Browning's Fearful Manhood: Masculinity in Pauline

Browning is foreverregarded as a master of the dramatic monologue and praised for his vivid and powerful creation of character. The earliest of Robert Browning vast collection of poetic voices is the Poet Narrator of Pauline, a long poem written in 1832 and published the following year in London by Saunders and Otley to a generally misunderstanding audience. Richard Henry Stoddard wrote in 1871 that Browning "excels Shakespeare . . . in the art -- if it be art -- with which he makes his characters betray what they really are" (372). The masculine persona of this poem fluctuates between the appearance of submission and the rapture of the assertion of the Apollonian dominance he desires over reality, a dominace he attempts to enforce through the controlled depiction of the world and of his own poetic development. The poem offers a confused and unstable relationship between the poet as a masculine persona and the feminine principle, as embodied by the ever-present, ever-listening, and ever-comforting Pauline.

Pauline is a portrait of a masculine persona highly confused at best and schizophrenic at worst, rejecting the more passive tradition of the Romantic achievement of ego. Isobel Armstrong argues that the poem "describes a near psychotic breakdown which occurs in the attempt to remake the self through sexuality, religion, and politics" (115). The poem shows the earliest experiments in dramatic monologue, which Harold Bloom argues is "neither dramatic nor a monologue but rather a barely disguised High Romantic crisis lyric, in which antithetical voices contend for an illusory because only momentary mastery" (3). Published quite early in Browning's career, the poet most immediately responds to certain Romantic definitions of masculine gender and its relationship and subjectivity as a creative, poetic persona. George Ridenour commends Browing's capacity "to exercise his own ego and 'get out of himself' by objectifying his drive to egoistic self-assertion in the creation of fictional characters" like the poet narrator of Pauline (16). Seeking to define himself as poet against the immediate example set by the Romantics, the poet meets only with frustration and contradiction. The poem opens with a scene of sexual intimacy between the narrator and his lover/Muse Pauline which reveals the narrator in conflict with his own desire. Pauline is immediately depicted as a psychological protectress, an enveloping comfort to the poet whose "sweet eyes/ And loosened hair and breathing lips, and arms" have erected "a screen/ To shut me in with thee, and from all fear" (2-3, 4-5). Quickly, the comforting image of the maternal is conflated with the seductive image of the lover. We must be cautious, however, for "Browning looms large as the celebrant of damaging and harrowing love experiences . . ." (Richards 134). Pauline is more than simply the poet's inspiration: she is the key capable of unleashing or undermining his poetic potential, the metaphysical power which is capable of unlocking "the sleepless brood/ Of fancies from my soul" (6-7). Indeed, the poet's description of her effect on him sounds oddly like an exorcism. As she removes the demons which block his poetic capacity, she is in turn tainted by the poet, rendered something of a sacrificial scapegoat to the Apollonian project of asserting his masculine ego through his poetry.

The opening lines reveal the narrator of Pauline as powerless, helpless, submissive, even castrated before the power of Pauline, the feminine embodiment of Nature. John Stuart Mill described the poem as "hysterical" (Armstrong 115). Supplicant before her immensity, the poet's "quivering lip/ Was bathed in her enchantments, whose brow burned/ Beneath the crown to which her secrets knelt,/ Who learned the spell which can call up the dead. . ." (18-21). Nature, who formerly offered inspiration and solace to the Romantic poets, is a cold and manipulative Other in this poem. Ironically, Nature is as much a salvation to the poet's vision as a damnation. Bringing the voice back to the present, the poet utters the simple words "Thou lovest me" (39, 42). This forward phrase becomes a mantra in the poem, repeated over and over again over its course. Such repitition can only reinforce a lack of ego assertion in the poet, a lack of confidence in his own poetic prowess. But, at the same time, the phrase also reveals an almost sadistic desire on the part of the poet to create a reality which reinforces his own increasingly distorted and distorting perception. Herein lies the tension which drives the poet and the poem. "Thou lovest me": I, as poet, shall define reality by naming your desire. Pauline is deified, made the queen of Nature, the object of "not love but faith" (43). By refusing to accept Pauline as a person, he is able to create his own "person" for her, thus conjuring his own Muse and inspiration. Armstrong concedes in this double reading of Pauline the character. On one hand, she is "an extension of the poet's narcissism" and, on the other, "an extension who has got away, freed from the speaker's personality and her status as object. She is both the addressee and object, and an editor, of the same text, a writing subject and annotator who appears to be both in and outside the text's control" (117). An exploration of Pauline's interjection in the poem, interestingly written in French and located near the end of the poem, while interesting in itself, lies beyond the scope of this essay.

We can never take this poet solely at his word. All perception and judgment in this poem are sifted through his eyes and his mind. The poet distinguishes between the "aimless, hopeless state" (50) of his past and the order which Pauline brings to his present. He hides the shame of his rough past from the morally perfect (because so deemed by the poet) Pauline. Pauline is the confessor who is redeemed by the sinful listener. The poet regards himself as base and low yet "not so low/ As to endure the calmness of thine eyes" (69-70). Soon, the poet reveals a different attitude, a clue to his manipulative personality. "Not being what I am" (88), the poet allows that "I must own/ That I am fallen" (79-80), actively creating an image of himself in a submissive position but hinting at a revolution. The poet lies. He pretends to feel "ruined who believed / That though my soul had floated from its sphere/ Of wild dominion into the dim orb/ Of self" (89-92), but this claim is only a pretext. He secretly relishes the ecstasy of the power of creativity that poetry allows him. While claiming to relent the achievement of a self, he nevertheless "felt/ A strange delight in causing my decay" (97-98).

In the poet's mind, the female presence is dually-powerful, capable of both creation and destruction. "The crisis of the poem," Armstrong considers, " arises from the contradictory reversals and repositionings occasioned by this odd relationship" between feminine and masculine "roles" (117). In the passage portraying the witch's usurpation of the power of the "radiant" sky god (114, 115), the poet jealously and transsexually identifies with the "young witch" (112). The poet connects with the witch's aggressive seizure of power and assertion of dominace, not necessarily with her feminized perspective. Adrienne Munich believes that "Browning distances the dangers to his masculinity of imagining himself as a woman, first by reporting the story as the dream of a troubled speaker, and second by emphatically and repeatedly insisting that the speaker is not the poet" (143). His fall from Pauline's affection, again questionable as the only evidence is his claim that he has fallen, "shuts him out/ From hope or part or care in human kind" (129-130). Isolated from humanity, the poet feels little remorse for this self-imposed sentence for isolation offers him the opportunity to concentrate his efforts on refining his poetic capacity. Mary Ellis Gibson suggests Browning challenges the positive Romantic consideration of isolation as a redeeming activity and that the poet offers the pome as "a criticism of isolation" (95). He seems to remember his youth with fondness, the time before he began his poetic journey. The contradictory claims in moments like these call his stability as an ego into question. With the sudden appearance of the "Sun-Treader" (14), variously described by critics as the Christian God and as Shelley, the poet encounters a Father Figure against whom he can define his own identity as a poet and as a man. Invoking this paternal image, he can now offer a justification for hs pursuit of self and begins to sing the praises of the poet's enterprise.

Just as suddenly as it vanishes, the image of Pauline returns to the poet's attention. She is "still for me as thou hast been" (162) and as he stands beside her while she gathers all of creation around them, he idealizes her like the God of Genesis. The poet almost seems to be attempting to seduce Pauline/Nature in the hope of stealing her radiant creative power. He is threatened because "The female principle is represented as a violently destructive harpy" (Armstrong 118). He woos her by calling for "thy name/ Which I believed a spell to me alone" (169-170). Nature is a source of deeper, more untapped truth, "the fountain-head" (179) of poetic wisdom. In this passage, Browning recalls his Romantic predecessors positive relationship with Nature as a source of wisdom, inspiration, and spiritual and psychological solace. Browning, however, is not so at ease with Her. The poet is a passive observer, prostrate to Nature, who disguises himself as "a watcher whose eyes have grown dim/ With looking for some star which breaks on him/ Altered and worn and weak and full of tears" (227-229). "The speaker of Pauline," writes Loy Martin, "can be described as a poetic subject that aspires to, but fails to experience, the Romantic sublime, a subject that began and has now abandoned a quest for self-contained homogeneity" (82-3). The poet denies the Romantic tradition by recreating the actions of the Romantic poet without the Romantic achievement of subjective freedom and creativity. Poetry becomes the ecstatic celebration of Nature and the sexual anxieties which inspire the poetry become edified by that poetry.

The hidden agenda of the poet's poetic enterprise is the dominant assertion of his own masculine ego. Armstrong contends that "As the creature of history, which includes his own sexuality, the speaker in Pauline cannot make himself anew ideologically or imaginately until he has accomplished a traumatic break from the past" (119), a break he never clearly makes. He is intensely self-aware:

I am made up an intensest life,

Of a most clear idea of consciousness

Of self, distinct from all its qualities,

From all affections, passions, feelings, powers. . . (268-271)

He is compelled by an eager creativity, " a principle of restlessness/ Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all" (277-278). Imagination becomes the saving grace of this anxiety-driven poet, the "only one [of my powers]/ Which marks me" (283-284). "The Pauline poet," Armstrong proposes, "repeats self-projection as self-pursuit, becoming the thing 'I fled' (97)" (122). With his achievement of the independent and creative self, he momentarily masters control over his passions and his past. He gains confidence and strength as soon as he usurps the feminine power of creativity and shuns her presence. The poet's mind becomes projective; events of his life become clearer to him and he is able to chart a course for his poetic future. The poet's voracious and projective desire to define himself likens him to Marlowe's Faustus, another visionary and Apollonian thinker. Driven by "an impulse but no yearning" (376), the poet begins lose subjectivity once again as he enters a Apollonian illusion of domination over reality. He renders himself "slave of a sweet task" (412) and his self-imposed desire is to translate the meaning of the ecstasy of his experience as a poet for the people, to find out the hidden meaning in works of art, "To disentangle, gather sense from song" (413). He engages the task with hardly disguised zeal: "ah, what a life was mine to prove!" (427). His achievement of poetic independence becomes the poem which dominates the present page.

The short dream passage of lines 451-457 anticipates another post-Romantic quester, Childe Roland, who seeks to define himself through poetry:

As some world-wanderer sees in a far meadow

Strange towers and high-walled garens thick with trees,

Where song takes shelter and delicious mirth

From laughing fairy creatures peeping over,

And on the morrow when he comes to lie

For ever 'neath those garden-trees fruit-flushed

Sung round by fairies, all his search is vain.

The poet is disturbingly joyful at the loss of human values such as hope, faith, freedom, and virtue because they are replaced by "wit, mockery,/
As we draw closer to the finale of the poem, the poet's madness becomes more and more clear to the reader, if not to the poet himself, as he struggles towards a unity of self. He euphemistically describes the faltering stability of his poetic voice as "The troubled life of genius" (506-507). Egotistically, he desires the canonical spotlight: "Mine shall be all the radiance" (520). This image recalls the earlier image of the fallen god whose radiance is usurped by the witch. If we accept that this fallen god is Browning's idealization of Shelley, then the poem becomes the battleground for the expression of the mascline anxiety of Shelley's influence on Browning, a Freudian attempt to usurp the position and power of the poetic father. The poet now wishes to confront the feminine as embodied by Nature, to assert his independence from and dominance against her seductive hold, to revenge his fallen father/self for the theft. Driven by the desire "to rise and rival" his poetic predecessor, the poem reveals itself finally as Browning's desire to rid himself of the anxiety of Shelley's influence (557). But again, he stirs his own confidence, faining humility while scarcely masking pride:

'Tis a fine thing that one weak as myself

Should sit in his lone room, knowing the words

He utters in his solitude shall move

Men like a swift wind. . . (531-534)

By identifying himself with a weakened figure, the poet nevertheless reveals the unsteadiness of his project and he forced once again to confront the immediate feminine presence of Pauline. As Shelley is the poet's paternal influence, so is Pauline the maternal force which offers comfort and protection from the psychological trauma of independence, the mantra once again providing solace: "And when I loved thee as love seemed so oft,/ Thou lovedst me indeed" (577-578).

The poet never rests for long, however. He is drawn to the infinite, although he yearns for the more practical and less taxing comprehension of the particular. He seeks to stretch the bounds of his mind and soul since he is limited by his body:

I cannot chain my soul: it will not rest

In its clay prison, this most narrow sphere:

It has strange impulse, tendency, desire,

Which nowise I account for nor explain,

But cannot stifle, being bound to trust

All feelings equally, to hear all sides. . .

(593-598)

Again, the tension between the desire to assert the self and the longing for maternal comfort threatens to destroy the poet. He looks forward "With hope to age at last, which quenching much,/ May let me concentrate what sparks it spares" (617-619). Poetic expression has exhausted this young poet. His "restlessness of passion" becomes "a chained thing," his "bright slave" (620, 631, 633). His desire promises to overwhelm him and destroy the fragile subjectivity he has fought so valiantly (he thinks) to achieve. "The subject," writes Martin, aspires to "become perversely bound into a unity. In [lines 93 to 123], that unity is described metaphorically, but the metaphors themselves, a sequence of dream narratives, reestablish the divided self in two ways: by projecting a dramatic exchange between two within the dim orb of self and by separating the subject who speaks to Pauline from the subject of the dreams" (83). The music of the language of poetry offers an alternative consolation to the poet's psychological pain. For a moment, he identifies with the helpless plight of the chained Andromeda, but words offer an escape for his passive position: "I fling age, sorrow, sickness off,/ And rise triumphant, triumph through decay" (674-675). Poetry, then, becomes an anodyne for the pursuant pain of Apollonian self-definition. The poem's final stanzas convey a desperate struggle for some resolution to the problem of the unified masculine self. "In spite of the constant lapses, the recognition of limitations," Donald Hair argues, "there has been, ever since the Andromeda passage, a steady if nonrational progression towards faith" (16-17). But faith alone can not compete with the radical importance that the poet attaches to his own will. His lack of a stable subjectivity, however, forces him to recognize his "need for faith, and it is this need
The end of the poem signals the reassertion of masculine independence as the guiding force of the poet's existence. He turns to Shelley, his poetic mentor but also a metaphor for God, but fails to find him. He begins speaking directly to Shelley in lines 822 to 830, imploring the divine poet to look down on him with the high regard he so desperately craves and can no longer receive from Pauline. He abrutly shifts his reference to Shelley to the third person from lines 831 to 837 before returning to address Pauline with a more intense passion. Since Shelley will offer no comfort, he turns to the single form who can. Once again, she becomes the creator and inspirer of his genius, who "bad'st me shadow this first stage./ 'Tis done. . ." (885-886). As the text draws to a close, the poet more and more begins to doubt his poetic abilities. His ego begins to crumbe and words no longer carry the force they once carried: "Words are wild and weak,/ Believe them not, Pauline!" (904-905). The poet collapses into fear and doubt over his own voice, lamenting that he has "too trusted my own lawless wants,/ Too trusted my vain self, vague intuition" (938-939) and begs Pauline to comfort him "like summer wind" (929). He regress and becomes "even as a child" (948). Sadly and in utter self-defeat, the poet even promises to relinquish his creative voice for Pauline's protective presence:

I'll sit with thee while thou dost sing

Thy native songs, gay as a desert bird

Which crieth as it flies for perfect joy,

Or telling me old stories of dead knights. . . (959-962)

With the memory of his poetic past and the traces of his creative potential, the narrator offers this poem "to tell for ever/ That when I lost all hope of such a change" as the loss of poetic desire (1004-1005). Bernard Richards comments that most of Browning's poetry "has the alarming combination of the over-determined cohabiting with the seemingly under-determined" (47), an insight especially descriptive of the psychological state of the narrator of this poem. The final lines of the poem again pay homage to Shelley and deliver a promise that the narrator will once again achieve a poetic power strong enough to face him in battle. But his ability to achieve this end is questionable and we are left with a sour disappointment in his fall.

Pauline offers the reader a new perspective on the validity of subjectivity and identity as an essential characteristic. Bloom recognizes in Browning " a healthy suspicion that poet and reader alike are rhetoical systems of many selves, rather than any single self or separate self" (2). This early glimpse at Browing's mastery of charcter formation reveals his characteristic reinforcement of character and formal structure. Armstrong agrees that "With characteristic virtuosity Browning learned how to make the textualising strategies developed in Pauline become the substance of drama" (126). This technique reaches fruition in such dramatic monologues as "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," "Fra Lippo Lippi," and "My Last Duchess." Ultimately, the audience must struggle with the shiftiness and unstable masculinity of the poet narrator. Gibson agrees that "The difficulties of 'Pauline' . . . arise not from the reader's being asked to sympathize with the poet-speaker's 'subjectivity' but from the reader's difficulty in finding a stable perspective for regarding Pauline's poet" (95). Masculine identification in Pauline is defined by lack, by an absence which must defined itself against the feminine creative norm. This poem offers a tense anticipation for the further exploration of masculine voices to come in Browning's later poetry.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, poetics, and politics. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Bloom, Harold. "Introduction: Reading Browning." Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. by Harold Bloom and Adrienne Munich. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979. pp. 1-12.

Browning, Robert. The Complete Works of Robert Browning. Ed. by Roma A. King, Jr. 8 vols. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969. Vol. 1.

Gibson, Mary Ellis. History and the Prism of Art: Browning's Poetic Experiments. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987.

Hair, Donald S. Browning's Experiments with Genre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972.

Munich, Adrienne Auslander. Andromeda's Chains: Gender and Interpretation in Victorian Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Richard, Bernard. English Poetry of the Victorian Period, 1830-1890. New York: Longman, 1988.

Ridenour, George M. "Four Modes in the Poetry of Robert Browing." Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. by Harold Bloom and Adrienne Munich. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, Inc., 1979. pp. 13-27.

Stoddard, Richard Henry. "Browning's Portrayal of Character" Browning: The Critical Heritage. Ed. by Boyd Litzinger and Donald Smalley. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc. 1970. pp. 372.