ABSTRACT
The three dramatic monologues the author discusses here involves secret that undermines normative definitions of both masculinity and heterosexuality while at the same time revealing this woman poet's uneasy relation to self revelation. When one looks to Browning's fellow aficionado of the dramatic monologue, Augusta Webster, one finds similar interests in monomania and secrets. The telling therefore functions to revealing the relations between violence, heterosexual and dissident masculinities, and the poet's subjectivity. In "The Snow Waste", "With the Dead", and "The Manuscript of Saint Alexius", they have a series of monologues that put into practice Augusta Webster's complicated, gendered understanding of the valence of the personal pronoun in poetry and that use Gothic and early-Christian narratives to comment on the mysteries of masculinity in her own age. In "Lay Figures", she even makes the case that such legends and myths offer the poet pre-narrated subjectivities that compel her to probe beyond the superficial levels of story and identity.
