his dramatic and narrative forms a decidedly Gothic sensibility. However, unlike most of his Gothic predecessors, Browning does not seem to delight in the use of terror for sensation's sake - not content to turn his readers into an audience of darkly thrilled voluptuaries, terror in Browning's poetry is a means to an end, that end being heightened awareness of a moral or philosophical nature. Thus, Browning can be ranked with the small group of Gothic writers who wrote poetry or prose within that genre with ulterior social motives, placing him in the same circle as Radcliffe, Blake, Coleridge, the Shelleys, and (if advocacy of the negative aesthetic and degenerate impulse counts) Sade.

Gothicism, for Browning, is not just an artistic expression or genre, but a statement about social structure, particularly the relationship between self and the outside world, which are frequently separated as if by some deep, romantic chasm.

That Browning's most frequent poetic form is the dramatic verse, in soliloquy or monologue, implies a certain paradoxical detachment within the voice of each narrator. On the one hand, to lose his ego within the personae of the Duke of Ferrara, Johannes Agricola, or other created characters bespeaks a capacity for empathy within Browning; on the other hand, the characters Browning create all suffer to some degree from isolation, often self-imposed, which frequently results in what is today called antisocial behavior.

For instance: in "My Last Duchess," the Duke of Ferrara is jealous to an extreme degree not generally associated with the sound of mind. "Twas not/Her husband's presence only, called that spot/Of joy into the Duchess' cheek...She had/A heart - how shall I say? - too soon made glad/Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er/She looked on, and her looks went everywhere..." (13 - 24) The Duchess' crime is that of not living solely for the Duke's pleasure. She is put into a double bind, however. So prideful is the Duke that he refuses to tell her the nature of her crime: "Even had you skill/In speech - (which I have not) - to make your will/Quite clear to such an one, and say, "Just this/Or that in you disgusts me... E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose/Never to stoop." (35 - 43) Thus, the Duke of Ferrara conveniently explains the necessity of executing his young wife. Bluebeard could not have been more efficient.

The true chill in the Duke's statement comes at the end of the poem, however, when he calmly shows off another one of his paintings, this one a mythological piece. The most recent wife (hopefully, the next will instinctively know to avoid smiling at sunsets or favorite mules) is reduced to a showpiece, objectified even more in death than she was in life. Meanwhile, the reader becomes a voyeur, isolated and egoistically detached as they wander through the gallery, gazing at the late Duchess and her surviving, arrogant Duke. The worst violence is not the Duke's act of killing his wife, but rather the detachment of sensibility experienced by the reader as the reader grows more attuned to the Duke's character, witnessing all the figures in the poem as portraits, actors, things to be watched. It is the reader's empathic impulse that is murdered.

If voyeurism is implicit in "My Last Duchess," it is excruciatingly explicit in "Porphyria's Lover." Incidentally, "Porphyria's Lover" is more obviously Gothic than "My Last Duchess," as well - whereas "My Last Duchess" only has the far-away setting and the earlier period, "Porphyria's Lover" opens with the dark and stormy night so beloved of Gothic writers of previous decades: "The rain set early in tonight/The sullen wind was soon awake/It tore the elm-tops down... I listened with heart fit to break..." (1 - 5) Like the Duke of Ferrara, Porphyria's lover is a swaggering specimen of masculine arrogance, possessiveness, and dominance (and Porphyria is such an odd name for a female character, considering that porphyria is a rare blood disease responsible for the superficial resemblance of those stricken with it to vampires). After the initial meeting with her lover, which sees her in a more active role, Porphyria is consistently portrayed as weak and helpless next to him, which again is a typically Gothic characterization. "She shut the cold out... And kneeled and made the cheerless grate/Blaze up... And, last, she sat down by my side/And called me. When no voice replied/She put my arm about her waist... Murmuring how she loved me - she/Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor/To set its struggling passion free/From pride... And give herself for me forever." (8 - 25)

Note the cold detachment of the narrator, who never deigns to speak to his coy mistress, but rather, remains silent and aloof. Also, note the sexual ambiguity inherent in this description of Porphyria. The phrasing of the narrator's speech seems to imply a very carnal interpretation of Porphyria's conflicting desires to submit and to remain her own person (i.e. virginal). The strangulation of Porphyria is likewise disturbingly sexual, too close to the description of defloration for comfort - "Be sure I looked up at her eyes/Happy and proud; at last I knew/Porphyria worshipped me: surprise/Made my heart swell, and still it grew/While I debated what to do/That moment she was mine, mine, fair/Perfectly pure and good: I found/A thing to do... No pain felt she/I am sure she felt no pain..." (31 - 42) Given that Victorian sensibilities demanded euphemism regarding the pleasures of the flesh, this passage once examined seems shockingly frank, especially given that erotic strangulation is not unheard of in the wide array of human sexual behavior. Browning displays an all-too-accurate knowledge of human physiology, adding to the disturbing power of this poem - after Porphyria has been strangled, her lover states, "Her cheek once more/Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss." (47 - 48) Strangulation turns a face red, a deep, blushing color. Again, the final devastating sentence is the most chilling of all the statements made in the poem - "And yet God has not said a word." (60) There is no moral judgment if the reader is limited to the eyes of Porphyria's lover. If God exists, God will not save the helpless or punish those who abuse their position of power. Indeed, to Porphyria's lover, is not such power God-given?

The Duke of Ferrara and Porphyria's lover (and with them Johannes Agricola, and to a much lesser degree, the Bishop whose dying command is a sumptuous tomb at St Praxed's Church) speak in the language of the id, a language full of stark isolation and even starker silence. It is a silence not at first detectable - how better to hide silence than in a long monologue, a barrage of words? - and yet it is there. The silence is that of moral ambiguity. In Browning's Gothic poems, his narrators and protagonists have cut themselves off from God, society, and moral convention, sometimes with devastating results. The Duke and Porphyria's lover trap themselves, entombing their romantic urges with the female companions they kill (their repressed Shadow-selves, if seen from a Jungian perspective).

Johannes Agricola, who seeks to reach God through sin, never achieves his goal. "I intend to get to God," he declares ("Johannes Agricola in Meditation," 6) but his intent never bears fruit - Agricola spends his entire poem making a frantic speech, speaking aloud his desire to reach God, but never having given any evidence of having done so. His statement, "I have God's Warrant, could I blend/All hideous sins, as in a cup/To drink the mingled venoms up/Secure my nature will convert/The draught to blossoming gladness fast" (33 - 37) is a far cry from Yeats' declaration that "everything is blest." The voice of the narrative politely conceals, like a fig leaf covering exposed genitalia, the neurosis of the character who is cut off from God, humanity, and sensibility - in other words, from the soul. As a result, there is a certain lack of resolution in the Romantic villain as portrayed by Browning. When such statements as "And yet God has not said a word!" or "How could I praise/If such as I might understand/Make out and reckon on His ways/And bargain for His love" ("Johannes Agricola," 56 - 59) are made, a hush perforce falls on the mind of the reader. A still, empty place is created, a lacuna where conventional yardsticks of right and wrong no longer have meaning. The result is delirium. Browning's villains are mad.

This stillness within a whirlwind of madness can be seen clearly, as well, in the nightmarish "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." The scene is that of a blasted wasteland, and the outlook of the knightly protagonist is mistrusting of person, setting, and ideal, resulting ultimately in nihilism. "What else should he set for, with his staff/What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare/All travelers who might find him posted there/And ask the road?" Childe Roland asks (7 - 10). What, indeed, except possibly to point the way to the dark tower that Childe Roland seeks? The figure of the old man is generally seen, in dreams, as an archetype of the wise, benevolent guide, an extension of tne the father image. Childe Roland has vastly different perceptions from other people, however, which perhaps explains his automatic mistrust of his guide; his difference of perception is established in lines 91 - 105 when he dismisses his former friends on the grounds of imagined moral lapses: "Good - but the scene shifts - faugh! What hangman hands/Pin to his breast a parchment? His own hands/Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst/Better this present than a past like that..." (100 - 104). Roland's difference, his uniqueness, has banished him to this wilderness. He has succeeded in damning himself.

Roland's psychic landscape, a hell of the imagination, is rife with images of death. The old man who points the way is close to death; Roland himself is close to death (stanzas 5 and 6). The plain is dead ("grey plain all round/Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound," 52 - 53. A starving horse, portrayed in monstrous terms, chews on grass that is "as scant as hair/In leprosy" (73 - 74). The world Roland inhabits is stunted by war, plague, and famine. This apocalyptic realm is the inner landscape denied so vigorously by the villain in Browning's poetry; this wasteland, that only the antiheroic Roland is honest or beaten enough to probe, is what is held at bay by the terrible acts of Porphyria's lover and Johannes Agricola. What Roland shares with his villainous counterparts, and what he sees as they do not, is the void contained within isolation. Roland rides to his certain doom.

Again, the silence of nihilism is masked within deafening noise. "Not hear? When noise was everywhere! It tolled/Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears/Of all the lost adventurers my peers... Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years/There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met/To view the last of me, a living frame/For one more picture! In a sheet of flame/I saw them and I knew them all. And yet/Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set/And blew. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came." (193 - 204) Isolated by his perceptions and his lonely ego to the last, Roland observes his companions (if they are real at all) as if gazing at a lurid painting before he meets his death. Thus the poem ends on an unresolved note. Doom is implied, but it is not spelled out and is thus not entirely certain; furthermore, the actual meaning of the poem is hidden within its Gothic trappings of nightmare and terror. Browning has once again struck his chord of silence into the heart of his reader, to emotionally devastating effect.

However, to say that Browning is a nihilist, or a writer who scribbles his verses purely out of a perverse desire to inspire unease in the reader, is to miss the point of his poetry. Browning disturbs in order that the dark, uncomfortable places might be exposed and this revealed to the reader as sordid, sad little corners of the mind, deserving of scorn and perhaps pity. It is far more natural, in Browning's eyes, to say "Let us be unashamed of soul/As earth lies bare to heaven above/How is it under our control/To love or not to love?" ("Two In the Campagna," VII) than it is to embrace the nihilist ideal, especially in its extreme form. Browning's villains, unlike Browning's other characters, do not accept the awkward presence of love, death, and the need for the individual to find a place within a largely oblivious society; rather, they reject both love and death by trying to capture each within a single fleeting moment, and they inflate the importance of the self to the point of solipsism. Those readers who fail to see the moralist lurking within Browning's more lurid tales are blind not only to his sense of irony (which was keen) but also to the underlying pathos that exists in the twisted characters who hold themselves captive within their own grey plains of ego.

Secondary source: Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest. Edited with introduction by Chloe Chard. Oxford University Press. Oxford: 1986.

February 1996