Maria Granic White

The Dramatic Monologue: Examining the Subaltern

Isobel Armstrong’s watershed essay “Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies: A False Dichotomy” (1999) has influenced much critical work on Victorian poetry. In their response to this essay, several critics have turned their attention to the Victorian poetry, especially to the dramatic monologues, which exemplify the Victorian poets’ awareness of their civil role. Unlike the Romantics, who assume the role of Prophets or Seers of the world, the Victorians de-romanticize the poet’s mission by placing responsibility upon their readers, who are to view their society through a critical perspective. Numerous dramatic monologues ask readers to align themselves with the subaltern, to see their own, inextricable role within society, not outside or above it. Moreover, such poems ask readers to operate within the ideological horizon of the society rendered in their discourse, to respond to them as literary critics with a constructive, moral function. This requires readers to know a great deal of literature and mythology, have their ear attuned to events regarding the subaltern classes in Victorian society, and analyze the rhetoric of the texts. Victorian scholarship has yet to bridge a connection with Subaltern Studies, an area within cultural studies influenced by the Italian Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Such a connection would facilitate analyses of various representations of the subaltern in Victorian dramatic monologues. Furthermore, since dramatic monologues represent different types of discourses rendering covertly human motives, Victorian scholarship can employ the discourse analysis developed by Kenneth Burke (1897-1993). This essay will examine three dramatic monologues that relate social issues concerning the subaltern and reflect or rather subvert Victorian ideologies: Felicia Hemans’s “The Indian With His Dead Child” (1830), Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842), and Matthew Arnold’s “The Forsaken Merman” (1847-9?/1849). By depicting subalterns of the Victorian time based on class, ethnicity and gender through the lens of the hegemonic group or the subaltern himself/herself, these poems offer a rich field of exploration of the Gramscian concepts of the subaltern and hegemony. Also, as discourses addressed to an audience, these monologues reveal human motives, which one could identify by way of Burke’s discourse analysis. An examination of the three above-mentioned dramatic monologues as discourses of or about the subaltern can reveal the ways in which some Victorian poets revealed or subverted the underlying Victorian ideology and intrinsic human motives behind it.

The Subaltern in Dramatic Monologues: A Grammar of Motives

Owing to the complexity of an analysis of the subaltern in the above-mentioned dramatic monologues, a preliminary review of two theoretical approaches is necessary. One approach is Gramsci’s theory regarding hegemony and the subaltern. In Prison Notebooks, written during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Gramsci views hegemony as a process of moral and intellectual leadership through which subordinate classes accept their own domination by ruling classes, as a form of control exercised by a dominant class, a group that controls the means of production (Selections from Prison Notebooks 5 n1). Gramsci uses the term “subaltern” to refer to the subordinate class in southern Italy, the proletariat, ultimately linked to economic relations and class consciousness. The term describes dominated and exploited groups which lack a sense of class consciousness. Gramsci asserts that the subaltern groups (slaves, peasants, religious groups, women, different races, and the proletariat) lack political autonomy and initiatives (Prison Notebooks vol. II 21, 24-25). Espousing Gramsci’s concepts, Subaltern Studies center on how class issues converge with other identity factors of marginality and disempowerment, such as gender and ethnicity. While Gramsci discusses subaltern groups within Italy, Subaltern Studies have in view how subalternity is constituted and how one can create emancipator politics.

The other approach, which would complement Gramsci’s, is Burke’s dramatism. In his book A Grammar of Motives (1945), Burke introduces a form of rhetorical analysis, the pentad (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose), a set of relational principles which functions grammatically and by way of which one can analyze discourses to learn how people attribute motivations to human actions. To utilize Burke’s terminology, rhetorical analysis results in the unearthing of the grammar of motives underlying human symbolic action. In Burke’s view, words define, persuade, appease, divide, victimize, inspire, and so on (Blakesley 33). The pentad articulates the relationships between ideas and shows how words describing motives explain human action. The act names what occurred; the scene represents the situation in which the act occurred; the agent names the person(s) who performed the act; the agency depicts the means the agent used; and the purpose suggests the motivation behind the act (Blakesley 33). A pentadic analysis of dramatic monologues as ideological discourses about or of the subaltern can reveal the grammar of motives underlying the speaker’s symbolic action, the ideological framework of this action, or the way in which the poems undermine that ideological framework. Moreover, the pentadic analysis brings light on the circumstances (scene) surrounding the subaltern’s situation and the subaltern’s limited agency or lack thereof within the Victorian society.

Several factors contribute to the choice of dramatic monologues for an analysis combining the two approaches discussed above, borrowed from Gramsci and Burke. Firstly, the poems portray or constitute the speech of the subaltern and present the mechanism of hegemony, as the poets perceive it. Secondly, the genre’s emergence signals a change on the Victorian scene. One is the changing literary market and another is the poets’ interest in the dramatic genre. In his essay “The Market” (2002), Lee Erickson portrays the somber situation of Victorian poetry starting in 1825, when the poetry market collapsed as a result of the early nineteenth-century industrialization of publishing. As a result of technological advancements, poetry became marginalized and had to compete against the preferred Annuals, the lyric gift book anthologies, and Walter Scott’s one-shilling poetry reprints and anthologies (345). Comparing the case of poetry to that of the novel, Erickson asserts that, unlike novel publishers, poetry publishers did not sell too many volumes to circulating libraries because readers of poetry were more likely part of the intellectual elite (350, 351). Some of the poets themselves caused a change, in that they showed an interest in the dramatic genre, which they incorporated in the lyric genre. Critics have remarked upon the dramatic monologue’s closeness to the dramatic genre and have referred to it in various terms: “unprecedented in its effects” (Langbaum 77); “theatrical events” (Pearsall 19); “the transcript of a speech not intended to be translated into oral speech” (Shaw 27); “a lyrical-dramatic-narrative hybrid” (Slinn, “Dramatic Monologue” 80); a “truncated play with very little plot and one real character,” “a substitute for playing” (Sinfield 3);or  “a play that had shrunk to one speech by one character” (Hawlin 61). The dramatic monologue illustrates the dominant struggles of the Victorian poets, who do not perceive their works as extricated from their milieu, but as ways of producing ideological forms which challenge the dominant ideology.

A study of the dramatic monologues indicated above can illustrate how the writers uncover (consciously or not) the iniquitous power relations extant in Victorian England. The poems explore the subaltern in terms of “the other” race (“The Indian with His Dead Child”), gender (“My Last Duchess”), and the bi-racial other (“The Forsaken Merman”). The purpose of this essay is not to illustrate the Victorian poets’ attempts to distinguish themselves from the Romantic poets or, to utilize Harold Bloom’s concept, their anxiety of influence. Rather, this paper conducts discourse analyses of the dramatic monologues in order to bring to the fore dissidences of subalternity in two major hypostases: the subaltern’s voice ventriloquized by Hemans, and the subaltern as the silent auditor in Browning and Arnold. These two kinds of subalternity—ventriloquized and silent—illustrate the first, the Victorian women poets’ attempt to call the public’s awareness to the need for an equitable treatment of the racial other, and the second, the male poets’ presentation of the subaltern’s condition favoring neither the hegemonic group nor the subaltern and forcing the readers to exert their ethics. Prior to the analysis of the poems, an explanation of the choice of the three authors is needed. Hemans is among the first Victorians to write a dramatic monologue ventriloquizing the subaltern, a type of poem used by other female poets of the time. Also, critics credit Browning with writing the best dramatic monologues, Ina Beth Sessions considering “My Last Duchess” to be a “perfect” example of the genre (512). Finally, Arnold brings to the readers’ attention the condition of the children as subalterns, in a more indirect way than Charles Dickens does in several of his novels.

The Subaltern Ventriloquized: The American Indian Father

The dramatic monologue offered Victorian women poets a way to experiment with identity and present it to their readers to underscore the suffering of the subaltern. Victorian female writers appear to show an interest in ventriloquizing the subaltern as the racial other. Felicia Hemans speaks for the American Indian in “The Indian with His Dead Child”; Eliza Cook also depicts the American Indian in “Song of the Red Indian”; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning presents the African slave woman in “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” Although the dramatic monologue is conventionally associated with Browning and Tennyson, Hemans’s poem predates the early monologues of both Browning and Tennyson. Kate Flint notices that, even if most critics name Robert Browning as the poet who established the importance of the dramatic monologue in 1830s, women poets used the genre first, assuming a multiplicity of voices to articulate social protest and to ventriloquize feelings of the marginalized, especially of the “fallen woman” (159-163). Glennis Byron credits Hemans, who had a great influence on the Victorians, and Letitia Landon with the development of the dramatic monologue in the transitional period of the 1820s (46). Hemans conveyed her attitude toward race in her dramatic monologue “The Indian with His Dead Child,” in which she guides her reader’s attention to the male Indian subaltern.

Romantic poets such as William Blake also showed sympathy toward the subaltern, particularly the subaltern as child. In Blake’s poetry, the speakers (often innocent children) lack awareness of their circumstance, of the injustice done to them. Moreover, as Blake suggests, the root cause of their warped society is the failure of imagination. Ignorant of their treatment as inferior beings, the subalterns have no hope to rid themselves of what Blake calls “mind forg’d manacles.”3 The Victorian poetry, however, depicts the subaltern as painfully aware of their social environment, of their place in society. The dramatic monologues illustrate the injustice of a society in which the hegemonic group oppresses the subaltern groups. Moreover, they inform their readers with regard to such injustice, not unlike the way in which Victorian novelists “teach” their readers Victorian middle class values.

Hemans ingeniously informs (in The Indian with His Dead Child) her reader about the situation of the American Indians. To do so, she exploits the child’s death as the event which shows the Indian the town’s lack of sympathy; hearing the speaker’s account of his son’s death, any parent would find consubstantiality with the bereaved father, no matter of the latter’s race: “Alone, amidst their hearth-fires,/ I watched my child’s decay;/ Uncheered, I saw the spirit-light/ From his young eyes fade away” (33-36). Indicative of death, the term “decay” also suggests the act of decomposition of the body before the death of the child and the father’s perception of a dilated time. The end stop of the second line breaks the connection between the idea of slow decomposition and the following idea, of death occurring gently, the enjambment in lines 35-36 producing a delaying of the process signaled by the words “fade away.”

Hemans overturns the subaltern-hegemonic dichotomy by ventriloquizing the subaltern; her choice of the genre, the dramatic monologue, allows her to ‘silence’ the powerful town people, representatives of the hegemonic group. One can argue that the poem represents the counter-hegemony strategy of the intellectual who presents the dominant current of subaltern praxis as non-rebellion; the Indian man expresses his discontent with the townsmen, the “pale race” (40), whom he leaves. A form of dissent constructed by the poetess herself, the dramatic monologue illustrates Hemans’s attempt towards an understanding of subaltern cognitive processes and consciousness. By allowing slippage between races, the dramatic monologue is “a form of literary transvestism,” a way “to explore the possibility of identification with others” (Flint 165). Hemans’s dramatic monologue represents a response to a genuine need to change the condition of the subaltern American Indian, to counteract the ideology of race, “a semiotic system in the guise of ethnology,” a system which imposed and controlled the white/non-white dichotomy and focused fetishistically on the product that results from their contact (Young, Colonial Desire 180).

The Subaltern as an ‘Absent Presence’ and as a Silent Presence: The Duchess and the Envoy

Instead of ventriloquizing subalterns, Browning’s “My Last Duchess” introduces them paradoxically as an ‘absent presence’ and as a silent auditor whom the speaker, a representative of the hegemonic group, addresses. Critics have alluded to the existence of the subalterns and the mechanism of hegemony in Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” Herbert F. Tucker Jr. regards the Duke of “My Last Duchess” as “Browning’s most formal monologist,” a “potently skilful speaker” (291), whose discourse marks an appropriation of power; because he belongs to the hegemonic group, the Duke can intimidate the envoy, to whom he relates his abuse. Esther Loehndorf proposes that Browning’s selection of characters from cultures and times different from his own testifies to his “fascination with the foreign, the ‘other’” (39), embodied by the envoy in “My Last Duchess.” Despite its condensed form contained in 56 lines, the poem shows its immersion in the author’s milieu particularly by way of revealing the acute problem of domestic violence and implicitly the objectification of women. Additionally, it focuses on the human mind, more exactly on mental pathology, one of the main scientific preoccupations of the Victorians.4 By bringing to the readers’ attention domestic violence and the human mind, Browning’s dramatic monologue presents the silenced subaltern. Two pentads for this dramatic monologue ascertain different grammars of motives that cause action on the part of different agents by way of different agencies.

Clearly, the Duke’s story is interspersed with allusions to domestic violence and murder. In her analysis of Browning’s dramatic monologues, Melissa Valiska Gregory posits that these poems shed light on the “psychology of sexual violence,” a commonplace feature of domestic life in Victorian times, which “occurred within families from a wide range of economic and social positions” (491, 492). This phenomenon occurred despite the Victorians’ changing view of marriage from a social contract between families to a union of two people, with an increasing equality between the spouses. This latter view stands in opposition to an earlier “patriarchal ideal in which the husband was regarded as the ruler of wife and children alike” (Bossche 89). A believer in the older view of marriage, the Duke reacted with violence against his wife’s lack of submission. Although dead, the subaltern woman “speaks” in the Duke’s discourse through body language rather than through spoken language. By “reading” her body and listening obliquely to the Duke’s story, the auditor can infer the abuse acted on her. The “faint/ half-flush that dies along her throat” (18-19), which the Duke describes, reveals his violence and represents incriminatory evidence. Nonetheless, the silent auditor cannot use it to exonerate the Duchess but rather to help the Duke by warning his potential new wife to conform to the Duke’s older, patriarchal view of marriage, which requires her total submission. As Loehndorf suggests, being controlled by social convention, the Duke cannot directly tell the envoy that he would murder his new bride if she does not conform to his will (166). However, to reinforce his position, the Duke makes another incriminating assertion, which alludes to a terrifying act, murder, whereby the Duke obtained the total submission of the subaltern woman: “I gave commands;/ Then all smiles died together” (45-46), and offers the auditor a glimpse into the psychology of a murderer.

That the Duke is disturbed proves not only the content of his monologue, but also its form: he speaks in a pentameter that mixes iambs and trochees, feminine and masculine rhymes.5 His use of the heroic couplet indicates, in W. David Shaw’s view, that he turns himself into “a surrogate god” (173). By speaking in heroic couplets, the Duke seems to emphasize the importance of form rather than of content; he utters his argument in controlled rhythms and forms that give the appearance of a logical argument to his speech, which becomes a mark of a man who believes that he is a superior being guided by a special set of principles. This “surrogate god,” who hides his threatened sexuality in the gendered categories of the mid-nineteenth century aesthetics, stifles his wife’s sexual energy and transfers it to art, a safe locus for a discourse on sexuality. Moreover, he replaces the Duchess, a subject whom he cannot control, with a painting, an object whose story he can tell.6 The Duke’s performance as an aesthetics analyst replaces the sexual act. His abhorrence of “stooping” (41) suggests his emasculation, his lack or repression of the male energy. To point to the Duchess’s alleged guile and to the Duke’s rhetorical talent, Browning employs enjambment, which creates a climactic scene accentuating the negative adverb and the noun “husband”: “Sir, ‘twas not/ Her husband’s presence only, called that spot/ Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek” (13-15). Thus, the husband admits that he lacked the power to make his wife happy. Feeling threatened sexually by his Duchess, the Duke silenced her. Since the Duke transformed the Duchess into a sign, the only agency that the Duchess possesses is the “glance” (12). As a semiotic representation of a subaltern, the Duchess speaks to the reader through her bruised body and her glance, but she cannot engage in dialogue. The personality of the Duchess, the Duke intimates, did not fit the desexualized, angelic figure of the desired subaltern woman. Instead of a sexually vibrant woman, he prefers an “object,” and he intends to treat his new wife as one (53). To reinforce his attitude toward marriage, before joining the rest of the party the Duke shows the envoy another of his art pieces, Claus of Innsbruck’s bronze figurine of Neptune taming a sea-horse (54-56), a display of violence which the Duke admires. The implication is that women need to be tamed into submission and violence is the way to achieve it. The auditor cannot hear the subaltern woman and can see a painting representing her; for him, as well as for the reader, the Duchess is an “absent presence,” a victim of domestic violence whose story cannot be heard directly within the hegemonic discourse but as it is rendered by a representative of the hegemonic group.

Since the Duke tells the envoy fairly openly what happened to his Duchess, an interesting analysis involves the relation between the Duke, a symbol of authority, and the silent auditor, a subaltern, who is burdened with the knowledge of abuse and murder but because of his place outside of hegemony is forced to keep silent. Robert Langbaum argues that the Duke’s conviction of matchless superiority, his intelligence and bland amorality, his poise, his taste for art, his manners—high-handed aristocratic manners that break the ordinary rules and assert the duke’s superiority when he is being most solicitous of the envoy, waiving their difference of rank (“Nay, we’ll go/ Together down, sir”); these qualities overwhelm the envoy, causing him apparently to suspend judgment of the duke, for he raises no demur. (83)

The focus here shifts from the motive of the Duke to convince his future wife to be submissive to Browning’s attempt to show his readers some serious societal problems that need to be addressed. One of the problems regards domestic abuse and murder. Unlike Porphyria’s lover, whom Stefan Hawlin calls “a ‘tender murderer’” (73), the Duke is characterized by cruelty. Moreover he displays aristocratic hauteur, and due to his social status, he goes unpunished. In an overtly feminist reading of “My Last Duchess,” Shifra Hochberg examines the portrait of the Duchess in terms of the “positionality of power,” as a female-authorized “countertext” to the male-authorized text of the Duke’s dramatic monologue: “It is significant that we are told twice, in lines 4 and 46, that the Duchess stands—not that her portrait stands but that she does . . . [T]he Duchess’ erect stance, associated with the phallocentric power of the Duke, helps to thematize the erotic strength of the Duchess as well as the poem’s central paradox of the intersection of power with seeming powerlessness” (80). Browning compels his reader to move from the symbolic action of poetry to concrete action with regard to domestic violence, to help the marginalized, particularly the abused Victorian wives. Browning’s Duchess has one essential characteristic in common with Hemans’s Indian, Cook’s Red Indian, and Elizabeth Barret Browning’s black slave: she does not have a name because she represents a class of subaltern people, subordinated to the ruling group’s initiatives and policies.

Another problem concerns the socially inferior subaltern and his ability to speak out against murder. According to Loy D. Martin, the interlocutor is “always a tenuous force because he is required by the genre to be silent or unheard” (132). In other words, the subaltern is required by the hegemonic group to be silent and his silence signifies submission. Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor also considers that the silence of the envoy “is not so surprising; he is simply in no position to dissent” and participates in what linguists call “‘imposed’ silence, which is grounded in fear” (290). Through the silent envoy, Browning is able to uncover an adumbration of the iniquitous power relations within Victorian England’s constellations, identifying one type of subaltern based on class. In presenting the silent subaltern, Browning does not overtly refute the justice or morality of the Duke’s discourse but instead places the onus on his reader to conduct an analysis that underscores issues of class not in Renaissance Italy but in Victorian England. As mentioned earlier, despite the fact that the Victorians live in a time when the notion of marriage is being redefined, in that the dynamics of the married couple is moving toward a more balanced husband-wife relation, domestic abuse still represents a serious concern.

The Subaltern Speaks: The Merman or the Racial Other; The Merman’s Children or the Bi-Racial Other

While Browning presents a silent auditor of a lower social class, Arnold dramatizes the subalternity existing outside of England. In “The Forsaken Merman,” the merman is the racial other and his children with Margaret are the bi-racial others. In her analysis of the poem, Mermin identifies sets of superimposed oppositions in the poem between “male and female, natural and human, family and society, human and divine” (“The Fruitful Feud” 164).

The poem deals with the disintegration of the biracial family on account of the white person’s religious calling and intrinsically of her fear of eternal death. Belonging to the hegemonic group, Margaret can return to the father land, England, where her bi-racial children and racial other husband do not belong.7  As stated by Mermin, the border at sea and land marks “the separation between men and women” (“The Fruitful Feud” 164). The same border, however, marks another separation, of races, deepened by the imperialist enterprises occurring during the Victorian time, when the racial other appears as a threat to the English. Back to the hegemonic space and blinded by “the holy book,” a symbol of religion or of ideology in general, Margaret takes care of her country’s children, embodied by the “child with its toy” (90), and not of her biological but racially mixed children, on whom she turns her back. The poem suggests the intransigence of the children’s situation at the level of the form as well. The paratactic utterance of the merman: “Loud prays the priest; shut stands the door” (82) contains two inversions, placing the adverbs of manner before the verb and the subject-noun at the end of the clause to render the unchanging character of the situation: the hegemonic group closed all communication with the racial other. Furthermore, the plosive consonants with which the verb “prays” and the noun “priest” begin, in the first clause, suggest the power of ideology and of the ideologues, respectively.

While he gives the woman a name, Margaret, Arnold refers to the man by way of the appellative “merman,” describing him based on his geographical location, beyond the border at sea and land, therefore as a racial other. Since he is a racial other, the Victorians would consider the merman as necessarily feminine. Nineteenth-century racial theories, Young claims, “portrayed Europeans as masculine and non-Europeans as feminine races” (Postcolonialism 326). The gender roles of the parents in Arnold’s dramatic monologue are opposed to those supported by the Victorian ideology, which confines the woman to the domestic sphere and allows the man to participate in the social sphere: Margaret has mobility and leaves the domestic space to enter the social field of the town, to work: “She sits at her wheel” (87). Denoting a circular device linked to machines and labor and connoting fortune, the noun “wheel” relates to the idea of money. Consequently, one could deduce that Margaret left the domestic sphere outside of England to become a factory worker in England, while her husband, the merman, a racial subaltern, remained with the children in the domestic sphere, outside Margaret’s father land. By assigning the waters of the sea as the children’s home, and by depicting them moving on land as well, Arnold suggests the children’s “in-between,” hybridic state, described by Armstrong as “miscegenated, subaqueous creatures” (Victorian Poetry 206). The children are a “silent presence” not because they do not speak, but because they do not verbalize their affective needs as a result of their parents’ separation and the reversal of gender roles due to the difference of race.

Although the merman does not attempt to alleviate his children’s suffering caused by their mother’s departure, he alludes to their silent distress and their introversion by means of the anaphoric beginning of the sentences in which he addresses them, of the repetition of the voiced consonant d, and the reiteration of the diphthong [au] and the nasal consonant n: “Come away, children, call no more! / Come away, come down, call no more!/ Down, down, down!” (83-86). The combination of the d sound, the diphthong [au], which begins with the most open vowel and ends with a close vowel, and the nasal consonant imitates the sound of the bell, symbolic of the ideology which the children may associate with the reason why their mother abandoned them. Armstrong’s significant interpretation of the poem proposes that both the merman and the woman are “forsaken” “in the double meaning of having been deserted and having given up something” (Victorian Poetry 206). Undoubtedly, the two adults are forsaken; nonetheless, the monologue also depicts the situation of the bi-racial children and draws attention to the parents’ duty to meet their children’s needs. Arnold dramatizes two main problems which colonialism can create within a mixed family, a reversal of gender roles when the woman belongs to the hegemonic group and the man to the subaltern group, and the silent suffering of the children born out of miscegenation and implicitly, their subalternity.

The dramatic monologues analyzed above avoid the hegemonic implications of an authorial positioning, in that they replace the third person narrative voice with the voice of the speaker, who performs in front of an auditor. The poems domesticate the readers’ apprehension of the unknown racial other and the mentally disturbed other. By making the predicament of the subaltern understandable to the readers’ consciousness, the dramatic monologues render the subaltern as another human being, whose condition the hegemonic class would have probably preferred to conceal from the public eye. Victorian writers bring the subaltern in front of their readers’ eyes to charge them with the ethical responsibility of establishing an equitable relation with the subaltern. Literature has always played a key role in teaching people to be good citizens, to support the power structures by promoting patriarchy, but also in acting counter hegemonically, by questioning traditional roles and by bringing to the fore the complexity of the subaltern’s condition. These dramatic monologues represent a few examples of Victorian works in which the authors invest the subalterns with consciousness of their position in society and use either their own voice (albeit ventriloquized) or the hegemonic voice to articulate the subalterns’ story. This way, the dramatic monologues not only present the subalterns as classes that exist in the Victorian society, but also elicit an ethical reaction to the mini-history lessons of their time from their readers. The combination of the Gramscian concepts and Burke’s dramatism offers a critical framework that obliterates the artificial antithesis mentioned by Armstrong between Victorian studies and cultural studies. This approach represents one of many ways by which we can remove the rigidities of Victorian studies and understand how nineteenth-century writers engaged with questions of identity and representations of the subaltern.

 

 

 

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