Victorian polemic and the poetics of the feminine subject: Robert Browning, Pompilia, and "The Ring and the Book" [microform]
- Bib ID:
- 3283551
- Format:
- Book and Microform
- Author:
- Mcdonell, Jennifer Ann
- Description:
- 497 p.
- Summary:
-
This thesis analyses the polemical contexts and gender politics of Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book. It contextualises relations between the poet, his poem and its historical sources; and between the poet, the Pope and Browning's centrepiece, the abused Pompilia Comparini. Browning's desire to resuscitate the Franceschini case from historical oblivion was impelled by his fascination with the woman he first encountered in the book. I interpret this confrontation with the "other" of history through the institutions and institutionalised discourses which constrain both the poet and his female subject: kinship, religion, patriarchal marriage, law, discourses on the "truth", and language itself. Chapter 1 analyses Browning's ambition to master his historical documents in light of his fascination with the mythic configuration of rescuer and rescued, special pleading, and the book's sign, the gold ring of Etruscan origin.
Chapter 2 examines ways in which both his assessment of The Old Yellow Book and his methodological perspectivism, conform to Victorian notions of truth--perceptual, archaeological, political and philological. I examine the researches of nineteenth-century optics, Victorian archaeology and restoration, Mill's arguments for liberty of opinion, Max Muller and "the science of language" debate, and Nietzsche's analysis of truth as metaphor. Chapter 3 looks at ways such assessments are complicated by religious controversies of the period, both Protestant and Catholic, especially in relation to the novel theology of Browning's Pope Innocent XII. Browning's interest in revelation and miracles, and alternatively, spiritual imposture, is contextualised by way of reference to Higher Criticism, in particular D.F.Strauss's Life of Jesus, and Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity.
In chapter 4 Pompilia's identifications as daughter, wife and mother are analysed through the trope of "naming", Catholic Mariology, writing and illiteracy. The "unnameable" topic of sexual assault, which Pompilia struggles to articulate, and her ideal of a heavenly union with Caponsacchi, are contextualised in relation to debates over marital rights, principally W. J. Fox's polemical writings, and the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act. Pompilia's reification of motherhood, and her transcendentalising representation of her relationship with Caponsacchi as unprintable soul-union, emerge as symbolic compensations for female abjection.
- Notes:
-
- (UnM)AAI9535099
- Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-06, Section: A, page: 2250.
- Supervisor: Bruce Gardiner.
- Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Sydney (Australia), 1995.
- Reproduction:
- Microfiche. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International.
- Subject:
- Literature, English
- Other authors/contributors:
- University of Sydney
- Copyright:
-
In Copyright
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- Reason for copyright status:
- Until 2058 [Created/Published Date + 70 Years]
Copyright status was determined using the following information:
- Material type:
- Literary Dramatic Musical
- Published status:
- Published
- Publication date:
- 1988
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