A matter of life and death: the auditor-function of the dramatic monologue.

Luu, Helen

Notwithstanding the critical consensus to agree to disagree on the definition of the dramatic monologue, the question of the auditor's function in the genre seems more central to our understanding of the form than has hitherto been acknowledged. (1) As the critical history of the auditor shows, the auditor is a defining feature of the dramatic monologue not only because how one theorizes the genre depends significantly on how one theorizes the auditor-function, but conversely because how one theorizes the auditor-function significantly alters one's theory of the dramatic monologue. For instance, where the genre is defined as gratuitous speech serving the monologist's purpose of self-understanding or the genre's purpose of self-revelation, the auditor is deemed to be superfluous. This is as true of theories that define the genre by its effect of ironic character revelation--that is, the unintended revelation of the speaker's hidden self or true character--as it is of theories that define the genre by its challenge to that view of a hidden, essential, and authentic self. For the latter, the genre is defined not by its revelation of the speaker's self, but by its revelations about the speaking self: that it is not the unified, autonomous or sovereign subject of the Cartesian "I" or the unconstrained lyrical "I" of the Romantic ideal, but the fragmented and contingent product of text and context. (2) For both, the auditor is superfluous, since it is the discrepancy between what the speaker says and "what he intends to say" or "set[s] out to mean" that produces both types of self-revelation. (3) This definition of the genre thus depends on the superfluity of the auditor as much as this view of the auditor is determined by this definition of the genre. Likewise, where the auditor is defined as the necessary immediate and active interlocutor of the monologue, the theory of the genre must change: the dramatic monologue becomes a form of rhetorical performance, whether for the purpose of communication (Dorothy Mermin) or transformation, be it through apostrophic swerves of voice (W. David Shaw) or performative acts of speech (Cornelia Pearsall). (4) Thus, the critical split between the view of the auditor as superfluous to the form and the view of the auditor as entirely necessary should not be regarded as simply a difference of opinion; the different theories of the genre that result reveal that at stake in the question of the auditor is the very question of genre: what the dramatic monologue is, what it does, and how it does it.

Focusing on the poetry of Augusta Webster, a poet distinguished in the nineteenth century for her dramatic monologues and in the twentieth for her unconventional auditors, this essay reopens the question of the auditor's function in the genre, but answers it by a different method. (5) Where previous studies have focused on the canonical dramatic monologues and the so-called "major" Victorian poets, their theories of the auditor-function have turned on the distinction between the immediate or empirical auditor and the implied or ideal, between auditors that are "human, adult, alive, awake, physically present, and able to hear and respond," in Mermin's useful definition, and those that are not. (6) For instance, Robert Langbaum had famously argued that the auditor's physical presence in the poem is superfluous since the speaker speaks ultimately to himself--"ultimately across the dramatic situation and across the ostensible auditor to some projection of the speaker"--while Loy D Martin effectively doubled the auditor's superfluity by arguing that the auditor was not just superfluous when present, but implied even when absent For Martin, "[a]ll dramatic monologues at least fantasize a listener." else, as T S. Eliot had put it, "why should a man put on fancy dress and a mask only to talk to himself?" (7)

For Mermin, in contrast, an auditor that is physically present and capable of responding shifts the genre's purpose from the ironic character revelation posited by earlier theories, where the auditor's physical presence "makes so little difference," to the question of the possibility and pragmatics of speech and communication, where the auditor's presence means everything (Langbaum, p. 190). And yet, for Shaw, the empirical auditor is important precisely, if paradoxically, for marking the moment at which the speaker turns away from the ostensible auditor to address, through this apostrophic "swerve of voice," an absent, silent or ideal audience such as God or the speaker's self. This in turn transforms the dramatic monologue from a genre that is about communication, as it was for Mermin, to one that "deflects," "complicates," or "disrupts the circuit of communication." For Shaw, this further alters the genre's purpose from that of "conscious or applied persuasion" of an immediate auditor to "unconscious, disinterested persuasion" of an ideal one instead (pp. 68, 16-17). Yet in the most recent re-theorization of the form, Pearsall reverses this formulation by arguing that the speaker's conscious and applied persuasion of an immediate audience is precisely what defines the genre. Since it is "the ambition of every dramatic monologue" to "attain some end," and that end is "to accomplish something in the monologue, by way of the monologue itself," it is the immediate audience of the monologue that determines whether the speaker accomplishes the transformative effects that, Pearsall argues, every dramatic monologist actively and intentionally seeks (pp. 202, 10).

To move past this impasse between an auditor whose presence is always implied and therefore unnecessary and an auditor whose presence is entirely necessary for achieving the genre's ends, this essay will pursue the question of the auditor's function by a different route. Rather than focusing on empirical auditors in canonical monologues to explain the function of the auditor's presence in the genre (or deny its purpose), this essay will examine auditors that defy this distinction between the empirical and ideal in order to explain the auditor's function in the genre even when absent. This is not a return to the position that the auditor's presence is always implied, but rather an attempt to understand the function of the auditor's presence by exploring the impact of its absence--on the speaker and his or her speech, as well as on the poem and on the genre. I will argue that the auditor presents a key to the genre's poetics in the peculiar way that it links each of the genre's other features currently considered essential to the form (viz. the dramatic speaker, his or her speech, and its specific dramatic context), and I will do so by examining auditors whose presence is precisely what is in question in the poem.

Webster's critically neglected poem "Jeanne d'Arc" (1866) offers the perfect starting point for such an investigation, populated as it is with auditors that are neither fully present nor entirely absent, not human or alive, but possibly present and certainly able to hear and respond. From the soldiers of Jeanne's opening dream to the saints of her visions to, finally, God, all the auditors of the poem either appear in invisible realms or do not appear at all. Even more than empirical auditors, I suggest that these marginal and ambiguous auditors press home the question of the auditor's function. Adapting Mermin's original question about "poems with auditors," we might now ask: if these auditors have so little real function, matter even less than their more prominent counterparts in the canonical dramatic monologues suggest, then why are they there at all? (8) Poised in this liminal space between poems with auditors and poems without, "Jeanne d'Arc" reveals just what is at stake in the auditor-convention of the genre, in the act of speaking to someone other than one's self, directing one's speech not just outward, but toward a specified audience that is present to the speaker. I will argue that at stake is not simply the speakers' linguistic power and authority, the prevailing critical claim, but the speakers' entire survival: their very life and death.

In the canonical dramatic monologues, critics have consistently claimed, what is at stake in the auditor-function is the speaker's linguistic power, whether it is the power to communicate with a present auditor (Mermin), the power to command absent ones through apostrophic address (Shaw), or the power to affect, even transform, the auditors internal to the poem and thereby the speaker's self or some larger situation (Pearsall). Indeed, the auditor functions as a sign of that power whether the auditor is silent or vocal in the poem. For example, in Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" (1842), the envoy's silence itself symbolizes the Duke's power, his "extraordinary freedom to speak," as Mermin puts it, "with absolute self-command and impunity, the worst of truths" (pp. 48-49), just as God's silence at the end of Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" (1836) signals to the speaker God's approval (or at least lack of disapproval) not only of the speaker's murder of Porphyria, but also of his account of that murder in the monologue. In other words, God's silence signals once again the speaker's freedom to tell, with absolute self-command and impunity, the worst of truths. Conversely, in Tennyson's "Ulysses" (1842) and "St. Simeon Stylites" (1842), it is the auditors' responses that signal the speakers' linguistic power. In "Ulysses," the mariners' implied assent to the speaker's call to "[p]ush off" one last time and "smite / The sounding furrows," against all reason and all odds, confirms his rhetorical power (ll. 58-59). (9) And as Pearsall persuasively argues, in "St. Simeon Stylites," the auditors' very vocal response to the speaker's performance of saintly self-abasement is what effects the transformation into sainthood that the speaker seeks. By the very act of calling him "St Simeon Stylites," Simeon's auditors not only confirm the suasive power of his performance, but performatively transform him into the saint they name (p. 98).

Based on the canonical dramatic monologues, then, one might agree with Pearsall's claim that "a major feature of this poetic genre is its assumption of rhetorical efficacy." (10) Yet the auditors of Webster's "Jeanne d'Arc" overturn this model of speaking in the poem's opening lines. Though the poem opens in paradigmatic dramatic monologue form, replete with an abrupt beginning, colloquial diction, immediacy of speech and action, and even multiple auditors, and though the speaker is Joan of Arc, an easy emblem of linguistic power and authority, Webster immediately undoes this model of rhetorical efficacy by dramatizing not Jeanne's linguistic power over her auditors, but her linguistic impotence. Addressing her soldiers in what she believes to be the September 1429 attack on Paris, but which turns out to be a dream during her imprisonment in Rouen, Jeanne assumes from the outset the position of military authority and command. The poem opens with a string of commands to her soldiers to return to battle and rescue her, but their failure to respond transforms her authoritative speaking into an instance of failed speech and failed communication. The poem opens:

   To me--to me! Dunois! La Hire! Old Daulon,
   Thou at the least shouldst stand by me--Oh haste!
   The soul of France is in me, rescue me!--
   Turn back the flyers--Cowards, have you learned
   These English can be conquered, yet you flee?
   To me!--Oh! 1 am wounded! Oh! this time
   We shall not sleep in Paris--(ll. 1-7) (11)

Unlike the canonical monologists, whose linguistic power is confirmed both by the auditor's silence and the auditor's response, Jeanne's power and authority here are directly undercut by the soldiers' refusal to respond, just as, in the next verse paragraph, they are undermined by the soldiers' compliance. In the next line, the dream shifts from Paris to Compiegne, where Jeanne wonders for a moment where she is, a sense of dislocation that pervades the scene and erodes her authority further. Jeanne is throughout the remainder of the dream (and the poem) not where she should be (she is outside the gates instead of inside the fort, in prison instead of on the battlefield), but this time, it is not because her auditors refuse her commands, but because they comply. They return to the fort as she commands, and they go in as she commands, but this leaves her "without, alone":

                            What is this?
   Is this not Paris but sieged Compiegne?
   Back, to the fort! This once we needs must fly.
   In, in! They are closing on us--in!--Oh Christ!
   The gate drops down! And I without, alone!
   Open, the foe is on me. Help! Oh now
   I feel I am a woman and 'mong foes!
   Oh save me!--(ll. 7-14)

Webster thus doubles Jeanne's linguistic failure in the poem's opening, first as a result of her auditors' silence and then as a result of their compliance. In the first instance, Jeanne does not get the response she intends, and when she does, in the second instance, it does not have the effect that she intends; it leaves her not only injured and isolated, but captured, imprisoned and imperilled, as the poem is set in the moments leading up to the trial that will lead ultimately to her death. What this opening therefore reveals is that the auditor functions not (or not solely) as a sign of the speaker's linguistic power and authority, since both the auditors' silence and their response signal the speaker's linguistic impotence and failure. Rather, the auditors function here as a sign of that failure and its effects on the speaker: Jeanne is first wounded because her auditors fail to respond to her commands, just as she is captured because they respond as she commands. By thus making the auditors' response the cause of Jeanne's failed speech, her physical wound and her final capture, Webster reveals the greater stakes in speaking and in the auditor-function: it is not simply the speaker's power to persuade, silence or ignore the auditor, but the speaker's very life and death.

By the "life and death of the speaker," I mean both the identity (life) and the viability (threat of death) of the speaking subject. Jeanne's exclamation at the end of the dream, "Oh now / I feel I am a woman and 'mong foes!" captures precisely the life-and-death stakes of speaking. That it is only "now," when Jeanne is "without, alone," as a result of her failed speech, that Jeanne feels she is a woman, suggests that both her identity ("I am a woman") and subjectivity ("I feel I am a woman") are not only effects of her linguistic failure, but also under threat because of that failure ("and 'mong foes"). Indeed, these life-and-death stakes are embodied by Jeanne herself, by Webster's very choice of speaker, since it is Jeanne's literal life and death that are at stake in her speaking. Not only must the historical Jeanne persuade her historical auditors at her trial of her status as God's messenger in order to live (a scene not dramatized in the poem, significant for reasons I later discuss), but Webster's Jeanne must prove herself, in the absence of empirical auditors, to be God's servant and not "the Fiend's" if she is going to die as such (l. 172).

Accordingly, Jeanne attempts upon waking from her dream of linguistic failure to defend her claim to authority by invoking its source: the saints Catherine and Margaret "who first sent [her] forth," "who have warned [her], counselled, comforted, / Given [her] persuasion and the gift to awe / And the strong soldier spirit of command" (ll. 19, 23-25). However, both the saints' silence and their response, like the soldiers', deny Jeanne the linguistic power and authority she seeks. Her first request, "Stay with me for awhile, / And let me feel your mystic influence / Thrill all my being into rapt delight," is answered by their disappearance: "Oh you are dimmer!" (ll. 54-57, 62). And though her second plea is answered--the "Mother of the Blessed" and the "virgin saints" (ll. 79, 83) do hear her and come down--they come not for the purpose Jeanne desires, not to "comfort [her] with love, and show [her] truth" or to "deliver [her] / In this distress," but to show her visions which compound her distress into "dull confusion" (ll. 82, 88-89, 121). While the first visions remind Jeanne of her domestic loss, the way that her "higher destiny" transformed her "dreamy" and "pleasant" "days" into an "oppressive quiet" (ll. 92-95), the next visions carry Jeanne through each crowning moment of her "true career," from the king's public recognition of Jeanne to the victory at Orleans and the coronation at Rheims (ll. 91, 97-103), but only to plummet her into a memory of her "first shame," her defeat in Paris (ll. 116-118). What follows then is "[c]loud / And dull confusion" in which Jeanne cannot decipher the visions or their significance:

   Oh! but my brain whirls--whirls--what is it? Cloud
   And dull confusion. Who is it that stands
   Mouthing and gecking at me? Why now, Pierre,
   Because, forsooth, thou art our neighbour's son,
   Must 1 be bound to dance with thee at will?
   Why flout me with so stale a grudge, my friend?
   Is the face changed? It was Dame Madelon's Pierre,
   The poor good clumsy youth, whose suits and sulks
   Had so passed from my mind, I thought I saw.
   And now--I know it, the long fiendish sneer,
   The sudden glare! (ll. 120-130)

Ending with a vision of her imminent trial, condemnation, and death, Jeanne's visions suggest that if the saints have indeed answered Jeanne's call to "show me truth," then the truth is that she is forsaken by God (l. 82). This conclusion is confirmed by the saints' answer to Jeanne's final request, to "[s]tay yet with me ye blessed": "They are gone!" (l. 140).

Rather than reinforcing her power and authority, then, Jeanne's invocation of the saints effectively and repeatedly undermines it. If they, her "guardians and consolers, who, beyond / All other saints, have taken part for [her]" now refuse to do so, then she is no longer one of God's elect but truly "deserted" by him (ll. 26-27, 174). Thus, unlike the silence of auditors in canonical monologues, which reinforces the speaker's linguistic power and freedom, the silence of Jeanne's auditors renders her powerless and vulnerable, transforming her from a "strong soldier" with the "spirit of command" to a "poor weak girl, lone in [her] helplessness, / Crying ... for that once strength" she had (ll. 25, 84-85). Furthermore, their silence not only de-authorizes Jeanne's speech, but also places both her identity and her subjectivity at risk. While the silence of the soldiers and saints together calls into question Jeanne's identity or subject status as "God's instrument" and "servant," the saints' silence in particular brings Jeanne to question her senses (ll. 112, 68). After their first disappearance, Jeanne cannot determine "which is dream" (l. 69)--whether her opening dream was "[b]ut a confused remembering in sleep" (l. 63) and whether what she "seemed" to see, "those Holy / Who lead [her]" (ll. 69, 71-72), were not hut "moonlight / Falling on prison-walls" (ll. 64-65). And while the incongruity of Jeanne's strange simile of "these men / Who press to carnage as a lightsome girl / Hastens her steps to where the dancers wait" itself hints at a mind in disorder, Jeanne's conclusion after the saints' disappearance, that "[t]his must he the dream: / These chains, this prison, they must be the dream," confirms the instability of her subjectivity (ll. 20-22, 77-78).

In turn, the uncertainty of Jeanne's subjectivity places in question the authenticity of her auditors: whether the saints appear to her as she describes-indeed, whether they appear to her at all. At the center of the poem is thus the central question of this essay: what is at stake in the convention of the empirical auditor, in the convention of an auditor that is real and not imagined, empirical and not ideal, visible and not invisible? Webster suggests that it is entirely the speaker's life and death: Jeanne's identity as either heretic or saint and her subject status as either mad or sane rest entirely on these distinctions, on whether the saints truly appear to her as she describes or are merely more "mad dreams" (l. 31). Jeanne's own question, "Oh you blessed saints of Heaven, / Do you come down to me again?" (ll. 14-15), makes explicit the centrality of this question to the poem. Though Jeanne asks the question rhetorically, convinced that they do, and describes their physical appearance as empirical proof--"You smile / A wondrous holiness, ineffable. / Oh what a brightness stars upon your brows! / It grows--it grows! 1 see you clearly now" (ll. 15--18)--Webster calls Jeanne's account into question. In addition to Jeanne's own questioning of her senses, the similarities between the saints and the soldiers suggest that the saints, like the soldiers, might merely be the effect of a mad dream. While Jeanne's cries to both are interchangeable--"help me," "hear me," "save me," "rescue me," "stay with me" (ll. 31, 32, 14, 3, 54)--their responses are identical: both disappear. Indeed, Jeanne's reproach to her soldiers, that "Thou at the least shouldst stand by me" (l. 2), lies implicit in her appeal to the saints. Insisting with a repetition that mounts to accusation that it is "You who first sent me forth," "You who have warned me, counselled, comforted, / Given me persuasion," and you, "My guardians and consolers, who, beyond / All other saints, have taken part for me" (ll. 19, 23-24, 26-27), Jeanne implies in this plea to the saints that it is also you who "at the least shouldst stand by me."

At the same time, however, the accuracy of Jeanne's visions of the future, particularly of her imminent trial and death, suggests that her visions of the saints might be equally authentic. Yet Webster problematizes this in turn by staging Jeanne's possible allegiance to "the Fiend" in what I will call Jeanne's slip from "speakability," following Judith Butler's term for the norms that govern the kind of speech that constitute or de-institute one as a subject. In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Butler defines the "domain of speakability" as those "implicit and explicit norms that govern the kind of speech that will be legible as the speech of a subject," where to violate those norms by speaking "in ways that cannot be regarded as speech or as the speech of a subject" would be to "risk one's status as a subject" and threaten "a certain dissolution of the subject." (12) In the same way, Jeanne risks her status as one of God's elect by speaking in a way that cannot be regarded as the speech of someone chosen by God. Confronted with the possibility of God's desertion and the imminence of an ignominious death, Jeanne attempts to disprove the accusation that she is allied with the Fiend, but in the process, risks the very heresy she is attempting to deny:

                        They say
   I commune with the Fiend and he has led
   My way so high. Yes, if he could do this,
   And I, deserted as I am of God,
   Might cease to war with him and buy my life,
   And greatness--and revenge!--
                       Oh God! forgive.
   I sin. Oh deadliest sin of all my life!
   Oh! pardon! pardon! Oh! have I condemned
   My soul to everlasting fire by this? (ll. 171-179)

Though Jeanne sets out in perfectly logical fashion here to prove the fallacy of the accusation by adopting its premise ("if the Fiend could do this, then I might join his ranks"), the expected conclusion fails to come, that "the Fiend cannot, so I did not." Instead, in this slippage between intention and effect, Jeanne affirms the possibility of the unspeakable: the "deadliest sin," allegiance to the Fiend.

If it is true, as Jeanne fears, that she has condemned her soul to everlasting fire "by this," this slip from speakability, then it is not simply or solely the authenticity of Jeanne's visions that places in question her status as saint, but also the source of their authority--whether her visions come from God or from the Fiend with whom, the poem suggests, Jeanne indeed "communes." For by Jeanne's own admission, the first of her "fearful visions" (l. 32) are sent by the Fiend to torture her (ll. 53-54), while in the final visions, she admits to knowing well "the long fiendish sneer" and the "sudden glare" that is pointedly no longer Pierre's:

   Is the face changed? It was Dame Madelon's Pierre,
   The poor good clumsy youth, whose suits and sulks
   Had so passed from my mind, I thought I saw.
   And now--I know it, the long fiendish sneer,
   The sudden glare! Ah! so the vision grows
   Perfect again. (ll. 126-131)

Jeanne's transgression of speakability thus complicates the link between empirical auditors and linguistic authority that is posited by earlier theories, and it does so hy interposing between the two the domain of speakability. While Jeanne's present status as God's servant and messenger and her future status as saint and martyr still depend on the authenticity of her auditors, her subject status depends even more on her embodiment of the norms of speakability in her speech. If the saints do not appear to her as she describes, then she is not the saint and martyr that she claims to be. However, even if they appear to her as she describes, she still might not be the saint and martyr that she claims to be if her transgression of speakability transforms her into the heretic she is accused of being. Jeanne's panicked plea for forgiveness immediately after the transgression foregrounds both her violation of speakability and its implications for her subject status--in short, it foregrounds the life-and-death stakes of her speaking. As Jeanne anxiously asks, "[H]ave I condemned / My soul to everlasting fire by this?" (ll. 178-179).

The reappearance of the saints in response to this question would seem to signal that, no, Jeanne has not condemned herself to everlasting fire but remains secure in God's favor: "Oh see they come, / They touch me with their palms! She smiles again, / The holy Mother! Yes, they beckon me" (ll. 180-182). Indeed, this is how other critics have read these lines. (13) Yet in the next line, the saints vanish once again and the question of their authenticity reappears in the wake of their disappearance. Jeanne's call here to an ambiguous auditor to "see" and verify the saints' reappearance underscores this question of their authenticity by reminding us that these visions cannot be verified, that it is only Jeanne who sees them, and that, as a subjective account offered by an unstable subjectivity, their very veracity is what the poem calls into question. Though Jeanne certainly seems "confident] in God's benevolence" and confident that "her prayer has been answered" at the end of the poem, as others have argued, I suggest that the saints' silence throughout the poem and God's silence at the end should shake the reader's faith in Jeanne's own confidence. (14)

Given that Jeanne herself is unsure of "which is dream," we will never know whether the saints do come down to her as she describes (l. 69). However, the fact that the very convention of the dramatic monologue (or "psychological monologue," as Webster's contemporaries called it) confines the auditor's response to signs within the speaker's monologue--as H. Buxton Forman had put it in 1869, "we learn that the person addressed has said or done something" only by "detail on the speaker's part, or by some such artifice as a sudden change in the tone of the monologue"--in other words, the fact that we know the auditor's response only through the speaker, even when the auditor speaks, makes the saints' silence especially strange. (15) For whether the saints are true visions or mad dreams, their speaking would not alter Jeanne's status or decide their authenticity. Since Jeanne is the only one who can hear them, just as she is the only one who can see them, we cannot determine, on the sole basis of their speaking, their authenticity or their source, and thus whether Jeanne is chosen by God, deceived by the Fiend, or self-deluded. This is true regardless of what the saints say, whether it is in favor of or against Jeanne, since such messages might still be deception or delusion. Thus, due to the auditor-convention of the form, the saints' speaking, inaudible to the reader, would have no effect on Jeanne's subject status, which remains in question even if the saints were to speak. The saints' silence, however, potentially reverses Jeanne's status from one chosen to one forsaken by God. For if the saints do come down to her as she describes and originate from God, but refuse each of her requests to help her, hear her, stay with her, comfort her, and deliver her in her distress (ll. 82, 88-89), then the truth is that she is once again abandoned and alone. As Jeanne states, "they are gone, / And I am left unaided to my fate" (ll. 143-144).

Read in this light, Jeanne's final account of the saints' reappearance and her final prayer to God seem less to me a sign of Jeanne's confidence in "God's benevolence" and a "martyr's death" than a sign of her recognition that both God's benevolence and a martyr's death are precisely what are at stake in her speaking (Hickok, p. 336). Having risked her subject status by her contemplation of an allegiance with the Fiend, a transgression she explicitly acknowledges in the poem, Jeanne has no choice but to re-embody the norms of speakability in her speech if she is to reinstate her subject status as martyr and saint. In her final prayer, Jeanne seems to do just that, to attempt to recover her subject status as saint or martyr by speaking like a saint, like a martyr:

          My God, I thank Thee who hast chosen me
   To be Thy messenger to drive them forth:
   And, since my death was destined with the mission,
   Lord of my life, I thank Thee for my death. (ll. 198-201)

This certainly follows the pattern of the poem whereby Jeanne struggles repeatedly with and for "speakability." For instance, when Jeanne watches the visions that show her rise from "a simple peasant girl" to the "first of women and of warriors," she glories in her victories and claims them entirely as her own:

                              Yes, my king,
   So did he honour me when I declared him
   Among his courtiers****Yes, so Orleans fell--
   Oh! my brave glory! yes I beat them back,
   These Englishmen that were invincible!****
   Yes, so I set the crown upon his head
   In sacred Rheims. Oh noble! how the crowd,
   Eager to kiss my vesture, touch me, throngs
   Around me, me a simple peasant girl
   Made first of women and of warriors
   In all our France!--(ll. 97-107)

Jeanne immediately recognizes the "unspeakability" of the claim, however,

and quickly returns to the domain of the speakable by rewriting her self-assertion as self-effacement:

                --Hush, hush, vainglorious heart,
   How often have the voices chidden thee
   For thy too arrogant delight! Not mine
   The honour, but the Lord's who sent me forth. (ll. 107-110)

In this final sentence, we can hear distinct echoes of Jesus' own statement when criticized for performing miracles on the Sabbath: "I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me" (John 5: 30). (16) Similarly, when faced with the vision of her imminent torture and death, Jeanne's anguished cry, "Oh! God, my God, / Dost thou behold, and shall these men, unjust, / Slay me, thy servant?" (ll. 167-169), unmistakably echoes Christ's cry at the crucifixion: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matt. 27: 46). In each case, Jeanne attempts to constitute herself a messenger and martyr by speaking like God's ultimate messenger and martyr, Christ; the simile is implied through the similarity of their speech. So too in her closing prayer, Jeanne seeks to shut down once and for all the threat to her subject status caused by her prior slips from speakability by embodying in her final speech the "courage and faith" and "confidence in God's benevolence" that would render her death a martyr's death (Hickock, p. 336).

And yet, in response to Jeanne's prayer, God does not say a word. The poem ends with the prayer, leaving Jeanne's subject status in question by leaving in doubt the status of her speech. Jeanne does not know whether God affirms and authorizes her speech, for God remains not simply absent in the poem, but silent. Because God is presumed to be present and capable of hearing and responding here, his silence places in doubt Jeanne's status as saint, for it remains uncertain whether God accepts her speech as the speech of his servant or whether Jeanne has in fact condemned her soul to everlasting fire by her prior slips from speakability. Thus, unlike Browning's "Porphyria's Lover," in which God's silence implies his approval of the speaker, God's silence at the end of "Jeanne d'Arc" quite possibly implies the reverse, his rejection of her, as God becomes the last in a long line of auditors in the poem who fail to respond and whose failure places Jeanne's subject status at risk. More precisely, God's silence at the end of the poem makes any conclusion about Jeanne's subject status impossible, for it leaves in permanent doubt the status of her speech. Unlike Christ, for instance, to whom God remained equally silent at the crucifixion, and unlike the innumerable other late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representations of Joan of Arc, which focus on vindicating her from the charges of madness and heresy, Webster's Jeanne is not (like Francis T. Palgrave's Jeanne) "[i]n [her] innocence secure" (l. 50). (17) Nor can she definitively declare, as Robert Southey's Joan does, " 'I am not mad' " (l. 60). (18) For unlike Katherine Tynan's monologue "Joan of Arc" (1885), which ends conclusively with Joan's first-person description of her ascension to heaven, Webster's poem ends with uncertainty. (19) While the ambiguity of Jeanne's auditors leaves in question the status of her subjectivity, her transgressions of speakability, coupled with God's silence at the end of the poem, place in perpetual doubt her status as saint.

By leaving the status of Jeanne's speech in question, Webster thus challenges the assumption of linguistic power or rhetorical efficacy that structures the auditor-convention of the canonical monologues. As discussed earlier, in the canonical dramatic monologues, regardless of whether the auditor is considered essential or superfluous, and regardless of the speaker's social and cultural position, the consistent claim is that the speakers all assume from the start the position of authoritative speaking subject. Whether Ithacan King, Italian Duke, failed artist, fraudulent medium or murderous madman, none question their linguistic authority and power. (20) Thus, though Porphyria's lover may be deemed mad by Browning, as indicated by the poem's original title "Madhouse Cells," neither the lover's speech nor his subject position is affected by his madness; he speaks with the same "absolute self-command" as the Duke and tells, with the same impunity, "the worst of truths." In fact, while Browning's original title may de-authorize the lover's speech by rendering uncertain his subjectivity, the subsequent removal of that title reverses that effect. Though we may believe that the speaker "belongs in a madhouse cell," as Mermin suggests, Browning's withdrawal of the original title removes any reason to believe that he sits there now, or to disbelieve that he continues to sit, as he claims, with Porphyria's corpse (pp. 48-49). And once again, God's silence, like the envoy's in "My Last Duchess," reinforces the speaker's linguistic power and freedom.

In contrast, Jeanne's ambiguous auditors and their ambiguous silence not only call into question the assumption of authoritative speaking of the canonical dramatic monologues, but more importantly, they reveal its necessary condition. Jeanne's status as God's messenger and martyr depends not only on each of her auditors to affirm and authorize her speech as one of God's elect, but also on the legibility of her speech as the speech of one of God's elect. This in turn, however, depends on the domain of speakability itself. As Butler writes, "The question is not what it is I will he able to say, but what will constitute the domain of the sayable within which I begin to speak at all" (p. 133). Since the question of Jeanne's subject status has received contradictory answers at different points in history, Webster's very choice of speaker crystallizes this link between speaker, auditor, speech, and speakability. First condemned to death as a heretic in 1431, Jeanne was declared innocent twenty-five years later when the Roman Catholic Church reversed its decision. More than four centuries after that, Jeanne was beatified in 1909, then canonized in 1920. In the five centuries between Jeanne's condemnation and canonization, Jeanne's speech had not changed; only her auditors and the domain of speakability had.

By shifting the question of Jeanne's subject status onto the question of her auditors' authenticity and the domain of speakability and by making the question a matter of life and death, Webster thus reveals not only the greater stakes in speaking, but also the greater function of the auditor in all dramatic monologues. As "Jeanne d'Arc" demonstrates, the auditor not only functions as a sign of the speaker's linguistic power (in Jeanne's case, her lack of it), but also signals the contingency of that power on each of the genre's other defining features: the dramatic speaker, his or her speech, and its specific dramatic context. The speaker's linguistic power and authority are contingent on the particular dramatic speaker's particular subject status, which is itself contingent on the legibility of his or her speech, which is further dependent on the domain of speakability, which is in turn dependent on the monologue's particular dramatic context (historical, social, and cultural) and, finally, on the auditor who can affirm (or deny) the "speakability" of the speech upon which the speaker's status as speaking subject depends. In short, Webster's ambiguous auditors reveal the indissoluble interdependence of the dramatic monologue's key features, showing that the auditor is not only entirely necessary to the form, but a matter of its very life and death--its function and its future.

By way of conclusion, I will demonstrate through a rereading of Webster's "A Castaway" (1870), the most anthologized and discussed of Webster's dramatic monologues, how this reconceptualization of the auditor-function demands a rethinking of all dramatic monologues, even those in which the speaker appears to possess absolute linguistic authority and power regardless of the status of the auditor (whether present or absent, real or imagined, empirical or implied). Critics have unanimously praised Eulalie, the poem's prostitute persona, for her "frank tone" and "straight-speaking dissent" as she delivers in the monologue a scathing critique of the Victorian gender ideology that both condemns and sustains her "trade" (l. 67). (21) For instance, Christine Sutphin applauds Webster for granting "narrative authority, psychological complexity, and a knowledge of social forces to a prostitute persona"; Susan Brown, for "inscribing] Eulalie not merely as a victim, but also as an agent and speaking subject" (and a "self-sufficient" one, according to Mermin); and E. Warwick Slinn, for "simulating] a marginalized, cast out figure of a prostitute speaking as if from a cultural center--or rather from the center of her self as sovereign subject " (22)

Yet I suggest that Webster's insistence on the auditor's absence throughout the poem calls into question the linguistic authority, agency, self-sufficiency and sovereignty consistently ascribed to the speaker. Eulalie stresses at five different points of the monologue that she is alone, asking, "Why do I play the hypocrite alone, / Who am no hypocrite with others by?" (ll. 60-61). She asserts at another point, "One cannot laugh alone" (l. 163) and pleads twice, "Will no one come? / 'Tis dreary work alone" (ll. 187-188), "Will no one come and laugh with me? No feast, / No merriment to-night. So long alone! / Will no one come?" (ll. 453-455). Indeed, "alone" is the final word of the poem. While other critics have acknowledged the auditor's absence in the poem, I suggest that they have minimized its import and impact by substituting the empirical auditor with a "functional" one, whether in the form of the implied auditor in the reader of the poem, the imaginary auditors of Eulalie's past and future selves, or the ideal auditor of Eulalie's mirror reflection. For instance, Sutphin highlights the auditor's absence when she writes that Eulalie's final lines addressed to a visitor "remin[d] us that Eulalie has not had an auditor," but then immediately places the reader in that role: "Yet we 'hear' her and readers heard her in 1870" (p. 527). Similarly, Pearsall argues that "Eulalie has not, however, been entirely alone in the course of the monologue, but rather flanked by past and future selves"; further, that the empirical auditor's absence engages Eulalie in a discursive dialogue, placing her "in conversation with a range of other monologues by fallen women, thus acknowledging her solitude while breaking her silence" (pp. 77, 76). Slinn extends this argument to posit more directly Eulalie's linguistic agency: where Eulalie's address to her mirror reflection "acts as a functional substitute for the interlocutors of more formal dramatic monologues," her self-objectification through mirroring "enacts a moment of self-recovery, whereby a woman--in a form of reverse colonization--reappropriates her body from the appropriations of external social forces" (pp. 164-165). In this, Slinn extends the observation of several critics that Eulalie openly contests throughout the monologue the multiple discourses that have constituted her--as Eulalie puts it--as either a "fiend, ... a slimy thing out of the pools," or a "fractious angel misconceived" (ll. 28, 78).

The argument for Eulalie's power to dialogise and reconstitute social discourses and social reality, and thereby recover and reconstitute herself, thus elides the differences between a real auditor to Eulalie's speech and an ideal, imaginary, or implied auditor in the form of her mirror reflection, her imagined selves, or the reader who becomes representative of society and its discourses. And yet, I suggest, Webster's introduction of an empirical auditor at the end of the poem challenges this elision by highlighting the critical difference between an actual auditor to Eulalie's speech and one that is ideal, imaginary, or implied: while the former directly subjects Eulalie to the norms of speakability, the latter does not. The entrance of the auditor at the end of the poem compels Eulalie to alter her "frank tone" of "straight-speaking dissent" into one of disingenuous companionability. Webster explicitly contrasts Eulalie's private speech, her internal railing against "the cackling goose" she sees in her auditor, with her public speech: "Most welcome, dear: one gets so moped alone" (ll. 626, 630).

With this introduction of an otherwise absent auditor at the end of the monologue, Webster significantly alters, by adding to, the monologue's critique: it not only criticizes, through Eulalie's direct speech, the Victorian gender ideologies and inequities that have necessitated prostitution as a "trade" (l. 67) while condemning and "casting away" those women for whom it has become a necessity, but at one and the same time, it exposes the myth of linguistic agency and power which Eulalie's overt criticism conjures but which Webster's omission of the auditor undermines. While the "frank tone," "daring," "straight-speaking dissent," "narrative authority," "psychological complexity," and socio-political perspicacity of Eulalie's monologue all contribute to the appearance of Eulalie's "self-sufficiency," "agency" and "sovereignty," I argue that Webster dispels this myth by subjecting Eulalie's speech to the norms of speakability at the poem's end, which foregrounds the fact that the linguistic freedom, authority, and agency of Eulalie's monologue is made possible only by the absence of an auditor--only by the fact that her speech is already foreclosed. While it is indisputable, therefore, that Webster reconstitutes, reformulates, and reappropriates the terms by which Eulalie's self is discursively produced by addressing the poem to the reader, it is not the case that Eulalie does so in the absence of an empirical auditor or in the presence of imaginary ones--does so, in other words, by the mere fact of speaking or by the sheer force of linguistic will. Rather, the critical point of the poem, I suggest, is that for all Eulalie's astute political and social analysis, there is no one she can speak it to--neither to the real auditor who enters at the end, nor the implied auditor of the middle-class Victorian reader whom Webster addresses. For the very form of the dramatic monologue stands as a formal reminder of the insuperable distance, however slight, between poet and persona, reader and auditor, real and fantasized speech. By exploiting this distance, Webster exposes the constraints of speakability that are the condition of linguistic authority: the fact that Eulalie is not a speaking subject at all, but a mask, and that this mask is the necessary condition of speaking for real women like Eulalie precisely because the real Eulalies of the world are not constituted as speaking subjects. For if the real Eulalies were to speak, they could not speak thus, at least not to any auditor with any cultural status or power. Like Eulalie's imaginary monologue, the speech of actual Victorian prostitutes was consigned either to the silence of interior monologue or the silence of imaginary auditors. What Webster dramatizes in this poem is thus not simply the powerful voice of Eulalie, but, ultimately, her voicelessness, made visible by Webster's insistence that Eulalie is not surrounded or "flanked" by auditors, but speaks alone, in the absence of the auditor whose absence is the sole guarantor of her power to speak thus: with self-command and impunity, the worst of truths.

As I hope this essay has demonstrated, this reconceptualization of the auditor-function as a sign of the contingency and conditions of linguistic authority might move us beyond the current debate on the auditor--beyond the question of whether the empirical auditor's presence is necessary to the dramatic monologue--to an analysis of the particular conditions of speaking. These conditions include the speaker's status, the context and content of the speech, and the status of the auditors, if present, relative to the speaker--conditions that, together, allow the speaker to disregard the auditor's presence or, conversely, demand the auditor's absence. Along with Pearsall, we might still ask what each speaker seeks to transform through the monologue and by way of the monologue, but rather than assuming that all speakers achieve their intended rhetorical effects, we might now also ask why they do not in the instances that they do not. Along with Shaw, we might also still attend to the speaker's disinterested persuasion of ideal auditors, whether it is the speaker's self, God, or the reader who, Mermin argues, is the ultimate audience of all dramatic monologues and whom the empirical auditor represents. But rather than treating the ideal auditor as equivalent to or a functional substitute for the empirical auditor, we might now attend to the differences between them and the impact of those differences on the speaker, his or her speech, and the poem's larger meanings. Finally, we might now add the auditor, whether present or absent, to the complex of speaker, text, and context as an equally critical component to the dramatic monologue's defining function, in Herbert F. Tucker Jr.'s words, "of placing the self into context and thus into question" ("From Monomania," p. 136). The auditor does so, I have argued, by signaling the condition of speakability that constrains each speaker, all speech, and every social, cultural, and historical context.

Notes

(1) As Herbert F. Tucker, Jr. memorably put it, " 'dramatic monologue' is a generic term whose practical usefulness does not seem to have been impaired by the failure of literary historians and taxonomists to achieve consensus in its definition." "From Monomania to Monologue: 'St. Simeon Stylites' and the Rise of the Victorian Dramatic Monologue," VP 22, no. 2 (1984): 121-122.

(2) For discussions of the genre's feature of unwitting character revelation, see Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York: Norton, 1963); Alan Sinfield, Dramatic Monologue (London: Methuen, 1977); Adena Rosmarin, The Power of Genre (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985). For postmodernist and poststructuralist accounts of the genre, see Tucker, "From Monomania to Monologue"; Herbert F. Tucker, "Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric," in Critical Essays on Robert Browning, ed. Mary Ellis Gibson (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), pp. 21-36; Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1993); Loy D. Martin, Brownings Dramatic Monologues and the Post-Romantic Subject (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985); Carol T. Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984).

(3) Langbaum, Poetry of Experience, p. 156; Tucker, "From Monomania," p. 125.

(4) Dorothy Mermin, The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1983); W. David Shaw, Origins of the Monologue: The Hidden God (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1999); Cornelia Pearsall, Tennyson's Rapture: Transformation in the Victorian Dramatic Monologue (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).

(5) Though the term "dramatic monologue" did not gain currency until the end of the nineteenth century, Webster's first collection of what we now call dramatic monologues, Dramatic Studies (1866), was already identified as such by The British Quarterly Review, and her poems were frequently compared to Browning's. Review of Dramatic Studies, The British Quarterly Review, October 1866, p. 551, http://search .proquest.com/docview/6471236?accountid=2837. Most notable in the discussions of Webster's auditors is Patricia Rigg's argument that most (all but two) of Webster's poems should be classified "monodramas" instead of "dramatic monologues" because they are not primarily addressed to an empirical auditor. Julia Augusta Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2009). Cf. Cornelia Pearsall, "The dramatic monologue," in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 67-88; Glennis Byron, Dramatic Monologue (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 20-24; E. Warwick Slinn, "Webster's Castaway Courtesan: Living on the (Cultural) Margin," in Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique: The Politics of Performative Language (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 156-84; Angela Leighton, "Augusta Wesbter (1837-94)," in Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 164-201.

(6) Mermin, Audience in the Poem, p. 2. For a critique of this distinction between "major" and "minor" Victorian poets and its effect on theories of the women's dramatic monologues in particular, see Cynthia Scheinberg, "Recasting 'sympathy and judgment': Amy Levy, Women Poets, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue," VP 35, no. 2 (1997): 173-191.

(7) Langbaum, Poetry of Experience, p. 190; Martin, Browning's Dramatic Monologues, p. 133; T.S. Eliot, "The Three Voices of Poetry" (1953), in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), p. 104.

(8) Mermin's original question reads: if auditors "have so little real function, matter so much less than their prominence in the poems seems to indicate, then why are they there at all?" Audience in the Poem, pp. 13-14.

(9) References to Tennyson's poetry are drawn from The Poems of Tennyson in three volumes, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. 1987).

(10) Notably, Pearsall includes Webster in her list of poets whose dramatic monologues are "clearly and consistently products of discursive ambitions" (p. 23).

(11) References to Webster's poetry are drawn from Augusta Webster: Portraits and Other Poems, ed. Christine Sutphin (Toronto: Broadview, 2000).

(12) Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 133, 136.

(13) For example, Rigg argues that the saints' reappearance is Jeanne's reward for pulling herself back from "the edge of human doubt and despair " Julia Augusta Webster, p. 80.

(14) Kathleen Hickok, "Augusta Webster," in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British Women Poets, Dictionary of Literary Biography 240, ed. William B. Thesing (Detroit: Gale, 2001), p. 336; Rigg, Julia Augusta Webster, p. 80.

(15) H. Buxton Forman, "Critical Notices," in Fortnightly Review 5, no. 25 (Jan 1869): 118.

(16) All Biblical references are to the Authorized (King James) Version.

(17) Francis T. Palgrave, "Jeanne d'Arc 1424," in The Visions of England (London: Macmillan, 1881), pp. 90-92.

(18) Robert Southey, "Joan of Arc," in The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Complete in One Volume, New ed. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850), pp. 1-75.

(19) Katherine Tynan, "Joan of Arc, a Monologue," in Louise de la Valliere and Other Poems, 2nd ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1886), pp. 25-35.

(20) The speakers listed here are, in order, from Tennyson's "Ulysses" and Browning's "My Last Duchess," "Andrea del Sarto," "Mr. Sludge, 'the Medium' " and "Porphyria's Lover."

(21) Hickok, "Augusta Webster," p. 339; Leighton, p. 200.

(22) Sutphin, "Human Tigresses, Fractious Angels, and Nursery Saints: Augusta Webster's 'A Castaway' and Victorian Discourses on Prostitution and Women's Sexuality," VP 38, no. 4 (2000): 514; Susan Brown, "Economical Representations: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 'Jenny,' Augusta Webster's 'A Castaway,' and the Campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts," Victorian Review 17, no. 1 (1991): 90; Dorothy Mermin, Godiva's Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830-1880 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ, Press, 1993), p. 80; Slinn, "Webster's Castaway Courtesan," p. 160.