Erotic, prosodic, and ethical-aesthetic forms of triangulation in Augusta Webster's Dramatic Studies and A Woman Sold and Other Poems.

Pionke, Albert D.

As has been noted since her recovery in the early 1990s by Isobel Armstrong, Angela Leighton, Dorothy Mermin, and others, much of Augusta Webster's poetry revolves around the problem of attenuated, suppressed, or otherwise circumscribed subjectivity. (1) Her work is particularly attentive to the frequency with which individuals could be stripped of their capacity for agency by the competing imperatives--social, material, institutional, and aesthetic--of modern life. Her dramatic poems, for which she is best remembered today, often feature the frustrated monologues of such over-determined individuals, both male, as in "A Painter," and female, as in her most critically discussed poem, "A Castaway." Pragmatic idealists at heart, these and others of Webster's speakers use a range of strategies, with varying degrees of success, to carve out niches of freedom for themselves amid the otherwise suffocating pressures of familial, vocational, and cultural norms.

This essay concentrates on one recurrent motif, triangulation, through which Webster explores this problematic in the first two books of poetry that she published under her own name, Dramatic Studies (1866) and A Woman Sold and Other Poems (1867). (2) Collectively, the triadic poems from these two poetic collections represent triangular relations as both unavoidable and fascinatingly varied. Despite their important difference of participants, relations, and motivations, however, all retain the basic configuration, posited most famously in Rene Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1965), of two subjects directed towards a third object. The problem, for Webster, lies in the readiness with which anyone occupying any of these three positions can be objectified by his or her participation in the triangle to the point of losing all capacity for independent agency. This risk is most apparent for the desired object, whose field of possibility is, at best, artificially confined to choosing between the two subjects, and, at worst, entirely eliminated by the results of those subjects' competition. Both subjects, however, also radically truncate their own actions by defining themselves oppositionally and teleologically. Whether possessed or bereft of the object at the contest's conclusion, the formerly dynamic subject ends in crippling stasis, one primary source of self-definition--the other subject banished from the scene, and the object of desire evacuated of significance and future potential by its acquisition. Tapping into and radically extending her century's pervasive rhetoric of fallenness, Webster shows that both men and women might "fall," their potential for independent agency equally imperiled by the threat of triangulation. (3)

Two dramatic poems from her 1866 book, "The Snow Waste" and "With the Dead," make this point negatively, by featuring male speakers unable to distance themselves from their desires and, who, as a result, degenerate from competitive triadic subjects to damnably objectified souls in torment. Two of the shorter lyrics from among the Other Poems of the 1867 volume, "Too Faithful" and "To One of Many," signal Webster's shift away from compromised male speakers. Finally, in A Woman Sold, Webster offers her most complex, successful, and implicitly political resolution to this same problematic through the liberal intentions of the titular Eleanor-cum-Lady-Boycott. (4) Each of these poems by itself amply repays the detailed attention of careful close reading, which reveals Webster's complex deployment of triangulation at the levels of form, content, plot, and theme. (5) Together, they also work towards her elegant solution, at least at this important early point in her career, to the problem of abrogated, or "fallen" agency, namely emotional self-mastery and intellectual disinterestedness. (6)

Competitive Triangulation and Damnation in Dramatic Studies

Webster's "The Snow Waste" presents the narrative of an overly assertive subject eternally objectified by the successful prosecution of his own triangulated desire. In mode, the poem is a hybrid between narrative and dramatic verse, using an objective third-person observer to frame the explanatory but not exculpatory confession of its male dramatic speaker. The observer's frame works on a number of levels to heighten the drama of the narrative to come: aurally, it lulls the reader into the familiar and relatively benign rhythms of blank verse, thereby emphasizing the "feat" that follows; mimetically, it represents a cold, unchanging setting--"a waste of snow ... silent skies ... a great stillness" (ll. 1, 3, 5) that mirrors the emotional and spiritual state of its central figure; and visually, it renders the central triad as an almost-sculptural form that reinforces the male dramatic speaker's irrevocably fallen condition: And nought was there that broke the level plain, And nothing living was there but himself. Yet was he not alone, there stood by him One right, one left, two forms that seemed of flesh, But blue with the first clutchings of their deaths, Fixed rigid in the death-pang, glassy-eyed, Turning towards him each a vacant gaze. And he looked on them blankly, turn by turn, With gaze as void as theirs. (ll. 6-14)

Within this tableau, the narrator's repetition of signifiers that, by definition, lack tangible referents--"nought," "nothing," "vacant," "blankly," "void"--stresses the extreme distance at which the dramatic subject remains from his own capacity for agency, even as it associates this loss of self with his position at the axis of a triangular relationship.

Once the poem shifts from narrative frame to dramatic utterance, the visually dominant middle figure compulsively recounts his story in terminally punctuated stanzas composed of eight iambic pentameter lines, with all the lines in each stanza sharing a single end-rhyme. It is a feat, almost grotesque, that reinforces on a structural, syntactical, and phonetic level the sense of over-determination already suggested by the narrator's frame. Further emphasizing his lack of agency, the speaker begins not with action, but with exposition, focusing on the present effects of past causes. His nine uninterrupted opening stanzas apostrophize his frozen companions, establishing that though still in full possession of his intellect, the speaker lacks affect: "So can I reckoning keep of woe and weal, / And mine own self unto myself reveal / In perfect knowledge: but I cannot feel" (ll. 44-46). This absence of emotion allows him to establish a binary opposition between his present "Cold" and his wished for "sentient memory" (ll. 50, 26); the latter, if achieved, would "waken in me energy of woe" and allow him to die, and his frozen companions to attain the eternal rest denied to them since "To the deep grave I gave ye" (ll. 27, 80). The speaker ends this expository opening statement with a stanza-length appeal to his now-apparent homicide victims, "to wake my heart from its strange night ... So I may come to mean my words aright / And not, as now, like some dull purblind wight / Prating by rote of shadow and of light" (ll. 85, 88-90). These final lines signal a complete repudiation of independence on the part of the speaker, who invites two frozen corpses to assume the active subject positions in a triangular narrative of the heart, with himself as the emotionally and morally undead object of their affective efforts.

When all three were still alive, he sought a much different role in their familial triad. In those days he was the husband of the now-frozen female figure, and the brother-in-law of his icy male companion. Problems emerge when the speaker finds his accomplishments eclipsed by those of his wife's brother: "He had no rival, leaving all behind; / Me too he passed, and then my love declined" (ll. 111-112). When he overhears his wife, "from whom no thought of mine could stray," praising her now-triumphant sibling, "Amid the maidens, 'None, seek where ye may / Will match my brother till his hair is grey'" (ll. 128, 130-131), he interprets her words as an indictment of his own masculinity. Thereafter, the speaker projects his own sexual jealousy onto his wife, whom he accuses in his own mind of excessive affection for the younger and more virile man. He thus creates a competitive triangle of desire within his own family group, casting himself and his brother-in-law, who is unaware of his hatred, as rival subjects contending for the affections of his objectified wife, who to his way of thinking must choose absolutely between them. He reveals the terms of this new zero-sum relationship to his wife during her brother's absence from their home while on a journey to a plague-ridden city. Pausing even during their "dearest talk" to worry for her brother's safety (l. 154), the speaker's wife provokes her husband into confessing his true feelings: "'Yes love him still, still me for him despise,' / I cried, 'What wife have I unless he dies? / Would that he might'" (ll. 176-178). In response to his wife's entreaty that she loves him before all others, but that room remains in her heart to love her brother also, the speaker pronounces what will be his own fate, wishing aloud that "all love die / Out from the earth for ever than warm him!" (ll. 221-122), and cursing the sun-as-God to "utter darkness, rather than he / Alike with me should shine on him I hate!" (ll. 229-130). The next day, expecting the return of his hated rival, the speaker comes home to find his wife dying of plague; when her sibling arrives, the speaker, in a monstrous assertion of his own competitive subjectivity, locks his now ex-brother-in-law in a room with her contagious remains until he, too, contracts the plague and dies. Afflicted with absence of feeling at sunset, the speaker dispassionately disposes of the bodies in the nearby lake, then "slept such quiet sleep as children know. / But I awakened in this waste of snow / Where evermore gnawed by quick cold I go" (ll. 354-156). From an assertive subject full of hateful feeling, he has regressed through the amorality of childhood to his present state of unfeeling fallenness, constrained entirely by circumstances of his own making to mere narrative compulsion and physical discomfort.

Careful readers will note that the lines in which the speaker's curse appears do not rhyme; in fact, the poem interrupts his monologue several times with blank verse in order to show that the ice-bound speaker has, himself, become the object of triangular competition between rival spirits. His dead wife's recitation of her preeminent love for him, summarized above, is prompted by "a lucent form, / As of a spirit making to itself/A pure white brightness" (ll. 181-183), which hopes thereby to determine, "if so any ghost of love / Might yearn in him towards thee" (ll. 185-186). It does not work: the speaker, "vacantly" (l. 199), returns to "his old unpassioned utterance" (l. 201). Next, "A form of darkness, like a tempest-cloud" (l. 216), urges his wife's brother to repeat the curse quoted earlier, "so some ghost / Of passion might awaken in his soul" (ll. 213-214). Although this briefly stirs "a dull dreamy loathing" in the speaker's eyes (l. 233), this semblance of feeling is quickly replaced by "the old quiet nothingness of gaze" and the speaker's resumption of his "shadeless rhythm" (ll. 235,236). Both spirits then lament that they have lost this contest for his soul, which remains so absolutely determined by the speaker's own early words and actions that he "is left to his dread doom" (l. 250).

The poem concludes with a return to the third-person observer's blank verse frame, amid the "boundless snows" and "wide unbreathing calm" (ll. 362, 363). Along with the observer, the reader witnesses the "slow and even" departure of the speaker and his attendant dead, and hears, "far away along the dreadful waste ... the droning murmur of his words" until "they died" (ll. 364, 367-368, 369). Once more, words that defy concretization feature prominently--"void" (l. 361) and "nothing" ll. (362, 363)--and one is left with the same sense of frozen stasis with which the poem began. In the end, then, swallowed up by the terminal "plain of snow and the unchanging sky" (ll. 370-371), the speaker remains imbricated within at least three debilitating triads: the first, of his own jealous construction, in which even as a triumphant subject he cannot avoid the consequences of his own words and actions; the second, his ceaseless cold-pinched wandering and compulsive narrating throughout the titular snow waste he has wished for, supplicant to his own murder victims for a spark of feeling; and the third, his spiritual objectification in a contest between two disembodied spirits for his soul. Webster thus represents the risks inherent in triangulation, but offers her speaker no way out of his eternally objectified state.

Featuring another male speaker imprisoned by the consequences of his own fatal triadic competition, "With the Dead" departs from "The Snow Waste" at the level of form and in the complexity with which it explores the possibilities of triangulated relations. "With the Dead" dispenses with both the observer's frame and the secondary speakers featured in "The Snow Waste," growing closer to a conventional dramatic monologue, although not completely satisfying Langbaum's classic formulation because it lacks an auditor. (7) Also, it is situated much more precisely than its counterpart within a historical moment, a time immediately prior to the Edict of Milan in 313, by means of an epigraph from Nathaniel Hawthorne's Transformation (1860) and by factual details regarding the clandestine worship of early Christians within the catacombs of Rome# This historical setting allows Webster to complicate what would otherwise be a simple erotic triangle through the introduction of faith: Christ and the Roman gods serve as both subjects and objects in the poem's many triads. Moreover, Webster employs triangular relations predicated upon both competition and cooperation, multiplying with near-mathematic precision the number and variety of triangles until the succession from one set of three terms to another catalyzes the narrative recounted by her dramatic speaker. Unfortunately for him, however, this speaker finds himself in an analogous position to that of the central figure from "The Snow Waste": afflicted for one day each year by "this added curse of memory" (l. 21), he recounts to himself the sequence of events in which his ruthless prosecution of his own jealous subjectivity has condemned him to an eternity without agency, wandering the catacombs in ceaseless madness for the remaining 364 days of the year.

Assigning pride of place to "the old hate" rather than "the old bitter love" (l. 19), the speaker begins his account out of chronological order; nevertheless, all of his actions are predicated upon an idealized triangular past. According to his first nostalgic reconstruction, he and Lucilla were subjects within a cooperative triad, both loving one another and worshipping the Roman gods. With her "glimmer of that lustrous hair / Rippling all over into dappled waves," "child-like eyes, blue as the sky," and "soft pink pallor of [her] cheek" (ll. 134-135, 138, 141), Lucilla combines innocence and sensuality sufficient to join eternally with the speaker, wandering "godlike in the happy fields" (l. 156). In truth, however, faith in the Elysian fields or the Roman gods may have been no more substantive than the speaker's actual relationship with Lucilla--there is only a single reference to "the hymnings of our gods" (l. 128), just as the speaker admits that he has seen Lucilla asleep only one time (l. 108), thereby implying a lack of intimacy between them. She seems to have been less his cooperative partner, and more the objectified focus of his desire even in this supposedly ideal past.

Still unwilling to accept that his own behavior may have driven Lucilla away, the speaker instead casts himself as the wronged subject in a competitive and rather conventional erotic triangle: "I knew my one life-hope, / Thy love, was stolen by that boy-beauteous Greek," Glaucon (ll. 125-126). Although he retains his role as determining subject rather than determined object in this re-membered relationship, the speaker must pay a heavy emotional price for his participation: Through all my soul there stirs the bitter past, Through all my soul there stirs the happy past More bitter than the bitter by the touch Of that great bitterness that curdles all Its sweetness into gall. (ll. 129-133)

Consumed by his bitterness towards Glaucon, the speaker can no longer recall even his own early idealized feelings for Lucilla, who in his mind grew "hateful that thou couldst love him" (l. 161). At the same time, as Girard or Eve Sedgwick might have predicted, the speaker's feelings for his rival drift uneasily in the direction of passionate fixation: "My heart burned in me like a poisoned wound / At speech of him, at inward thought of him.-- / And how could I once cease to think of him?" (ll. 162-164). (9) In losing to his rival in their contest for Lucilla the speaker risks losing the subject position he has adopted by unselfconsciously transferring his affections from Lucilla to Glaucon.

That his intense feelings for Glaucon influenced his own memories of his time with Lucilla seems undeniable in light of the effects of "that bitterness that curdles all." Indeed, Glaucon's own devout Christianity helps to explain why the Roman gods are present, even superficially, in the speaker's idealized vision of the past--he seeks to impose symmetry on their respective relationships with Lucilla. The record of Glaucon's love with her is recorded not merely in the speaker's recollections, but also in the carving on their shared tombstone: "LUCILLA A SWEET SOUL ASLEEP IN CHRIST. / AND GLAUCON LOVING HER, MORE LOVING CHRIST" (ll. 50-51). The first triad revealed in the poem, this epitaph articulates the idealized standard against which the speaker continues, futilely, to measure himself. A truly cooperative union of subjects worshipping a greater object, their relationship allows Glaucon and Lucilla to outlive even the speaker's homicidal agency: I thought that death Should part thee from that Glaucon through all time. And lo! it weds thee to him through all time; Thou art with him in death, and I, alone Look on thy tomb and am thy murderer. (ll. 214-218)

Since he has stubbornly conceived of human relations in triangular terms, once Glaucon's faith introduces a third term, Christ, into his relationship with Lucilla, the speaker has no place left to stand, and so he conceives an elaborate plot to regain what he has lost by eliminating his rivals, both human and divine.

As a first step, he infiltrates Rome's Christian community, voluntarily subjecting himself to a pair of cooperative triads. Feigning "well-put words of doubt and half belief" (l. 187), the speaker deceives Lucilla into thinking that he has joined with her in praise of Christ. She leads him "to the secret vaults," where he duplicates this faith-based relationship with Glaucon (l. 191). The speaker had already imagined such a union with Lucilla earlier in the poem--"I might have slept with thee, / My soul with thine in Christ" (ll. 154-155)--but rejected it, because of necessity such a relationship with Christ would require him to accept a bond with Glaucon as well: "shall I sleep with him, I wake with him, / The hated, hated that she did not hate?" (ll. 104-105). Once in possession of their trust, "Holding their lives in my hands" (l. 196), the speaker betrays Lucilla and Glaucon to the Roman authorities, who condemn them to "the place of shows / Red with dark pools, ghastly with mangled limbs / And shapeless dead" (ll. 249-251). Both refuse to renounce their faith, and so are slain. The speaker had intended to save Lucilla at the moment of her arrest, but instead he lost himself in the catacombs, and so can only witness during his one day of lucidity each year the spectacle of her death, "A dream that will return / For ever and for ever!" (ll. 279-280). Contrary to his hopes, then, the speaker's attempt to perpetuate his competitive agency through disguised cooperation ultimately martyrs Glaucon and Lucilla to the lions of the coliseum, insuring their eternal salvation, and traps him within "my awful doom ... a madman in the place of tombs" (ll. 221-222).

Now radically over-determined by his past decisions and present circumstances, the speaker shifts positions within the triadic structure yet again, assuming the role of object in three successive triangles featuring at least one divine subject. Not long after awakening to his annual day of consciousness--and thus early in the poem, but late in his own story--the speaker interrogates the Roman gods about their role in his dilemma: Do ye sleep, ye gods, The guardians and the worshipped of great Rome, That ye will yield me to the vengeful might Of this new demon whom these heaven-accursed Would set above you mocking at your thrones, This new-found god whose anger I have earned Because I warred against him, having care To keep the honours of your temples pure? Are ye asleep, great gods, or are ye wroth That in my love for her I would have saved One who had dared to mock you with her scorn? (ll. 58-68)

Imagining himself the object of competition between the Roman gods and Christ, the speaker seeks to make himself a martyr to his faith. As his second question begins to suggest, however, and as we know, the speaker's faith is, at best, reactionary and self-serving, an attitude put on to retain possession of Lucilla or to achieve symmetry with Glaucon. In fact, this entire passage appears immediately after his unwilling witnessing of their tombstone and his first unspecific allusion to, "That which these Christian fools would call my sin" (l. 57), marking this imagined divine contest as a defensive attempt at self-aggrandizement. (10) A more authentic moment of nascent faith and possible redemption occurs after the speaker's graphic vision of Lucilla's martyrdom. At the moment of her death, she prays to Christ, "'Oh Lord, forgive him, lead his soul to thee'" (l. 288), forming a new, cooperative triangle whose object of desire is the speaker's soul. Already wandering the tombs, the speaker magically hears her prayer, and nearly falls down himself to "call upon her god as she had called" (l. 293). However, just as joining with Lucilla as a subject cooperatively worshipping Christ would have been unavoidably accompanied by union with Glaucon, so serving as the object of Lucilla's prayer for salvation means accepting Glaucon's plea for divine intercession as well: "But he replied, that Glaucon, 'Lord, forgive'" (l. 294). The speaker has thus reached his personal nadir, the triangular competition with Glaucon--characterized, however disingenuously, as a contest of faith--having transformed him into the object of his rival's cooperative efforts with Christ to redeem him.

Unable to accept being objectified by his rival, even in prayer, the speaker reestablishes himself as the subject of the only triangular relationship remaining to him: competing with Glaucon for Christ. Whereas Glaucon prays for forgiveness, the speaker demands his own damnation: Thou Christ, if thou hast any power to hear, Hear me, not him--hurl all thy wrath on me, I will not be forgiven at his prayer. If thou canst hear, hear me. (ll. 296-299)

He gets his wish, and loses his soul. In a final act of willful self-deception, he also fails to recognize the falseness of his earlier statements of religious belief. By contending with Glaucon in this final triangle through prayer, the speaker demonstrates a faith in Christ greater than that he purports to hold in the Roman gods. However, unable to resign his competitive subjectivity, he condemns himself to the vengeance of the Eumenides (l. 301) rather than accept the attendant Christian doctrines of redemption by grace through supplication and the relinquishment of earthly ties through heavenly unity with Christ, and therefore with Glaucon. (11) Like the speaker in "The Snow Waste," then, he has won his competition with his rival for his object of desire, and in so doing has lost almost all capacity for unfettered agency. Unlike his frozen counterpart, however, the speaker of "With the Dead" is offered the same chance each year to change his fate, by admitting his guilt and asking Christ for forgiveness; for centuries now, presumably, as he still remains in the catacombs, the speaker's own unrestrained jealousy compels him to repeat, "Hear me, not him, thou Christ" until he returns to "Darkness, all dark--I know not what I say" (ll. 329, 332).

Cooperation and Disinterestedness in A Woman Sold and Other Poems

In addition to reminding readers of Webster's range as a poet, two of the shorter lyrics of A Woman Sold and Other Poems also offer a fresh perspective on the problematic of triangulation. (12) As feels appropriate to their relative brevity, these lyrics are both less epically consequential--they feature no divine curses or lost souls--and more immediately and diversely human, exploring emotions and experiences beyond homicidal male jealousy. In addition, when explicitly gendered at all, their speakers tend to be women, and women thoroughly enmeshed within the uncomfortable realities of social relations. This is not to say, however, that the poems dispense with the possibility of over-determined agency rendered so powerfully omnipresent in "The Snow Waste" and "With the Dead"; rather, they present readers with a more domestic, quotidian version of objectification-through-triangulation. Like "The Snow Waste," the lyrics tend to capitalize upon the power of form to reinforce their emotional and intellectual impact: one deploys terza rima to figure its triads, and both feature highly artifactual rhyme schemes that call attention to themselves and their occasional phonetic lapses. Together, they begin to suggest one successful strategy, emotional reticence combined with personal disinterestedness, for escaping the seemingly inevitable loss of self experienced by the speakers of Webster's previous poems from Dramatic Studies, and in so doing offer a productive transition to the eponymous text of Webster's second mature book of verse.

The nineteenth poem included in A Woman Sold and Other Poems, Webster's "Too Faithful" most perspicuously extends the motif of erotic triangles explored in her earlier works from Dramatic Studies. The poem opens with a female speaker apparently addressing another woman who has been disappointed in love: "Too fond and faithful, will thou vainly yet / Waste love on one who does not ask it now / And, having wronged thee, seeks but to forget" (ll. 1-3). As the conversation develops, however, the speaker's intimate knowledge of the failed relationship suggests that the dramatic situation echoes that of Webster's earlier "By the Looking-Glass," in which the speaker addresses herself in a mirror. As she describes it to herself, then, the central triangle of "Too Faithful" consists of two female subjects competing for the same man, who has ultimately chosen "A fairer face," though "a bauble something touched with rust" (ll. 4, 22), over the "nobler-natured" speaker (l. 6). Hardly one of the hyperbolic wrongs featured in "A Snow Waste" or "With the Dead," the lover's unfortunate choice is, instead, a symptom of the "rise and falling of the marriage mart" (l. 18). It causes present unhappiness for the speaker and potential disillusionment for the man, "should he wake to see / The gem, he dreamed so pure, of paltriest kind" (ll. 28-29), but no one's immortal soul has been imperiled. In fact, at a number of points the speaker upbraids herself for dwelling too much on the situation: "For did he come into thy life to bless?" (l. 21); "Thou hast thy sorrow; wherefore look beyond / To sorrow for his sorrow that shall be?" (ll. 31-32).

The poem's form works against such easy diminution of her feelings, though, disrupting the interlocking cadences of its terza rima at two points to highlight subtly the social and individual stakes of its deceptively common story. The first of these disturbances occurs when the speaker alludes to the "marriage mart." The final term in what should be a rhyming triplet, "mart" is grouped with "heart" (l. 16) and "shame" (l. 14), a word with no phonic equivalent among the poem's many end-rhymes. Such an anomaly suggests that marriage conducted on business principles not only objectifies the individual parties involved, represented by their hearts, but it also renders shameful the society that would sanction such mercenary matches. The speaker of "Too Faithful" ultimately elects to remove herself from the marriage mart altogether, embracing spinsterhood and thus preserving a chance to extend a "sister power of comforting" to her former lover (l. 45), "should he need it in his day of pain" (l. 44), presumably when he discovers that he has "given gold for that which is not gold" (l. 26). The poem's final stanza, with its unrhymed middle line, emphasizes the way in which this choice may guard her against the possibility of fallenness that accompanies her past participation in an erotic triangle: "it may make less that care / Centered in self thou canst not wholly quell, / If others' not thine own its place shall share" (ll. 49-51). Refusing to participate in further erotic competitions founded upon filthy lucre may help the speaker of "Too Faithful" to achieve a less selfish relationship with others, and so preserve her from the hell reserved for the protagonists in "The Snow Waste" and "With the Dead," both of whom might be described as objectified by selves they could not wholly quell.

The triad that serves as the catalyst for "To One of Many," which appears eight poems after "Too Faithful," consists of an even less individuated speaker and an unnamed addressee competing to define an anonymous "him." It would be possible to hypothesize about more specific roles for these figures--lover/ wife, previously unsuccessful suitor, lover/husband; sister, public rival of brother, brother; even speaker, self, him--but the poem declines to provide sufficient information for unambiguous subject positions. Instead, the reader is permitted to overhear that an abstracted "He hath done evil" (l. 6), and to infer that the nameless addressee has "dare[d] to scoff at him with scorn or blame" (l. 2). The speaker then proceeds to repudiate this censure on two fronts, that "He will redeem his nature" (l. 21), and that the addressee lacks a moral high ground from which to judge: "Upon thy level way / Are there the perils of the hills of snow? / Yea, he has fallen, but wherefore art thou low?" (ll. 28-30). Readers of Dramatic Studies will likely have difficulty reading this passage without thinking of "The Snow Waste," although in "To One of Many" society has replaced the supernatural as supreme moral authority. Despite the speaker's professions of faith in the future, however, the contested "him" appears every bit as frozen within his wrong as Webster's earlier unfeeling soul. Indeed, the speaker in "To One of Many" cannot stop talking about "his" moral mistake, successively labeled "evil" (ll. 6, 9, 17, 23), "wrong" (ll. 8, 13), "error" (ll. 14, 25), and "fall" (ll. 24, 27, 30, 35), just as she cannot avoid admitting that, "therefore is my thought / Of him made sadness with no common grief" (ll. 17-18), and that, "he has lessened the first faith I bore" (l. 33). Impelled to her justification by the addressee's singular "stone of malice" (l. 1), the speaker condemns "him" repeatedly during her defense, counter-productively declaring her support even as she rearticulates "his" wrong over and over again within the poem's unremitting ababb rhyme scheme. Indeed, so effectively has "he" been identified with his misstep throughout the poem, that the speaker's professed faith in his ability to "lift him[self] from his fall a nobler man" appears to give him more credit for moral agency than he, perhaps, possesses (l. 24). Presented as an example of what not to do, the poem shows how competitive triangulation, even that ostensibly undertaken in the name of "any tie / Of birth or love" (ll. 9-10), leads once again to an absence of future independence, not necessarily for the speaking subject, as in previous poems, but for the object of the speaker's vociferous efforts.

A closet drama, and therefore different in form from the other works by Webster discussed in this essay, A Woman Sold nevertheless productively revisits and further complicates their shared problematic of triangular relations. (13) Like "The Snow Waste," it begins by featuring an emotionally immature male speaker eager to secure his lover's exclusive affections against all comers. Like "With the Dead," it is structured by a succession of competitive and cooperative triads involving multiple interrelated subjects and objects. Like the shorter lyrics that accompany it, A Woman Sold also focalizes its poetic study of the social complexities of triangulation through its central female figure, whose ultimate response to her potentially objectifying situation benefits from their variously successful models of emotional self-mastery.

Webster divides A Woman Sold into two acts, each featuring only two speakers, with a third figure who never appears on stage but whose absent presence nevertheless forms the third term in the primary triangle that underlies the drama. Each act bears the name that identifies the central woman sold during its moment in time. Thus, act one, "Eleanor Vaughan," features an emotionally overwrought interview between Eleanor, "a young thing / In the bud of stainless girlhood" (ll. 18-19), and Lionel, a passionate young lawyer, and therefore still "a poor man" (l. 303), young lovers not able to be married. On the strength of their private feelings, expressed three months prior in an interview that has become Lionel's "sweetest memory" (l. 128), he has once formally asked her family for her hand in marriage and been rebuffed. Thus the first of the text's triads has already come and gone, with Lionel competing with the Vaughan family for possession of Eleanor. Given the age implied by "stainless girlhood," the financial dependency of unmarried middle- and upper-class daughters on their parents in the period, and the legal transfer of agency from father to husband effected by Victorian marriage laws, this early competition is not simply one of feeling, despite Lionel's affective assertions. It is little wonder, then, that he comes out second best in his contest with the combined forces of family, money, and law.

In the three months that have passed since their aborted engagement, Lionel has been absent, working in the city to become, he hopes, "rich enough to ask your leave again" (l. 278); in that time, Sir Joyce Boycott has appeared on the scene. With the approval of the Vaughan family, he has pursued Eleanor, who serves as the object of a second matrimonial triangle. Offering "the tempting paradise" of "a wealth and rank / As shall be Lady Boycott's at the Hall" (ll. 295, 288-189), Sir Joyce, in cooperation with Eleanor's parents, has secured her hand. Rushed back to the country in response to the news of their engagement, Lionel scornfully judges Eleanor and her parents "fooled / To your blind venture by a moral shred / Of heartlessness" (ll. 215-217). As he notes, the pith of it is "Do not choose by love, But look to means; because a man who's poor Must be unkind, for want of cash to spend Upon his wife." And so you're all agreed, You and your family, Sir Joyce will be A model husband (he's so rich), and make, By paying bills, and giving jewelry, The typed good wife of you. (ll. 220-227)

She has been sold, but Lionel hopes to win her back on the strength of their prior love. He thus precipitates the primary triangle in act one, consisting of himself in competition with Sir Joyce for Eleanor's promise of marriage. Carried out in person by Lionel with Sir Joyce absent from the stage, this affective contest seems promising. However, having already failed to convince her parents to allow him to engage himself to her, Lionel's success in his competition with Sir Joyce depends upon a fourth triangle, in which he and Eleanor cooperate to gain her parents' sanction of their relationship. Unfortunately for him, this necessary step assumes that Eleanor can act as a subject in full possession of autonomous agency. Dispassionate readers, who can visually compare the lopsided amount of dialogue accorded to each character, will be able to perceive the problem with this assumption at once. Eleanor's subject position is further undermined by the readiness with which she receives Lionel's verbal hectoring--"Can I not taunt you even to a no? / Look up; defend yourself' (ll. 63-64)--and even his physical coercion: "You hold my hand; / Look what you hold with it--it hurts me now / In your tight grasp," (ll. 191-193). Eleanor's allusion to her engagement ring points to the additional problem that, with the sanction of her parents, she is the legal possession of another man. As she succinctly notes, "I suppose I am his now, / Marked by his ring" (ll. 197-198). Despite such sure indications of her lack of independence, Lionel satisfies himself with a renewed, private declaration of their mutual love, then leaves her alone to return to his pursuit of the wealth necessary to transform himself into a typed good husband, one implicitly capable of affording the bills and jewelry he had dismissed earlier when supplied by Sir Joyce: "Clients and causes stand no truanting: / And I am greedy now to heap up gains" (ll. 313-314).

The title of Webster's second act, "Lady Boycott," indicates that Eleanor was not able to maintain her independence alone. Six years after her marriage to Sir Joyce, Eleanor, now Lady Boycott, shares an intimate conversation with Mary, one of the bridesmaids at her wedding. Sir Joyce has died, likely between one and two years earlier, and in his absence serves as the initial third term in and object of their discussion. (14) Lady Boycott first confesses to her friend, rather inappropriately according to Victorian emotional norms, "Mary, you know I never loved Sir Joyce" (l. 362). Her absence of feeling correlates with her continued absence of agency after marriage: constrained from speaking her heart while the kindly but still overbearing Sir Joyce was alive, she kept "A cheating silence for so many years" while receiving "only smiles / And too familiar fondlings. Ah! he had / His rights upon me .... He made me feel so abject and so false" (ll. 369, 424-426, 459). Later, she dramatically qualifies this portrait of passive loathing while describing her surprising response to his last illness and death: "something too the still dread show of death, / Struck me with such a sadness as made tears / A natural comfort to me, made the calm / Of one who has been grieving hush my life" (ll. 684-687). Hardly the bleeding heart in "Too Faithful," Lady Boycott, grown ascendant now in her role as final caregiver, still manages to enact the speaker's lesson of being-for-another in his day of pain, and so avoids the damnable self-objectification that comes to the male protagonists of "The Snow Waste" and With the Death" when presented with the mortality of their partners.

This calm hush does not last, however, once the absent third term in their colloquy shifts from Sir Joyce to Lionel, who remains, crucially, an unnamed "him" during Lady Boycott's emotional reminiscences, Admitting to Mary the sad results of her first love, Lady Boycott also reveals that all her old feelings have returned as a result of seeing him again now that she is a widow. Unfortunately for her, Lionel does not appear to return her affections, bestowing "one cold and civil look" that, to her, clearly signifies, "He does forgive me, has no rancour left, / Has quite forgotten bitterness and blame, / Doubtless would pity me if he but cared / To know if I am sorry or content" (ll. 501,560-563). Through a relative they have met cordially since, allowing her to discover both that, "He's growing famous at the bar, rich too--/ A very rising man" (ll. 867-868), and that he is betrothed to another woman.

In these triangulated portions of their shared conversation, Mary both cautions her friend against excessive expressions of feeling, and serves as a present, homosocial counterweight against the affective burden of past heterosexual ties. Presciently anticipating Lady Boycott's yet-to-be acknowledged moment of emotional reconciliation with Sir Joyce, Mary bids her, "Hush, oh! hush" (l. 389), and counsels, "Oh! my poor Eleanor, / I stop you once again. You run too wild / In your regrets" (ll. 470-472). (15) After recommending her to seek "The hand of God" (l. 530), Mary ultimately invites Lady Boycott's intimacy, exclaiming "Dear, tell me all" (l. 653). Indeed, as cooperating subjects in two affective triads, the women share a bond with one another at least equal to those between Lady Boycott and her men. Calling Mary her "friend, sweet secret friend" (l. 365), Lady Boycott recalls how Mary sought to comfort her, during her unhappy marriage to Sir Joyce, "with your silent tenderness, your talk / Of making duty dear by loving it / For God's sake, if not man's" (ll. 413-415). When under emotional duress, she bids, "Oh! Mary, darling, comfort, comfort me. / Yes, hold me to you, let my head lie so. / Yes, sooth me, love me, darling" (ll. 506-508). This bond's capacity for comfort will soon be tested once the interview turns from Lady Boycott's past and present to Mary's previous sorrow and current large happiness.

Emotionally exhausted, Lady Boycott requests her friend, "Talk of something else, / Of any thing but me. 'Tis your turn now" (ll. 762-763). Mary begins by reviewing her own first unsuccessful effort at matrimony, in which her fiance proved sexually unfaithful until she "bade him wed / The mother of his child; and that he did, / And has been worthier since" (ll. 773-775). Her situation thus echoing that of the speaker in "To One of Many," Mary does not spend her energy on recriminations or passionate defenses; instead, since that experience of finding herself the unsuccessful subject of an erotic triangle, Mary has followed the path of spinsterhood chosen by the speaker of "Too Faithful." (16) Recently, her situation has changed, however, and she now finds herself happily engaged to an almost ideally complementary man who has also known romantic disappointment. Mary's new relationship is one of emotional equilibrium, in that she and her lover enjoy emotional self-mastery, figured as "calm fearless rest" (l. 808), in the midst of their obvious attachment to one another. Lady Boycott even mistakes their lack of passion for her own experience of a loveless marriage, and warns her friend not to settle for anything less than "a man who is not all to you!" (l. 815).

Readers accustomed to the Victorians' predilection for melodramatic plots will have already foreseen the revelation that accompanies Mary's rejoinder, "You'll know how far from possible it were / For the woman who loves Lionel Ellerton / To love a little" (ll. 824-826). Crucially, this unmasking is innocent: Mary does not know that Lady Boycott, when Eleanor, was Lionel's "fickle beauty" (l. 805); neither is Lionel aware that Eleanor-cum-Lady Boycott and Mary are friends. In other words, the relationship among the parties in this final triangle is not yet fixed, leaving Lady Boycott to decide how she will respond to the complex situation. Faced with the imminent arrival of Lionel as a possible present object of desire, Lady Boycott extracts a promise of secrecy from Mary regarding their recent conversation, further emphasizing their shared homosocial bond, then sends her out to meet him. Swiftly considering her options, which presumably include competing with Mary for Lionel, and allowing Mary and Lionel to fill enough gaps in each others' knowledge to unite them in opposition to and pity for her, she decides upon the one best triad that remains: she will meet Lionel alone, play the part of his Platonic friend, and thereby effectively invite him to cooperate with her in preserving Mary from full knowledge of their shared romantic past; anticipating the results, she thinks, "We shall be / A genial pair of friends. We both love her, / And there's our bond" (ll. 905-907). This prospective resolution of her triangular problematic does require sacrifice, in the form of the final "death" of Eleanor and the romantic hopes she represents--"I'm coming to you; I, not Eleanor / She's gone, she's dead" (ll. 916-917)--but in her newly empowered subject position as a financially and legally independent widow, Lady Boycott now possesses sufficiently unfettered agency to carry out her plan. No one need be objectified by this final, unavoidable threesome so long as both Lady Boycott and Lionel can master their emotions and renew an even more intimate relationship, one grounded in mutual disinterestedness on Mary's behalf.

Although some readers are unlikely to be satisfied by this final solution to the problematic of triangulation--a solution which, interpreted according to a more suspicious hermeneutic, could be read as ultimately self-serving and disingenuous--it is important, I would argue, to acknowledge that living within this final triad will be anything but easy for Lady Boycott. In forcing herself to unite with her former object of desire, Lionel, for the sake of her erstwhile rival, Mary, Lady Boycott must resign herself to friendship--rational with Lionel, reticent with Mary---over the pleasurable excesses of passion, and must practice a species of self-discipline grounded in sincerity that would become increasingly undermined by the late Victorians' turn towards more modern forms of authenticity. (17) Moreover, contemporary high Victorian readers more practiced in sincerity would almost certainly have seen their shared concealment as ethical, since it was based on self-abnegation and a presumably shared desire for Mary's happiness. Those readers who had noted the unfortunate outcomes of Webster's many triangles throughout Dramatic Studies and A Woman Sold and Other Poems, finally, might have been even more inclined to accept Lady Boycott's efforts as the best strategy yet for avoiding the full perils of objectification.

Conclusion

It is to Webster's credit that, even in these early volumes, she does not ingenuously present a wholesale solution to the problem of attenuated subjectivity, which seems an unavoidable consequence of living in society. Instead, she exposes with unusual breadth and depth the ubiquity of circumscribed agency through the motif of triangulation, which she builds into the poems discussed here at the levels of prosody, deploying terza rima in "Too Faithful"; phenomic over-determination, in the form of the speaker's dramatic rhyming utterance in "The Snow Waste"; structure, as in the successive permutations of triads in "With the Dead"; and narrative convention, the erotic triangle, both competitive and cooperative. She also compels readers' attention to the readiness with which the objectification inherent in triangular relations imperils men and women alike, threatening both with the possibility of disabling fallenness.

Avoiding, or at least mitigating this possibility becomes, in the final hypothetical of A Woman Sold, a matter of achieving cooperative disinterestedness. Arguably worthy ways-of-being during any historical moment, cooperation and disinterestedness were especially topical, political, and fraught principles in the Victorian period. The emergence of a recognizably modern capitalist economy, coupled with the growth of national party politics--both built upon zero-sum competition and the alienation of individuals from the results of production, whether industrial or political--gives special poignancy to Webster's poetic solution. That she was aware of the urgency of these matters seems evident from Webster's political activism during the writing and publication of Dramatic Studies and A Woman Sold and Other Poems. Shuttling back and forth between her Cambridge home and the London offices of the Kensington Society, Webster was cooperatively seeking a legislative solution to one especially pernicious threat to individual agency posed by present social circumstances, through the enfranchisement of Britain's presumably disinterested but also politically circumscribed women. (18) She would go on to campaign successfully for two terms on the London School Board, and would weigh in as a committed feminist on public issues especially pressing for women, most noticeably in her essays for the Examiner, collected and republished with the highly ironic title A Housewife's Opinions (1878). (19) That she was on the scene in London to intervene in these later forums at all is largely due to critics' favorable reception of her early poetry. Thus, although Dramatic Studies and A Woman Sold and Other Poems represent neither the first nor the last time that Webster would wrestle with the complexities of subjectivity using the motif of triangulation, these texts' conceptually nuanced approach and unique place in Webster's career invite further undivided critical attention.

Notes

I gratefully acknowledge my University of Alabama colleagues William Ulmer and Deborah Weiss, along with the editorial staff and anonymous reviewers for Victorian Poetry, for their sage advice during the writing and revising of this essay.

(1) Isobel Armstrong discusses several of Webster's poems, in her magisterial and still influential Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1993), as examples of the turn away from expressive poetics undertaken by women poets in the last third of the nineteenth century (see esp. pp. 373-374). Angela Leighton, in Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1992), devotes an entire chapter to Webster, offering a wide-ranging overview of critical and creative output--although she does not read any of the poems featured here--and distinguishing Webster's dramatic speakers for their awareness of their objectification by "historical and social double standards outside themselves" (p. 178). Dorothy Mermin, in Godiva's Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830-1880 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993), recursively returns to Webster's life and writings, which she recommends to the reader for their attention to "new kinds of stories" and "aberrant points of view," including those of "the mysterious, morally ambiguous or evil figures who haunt Romantic and Pre.Raphaelite art but seldom find expression in women's verse" (p. 80).

(2) The prevalence of predominantly erotic triangles has been noted by some of Webster's recent critics, including Patricia Rigg, Christine Sutphin, and Robert Fletcher, but their interpretive investments have prevented sustained attention to triangulation as such. Thus, in Julia Augusta Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer (Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2009), Rigg notices the love triangle at the heart of Lilian Gray (p. 58), and the similar combination of erotic and monetary competition in Lesley's Guard/am and A Woman Sold (p. 116). Similarly, in the excellent introduction to her recent edition of Webster's poetry, Portraits and Other Poems (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), pp. 9-37, Sutphin has space only to mention A Woman Sold as an exemplary triadic poem and to observe both that "triangular relationships often complicate her characters' lives, usually with rather unconventional results," and that Webster "manages to escape some of the cliches of this popular strategy" (pp. 12, 14). Robert Fletcher's recent essay, "The Perverse Secrets of Masculinity in Augusta Webster's Dramatic Poetry," from Victorian Secrecy: Economies of Knowledge and Concealment, ed. Albert D. Pionke and Denise Millstein (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 149-164, offers a more extended look at the erotic triangles at the center of "The Snow Waste" and "With the Dead," connecting their disappointed threesomes to Webster's critique of the reductio ad absurdum of Victorian manliness. The careful attention he devotes to these poems' "secretive monomaniacs" insightfully reveals both Webster's sustained interest in "the discursive contradictions about gender and sexuality in Victorian culture, especially as demonstrated in the links between eros and aggression" and her explicit concern "with the rhetoric that enabled and even normalized sexual domination" (pp. 149, 156). At the same time, this focus on monstrous masculinity and purely erotic triangles necessarily precludes further discussion of triangulation in the texts.

(3) I take the phrase "rhetoric of fallenness" from the subtitle of Amanda Anderson's Tainted Souls and Painted Faces (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), which traces Victorian deployments of this concept through multiple genres in works by Barrett Browning, Dickens, Gaskell, J. S. Mill, and D. G. Rossetti.

(4) I use "liberal" in both its general connotative and more specific denotative senses. A strict commitment to both disinterestedness and the legislative amelioration of social problems is perhaps the central defining characteristic of Victorian liberalism, which is why Angela Leighton is entirely right to locate Webster, alongside George Eliot and Francis Power Cobbe, within "the liberal, humanitarian tradition of the high Victorians, with its social responsibility and philanthropic concerns" (pp. 166-167).

(5) All of these poems are subject to different degrees of interpretation by Rigg in Julia Augusta Webster, but her decision "to delineate [Webster's] increasing commitment to aestheticism in the form and substance of her lyric poetry, as well as in the circle of friends and colleagues with whom she spent time in the 1880s" (pp. 9-10) results in somewhat different readings from my own. Rigg's discussions of individual poems appears on the following pages: "The Snow Waste," pp. 87-91; "With the Dead," pp. 91-93; "Too Faithful," p. 118; "To One of Many," p. 106; and A Woman Sold, pp. 115-116.

(6) All quotations from Webster's poetry are taken from Sutphin's Broadview Edition of Portraits and Other Poems. Individual poems appear on the following pages: "The Snow Waste," pp. 96-106; "To One of Many," pp. 165-166; "Too Faithful," pp. 163-165; "With the Dead," pp. 107-116; A Woman Sold, pp. 123-149.

(7) In "Augusta Webster: The Social Politics of Monodrama," Victorian Review 26, no. 2 (2000): 75-107, Rigg discusses the problems with classifying Webster's dramatic poems. Focusing on "The Happiest Girl in the World" and "A Castaway," both from Webster's Portraits (1870), she argues that "monodrama, with its links to prosopopoeia, the Attitude, the Closet drama, the tableaux vivant, and melodrama," is not only a more accurate label for Webster's poems, but also one that locates her within "a literary and artistic female-centred tradition that spans the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (p. 77).

(8) Transformation was published in the United States under the title The Marble Faun later that year. Noting the appropriateness of Webster's choice of epigraph, Fletcher pithily summarizes Hawthorne's plot in the following terms: "Hawthorne's novel deals with the power of past secrets or hidden shames to shape the present, and the legend serves to establish the malignancy of sin in the story to come; it also offers a narrative thrill of the marvelous, as the main characters encounter what they think to be the specter of the catacomb, only for him to resolve into a real person from the heroine's past come to blackmail her" (p. 154).

(9) Speaking of Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Sedgwick writes, in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), "What is most interesting for our purposes in his study is its insistence that, in any erotic rivalry, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved: that the bonds of 'rivalry' and 'love,' differently as they are experienced, are equally powerful and in many cases equivalent" (p. 21). Indeed, the succession of triangles within "With the Dead," with their recurrent positioning of the speaker and Glaucon, compare favorably with Sedgwick's own later analysis of the plethora of triads in Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (pp. 165-166).

(10) For a more sympathetic reading of the speaker's declarations of religious faith, see Fletcher, p. 155.

(11) See, for instance, Matthew 12.48-49 and 22.30, Mark 12.25, and Luke 12.33-36.

(12) Writing from the perspective of Webster's later career as a critic, Rigg convincingly argues that "we cannot assume that she defined herself as a writer of dramatic poetry. We need to take a more comprehensive look at a woman who promises to figure prominently in contemporary Victorian studies" ("Augusta Webster and the Lyric Muse: The Athenaeum and Webster's Poetics," VP 42 (2004): 135).

(13) In "Determined Heroines: George Eliot, Augusta Webster, and Closet Drama by Victorian Women," VP 33 (1995): 89-109, Susan Brown first proposed distinguishing A Woman Sold as a closet drama, thus aligning it with several of Webster's later works, as well as George Eliot's Armgart.

(14) This approximate timeline is suggested by a recalled dialogue between Lady Boycott and her aunt, who remarks, "So, my dear, / The widow's weeds put by. Well, quite time too: / You've worn them past the fashion for wives now" (ll. 690-692).

(15) Mary uses hush in a similar sense of emotional self-regulation later, when she seeks to quell Lady Boycott's heartfelt fantasies toward Lionel, importantly still unnamed, by telling her, "I know well you have been hushed to him--/ You'd not woo, you, if could win him so" (ll. 667-668).

(16) Mary reinforces her connection to the speaker of "To One of Many," admitting both that "it must be worse / Than one's own due remorse for wrong to find / Shame in you for the man you love" (ll. 776-778) and that "not yet so long ago / I could have told my tale more passionately, / With intricate vexed memories" (ll. 766-768).

(17) Following Lionel Trilling's argument in Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), I would define sincerity as socially sanctioned role-playing motivated by a desire to maintain supra-individual cultural and institutional cohesion; authenticity, by contrast, privileges individual self-actualization over the pressures of social conformity. In the context of A Woman Sold, sincerity is implied by the title "Lady Boycott" and the final figurative death of "Eleanor," the earlier, more passionate and authentic self.

(18) For example, see Rigg, Julia Augusta Webster, p. 101.

(19) Several of these essays are reprinted in Sutphin's Broadview Edition of Portraits and Other Poems. In all of them, Webster's acerbic prose makes an argument at the level of rhetorical sophistication that reinforces her position on the social reform that serves as the occasion for her writing, even as it reminds one of the canny manipulation of form in her early poems.