“Negation, Selection and Substitution: Charlotte Bronte’s Feminist Poetics”

Abstract

This study examines an early dramatic monologue by Charlotte Bronte and finds that Bronte is a contemporary of Robert Browning and has precedence over Alfred Tennyson. She also predates Victorian women poets in use of the form. The study investigates both how Bronte developed the form and why she introduced it into poetry. The findings point in the direction of her readings in seventeenth-century drama and her earlier writing of a short play as a background that made the monologue possible. Her personal motive for using it in poetry is a reaction to Robert Southey’s discouraging response to her experience of poetry writing. The poem complains of literary marginalization and asserts female poetic potentials in an objective manner. The form also allows Bronte to contradict Romantic ideology and challenge patriarchal culture. Bronte’s experience with the dramatic monologue in this poem on both formal and contextual levels should grant her better recognition in the poetic canon than that assigned to her so far.