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Robert Browning and the Lure of the Violent Lyric Voice: Domestic Violence and the Dramatic Monologue

Although the study of Victorian poetry may not be teetering on the brink of extinction, contemporary literary scholars have tended to work through their primary concerns in novels rather than poetry when it comes to questions of nineteenth-century domestic ideology. Like Nancy Armstrong, who argues in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) that "the gender of representation is . . . bound . . . to the institution of the novel," academic critics repeatedly position the novel as the most effective testing ground for hypotheses regarding Victorian culture and domesticity. This essay, by contrast, situates Victorian poetry, and Robert Browning's dramatic monologues in particular, within the analysis of domestic and sexual dynamics that has dominated literary and cultural criticism over the past two decades. More specifically, I suggest that Browning's dramatic monologues shed new light on a domestic problem of considerable importance to the Victorian period: the psychology of sexual violence.