Definition
Women poets steadily produced dramatic monologues – poems impersonating somebody who is not the poet – from the threshold of the Victorian era into the twentieth century. The form was admirably adapted to kindle character out of the friction between women’s subjective desires and the constraints that governed their lives, constraints that the performative nature of the genre exposed at once to sympathetic understanding and to analytic critique. Leading subgenres spoke in the persona of women in marginal positions: the artist, the queen, the prostitute, the slave, the witch, and the person at death’s door all articulated a vantage that highlighted prevailing norms and tested them.
Introduction
In dramatic monologues the poet impersonates an individual – fictive or historical, known or nameless – who is manifestly not herself and whose assumed role and voice are sustained throughout the utterance that constitutes the poem. While the genre dates back to classical antiquity...
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References
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Tucker, H.F. (2019). Dramatic Monologue. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_84-1
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