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THE BENTHAMITE THEORY OF FICTION AND PROBLEMS
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THE RING AND THE BOOK

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THE BENTHAMIT E THEORY OF FICTION AND PROBLEMS OF LANGUAGE IN
ROBERT BROWNING’S THE RING AND THE BOOK

By

KIHO SONG

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

2001

ABSTRACT

THE BENTHAMITE THEORY OF FICTION AND PROBLEMS OF LANGUAGE IN
ROBERT BROWNING’S THE RING AND THE BOOK

By
KIHO SONG

One thing that has hardly been emphasized in modem Browning studies is the
importance of the Benthamite theory of ﬁction towards understanding his poetry.
Bentham’s theory of ﬁction takes accounts of the way a certain ﬁctional entity exercises
coercive power on human thoughts and actions. The Ring and the Book investigates
prevalent Victorian cultural ﬁctions and exposes their politics. Browning’s
investigation is important in that the Victorian ﬁctions and their politics in the poem
persist in our own modern cultural productions.

Chapter I discusses the importance of Bentham’s theory of ﬁction as an aid to
reading The Ring and the Book. The concept of Benthamite ﬁction has little difference
from the Marxist idea of ideology, so these two concepts are discussed in some detail.
The question of language is also important in reading the poem. Some important
developments in the philosophy of language are discussed to illuminate Browning’s
understanding of language.

Chapter II discusses Guido’s sexual politics. The word “honor” is the very gist
of his ﬁction. His ﬁction of honor dictates him to believe that a husband’s honor within
the institution of marriage is God’s giﬁ, and that female submissiveness is a natural law.
But his monologue ultimately reveals that honor as such is just a ﬁction, suggesting the

possibility that the whole structure of a patriarchal society is built on ﬁction.

Chapter III discusses the politics of nothingness in the two lawyers’ legal
discourse. Their monologues are characterized by aesthetic language. Archangeli
constantly resorts to Latin phrases and Bottini makes numerous allusions to classical
mythologies. Their aesthetic language conceals the very nothingness of their legal
discourse.

Chapter IV discusses the question of ﬁction in religion. The Pope attempts to
prove a transcendental a priori God. However, this attempt is constantly subverted by
the possibility of an empirical a posteriori God. The conﬂict between the two remains
unresolved. On the other hand, for Caponsacchi, ﬁction produces some positive results.
He identiﬁes Pompilia with the Madonna, which is a ﬁction, but this ﬁction saves him
from the alienation of his life within the secularized institution of the Church.

Chapter V discusses problems of language. Bentham condemns language
because a ﬁction is created by the conjuring power of language. Guido’s second.
monologue draws on a double function of language. By reordering the past and the
present, language opens up a new future. Faced with death, Guido tries to create,
through the black magic of language, a self that will survive the death. Nevertheless, as
Bentham warns, it creates a ﬁction, distorting the real material condition of existence.

The conclusion includes some ﬁnal thoughts on Browning’s investigation into the
question of Benthamite ﬁction. Though Browning seems to believe one can never
completely escape the dictates of ﬁction, he suggests that one can come closer to an
understanding of the real material conditions of existence by an endless redeﬁnition of the

world.

Com/right by
Kiho Song
2001

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am acutely aware of the debt I owe to Professor Victor Paananen, who helped
make this dissertation a reality. During my graduate studies at Michigan State
University I was privileged to participate in many of his seminar courses, which enriched
my study to a great extent. As the director of the dissertation guidance committee, Prof.
Paananen has given me constant support and encouragement from the early stages of my
dissertation to the last. His advice and insightful comments at various stages of my
work helped shape this dissertation. I also greatly beneﬁted from the numerous personal
conversations that I had with him. No less vital were the intellectual support and personal
encouragement from the rest of the committee, Prof. James Hill, Prof. Lister Matheson,
and Prof. Katherine Geissler. They reviewed my prospectus and read drafts, sometimes
on short notice, and kindly offered valuable comments. I would like to take this
opportunity to express my gratitude to all of them.

I owe the most to Euikyung Kim, my wife, for her support and encouragement.
For many years she has patiently supported and encouraged me. Without her I would
not have gotten this far. I would like to dedicate this dissertation to my mother, in
memory of her love. She made me what I am but will not be able to see the completion

of this dissertation, and I am sorry for that.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Browning and Cultural Criticism ................................................. 1

Chapter One: Browning and Victorian Poetics: Fiction and Ideology ............ 10
Chapter Two: Sexual Politics in Guido and Pompilia ....................................... 66
Chapter Three: Legal Fiction in Archangeli and Bottini ................................... 107
Chapter Four: Religious Fiction in the Pope and Caponsacchi ....................... 130
Chapter Five: Problems of Language .............................................................. 167
Conclusion: Correcting the Portrait by the Living Face ............................... 197
Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 204

 

 

INTRODUCTION

BROWNING AND CULTURAL CRITICISM

Two relatively recent collections of critical essays on Robert Browning (1812-89)
clearly indicate in which direction current Browning studies are headed. In 1989
Victorian Poetry issued a special collection of critical essays on Browning to celebrate
the centemrial of his death.l The essays collected in the edition fully demonstrate that
various modern critical theories regard Browning’s poetry as an important site for
theoretic reﬂection and contention. The ﬂourishing of various critical methodologies in
recent decades has brought a remarkable increase of attention to Browning and to
Victorian poetry in general, rescuing them from many decades of neglect under the
dominance of New Criticism. Speciﬁcally, recent contributions from culturalism,
Marxism, feminism, and post-structuralism to Browning’s poetry have brought out some
of the most intensive and arresting discussions of Victorian poetry. Particularly,
Browning’s magnum opus, The Ring and the Book, has drawn a wide range of critical
attention for its multi-layered rings of poetic experiment, conﬁrming not only the
centrality of this work in his poetry but also Browning’s stature in Victorian poetry.

The other collection of critical essays on Browning, entitled Critical Essays on
Robert Browning (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1992), compiled by Mary Ellis Gibson,
conﬁrms Browning’s contemporaneity. Gibson’s collection addresses the important
“question of why Browning should be read at all.”2 The collection, which mostly reprints
essays published in the 1980’s, is “primarily concerned with the variety of cultural

3

approaches to Browning,” as the general editor of the collection notes. Cultural

criticism can be broadly deﬁned as an attempt to relate art and literature to the politics

 

 

and cultural productions of a society. The various cultural approaches collected in this
edition demonstrate that reading Browning’s poetry can become a highly productive
venue towards understanding Victorian culture and society. More importantly, a close
investigation of Browning’s exploration into the various forms of Victorian culture in his
poetry also helps us to understand the conditions of our own modern cultural productions.
According to Gibson, “Reading Browning—and reading nineteenth-century reactions to
Browning—can give us a measure against which to situate and judge our own cultural
productions.” 4

Certainly Gibson’s remark is validated by the growing recognition among critics
that Browning’s poetry consciously attempts to investigate the new constitutive elements
of Victorian culture that were then just being introduced, and, importantly, that are
conceived to be elements of our own cultural productions. As Isobel Armstrong points
out, Victorians considered themselves “modern.” According to her, to be modern meant,
for Victorians, “to deﬁne the contemporary self-consciously and this is simultaneously an
act which historicises the modern.”5 For Browning and his contemporaries, this self-
conscious act of historicizing the modern was an important strategy for investigating the
nature of the newly introduced constitutive elements of their culture. This act was a part
of their sincere efforts to cope with the many unprecedented changes that they were
witnessing.

One thing that readers of Victorian poetry become constantly aware of is the
presence of a certain sense of anxiety and crisis that Victorians were experiencing in
dealing with various social changes. The anxiety and crisis was largely political and

economic, but, at the same time, it was epistemological, philosophical, and cultural.

Obviously the former was brought about by such factors as the irrevocable change in the
mode of production, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, and also the growing
demand and struggle for democracy. On the other hand, the latter reﬂected the crisis of
modernity which in every instance, foregrounds such questions as knowledge,
consciousness, representation, and language.

Browning, like other Victorian poets, was acutely aware of the new politico-
economic and cultural formations of Victorian society. His poetry dramatizes various
forms of anxiety and contradiction that his contemporaries were experiencing.
Particularly the dramatic form of his poetry provides a structure for drinking through the
contents of Victorian anxiety and crisis. Browning’s poetry is a highly political discourse.
Though Browning’s poetry does not directly deal with contemporary political events or
issues, it is political because, in his efforts to articulate the new constitutive forms of
Victorian culture, Browning brings politics, society and history into the world of
aesthetics, which the essays in Gibson’s collection recognize.

The recent surge of cultural criticism in Browning studies redresses some of the
critical limitations that it had suffered from for many decades, especially under New
Criticism. Victorian poetry in general has not received the critical attention it deserved
throughout much of the twentieth-century. Victorian poetry has either been awkwardly
inserted between Romanticism and Modernism in literary history, as Armstrong notesf’
or it remained in “the disparagements of modernists and the critical backwaters of studies
of Romanticism,” as Patricia O’Neill points out.7 T.S. Eliot’s critique of Victorian

poetry for its lack of a “uniﬁed sensibility” early in the century, and later F.R. Leavis’s

dismissal of it for its too many compromises with philistine convention were reinforced
by the so-called New Critics, whose primary allegiance was to the Romantics.

Browning studies in most of this century were crippled by the limitations of the
New Critical practices. As clearly indicated in Cleanth Brooks’ statement in the preface
to The Well- Wrought Urn (1947) that “I have been anxious to see what residuum, if any,

is left after we have referred the poem to its cultural matrix,”8

the New Critical approach
emphasized the science of textual analysis. As Alan Sinﬁeld reminds, “meaning is
always dependent upon context: it is produced in history and ideology, within the
prevailing power relations”; nevertheless, the New Critical practice in Browning studies
detaches literature from society and history. It focused on the imagery, character,
symbolism, and other technical features of Browning’s dramatic monologues, but this
approach disregards the fundamentals of Browning’s poetry: politics, culture, society and
history.

Browning’s poetry is fundamentally a political discourse that participates in
contemporary political and cultural debates. Cultural criticism in Browning studies, as
Gibson’s collection demonstrates, attempts to locate Browning’s poetry within the very
political and cultural contexts in and for which he was writing. His poetry is radical but
subtle in addressing contemporary politics and culture. Instead of directly discussing
them, Browning creates unique poetic structures that bear some deﬁnite structural
resemblance to contemporary political, economic, and cultural crises by bringing together
various men and women of various social backgrounds and dramatizing their situations as

enmeshed in these crises. The Ring and the Book represents the crowning achievement of

such an attempt. By weaving together various monologues about a seventeenth-century

Roman murder trial, Browning attempts to construct a structure, or framework, for
thinking through the constitutive elements of the cultural crises in both seventeenth-
century Italy and, by extension, nineteenth-century England. This structure, this thought
process, then, can be grasped and examined in its totality and so some possible solutions
to the crisis might be sought thereby. In building the structure, Browning brings together
nearly all the most important issues of both Victorian and modern poetics, including
questions regarding the nature of subject, of representation, of knowledge and even
language itself.

For Victorians, the contemporary political, economic and cultural crisis, about
which Browning’s poetry is so much concerned, was a matter of dealing with the newly
introduced elements constituting their society and culture. As Raymond Williams shows
in Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (1983), during Browning’s time, the growth of
industrialization was inaugurating a new kind of society. 10 This industrialization
fundamentally changed the character of Victorian society, “strangely altering old
relations,” as Thomas Carlyle noted.11 Under the new society the whole of the human
condition had to be redeﬁned and renegotiated. Not only political and economic
structures had to be re-exarnined, but such fundamental ideas as self, nature, labor,
society, and language had to be redeﬁned, and any relationships among them also had to
be renegotiated.

Victorian poetry and poetics reﬂected and participated in this process of
redeﬁnition. Victorian poets necessarily made efforts to create certain poetic forms that
could accommodate such a redeﬁnition, so it may not be surprising that various poetic

experiments, including the dramatic monologue, were attempted in the Victorian age.

Isobel Armstrong deﬁnes the fundamental characteristic of Victorian poetry as the
“double poem.”12 In a double poem, any poetic utterance becomes the object of scrutiny
and analysis within the same poem; moreover, every poetic utterance retains only a
temporal validity and is thereby historicized, and so this structure allows for the
renegotiation of self, labor, the world, and language.

The process of redeﬁning contemporary values and practices necessarily
foregrounds the question of representation. The introduction of democracy and of a
voting system raised the question of political representation, while the capitalistic mode
of production necessarily raised the question of economic representation of labor through
products and wages, as Karl Marx so eloquently explained. Apart from this, for
Victorians, language became problematic, since it raises the question of representation in
the relation between sign and signiﬁed. The Victorian concern with the question of
representation necessarily includes not only the mode of representation but also
discrepancies between representing signs and the objects they signify.

The one thing that most squarely addresses the question of representation is
Bentham’s theory of ﬁction, his “politics of as-if.” Bentham’s theory of ﬁction points out
the way something that does not have its counterpart in the world is presented every day
and accepted as if it were a real entity, and furthermore, that this ﬁctional entity exercises
coercive power on the thoughts and actions of individuals. Bentham’s insights into
“ﬁction” and its coercive power open up for Browning a new way of investigating
Victorian culture and society. Browning ﬁnds ﬁction and their coercive power, which
Bentham found to be all pervasive in contemporary legal practices, in many other forms

of Victorian cultural and institutional practices, including religion and gender

relationships. The Ring and the Book, therefore, is an extensive exploration into the
politics of various forms of Victorian cultural and institutional ﬁctions.

Importantly, the Marxist idea of ideology as false consciousness also addresses
the question of Benthamite ﬁction and its coercive power. The traditional Marxist
understanding of ideology as false consciousness has recently been under heavy attack
from post-modemism and post-structuralism for its naive notion of subjectivity and social
formations. Nevertheless, this does not mean that such recent social theories entirely
renounce the whole idea of ideology. They rather conﬁrm the presence of certain forms
of mystiﬁcation that hide and conceal real material conditions. Bentham’s theory of
ﬁction and the Marxist idea of ideology provide an important clue towards understanding
the Victorian “politics of ﬁction”, which is still actively present in our own social
conditions.

Another important issue related to the Benthamite theory of ﬁction is the question
of language. As Bentham himself repeatedly emphasizes, ﬁctional entities are created
and sustained by the power of language. Browning’s poetry is in close dialogue with
Bentham, and as in Bentham’s theory of ﬁction, the problem of language becomes one of
the central concerns of Browning’s The Ring and the Book. Like Bentham, Browning
believes that language is responsible for creating ﬁctions, and that language is unreliable
since it is potentially capable of distorting reality. However, Browning does not entirely
condemn language. The poem simultaneously condemns and celebrates the power of
language. Asking “For how else know we save by the worth of word? (I. 837),”'3 the
poem conﬁrms the indispensability of language in human life. Language mediates

between the human subject and the world, and more importantly, for Browning,

language’s power to rearrange the past becomes an important means of opening up the
future.

This dissertation addresses the question of the Benthamite ﬁction and of its
coercive power in human thoughts and actions as explored in Browning’s major poetic
work, The Ring and the Book, and it discusses various forms of Victorian ﬁctions and
their ideological strategies. The ﬁrst chapter examines some important features of
Victorian poetics as a way of locating Browning’s poetry within the Victorian political
and cultural landscape. The latter part of the chapter discusses Bentham’s theory of
ﬁction and its coercive power, as well as the Marxist idea of ideology and its strategies.
The next three chapters examine some important forms of Victorian cultural and
institutional ﬁctions as explored in the poem. Chapter Two examines Victorian sexual
politics by reading Guido’s ﬁrst monologue and Pompilia’s monologue. Chapter Three
addresses the question of ﬁction in Victorian legal discourse through the reading of the
monologues by the two lawyers, Archangeli and Bottini. Chapter Four investigates the
question of ﬁction in the religious discourse of the Pope and of Caponsacchi. Chapter
Five looks into the question of language in relation to ﬁction, focusing on Guido’s second
monologue. Lastly, the conclusion evaluates Browning’s overall achievement in

addressing the question of Victorian cultural ﬁctions.

’. Victorian Poetry also devoted its Vol. VI, Nos. 3& 4, 1963 issue exclusively for
discussion of Browning’s The Ring and the Book.

2. Critical Essays on Robert Browning, ed. Mary Ellis Gibson, (New York: G. K. Hall &
Co., 1992); see General Editor’s Note.

3. Ibid..

4 . Gibson, 3.

5 . Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London & New

York: Routledge, 1993), 3.
6. Armstrong , 1.

7 . Patricia O’Neill, Robert Browning and T wentieth-Century Criticism (Columbia, SC:
Camden House, 1995), 128.

8 . Cleanth Brook, The Well- Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New

York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1947), x.

9 . Alan Sinﬁeld, Alfred Tennyson (Oxford & New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 7.

m. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1 780-1960 (New York: Univ. of Columbia,
1983); see chapters 11 through V.

H . Thomas Carlyle, The Works of Thomas Carlyle in Thirty Volumes, vol. XXVII
(London: Chapman & Hall), 60.

‘2 . Armstrong, 13.

'3 . Robert Browning, The Works of Robert Browning (London: Smith, Elder & Co.,
1912), ed. F. G. Kenyon.

CHAPTER ONE

BROWNING AND VICTORIAN POETICS: FICTION AND IDEOLOGY

Victorian aesthetics is fundamentally a political discourse. Victorian poetics was
in a close dialogue with the prevailing contemporary political discourses, including
utilitarianism, political economy, and the discussion of democracy. Victorian aesthetic
discourse participated in contemporary political discourses, at once adopting and often
negating them. Therefore any serious discussion of Victorian poetry should begin with
an investigation of the multi-layered relationships between aesthetic and political
discourses. A good place to study the close ties between the two is the Victorian literary
reviews, especially reviews of major works by Tennyson and Browning. Isobel
Armstrong points out that “Tennyson’s Poems, Chieﬂy Lyrical (1830) immediately raised
nearly all the problems which were to preoccupy critics during the next four decades.”l
One of the important issues raised by Tennyson reviewers, especially William Fox,
Arthur Hallam and John Wilson, was the question of the status and role of poetry in
contemporary society, which was being rapidly industrialized. In the nineteenth century,
as Alan Sinﬁeld points out, with the rise of the middle class and their political hegemony
through utilitarianism, poetry came to be considered less important and became
marginalized.2 Thus one of the central concerns of nineteenth century poetics was the
urgent necessity of defending poetry from its questionable status.

Beginning in the early decades of the century, there were growing voices
Questioning the status of poetry in the new form of society that massive industrial

Progress was inaugurating. Thomas Peacock’s utilitarian aesthetic in The Four Ages of

10

Poetry (1820) contends that poetry is no longer important in the contemporary society,
since poetry has not made such progress as could be seen in other parts of society.
Claiming that poetry, “like other trades, takes its rise in the demand for the commodity,

”3 Peacock contends that poetry in

and ﬂourishes in proportion to the extent of the market,

his time would not ﬁnd readers for its morbid irrationality. He remarks:
A poet in our times is semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days
that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous
manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is
like that of crab, backward. The brighter the light diffused around him by the
progress of reason, the thicker is the darkness of antiquated barbarism, in which he
buries himself like a mole, to throw up the barren hillocks of his Cimmerian labours.
The phiIOSOphic mental tranquility which looks round with an equal eye on all
external things, collects a store of ideas, discriminates their relative value, assigns to
all their proper place, and from the materials of useful knowledge thus collected,
appreciated, and arranged, forms new combinations that impress the stamp of their

power and utility on the real business of life, is diametrically the reverse of that

frame of mind which poetry inspires, or from which poetry can emanate.4

’3 66 ” 6‘

Such phrases as “civilized community, exploded superstitions, march of intellect,”
and “progress of reason” reﬂect the utilitarian values and principles by which the
contemporary society was governed and regulated overall. Peacock’s utilitarian
aesthetics condemns the contemporary poetry for breeding a “frame of mind” that is the
reverse of the sprit of utilitarianism. His aesthetics denies to the contemporary poetry the

status of being one of the major social and political discourses because he believes it does

not contribute to the utilitarian progress of society he values so much; thus poetry is to be
marginalized.

As clearly indicated by Percy B. Shelley’s response to Peacock in his A Defence
of Poetry (1821), a major line of development in the nineteenth century poetics was
deveIOped under this kind of the Peacockean pressure. The contemporary poetics had to
redeﬁne the role of poetry in a society primarin governed by the principles of
utilitarianism and search for some ways in which poetry could continue to exist within it.

Obviously the nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented social change in
England. Politically, the French Revolution (1789-99) was followed by political unrest
and struggle for democracy both in England and on the European continent.
Economically, the irreversible change in the mode of production, from feudal to
capitalistic, and the ensuing industrial progress were rapidly introducing a new kind of
society. As critics point out, Carlyle’s short essay entitled Signs of the Times (1829)
seems to best summarize the nature and problem of the social changes that Browning’s
contemporaries were struggling with. Carlyle deﬁnes his age as “the Mechanical Age,”
where “nothing is done directly, or by hand.” 5 This mechanical age has brought many
“wonderful accessions,” but at the same time, he insightfully points out, it has caused a
fundamental change in the political economy of the period, “strangely altering the old
relations, and increasing the distance between the rich and the poor.”6 For Carlyle, the
most problematic aspect of the mechanical age is that it brought “a mighty change in our
whole manner of existence” (italics are mine) so that “Not the external and physical alone

is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also.” 7 He continues:

For the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of
thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in
hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any
kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements,
for institutions, constitutions,——for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope
and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn mechanism, and are
of a mechanical character.8
This Carlylean concern that the whole human condition had been given a mechanical
character with the progress of industrialization became one of the major shaping elements
of nineteenth-century poetics. The industrial revolution did not bring changes only to
contemporary political economy. As Raymond Williams points out, the socio-cultural
reactions to the changes brought about by industrial progress caused “a radical change in
the idea of art, of the artist, and of their place in society.”9 Nineteenth-century poetics
began with a reaction against the situation in which the whole human condition was given
a mechanical character with industrial progress. In his Defence, Shelley certainly
articulated the characteristic emphasis of contemporary poetics that would last throughout
the century: a strong critique of the new form of society that industrial progress was
inaugurating, and of the values and principles that this new society was embracing.
Shelley’s critique of the new form of society in his Defence is particularly important in
that it opens a way for contemporary poetics to extend its aesthetics into politics, culture,
society, and history, and provides an important clue towards understanding Browning and

Victorian poetry.

The Shelleyan voice against the bourgeois hegemony and its utilitarian poetics in
contemporary society continues to sound in Victorian poetry. A well-known Browning
critic, Philip Drew, states that “more and more, I think, we are coming to see that the
Victorians were confronted, as we are, with the problems of an urban industrial society,
and tried, as we are no doubt trying, to evolve values by which man can live in such a
society... It is my conviction that the more we know about the nineteenth century the
greater Browning will be seen to be.” '0 As Drew insightfully points out, Browning’s

poetry, like other Victorian poetry, was primarily concerned with investigating the nature
and problems of various social changes that industrial progress was introducing into
Victorian society, and with investigating the new constitutive elements of Victorian
culture.

As mentioned before, Victorian poetics is fundamentally a political discourse. A

critic remarks that “Victorian poetry began in a vacuum,”11

referring thereby to the
deaths of major Romantics and the decline of literary poetry against popular poetry at the
beginning of Victorian era. Nevertheless, young Victorian poets, especially Tennyson
and Browning, inherited and continued the political tendencies of their Romantic
predecessors, especially their strong critique of the values and principles embraced and
promoted in contemporary industrial society. In Browning’s poetry there is an
undeniable trace of Shelleyan Romantic reaction to the mechanical character of human
condition under the newly industrialized society. However, his politicized aesthetics
developed in a complex way, at once adopting Shelley and at the same time negating him

through other political discourses. At this juncture, it might be helpful to discuss

Shelley’s politicized aesthetics in some detail.

As Sinﬁeld correctly points out, Shelley’s argument in Defence is a highly
political one in that it is directed “against the nexus of attitudes and theories through
which the industrial revolution was being explained and prompted by manufacturers and
intellectuals associated with them.”12 Like Carlyle, Shelley points out the growing gap
between the poor and the rich; Shelley’s critique of “an unmitigated exercise of the

calculating faculty”13

corresponds to Carlyle’s disapproval of the mechanical character of
whole human efforts, attachments, and opinions. The similarity in argument between
Shelley and Carlyle clearly illustrates how closely the aesthetic discussions of the period
were interlocked with political discourses. In his Defence, Shelley presents his theory of
imagination as an alternative to the unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty and of
the institutional superstructures based on it, thus extending aesthetics into politics.
Shelley contends that his age is in need of true poets more than any other age in history,
since poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the World”14 who can reform society
by readjusting and realigning the collective imagination of society through their insight
and prophecy.

One of the main emphases in his Defence is the image of the poet as a prophet or
a seer. Under the contemporary industrialized society, Williams points out, the
production of art and literature became subject to the law of the market, just like other
kinds of material production, and the artist or poet also came to be treated as “just one
more producer of commodity for the market.”15 According to Williams, a new emphasis
on the poet as a seer or a prophet came out as a response to this situation, and this

emphasis led to another important response: “an emphasis on embodiment in art of

certain human values, capacities, energies, which the development of society towards an

15

”16

industrial civilization was felt to be threatening or even destroying. If poetry is to be
more than a mere commodity, it has to contain within it something of a higher order or
truth about human experiences. This is what Shelley repeatedly emphasized throughout
his Defence. Shelley states that “poets, or those who imagine and express this
indestructible order they are the institutors of law, and the founders of civil society
and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity
with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible
world which is called religion.”17 He continues, “Poetry ever communicates all the
pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of

”18

whatever of beautiful, or generous, or true can have place in an evil time, and again,

“The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people
to work a beneﬁcial change in opinion or institution, is Poetry.”19
Browning’s position in his Essay on Shelley is an interesting adoption of the
Shelleyan reaction to industrialization and to his idea of poet. This Essay on Shelley has
been the object of much critical dispute, and it marks an important development in
Victorian poetics. Browning contends that literary history alternates between two
different poetic faculties, the subjective and the objective. First, Browning characterizes
the subjective poet as a seer or prophet:
He, gifted like the objective poet, with the fuller perception of nature and man, is
impelled to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with reference to the
many below as to the One above him, the supreme Intelligence which apprehends

all things in their absolute truth, -- an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially

attained, by the poet’s own soul. Not what man sees, but what God sees—the

16

Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying bumingly on the Divine Hand, —-it is toward
these he struggles. Not with the combination of humanity in action, but with the
primal elements of humanity, he has to do... He does not paint pictures and hang
them on the walls, but rather carries them on the retina of his own eyes: we must
look deep into his human eyes, to see those pictures on them. He is rather a seer,
accordingly, than a fashioner.20
The subjective poet sees “not what man sees, but what God sees,” working with “the
primal elements of humanity.” This notion of the poet as a seer or a prophet is not a new
one. What is important is the new emphasis given to the old concept during the early
decades of the nineteenth century. According to Williams, “the positive consequence of
the idea of art as a superior reality was that it offered an immediate basis for an important
criticism of industrialism. The negative consequence was that it tended, as both the
situation and the opposition hardened, to isolate art, to specialize the imaginative faculty
to this kind of activity, and thus to weaken the dynamic function which Shelley proposed

for it.”2 1

The most serious problem that the subjective poet and his poetry created is that
the higher order or truth a poet may ﬁnd, tends to remain subjective and conﬁned to
private insights. The higher order or truth is often untransferable; the poet cannot ﬁnd
analogous forms or available objects to translate it. So it remains private and does not
reach out into community, society, or history. In Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” the poet
entreats the Skylark:

Teach us, Sprite or Bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine;

l have never heard

17

 

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a ﬂood of rapture so divine. (61-65)

The poet attempts to communicate the skylark’s song through various similes--poet,
maiden, glow-worm, and rose. However, each simile fails to fully translate the skylark’s
singing -- as the Skylark is unseen, the poet is “hidden”(36); the glow-wonn is
“unbeholden”(48), and the rose is also “embowered / in its own green leaves”(51-52).
Thus, the subjective poet “does not paint pictures and hang them on the walls” for
everyone to see, “but rather carries them on the retina of his own eyes.” For Shelley,
unfortunately, the knowledge of the higher order or truth that the poet is able to perceive
cannot be shared by average minds but by only the few who have the same quality of
perception as the poet. Shelley asserts, “the jury which sits in judgement upon a poet,
belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by
Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations.”22 Thus, for him, “a poet is a
nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sound.”23
His poetic vision cannot be extended into community, society, or history.

Browning’s other poetic faculty, the objective poet, on the other hand, is directed
towards community, society, and history. It brings the private expressive world of the
subjective poet into the public arena of discourse where the limit of a subject-centered
utterance of lyricism is revealed and its validity is tested. While the subjective poet
embodies what he perceives in reference to the absolute, the objective poet reproduces what
he perceives in reference to the common ground of apprehension of ordinary men:

One whose endeavor has been to reproduce things external (whether the

phenomena of the scenic universe, or the manifested action of the human heart

18

and brain), with an immediate reference, in every case, to the common eye and
apprehension of his fellow-men, assumed capable of receiving and proﬁting by
this reproduction.24

The objective poet focuses on reproducing “the phenomena of the scenic universe, or the

”25 as the subjective poet does on “nature

manifested action of the human heart and brain,
and man.” The objective poet has a far superior perception of nature and man than does an
average man. Nevertheless, he makes efforts to reproduce his perception in reference to the
“doings of men” in society, to their daily lives, with the whole spectrum of human feelings
and emotions under a variety of human situations. Thus, his primary concern is to bring his
perception into a common ground of understanding, a public arena of discourse where
various social transactions occur:
It has been obtained through the poet’s double faculty of seeing external objects
more clearly, widely, and deeply than is possible to the average mind, at the same
time that he is so acquainted and in sympathy with its narrower comprehension as
to be careful to supply it with no other materials than it can combine into an
intelligible whole. The auditory of such a poet will include, not only the
intelligences which, save for such assistance, would have missed the deeper
meaning and enjoyment of the original objects, but also the spirits of a like
endowment with his own, who, by means of his abstract, can forthwith pass to the
reality it was made from, and either corroborate their impressions of things known

already, or supply themselves with new form whatever shows in the inexhaustible

variety of existence may have hitherto escaped their knowledge.26

19

Browning names the employment of the objective poetic faculty “dramatic poetry?"27 The
objective poet consciously attempts to bring poetry into the public arena of discourse, in so
far as a drama is written to be staged for an audience to watch it. Here Browning’s idea of
dramatic poetry is a critique of John Mill’s notion of subjective expressive poetry. As
mentioned before, Victorian poetics had to urgently deal with the Peacockean utilitarian
aesthetic that argues for the uselessness of poetry in a newly industrialized society, where
poetry was becoming marginalized. One possible way of dealing with Peacokean argument
was to separate poetry from other social discourses and divest it of any social functions,
assigning it to the realm of pure aestheticisrn. John Stuart Mill does this when he
distinguishes poetry from eloquence:
eloquence is heard poetry, is overheard. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to
itself, in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the
nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exist
in the poet’s mind. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself out to other minds
poetry is soliloquy in full dress. . .. But no trace of consciousness that any eyes
are upon us must be visible in the work itself. The actor knows that there is an
audience present; but if he acts as though he knew it, he acts ill... he [the poet]
can succeed in excluding from work every vestige of such lookings-forth into the
outward and everyday world. . .. But when he turns around and addresses himself
to another person; when the act of utterance is not itself the end, but a means to an
end... then it ceases to be poetry and becomes eloquence.28
Here Mill frees poetry from social affairs. For him, eloquence works in the public realm

of discourse since it directs itself out to other minds; it necessarily involves social

20

interactions and includes the notion of community and society. On the other hand, Mill
believes, poetry works within the boundary of private feelings, emotions, and subjective
psychology; it can freely work on itself without social conﬂicts or restrictions. For
poetry, moral and social questions become irrelevant. However, one thing that Mill fails
to recognize was that even the act of “feeling confessing itself to itself” in poetry is
actually a social act. As long as poetry is written for readers, the act of feeling confessing
itself to itself is always an act of feeling pouring itself to other minds—«the audience or
readers. As implied in his stage analogy, the act of feeling confessing itself to itself is a
social act performed in a space; the act of confessing on the stage is directed to the
audience and any subjective expressionism on the stage becomes the object of scrutiny or
criticism for the audience. Nevertheless, Mill asks poets to deny the fact that the whole
poetic discourse is always a social practice that operates in a public dimension, emulating
other discourses, and subject to the market system of production and consumption,
especially when poets began to be aware of the presence of the reader more acutely than
ever.

A different direction that Browning and other Victorian poets chose to take was to
bring poetry into the public arena of disputes and politics, extending the Millite notion of
poetry into eloquence. Instead of overhearing the poetic utterance confessed in a remote
space of a private, individual, idiosyncratic world of feelings and emotions, the Victorian
poets attempted to bring the poetic utterance actively into the broad public space of social
discourse, and to test its validity there. This attempt resulted in the emergence of Victorian
dramatic poetry. Interestingly, Mill’s own analogy of a poet to an actor exactly describes

the very structure of Victorian dramatic poetry. In Victorian dramatic poetry, ﬁrst, the

21

subject-centered, confessional lyricism is presented, and, at the same time, any positions or
claims that this subjective utterance establishes are undermined by its listener or reader, as
best illustrated in Victorian dramatic monologue. In this way Victorian dramatic poetry
becomes, as Armstrong points out, at once an expressive model and an epistemological
model.29
The conﬂation of Mill’s poetry to eloquence is possible, W. Fox suggests, through
“sympathy.” Fox contends that poetry in an industrialized society still can be useful. In
his review of Tennyson’s Poems, Chieﬂy Lyrical, Fox contends, “it would be pity that
poetry should be an exception to the great law of progression that obtains in human
affairs; and it is not. The machinery of a poem is not less susceptible of improvement
than the machinery of a cotton-mill.”30 For Fox, the utility of poetry can be found in its
ability to explore the human mind and psychology. For him, this aspect of poetry has
important political implications. In his review of Tennyson’s poetry he writes:
there is sincerity where the author writes from experience, and accuracy whether
he writes ﬁom experience or observation; and he only writes from experience and
observation, because he has felt and thought, and learned to analyze thought and
feeling; because his own mind is rich in poetical associations, and he has wisely
been contend with its riches; and because, in his composition, he has not sought to
construct an elaborate and artiﬁcial harmony, but only to pour forth his thought in
those expressive and simple melodies whose meaning, truth and power, are the
soonest recognized and the longest felt.
The most important department in which metaphysical science has been a

pioneer for poetry is in the analysis of particular states of mind; a work which is

22

now performed with ease, power, and utility as much increased, as in the grosser
dissections of the anatomical lecture. Hence the poet, more fortunate than the

physician, has provision made for an inexhaustible supply of subjects. A new

world is discovered for him to conquer.31

On the surface, Fox’s claims of “particular states of human minds” as the subject of
poetry looks little different from Mill’s claim that the exploration of feelings and
emotions is the only poetic subject. However, unlike Mill, Fox consciously makes an
effort to bring the exploration of human minds into a public arena of disputes and
politics. As mentioned previously, Fox claims that poetry, like the cotton mill, can
progress along with material progress of society and contribute to the good of society.
For Fox, what saves the exploration of particular states of mind from the danger of
solipsism, or private enterprise, is the idea of “sympathy.” Sympathy became a key word
with important political implications in nineteenth-century poetics. Early in the century
Shelley emphasized the importance of sympathy in his poetics, claiming that it is
Sympathy that makes the formation of society possible. For Shelley the sympathy one
feels towards other human beings is a reminder that he lives in a society:
Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of

the passions and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions produces an
augmented treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative arts,
becomes at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture,

the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony. The social sympathies, or

those laws from which as from its elements society results, begin to develop

themselves from the moment that two human beings coexist; The future is

23

contained within the present as the plant within the seed; and equality diversity,

unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles alone capable of

affording the motives according to which the will of a social being is determined

to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in

sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind.32
Nevertheless, it seems the full political potential of sympathy is not fully explored in
Shelley’s poetry.

Shelley’s notion of a poet-—“a poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to
cheer its own solitude with sweet sound”-- and the untransferable nature of truth in his
poetry associate him more closely with the subjective poet than the objective poet. As
implied in his discussion of the two poetic faculties, Browning detaches himself from the
early inﬂuence of Shelley, and adopts WJ. Fox’s idea of “sympathy” as a political tool and

his notion of poetry essentially being “dramatic.” Browning states that the objective poet,
“in his appeal to the aggregate human mind, chooses to deal with the doings of men (the
result of which dealing, in its pure form, when even description, as suggesting a describer, is

dispensed with, is what we call dramatic poetry:33

(italics are mine). The notion of poetry
being essentially dramatic is initially implied in Mill’s idea that the purest form of
expression is feeling “dramatized” as “soliloquy.” However, for Mill, the idea of poetry as
dramatized soliloquy and its subjective expressionism is apolitical since it is not directed to

other minds, while eloquence is directed to them: poetry is overheard and eloquence is

simply heard.

24

It was Fox’s utilitarian poetics and his idea of sympathy that fully helped develop
Browning’s dramatic poetry and its political implications. In his review of Tennyson’s
Poems, Chieﬂy Lyrical (1830), Fox remarks:

A genuine poet has deep responsibilities to his country and the world, to the present

and future generations, to earth and heaven... They can inﬂuence the associations of

unnumbered minds; they can command the sympathies of unnumbered hearts; they
can disseminate principles; they can give those principles power over men’s
imaginations; they can excite in a good cause the sustained enthusiasm that is sure to
conquer; they can blast the laurels of the tyrants, and hallow the memories of the
martyrs of patriotism; they can act with a force, the extent of which it is difﬁcult to
estimate, upon national feelings and character, and consequently upon national
happiness.34
For Fox’s contemporaries, sympathy was a faculty used to help understand certain difﬁcult
situations of other persons by exchanging places with them through the power of
imagination. The term sympathy had a wide currency in contemporary poetics, with ample
moral and social references. Like other Victorians, Fox believed that the employment of the
faculty of sympathy by every member of society could resolve various social conﬂicts and
problems. Thus, for Fox, sympathy becomes an important political tool. In Fox, the word

‘C

“sympath ” is engaged with such vocabularies as “disseminates,” excite,” and “blast,” or
such phrases as “national feelings and character” or “national happiness.” What is important
at this juncture is that the employment of the faculty of sympathy is possible by dramatizing

human feelings and emotions. To feel sympathy with other people is to dramatically

reconstruct the situations of other persons so as to be able to enter the state of their feelings

25

and emotions. Therefore, Fox’s utilitarian poetics emphasizes the political function of
poetry that dramatically reconstructs the structures of certain feelings or emotions.

Browning’s poetic development was in close dialogue with Shelley, Mill and Fox.
His position, revealed in his Essay on Shelley, is a curious amalgam of these three inﬂuential
ﬁgures of his time. From the earliest phase of his poetic career, Browning’s poetry reveals
a certain aspiration to the Promethean spirit and creativity, as clearly implied in his Essay on
Shelley when he says that “the subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of
every age.”35 The characters from his earliest poems, Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello, are
portrayed as ﬁgures with some obvious traces of the Shelleyan idea of poet as a seer or a
prophet. However, that all these poetic ﬁgures ﬁnd their initial dreams or aspirations cannot
be fulﬁlled, certainly indicates what Browning’s position towards the Shelleyan or Millite
subjective expressionism is. Though he never seems to discard the idea of the subjective
poet, Browning was well aware of the limits of subjective expressiveness. What separates
Browning from his early mentor, Shelley, is that through his dramatic poetry Browning
consciously makes efforts to bring the subjective expressiveness of Shelley and Mill into the
public arena of discourse, that is, into community, society and history.

In Browning’s dramatic poetry, private feeling and individual consciousness are not
just expressed, but dramatized so that they become the object of scrutiny and criticism.
Importantly, the politics and problems of the human mind—feelings, emotions and
consciousness, the main components of human essence that the subjective poet is primarily
concerned with—are brought under scrutiny. In his essay Browning speaks of the politics of

the subjective poet:

26

the subjective poet, whose study has been himself, appealing through himself to

the absolute Divine mind, prefers to dwell upon those external scenic appearances

which strike out most abundantly and uninterruptedly his inner light and power,

selects that silence of the earth and seain which he can best hear the beating of his

individual heart, and leaves the noisy, complex, yet imperfect exhibitions of nature

in the manifold experience of man around him, which serve only to distract and

suppress the working of his brain.36
The study of the subjective poet is “himself,” “the primal elements of humanity” that reside
inside man. For him, nature and the objective world are “imperfect” and they become
something meaningful only when they can illuminate his inner light and power. The
subjective poet “is impelled to embody the things he perceives with reference to the
One above him, the supreme Intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute
truth. . .. Not what man sees, but what God sees,—the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying
burningly on the Divine Hand,--it is toward these that he struggles.” For the subjective poet,
“his own soul” is “the nearest reﬂex of that absolute Mind.” The human mind as the
reﬂection of God’s Mind creates and rearranges the whole of human experience.

Browning’s dramatic poetry which explores the politics of the human mind is best
illustrated in his The Ring and the Book. In The Ring and the Book the poet persona
describes how he creates his poetry out of the Old Yellow Book:

I ﬁnd ﬁrst
Writ down for very A B C of fact,
“In the beginning God made heaven and earth”;

From which, no matter with what lisp, I spell

27

And speak you out a consequence—that man

Mam—as beﬁts the made, the inferior tiring,—

Purposed, since made, to grow, not make in turn,

Yet forced to try and make, else fail to grow,—

F ormed to rise, reach at, if not grasp and gain

The good beyond him,--which attempt is growth,——-

Repeats God’s process in man’s due degree,—

Attaining man’s proportionate result,—

Creates, no, but resuscitates, perhaps. (I. 707-719)
The poet persona revives the characters of his tale from the Old Yellow Book, like the
biblical character Elisha “Who bade them lay his staff on a corpse-face” (I. 761). As a
reﬂex of God’s mind in a reduced scale, the human mind creates his conditions and
experiences: “For such man’s feat is, in the due degree, /——Mimic creation, galvanism for
life” (1. 739-40). However, the human mind’s creation is fundamentally different from that
of God’s mind. Unlike “the Supreme Intelligence that apprehends all things in their
absolute truth,” hmnan mind creates a ﬁction. The poet persona asks about the nature of his
mind’s creation, “What ’3 this then, which proves good yet seems untrue? / This that I
mixed with truth, motions of mine” (1. 700—1). It is a ‘ﬁction ” (I. 705; italics are mine).

Browning’s dramatic poetry explores the nature and creation of the human mind.
His poetry dramatizes the situations in which individual poetic voices are articulated. This
dramatization brings the Millite subjective world of human feelings and emotions into the
public arena of society and history. This allows readers to examine in a broader social

context the validity of various forms of individual consciousness, the human mind’s creation,

28

which is, in a fundamental way, a ﬁction. Browning’s poetry is a political discourse in that
it examines the various ﬁctions of human consciousness that exercise a coercive power on
human thoughts and actions and exposes their politics, which ultimately suggests a change
in existing human relations of power and domination. This political aspect in Browning’s
poetry was provided, it seems to me, most directly with his adoption of Jeremy Bentham’s
theory of ﬁction or philosophy of as-if Bentham’s theory of ﬁction is primarily a theory of
language. Bentham notes that, in contemporary language usage, certain words that represent
ﬁctional entities are accepted, by confusion, as if they were representing real entities.
Bentham notes:

“Division of entities into real and ﬁctitious; or say, division of noun-
substantive into names of real entities, and names of ﬁctitious entities.

By the division and distinction thus brought to View, great is the light thrown
upon the whole ﬁeld of logic, and thereby over the whole ﬁeld of art and science,
more especially the psychological and thence the ethical or moral branch of science.

It is for want of a clear conception of this distinction that many an empty
name is considered as the representative of a correspondent reality; in a word, that
mere ﬁctions are in abundance regarded as realities. ’7

Bentham ﬁnds that ﬁctional entities are accepted as real entities, not simply in the realm of
language, but, more seriously, in various institutional and cultural practices. Bentham’s
“Fictions of Law” is concerned with how ﬁction can intervene in reality. His theory of
ﬁction is primarily concerned with attacking contemporary legal practices in England, such
that a ﬁction is accepted and exercises a coercive power in a legal court. About Bentham’s

“Fictions of Law” John Hill Burton wrote in 1828:

29

The ‘Fictions of Law’, of which the English practice is so ﬁill, were repeatedly and
earnestly attacked by Bentham, both collectively and in detail. The example shown
to the world, of falsehood deliberately, and on a ﬁxed system, told in the very
workshops of justice, and by those who are employed to support truth and honesty,
he looked upon as holding out a pernicious example to the public. Without any
sarcastic or reprehensory qualiﬁcation, a Fiction of Law may be deﬁned in general
as the saying something exists which does not exist, and acting as if it existed; or
vice versa.38
Bentham’s theory of ﬁction notices the way something that does not have any counterpart
in the world is presented as if it were a real entity, and this ﬁctional entity exercises
coercive power in the thoughts and actions of individuals involved.

Some implications of Bentham’s ﬁctions of law were of tremendous importance
to Browning’s poetic development. Browning noticed that the ﬁctional entity and its
coercive power in the legal world can also be found in other institutional practices, and
legal ﬁction is interlocked with other cultural and institutional ﬁctions, especially those
of politics, religion, class, and gender; so he made an extensive investigation of the
politics of ﬁction. Thus, Archangeli in the Ring and the Book claims, “Law, Gospel and
the Church—~from these we leap / To the very last revealment, easy rule / Beﬁtting the
well-bom and thorough-bred / O’ the happy day we live in” (VII. 731-35). According to
Isobel Armstrong, Browning’s poetic development was, to a great extent, indebted to
Bentham’s theory of ﬁction.39 The Ring and the Book is an exhaustive exploration into

Victorian cultural ﬁctions and into how they are exerting coercive powers on human

thoughts and actions. Throughout the twelve monologues of the work, various forms of

30

cultural institutional ﬁctions are examined in the multiple sets of relationship: religion in
Caponsacchi and the Pope, sexual politics in Guido and Pompilia, or Caponsacchi and
Pompilia, class questions in Half-Rome & the Other Half-Rome and Tertium Quid, or
Guido and Pompilia, etc.

As Armstrong insightfully points out, Bentham’s idea of ﬁction and its coercive
power on human droughts and actions forms an essential part of Browning’s poetry.40 One
thing that I would like to discuss in some detail at this point is the similarity between
Bentham’s idea of ﬁction and the Marxist notion of ideology. The Marxist idea of ideology
greatly helps illuminate the issue of ﬁction and its intervention in Browning’s poetry.
Undoubtedly the single most controversial idea in Marxist thinking is “ideology.” Despite
the wide p0pularity of the term in the development of the Marxist critique of the political
economy of capitalism and its cultural productions, ideology is a concept about which the
least polemical consensus has yet been reached, as proved by the various deﬁnitions of the
term currently available."1 Ideology is not a single concept; rather, it is a cluster of
meanings and ideas, often contradictory, contained under a single word. Internal fractures
and contradictions in the concept of ideology make it difﬁcult to fully grasp the scope and
range of its signiﬁcation in contemporary social theories, a condition that ultimately reduces
the usefulness of the concept. A far more problematic matter than such intemal
contradictions is the possible inadequacy of the concept in current social theories, as
suggested by post-modemists or post-structuralists. This makes it necessary to sort through
various concepts of ideology and decide whether the Marxist idea of ideology is still an

adequate and USCﬁJI concept for explaining the cultural productions of a society.

’3
|i

it t

The contradictions in discussion of ideology were inherited from Marx’s own
writings on the subject. One dominant deﬁnition of ideology, which was initiated by
Marx and is still widely accepted, is “false consciousness.” Traditionally Marxist
discussion of ideology was focused on certain forms of mystiﬁcation or falsiﬁcation of
real material conditions. This deﬁnition of ideology as false consciousness can be found
in one of Engels’ letters:

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true,

but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain

unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he
imagines false or seeming motive forces. Because it is a process of thought he
derives its form as well as its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his
predecessors. He works with mere thought material, which he accepts without
examination as the product of thought, and does not investigate further for a more
remote source independent of thought; indeed this is a matter of course to him
because as all action is mediated by thought, it appears to him to be ultimately based
upon thought.42
For Engels here, ideology has nothing to do with material conditions; it is purely a mental
process within the realm of thought. It derives its form and content from thoughts. For
Engels, ideology exists only when material social relations are not known to men, and
when men take for granted the dictations of ideology without questioning. This is little
different ﬁom Bentham’s notion of ﬁction that a certain ﬁctitious entity, which does not
have real existence, exercises coercive powers. Despite this clear-cut explanation of

ideology as false consciousness, the actual development of discussions regarding

32

ideology in the Marxist tradition have become much more complicated and internally
fractured than Engels’ explanation would suggest. The complication was inherited from
Marx and Engels themselves. The following passage from Marx and Engels’ The
German Ideology may help clarify the point:
Men are producers of their concepts, ideas, etc,--real, active men, as they are
conditioned by a deﬁnite development of their productive forces and of the
intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can
never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their
actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-
down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their
historical life process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their
physical life-process.”
One thing that Marx repeatedly emphasizes in his writings is man in the actual life-process,
man in the process of creating himself through his labor in nature. Man’s consciousness in
this life-process can never be separated from his material conditions and circrunstances. It is
indissolubly bound up with them: “consciousness can never be anything else than conscious
existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process.” This is Marx’s strongest
critique of “doctrine of ideologues which in a contrived manner seeks to ﬁnd primary
causes” in “ideas.” Marx continues:
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here
we ascend from earth to heaven. This is to say, we do not set out from what men
say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived,

in order to arrive at men in the ﬂesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the

basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological
reﬂexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain
are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life—process, which is empirically
veriﬁable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the
rest of ideology and their corresponding form of consciousness, these no longer
retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but
men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along
with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is
not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.44
The above passage contains two contradictory ideas on the relationship between ideology
and material social process, and the contradiction persistently appears in later discussions of
ideology. One obvious point that Marx emphasizes is that consciousness is indissolubly
bound up with material social process. For Marx, consciousness is always a practical
consciousness; consciousness itself is always a part of the material life-process. While he
emphasizes this point, the use of the phrase, “the ideological reﬂexes and echoes of this life-
process,” obscures the very emphasis. By the use of the phrase of “reﬂexes and echoes”
Marx presents consciousness as if it can be separated from the “material life-process.”
Raymond Williams points out that “separation and abstraction of ‘consciousness and its
products’ as a ‘reﬂective’ or ‘second—stage’ process results in an ironic idealization of
‘consciousness and its products’ at this secondary level.”45 In the passage quoted above
Marx and Engels emphasize the indissolubility of consciousness through the same dualistic
framework of consciousness and material social process that the contemporary Hegelian

Philosophical idealists held. The difference is that, while the German idealists contend that

34

“idea” is the center of the whole of human condition, Marx and Engels emphasize that the
life-process determines consciousness. According to Terry Eagleton, “in their zeal to worst
the idealists they [Marx and Engels] risk ending up here simply inverting them, retaining a
sharp duality between ‘consciousness’ and ‘practical activity’ but reversing the causal
relations between them?”6

It is this kind of dualistic notion about consciousness and the material social process,
rather than “indissolubility,” which was existent in Mark and Engels, that persisted in later

6“

discussions of ideology, in spite of the fact that consciousness and its products’ are
always, though in variable forms, parts of the material social process itself.”47 The concept
of ideology as false consciousness, when it was juxtaposed with the idea of indissolubility,
raises an important question: how would man’s consciousness and its products which are
indissolubly bound to his real life-process, material social process, be “false”? Does not
even the false consciousness come from real material conditions? One way of maintaining
ideology in the negative sense of false consciousness is to argue that consciousness and its
productions “come in variable forms, and that some of these forms are “ideology” while
others are not.”48 In this line of development ideology is contrasted with “science.” In
Marx, the word “science” is used in the broader sense of “systematic knowledge” or
“organized learning” about “the active material social process.” Marx emphasizes “real,
positive science” that studies, not “man” and “the world” in static, separated categories, but
“an active, interactive, and in a key sense self-creating material social process” where the
two are dialectically interacting.49 This was an important development that attempted to

understand and grasp consciousness and its production as indissolubly connected to material

social process.

Ideology is contrasted with science. In this contrast ideology is a false
consciousness, while science is a practical consciousness. As the opposite of science,
ideology was developed as the sense of “the received assumptions, concepts, and points of

view which can be shown to prevent or distort such detailed and connected knowledge.”50
Thus, for Engels, ideology is the conscious act of falsifying or mystifying the real material
social process, as is shown in a letter previously quoted. In F euerbach, Engels notes:

Every ideology... once it has arisen, develops in connection with the given concept-

material, and develops this material further; otherwise it would cease to be ideology,

that is, occupation with thoughts as with independent entities, developing
independently and subject only to their own laws. That the material life conditions
of the persons inside whose heads this thought process goes on, in the last resort
determines the course of this process, remains of necessity unknown to these
persons, for otherwise there would be an end to all ideology.5 ’
Ideology is an abstract, limited knowledge about the practical, active social process. It is a
false, at best, pseudo-scientiﬁc rationalization of real material social process.

More seriously, it functions autonomously, separated from the material social

process. Thus Eagleton points out, “Karl Marx’s theory of ideology is probably best seen as

2

a part of his more general theory of alienation.”5 Discussing alienated labor in the

capitalistic mode of production in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx
states:
For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more
powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-against

himself. . .. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains

36

in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer
belongs to him but to the object. . .The alienation of the worker in his product means
not only that his labour become an object, an external existence but that it exists
outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power
of its own conﬁonting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the
object confronts him as something hostile and alien.53
The theoretical implications of this passage are important and undeniable. As in his labor in
the capitalistic mode of production, according to Marx, man, in certain social conditions,
loses connection with, and becomes estranged from, his labor, the product of his labor, and
also the process of his labor. “Human powers, products, and processes escape from the
control of human subjects and comes to assume an apparently autonomous existence.”54
The autonomous entity exerts a powerful inﬂuence on human thoughts and actions. This
Marxist idea of “reiﬁcation” is not different from the Benthamite theory of ﬁction. The
autonomous entity in Marx, detached from the material life-process in assuming
autonomous status, is nothing other than ﬁction in Bentham. Like Marx, Bentham contends
that ﬁction, despite its ﬁctionality, exerts real substantial power on human thoughts and
actions.

Marx’s notion of science, which focuses on real material social process, is important
as a way of overcoming ideological falsiﬁcation or mystiﬁcation of material social process.
Marx’s idea of science is a valuable one, but such scientiﬁc knowledge of material social
process is not practically easy to achieve. As Williams points out, it is not easy to establish
“a knowable distinction” between scientiﬁc knowledge and ideological knowledge.55 Is not

ideological rationalization based on real life-process, as much as science is? How do we

37

distinguish practical consciousness from false consciousness? Since man’s consciousness is
indissolubly connected to his real life-process, is not even any false rationalization in man’s
consciousness based on real-life process? Then, is not ideology a rationalization of real
material conditions? Eagleton asks similar questions: “Are not the illusions of bourgeois
society in some sense actually true to its practices? If they are rationalization of
contradictions to which those practices give rise, are not such misconceptions indeed rooted
in the ‘real life-process’; rather than idly autonomous of it?”56 Williams points out that the
discussion of science in Engels and after is quite different from the “uncritical” use of
science in Marx.57 Engels and others assume an a priori something that escapes ﬁ'om
Marx’s scientiﬁc analysis, such as the privileged consciousness of the proletariat for
orthodox Marxists. Ideology, developed as the opposite of science, is necessarily a limited
concept.

It is a genuinely difﬁcult matter to distinguish between scientiﬁc and ideological
knowledge without an assumption of a priori. To establish a knowable distinction between
practical consciousness and ideological consciousness is not easy since in a sense
ideological false consciousness is based on real life-process as much as practical
consciousness is. Ideology in Marxist thinking is not precise enough. This aspect is more
speciﬁcally illustrated in the related topic of base and superstructure. The architectural
model of economic “base” and institutional, socio-political superstructure has been a key
concept in the Marxist critique of capitalist political economy. Like ideology, unfortunately,
this well—known model unintentionally presupposes the duality between consciousness and
its products, and the material social process, which continues to remain in later discussions

of the subject.

38

In his 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx
contends:
In the social production of their life, men enter into deﬁnite relations that are
indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production that correspond
to a deﬁnite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total
of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which
correspond deﬁnite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of
material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It
is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their
social being that determines their consciousness.58
Here superstructure is presented as legal and political practices or institutions that represent
the existing relations of production. And deﬁnite forms of social consciousness correspond
to the relations of production. From this passage it is not clear whether the deﬁnite forms of
social consciousness are scientiﬁc or merely ideological. Another writing of Marx that
discusses superstructure clariﬁes the point. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,
1851-2 Marx writes:
Upon the several forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, a whole
superstructure is reared of various and peculiarly shaped feelings, illusions, habits of
thought and conceptions of life. The whole class produces and shapes these out of
its material foundation and out of the corresponding social conditions. The
individual unit to whom they ﬂow through tradition and education may fancy that

they constitute the true reasons for and premises of his conduct.59

39

The “various and peculiarly shaped feelings, illusions, habits of thought and concepts of
life” are the deﬁnite forms of social consciousness which Marx discusses in the previous
passage. Here superstructure is presented as ideology that rationalizes the existing material
and social conditions. The important point is that this rationalization of ideology is not
necessarily false or untrue to real material conditions, rather it is an attempt to be true to real
material conditions:
At certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come
in conﬂict with the existing relations of production or—what is but a legal
expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have
been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these
relations turn into their fetters. There begins an epoch of social revolution. With the
change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less
rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should
always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of
production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the
legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short, ideological—forms in
which men become conscious of this conﬂict and ﬁght it out."0
Here legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophical forms of society are forms of
ideology. Importantly, these ideological forms are not just false rationalization or
mystiﬁcation of real relations of production but the very space where “men become
conscious of this contradiction and ﬁght it out.” This aspect in ideology makes it genuinely

difﬁcult to distinguish ideology from science, and a false consciousness from practical

4O

consciousness. In this sense, as mentioned before, ideology developed as the Opposite of
science retains only limited value as a concept.

Marx’s notion of ideological forms, as the space where men sense contradictions in
relations of production and ﬁght them out, requires a rather different notion of ideology
from the one conceived of as merely false consciousness. Obviously Louis Althusser’s
explanation of ideology merits some serious attention. For Althusser, ideology does not
represent the relation between men and their real material conditions of existence but the
way men live the relation. In For Marx, Althusser deﬁnes ideology:

Ideology is a matte of the lived relation between men and their world... In ideology

men do indeed express, not the relation between them and their conditions of

existence, but the way they live the relation between them and their conditions of
existence: this presupposes both a real relation and an ‘imaginary,’ ‘lived’ relation.

Ideology, then, is the expression of the relation between men and their ‘world,’ that

is, the (overdetermined) unity of the real relation and the imaginary relation between

them and their real conditions of existence. In ideology, the real relation is
inevitably invested in the imaginary relation, a relation that expresses a will

(conservative, conformist, reformist or revolutionary), a hope or nostalgia, rather

than describing a reality.61
Althusserian Marxism generally regards ideology as the general material process of
production of ideas, beliefs, and values. Althusser’s understanding of ideology is important
in several ways. As Marx’s 1859 preface notes, ideology is not just a mirror-like reﬂection
of economic conditions or simply justiﬁcation of them. As Althusser emphasizes, ideology

is a ﬁeld of struggle where real relations are invested in imaginary relations. The imaginary

41

relations of ideology express to some extent genuine necessity and represent real life-
process. Even the bourgeois notion of labor and the capitalistic mode of production, which
Marx condemns for its dehumanizing nature, expresses a real necessity of life: production
itself. What matters is how one formulates one’s relation to it. The Althusserian notion of
ideology is important in that it recognizes the genuine necessity that is invested in the
imaginary relation of ideology.

For Althusser, ideology is a necessary medium in which men live out their relations
to a social structure. However, this does not mean that he sees ideology simply in a
descriptive and non-critical way. Althusser’s fundamental position is a critique of ideology.
His well-known essay entitled “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus” focuses on how
various institutional entities ﬁinction as the ideological apparatus in a capitalist state. What
he calls an “ideological state apparatus” is “a certain number of realities which present
themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions.”62
In this essay, Althusser explains how ideology is fundamentally formulated through various
forms of institutions and social practices, such as religion, education, family, law, political
systems, trade-unions, mass communication systems, culture, including literature, the Arts,
and sports.63 This is a very serious revision of the traditional Marxist model of base and
superstructure. Althusser’s recognition of ideological state apparatus makes it necessary to
modify the two-level model of base and superstructure into a three—level one: the base of
material production, state and ideological state apparatus, and forms of consciousness. This
is a much more subtle approach to the realm of ideology than traditional explanations of

ideology have permitted.

42

 

Another important point that needs to be emphasized from Althusser is his notion of
ideology as a strategy of containment. Althusser contends that “in ideology, the real relation
is inevitably invested in the imaginary relation, a relation that expresses a will, a hope or
nostalgia, rather than describing a reality.” According to him, ideology is not just
description of a reality, rather it is an expression of will. This will or hope necessarily
restructures and reorders reality, and more importantly, ideology develops certain strategies
for that purpose. For Althusser, ideology is a matter of strategies. That ideology attempts to
explain reality in a plausible whole, and in doing so recreates reality, was already recognized
from the earliest stage of the development of Marxist thinking. The contribution of
Althusserian Marxism is that it makes an effort to identify and explain the various forms of
ideological strategies, which makes a discussion of ideology still important in modern social
theories. Understanding ideology as a matter of strategies makes it possible to understand
ideology, not as abstract, static, ﬁxed sets of ideas, beliefs, and values, but as a process that
is constantly adjusting itself and on the move.

Terry Eagleton in Ideology: An Introduction explains various forms of ideological
strategies. Eagleton identiﬁes six major ideological strategies: “unifying, action-oriented,
rationalizing, legitimating, universalizing and naturalizing.” 6" According to Eagleton,
“ideologies are usually internally complex, differentiated formations,”65 rather than unitary
and homogenized ones. A successful and dominant ideology “ ‘speaks’ from a multiplicity
of sites, and in this subtle diffuseness presents no single target to its antagonists.” 6"
Eagleton reminds us that ideologies are “action-oriented sets of beliefs, rather than

speculative theoretical systems.”67 Ideologies participate and actively intervene in reality,

just as Bentharn’s ﬁction does.

43

As I will discuss in detail in later chapters, The Ring and the Book clearly
demonstrates this aspect of ideology. Guido’s ﬁction of honor drives him to kill Pompilia.
Ideology also rationalizes and legitimates; ideologies are “systematic attempts to provide
plausible explanations and justiﬁcations for social behaviour which might otherwise be the
object of criticism.”68 Each monologue in The Ring and the Book is a strenuous and
persuasive justiﬁcation of his/her action by the characters themselves, including Guido,
Pompilia, Caponsacchi, the Pope, and others; each monologue justiﬁes certain ideological
forms, and adopts different ideological strategies.

An important ideological strategy is to universalize and naturalize. In The German
Ideology Marx and Engels point out:

Each new class which puts itself in the place of the one ruling before it, is

compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the

common interest of all the members of society, put in an ideal form; it will give its
ideas the form of universality, and present them a the only rational universally valid
ones.69
A characteristic aspect of this ideological strategy is that it attempts to dehistoricize. Any
ideology comes into being at a speciﬁc historical context. Once it becomes dominant,
however, it attempts to present itself as universal, timeless, and natural, hiding the historical
contexts that gave rise to it.

In Studies in the Theory of Ideology, John Thompson makes a similar investigation
of various ideological strategies. According to him, ideologies operate largely in three
ways: legitimation, dissimulation, and reiﬁcation. Ideology attempts to legitimate; “every

system of domination seeks to cultivate a belief in its legitimacy, by appealing either to

44

rational, traditional or charismatic grounds.”7O By dissimulation, Thompson means that
relations of domination may be concealed, denied, or ‘blocked’ in various ways” so that
“these ways may conceal themselves presenting themselves as something other than

” 7’ Thompson’s notion of the ideological strategy of reiﬁcation is similar to

what they are.
Eagleton’s notion of universalization. Ideology operates “by means of reiﬁcation, that is, by
representing a transitory, historical state of affairs as if it were permanent, natural, and
outside of time.”72

The complex ways and various forms of strategies in which ideologies operate make
it preposterous to dismiss ideologies as simply “unscientiﬁc” in a Marxist sense. Ideologies

often represent “genuine wants, needs, and desires,”73

as Eagleton notes. Drawing on the
fact that ideology has emerged in conjunction with science, Thompson objects to regarding
ideology as “failed science, as the hapless half of an inseparable pair.” This is because, he
argues, “the concept of ideology also emerged in conjunction with the critique of

domination, and it is this link which must be taken as basic.”7

Thompson’s recognition
of the link provides an important suggestion for which direction a genuinely material
discussion of ideology should take. Problems of the dichotomized notion of science vs.
ideology can be solved by drawing on the undeniable fact that consciousness and its
products are indissolubly interlocked within the material social process. What needs to be
done in discussions of ideology is to investigate the various ideological strategies in which
dominant social and cultural practices operate within this very indissolubility.

Raymond Williarns’ cultural materialism is probably one of the best examples of

this sort of work. In Marxism and Literature Raymond Williams develops a unique idea on

social practices by combining cultural theory with Marxism. In this book Williams

45

introduces a theory of cultural materialism, which he deﬁnes as “a theory of the speciﬁcities

”75 The central

of material cultural and literary production within historical materialism.
tenet of Williarns’s cultural materialism is that culture, which bourgeois thinkers, and many
Marxists as well, regard as something independent and separate from the material
productions of society, is itself a part of material production. A crucial point of this
materialization of culture is that it reveals problems and weaknesses of some fundamental
Marxist concepts, such as base and superstructure, mediation, ideology, etc. Williams
contends that many Marxist ideas are not truly Marxist because they reﬂect or are inﬂuenced
by fragmentary and dichotomous ways of thinking characteristic of bourgeois culture.

A notorious example of such a case, Williams claims, is the separation of the
economic base from the cultural superstructure. Williams contends that society is shaped
as a complex whole formed by interrelations of a variety of social practices, and that, at
the same time, this complex whole is not a state but a process that is always on the move.
The only possible way for Williams to tap into this process is through “lived experience.”
Terry Eagleton correctly, however disapprovingly, points out that “it is precisely this
insistence on experience, this passionate premium placed upon the “lived,” which
provides one of the centrally unifying themes” of Williams’ work. Eagleton makes this
point by drawing on the following passage from Williams:

As for Marx, one accepted the emphases on history, on change, on the inevitably

close relationships between class and culture, but the way this came through was,

at another level, unacceptable. There was, in this position, a polarization and

abstraction of economic life on the one hand and culture on the other, which did

46

not seem to me to correspond to the social experience of culture as others had
lived it, and as one was trying to live it oneself.76
Williams claims that this polarization and abstraction in relations of economic base and
cultural superstructure has been so habitually persistent in the development of Marxism
that culture and material production have come to be understood as areas that can be
separated from each other. As Williams points out, traditional explanations of base and
superstructure, including Plekanov's distinction of “ﬁve [separable] and sequential

”77

elements, tend to abstract “the indissoluble connections between material production,

political and cultural institutions and activity, and consciousness.”78 For Williams, a
serious consequence of this abstraction is losing sight of a “constitutive process”79
existing in the indissoluble connections.

Williams points out another serious abstraction in theories of culture: such as
concepts of production, productive force, and productive work. In a capitalist society, the
meaning of production has been limited to production of commodities, and this has led to
a neglect and under-evaluation of that portion of social production that is called
superstructure. Williams contends:

The social and political order which maintains a capitalist market, like the social

and political struggles which created it, is necessarily a material production. From

castles and palaces and churches to prisons and workhouses and schools; from
weapons of war to a controlled press: any ruling class, in variable ways though

always materially, produces social and political order. They are never

superstructural activities. They are the necessary material production.80

47

For Williams productive forces mean “all and any of the means of the production and
reproduction of real life.”81 To maintain society, men cannot produce commodities only,
they also have to produce politics, law, religion, etc. These superstructural elements play
an essential role in the production and reproduction of human life. More importantly, for
Williams as well as for Marx, these activities of production and reproduction produce

themselves and their history.
What is repeatedly emphasized throughout Marxism and Literature is the

2 existing in the production and reproduction of

“speciﬁc and indissoluble real processes”8
real life. However, for Williams this does not simply mean a recognition of a complex
whole of social reality. In his essay entitled “Base and Superstructure in Materialist
Cultural Theory,” which is a valuable essay in that it recapitulates and summarizes all the
issues of Marxism and Literature, Williams argues:
If we come to say that society is composed of a larger number of social practices
which form a concrete social whole, and if we give to each practice a certain
speciﬁc recognition, adding only that they interact, relate and combine in very
complicated ways, we are at one level much more obviously talking about reality,
but we are at another level withdrawing from the claim that there is any process of
determination. And this I, for one, would be very unwilling to do.83
The concept of totality for Williams is an alternative concept for the problematic base and
superstructure. However, Williams objects to the notion of totality merely as the
recognition that numerous interrelated and contemporaneous social practices are

interlocked into a concrete and complex whole. It is missing an important element

involved in the indissoluble social process: the intentions of the ruling class. Thus,

48

 

Williams observes that “the key question to ask about any notion of totality in cultural
theory is this: whether the notion of totality includes the notion of intention.”84
Williams contends that, in every society, and at every stage of its develOpment,
there surely exist expressions of social intention: certain laws, constitutions, theories
which are “expressing and ratifying the domination of a particular class.” 85 This
important insight into human culture was ﬁrst pointed out by Marx and Engels:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class
which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling
intellectual force. The class which has means of material production at its
disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the
ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The
ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material
relations; the dominant material relations grasped as ideas; hence of the relations
which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.86
This dominance in mental production by the dominant social class has been recognized
by many later Marxists. However, most of them understood social intention of dominant
classes as something obvious and explicit, and this often led to an abstract understanding
of social intention. The concept of ideology is a good example of such an abstraction.
Traditionally, ideology has been understood as “a relatively formal and articulated system
of meanings, values, and beliefs, of a kind that can be abstracted as a “worldview” or
class outlook.”87 Williams argues that among the meanings, values, and beliefs that a
certain class has, there also exists, apart from the articulated ones, “the relatively mixed,

n 88

confused, incomplete, or inarticulate consciousness of actual men. If the social

49

intention of the dominant class, or a section of the dominant class, is something explicit

and has isolable meanings and practices which get imposed on other social classes, then it
would be relatively easy to overthrow such meanings and practices. Class outlook is not
pure and unitary. The social intentions of the dominant class are transmitted to the
subordinate classes through very subtle mechanisms. Therefore, for him the concept of
totality is useful only when it is supported, not by ideology, but by another important
Marxist concept: hegemony.

Williams argues that in any society, in any particular period, there exists a
“central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values” which represents the
social intention of the dominant class, but which, unlike ideological instances that are
relatively easy to isolate it, constitutes a sense of reality as “a whole body of practices
and expectations, over the whole of living.”89 In other words:

It is a set of meanings and values which as they are experienced as practices

appear as reciprocally conﬁrming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most

people in the society, a sense of the absolute because experienced reality beyond
which it is very difﬁcult for most members of the society to move, in most areas

of their lives.90
This set of meanings and values does not operate in a static system; rather, it operates as a
process that continually renews and modiﬁes its shape. This hegemony of the dominant
class transmits dominant culture to other cultures, and at the same time incorporates other
cultures into it through hegemonic instances. For Williams, education is one of the major
hegemonic instances, through which “the dominant culture is distributed. Tradition is

another instance. For Williams, tradition is “in practice the most evident expression of the

SO

 

dominant and hegemonic pressures and limits.”91 Williams contends that what is passed

off as “the tradition” is in fact a “selective” tradition."2 From a whole possible area of

past and present, certain meanings and values are chosen for emphasis, while certain

others are excluded. Further, some of these meanings and values are reinterpreted or

modiﬁed into something supportive or at least compatible with the dominant culture.

This whole process of transmission and incorporation forms “a continual making and

remaking of an effective dominant culture.”93

Williams’ work in Marxism and Literature is one possible way that a discussion

of ideology can be productive. Another possibly productive direction that a discussion of

ideology might move towards is in the consideration of discourse or discursive practices.

Thompson argues:

The analysis of ideology is fundamentally concerned with language, for language

is the principal medium of meaning (signiﬁcation) which serves to sustain

relations of domination. Speaking a language is a way of acting, emphasized

Austin and others; what they forgot to add is that ways of acting are infused with

forms of power. The utterance of the simplest expression is an intervention in the

world, more or less effective more or less endowed with institutional authority.

‘Language is not only an instrument of communication or even of knowledge’,

writes Bourdieu, ‘but also an instrument of power. One seeks not only to be
understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished.’ 9"

Eagleton also suggests that the notion of ideology as discourse, as the third way between

two extremes of ideology as “disembodied ideas,” and of ideology, simply, as “behaviour

patterns.”95

51

 

Understanding ideology as a discursive practice can be important in three ways.
First, it discusses ideology in its speciﬁc material practices by drawing on the materiality of
language. Language is an important part of the material forces of society. An important
emphasis in Marxist thinking has been placed on the materiality of language. In The
German Ideology Marx and Engels argue that “language is practical consciousness, as it
exists for other men... ; for language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the
necessity, of intercourse with other man.”96 Williams also draws on the materiality of
language by saying that “language has to be seen as a persistent kind of creation and re-
creation: 3 dynamic presence and a constant regenerative process.”97 Since it focuses on the
materiality of language, regarding ideology as a discursive practice can be used to
investigate ideology, not in an abstract way, isolated from material process, but in its
speciﬁc material conditions and process.

The next point that needs to be understood is that to see ideology as a discourse
focuses on the question of power. Thompson emphasizes that “to study ideology is to study
the ways in which meaning (signiﬁcation) serves to sustain relations of domination.”8
Language is primarily about meanings and signiﬁcations, and dominant ideologies exercise
their power through the dissemination of meanings that are preferable to the ruling class.
Therefore, as Thompson emphasizes, language is the principal medium through which
relations of dominance are created and maintained. A last point that needs to be mentioned
is the question of interpretation. Thompson believes that “the link between language and
ideology provides the touchstone for the elaboration of a systematic methodology of

99 99

interpretation. Thompson draws on two considerations related to this linkage:

52

“discourse... is already an interpretation,” and this must be recognized in order to form the
“creative character of the interpretative process.”100

That discourse is always already an interpretation is especially helpﬁrl in reading
Browning’s The Ring and the Book. The poem consists of twelve monologues that draw on
the same murder case. Each monologue is a working of different individual
consciousnesses, and it is fundamentally an interpretation of a murder case of the past. The
extensively long poem, interestingly, is based largely on only two incidents—the ﬂight of
Pompilia from Guido’s house and Guido’s murder of Pompilia—with some minor related
ones. The three monologues in the middle (V -VII) are the interpretations of the incidents by
the main characters of the poem: Guido, Pompilia, and Caponsacchi, while the next three
monologues (VIII-X) show how institutions interpret the incidents, especially law and
religion. Guido, Pompilia, and Caponsacchi, alike, restructure and reorder the past in their
interpretations for their respective presents. This act of interpretation is fundamentally
connected to the question of power. Guido justiﬁes his act of killing Pompilia to retain his
power as a member of privileged class in a classed society and also his patriarchal authority
within the institution of marriage. On the other hand, Pompilia’s interpretation directly
challenges the power represented by Guido. She consciously attempts to place herself
outside of Guido’s signiﬁcation of honor, ultimately nullifying Guido’s power. Also
Caponsacchi renounces his institutionalized power as a priest and opts to help Pompilia once
he ﬁnds that his labor within the religious institution has become of religion alienated.

The monologue of the Pope clearly demonstrates how institution is related to power
and domination. The Pope’s institution serves as one of the main distributors of meanings

in the contemporary Roman society; the Church functions as the ultra-legal entity, the

53

ultimate disseminator of meanings. Institutions form a subject. As Guido’s ﬁrst monologue
clearly demonstrates, the individual utterance of a subject is deeply invested with
institutional discourse; Guido’s defense of his sexual ideology is deeply invested with
religious and legal discourses. In maintaining their power, institutions constantly renew
themselves by incorporating new ideas, concepts or values, or reemphasizing old ones. The
Pope’s institution, on the one hand, constantly adjusts itself by incorporating new ideas and
values, as indicated in his reﬂection on the acts of Caponsacchi who acted beyond the
regular boundary of the institution. On the other hand, the Pope’s institution attempts to
maintain its authority, coherence and integrity by strictly demarcating its boundaries in the
Foucaultian sense of “prohibition,” as illustrated in the Pope’s rejection of Guido when he
appropriates legal and religious institutions themselves in killing Pompilia. The monologues
of two lawyers, Archangeli and Bottini, draw on some different aspect of institutional
power, which more directly raises the question of Benthamite ﬁction. The two lawyers’
legal discourse is governed by aestheticism, and it is more concerned with following its own
aesthetic principles than with referring to real life conditions, which makes it fundamentally
an aesthetic, legal ﬁction. Yet the ﬁction exercises power and intervenes in the real life
process, invested with institutional authority.

The three early monologues in the poem, Half-Rome, The Other Half-Rome, and
Tertium Quid (II-IV), address the question of ideology as set of signiﬁcations. Each of
these is “a sample-speec ” (I. 864), that is, “the world’s outcry / Around the rush and ripple
of any fact” (1. 839-40). Drawing on the word “half,” Isobel Armstrong asks, “Do they
represent a set of opinions? A class? And what is designated in the [half]? District? Group?

Ideological and reli 'ous divisions? What voice eaks?”101 M answer to the uestion is
81 5P Y q

54

that they represent a set of sigmﬁcations. Society, under any epoch, place, and relation of
production, is composed of a constellation of various sets of signiﬁcations, and the sum total
of these sets of signifying systems form the social totality. Each individual set of
signiﬁcation may rise from some speciﬁc material conditions, such as class, gender,
religion, profession, age, race, ethnicity, etc.; however, the division between each set of
signiﬁcation is not strict and exclusive; these sets are overlapped, and “overdetennined” in
the Althusserian sense. The division of Half-Rome and The Other Half-Rome is largely
based on gender ideology. The speaker of Half-Rome is a middle class man, not from the
aristocracy like Guido, but as a married man he shares Guido’s male code of honor and
patriarchal authority in the institution of maniage. The speaker of the Other Half-Rome, as
a single bachelor, sides with Pompilia. However, his siding with Pompilia seems to have
less to do with any conscious objection to a male code of honor than with his fascination
with Pompilia, and with the unconscious rendering of his sexual libido. The monologue of
Tertium Quid, another sample speech, obviously draws on a signiﬁcation based on class.
However, though he is an aristocrat like Guido, he is not sympathetic to Guido. He
condemns Guido’s economic motivation expressed in his marriage to Pompilia.
Collectively the monologues in The Ring and the Book expose various forms of
Signiﬁcation. Each speaker brings into the poem both real and imaginary relations that
he/she is conditioned by. All of them speak from the reality of their own conditions. Both
Guido and Caponsacchi are trying to justify their acts, and Pompilia needs to prove her
innocence to others. Each of the lawyers is representing his client, and the Pope has to
decide whether he should condemn Guido or not. Even the sample-speeches are not idle

talks. Half-Rome must warn a cousin of his listener’s against making amorous moves

55

toward his wife, and Tertium Quid is trying to ﬁnd some favors from his social elders at the
card table. Each of them speaks from his own reality, what seems real to him: “All for the
truth’s sake, mere truth, nothing else!” (I. 881) Browning makes efforts to show, however,
that any perspective a speaker brings into the poem is an ideologically invested one: “The
instinctive theorizing whence a fact / Looks to the eye as the eye likes the look” (1. 863-4).
Seen from contemporary Victorian religious perspective, this aspect may be understood as
the conﬁrmation of the claim that mortals are doomed to limited understandings while only
God is not.

Many critical readings of the poem have focused on Browning’s religious
perspective, whether he was skeptical or conﬁrrnative of contemporary religious beliefs,
drawing on passages like “In the face of one proof more that ‘God is true / And every man a
liar’——that who trusts / To human testimony for a fact / Gets this sole fact—himself is
proved a fool” (XII. 600-603). However, more fundamentally, the poem addresses the
question of ideology and fiction. Around a seventeenth-century Roman murder trial
Browning brings together various forms of individual consciousness enmeshed into their
own ideological conditions. Browning attempts to grasp them in their real life-process, in
their materiality, and in their discursive practices of language. When the twelve
monologues are brought together, they create a discursive ﬁeld where different
interpretations of the same incident converge. In the discursive ﬁeld, different forms of
consciousness intersect, confronting, emulating each other for dominance, and at the same
time, conﬁrming and reinforcing each other.

What is remarkable about The Ring and the Book is that Browning renders the

discursive ﬁeld into a dramatic form, which Fox believed is fundamentally political in

56

nature. Browning addresses the question of ideology and ﬁction in a dramatic form,
creating a “double poem” that Armstrong notices. The poet persona in the ﬁrst book of the
poem says:

Let this old woe step on the stage again!

Act itself o’er anew for men to judge,

Not by the very sense and sight indeed—. ..

—No dose of purer truth than man digests,

But truth with falsehood, milk that feeds him now,

Not strong meat he may get to bear some day—

To-wit, by voices we call evidence,

Uproar in the echo, live fact deadened down,

Talked over, bruited abroad, whispered away,

Yet helping us to all we seem to hear:

For how else we know we save by worth of word? (I. 824-837)
The dramatic form of the poem brings the Millite subjective expressiveness under scrutiny
and inspection. Each individual consciousness “act itself o’er anew for men to judge.” In
Victorian dramatic poetry a subjective voice is objectiﬁed. Just as a Millite subjective
expressive poet on stage is heard by the audience, the poetic voice in Browning’s dramatic
poetry becomes the object of scrutiny in the same poem. What this structure lays bare is the
politics of subjective expressionism and the fact that “consciousness and its products” are
always invested with ideological, imaginary relations: “truth with falsehood.” In a dramatic

poem any poetic voice that a speaking subject establishes is constantly undermined, and is

57

'I"!

(“D

given only a partial and temporal authority; it becomes historicized, revealing its culturally
formulated position.

In The Ring and the Book various culturally determined forms of consciousness are
investigated through the material condition of discourse, which is language: “how else we
know we save by worth of word?” (I. 837) Thus, in Browning’s dramatic poetry language is
linked to ideology. As mentioned before, Thompson argues that the link between language
and discourse foregrounds the “creative character of the interpretative process.” The Ring
and the Book as a whole produces a very unique structural form. Ten monologues are
spoken by nine characters, and these ten monologues are, in turn, presented by a poet
persona who speaks the ﬁrst and last monologues. The poet persona is also only a character
created by the poet Browning himself, and Browning the poet is read and examined by
readers through the poem.102 This way the poem creates a spiral of multiple layers of a
hermeneutic circle. Each layer in the circle is historicized by the next one. In these ever-
moving circles of meaning no position is privileged but only historicized. In this chain of
interpretation even the position of reader, which occupies the last stage in the process of
interpretation, is always unstable; he is always a historicized reader.

The monologues in The Ring and the Book as a whole raise almost all the important
issues in modern critical theory, such as knowledge, consciousness, representation,
epistemology, language, discourse, and hermeneutics. It is not surprising, then, that the
poem recently has been recognized as an important site for theoretic reﬂection and
contention by various modern critical disciplines. As cultural criticism in Browning studies
recognizes, Browning’s poetry can become a highly productive venue towards

understanding not only Victorian culture and society, but also our own. Browning’s poetry

58

it

is fundamentally rooted in politics, culture, society and history. The Ring and the Book
extensively addresses one of the most important aspects of the Victorian cultural crisis: the
Benthamite question of ﬁction. The Benthamite question of ﬁction, despite its importance
in Browning’s poetry, has not been seriously addressed. The next three chapters will
examine some important forms of Victorian cultural ﬁctions. Some aspects of Victorian
sexual politics will be discussed through an examination of the monologues of Guido and
Pompilia. Legal discourse forms an important part of Victorian cultural ﬁction, and so an
examination of the two lawyers’ monologues will look into the subject. The question of
ﬁction in Victorian religious discourse will also be discussed through the monologues of the

Pope and the Canon Caponsacchi.

59

'. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry 1 83 0-18 70 (London: The
Athlone Press, 1972), 14.

2. See Alan Sinﬁeld, Alfred Tennyson, (Oxford & New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 18.

3. Shelley & Peacock, A Defence ofPoetry & The Four Ages ofPoetry (The Bobbs-
Merrill Co., 1965), 4.

4. Ibid., 17.

5. Thomas Carlyle, The Works of Thomas Carlyle in Thirty Volumes, Vol. XXVII,
(London: Chapman & Hall), 60.

6 . Ibid..
7 .Ibid..
8.1bid., 63.

9. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983), 32.

'0. Philip Drew, The Poetry of Browning: A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen,
1970), 428.

H. The Victorian Poet: Poetics and Persona, ed. Joseph Bristow, (London & New York:
Croom Helm, 1987), 4.

12. Sinﬁeld, Alfred Tennyson, 14

'3. Shelley ’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Donald H. Reiman & Sharon B. Powers (New York
& London: Norton, 1977, 481.

'4. Ibid., 508.
. Williams, Culture and Society, 36.
‘6. Ibid..

. Shelley ’5 Poetry and Prose, 482.
. Ibid., 493.

.Ibid., 508.

60

‘1

.l

a)

 

20. Robert Browning ’s Complete Works (New York: Fred DeFau & Co., 1910), Vol. XII,
286.

21. Willliams, Culture and Society, 43.

22. Shelley ’s Poetry and Prose, 486.
’3. Ibid..

24. Robert Browning ’5 Complete Works, 283.

25.11)th

26. Ibid., 283-4.

27. Ibid., 287.

28. John Stuart Mill, “What is Poetry?” from Victorian Poet: Poetics and Persona, 37.

29. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London & New
York: Routledge, 1993), 13.

30. Armstrong, Victorian Scrutinies, 71.

3‘. Ibid., 75.

32. Shelley 's Poetry and Prose, 481.

3. Robert Browning '8 Complete Works, 287.

34 . . . .
. Armstrong, Victorian Scrutinies, 83.

35. Robert Browning ’s Complete Works, p. 288.

36

.Ibid., 287.

37. Quoted ﬁ'om G. K. Ogden, Bentham ’8 Theory of Fictions (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& Co., 1932), . xxvii.

38. Ibid., xvii.
39. See Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, 112-135.

40. See ibid., 147-161.

61

4’. In Ideology: An Introduction (London & New York: Verso, 1991), 1-2, Terry
Eagleton lists the following deﬁnitions of ideology: the process of production of
meanings, signs and values in social life; a body of ideas characteristic of a particular
social group or class; ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power; false
ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power; systematically distorted
communication; that which offers a position for a subject; forms of thought motivated by
social interests; identity thinking; socially necessary illusion; the conjuncture of discourse
and power; the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;
action-oriented sets of beliefs; the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;
semiotic closure; the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to
a social structure; the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality.

42. The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker. (New York & London: Norton,
1978), 766.

43. Marx & Engels, The German Ideology (London, 1963), 14.
44. Ibid..

45. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford & New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977), 61.

’6. Ibid., 73.
47. Ibid., 61

43. Ibid., 62.

4° . Ibid., 62-63.

5°. Ibid., 64.

5'. Friedrich Engels, Ludwig F euerbach (London, 1933), 65-6.

5’. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, 70.

53. The Marx-Engels Reader, 72.

54. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, 70.

5 . . .
5. Wllllams, Marxism and Literature, 64.

6. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, 72.

57 . . .
. Wllllams, Marxism and Literature, 63.

62

 

58. Marx & Engels, Selected Works, 2 vols. (London, 1962), 362-3.

5? 1on1, 272-3.

6". Ibid., 363-4.

6'. Iouis Althusser, For Marx (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 233-4.

62. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1971), 143.

63. Ibid..

64. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, 45.

65. Ibid..
6". Ibid..

67. Ibid..
68. Ibid., 52.

69. Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, 40-1.

70. John Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley & L.A.: University of
California Press, 1984), 131.

7'. Ibid..

7’. Ibid..

73. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, 45.

74. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology, 140.

75 . . . .
. Wlllrams, Marxism and Literature, 5.

76. Quoted from Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Humanities Press,
1976), 22.

77. These are (i) the state of productive forces; (ii) the economic conditions; (iii) the
socio-political regime; (iv) the psyche of social man; (v) various ldeologles reflectlng the

Properties of this psyche. See Marxism and Literature, 80.

78 . . .
. Wllllams, Marxism and Literature, 80.

63

79. Ibid., 81.
80. Ibid., 93.

3'. Ibid., 91.
82. Ibid., 82.

83. Inserted in Debating Texts: A reader in T wentieth-Century Literary Theory and
Method, ed. Rick Rylance, (Milton Keynes [Buckinghamshire] & Philadelphia: Open
University Press, 1987), 207.

8“. Ibid..
85. Ibid., 208.

86. Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, 70.

87. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 109.

88. Ibid..
89. Ibid., 110.

. Rick Rylance, Debating Texts, 209.

. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 115.
92. Ibid., 115.

. Rick Rylance, Debating Texts, 209.

. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology, 131.

. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, 194.

96. Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, 19.

9 . . , .
7. Wllllams, Marxism and Literature, 31.

98. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology, 130-1-

99

. Ibid., 133.

‘00. Ibid..

'0'. Isobel Armstrong, “Problem of Representation in The Ring and the Book: Politics,
Aesthetics, Language.” Perosa, Browning e Venezia (1990), 212.

102. Morse Peckham in his essay entitled “Historiography and The Ring and the Book,”
Victorian Poetry, 1968, vol. 4, 243-58, draws an insightful diagram about the structure of
The Ring and the Book. According to the diagram, supposing that a signiﬁes a speaker, x
the speaker’s situation, @ the act of interested and compromised interpretation, and B
Browning, most of Browning’s monologues can be diagrammed as (a @ x). (However,
the speaker in a dramatic monologue himself is always interpreted by Browning, and also
the monologue itself is always interpreted by the reader, so the actual diagram should be

‘ reader @ [B @ (a @ x) ] ). What is innovative in The Ring and the Book is that
Browning makes this diagram much more complex by bringing several monologues
together and also creating a poet persona who is to be believed as the mouthpiece of
Browning the poet himself: B @ [ (a @ x) + (b @ x) + (c @ x) ----]. As Peckham
correctly points out, Browning the poet is no less stable as the speaker(s) of his dramatic
monologues, and especially in The Ring and the Book, the poet persona in Books I and
X1] is a compromised Browning--he is both ﬁctional Browning and historical Browning).
With a little correction of Peckham’s diagram, RB can be diagrammed as hR @ ( hB @ [
cB { (a @ x) + (b @ x) + (c @ x) ----} ] )——hR refers to a historicized reader, hB the
historicized Browning the poet, and cB a compromised Browning the poet persona.

65

CHAPTER TWO

SEXUAL POLITICS IN GUIDO AND POMPILIA

About Browning’s important collection of poems, Men and Women, Isobel
Armstrong writes:

The central project of Men and Women is the investigation of cultural ﬁctions and
the form in which they are constructed. The Benthamite fascination with the
construct, with the ﬁctional entity which may have no counterpart in the world but
nevertheless intervenes in it, exercising a coercive imaginative pressure on thought

and action is developed in a remarkable way in this volume.1
Bentham’s theory of ﬁction, his philosophy of “as-if,” was primarily concerned with
reforming English legal practices. However, as I have already discussed in the previous
chapter, the implications of a ﬁctional entity and its coercive power go much beyond the
world of legal discourse. Browning’s adoption of the Benthamite theory of ﬁction, along
with his experiments with dramatic poetry, opened a new possibility of poetic development.
In Men and Women Browning explores the problematic nature of Mill’s subjective poetics
through an examination of various forms and politics of ﬁction in subjective psychology.
Unlike Romantic subjective minds, the individual psychologies in Browning’s poetry are
fragmented and ﬁctional. In The Ring and the Book Browning explores Victorian cultural
ﬁctions and their coercive power more extensively than he does in Men and Women. In the
poem, various forms of subjective psychology and cultural ﬁctions clash with each other in
a social milieu, creating a discursive ﬁeld. And more importantly, the ways these cultural

ﬁctions are created and thereby they exercise a coercive power on human minds and actions

66

are explored in relation with other important questions in Victorian poetics, such as
epistemology, language, hegemonic ideology, consciousness, and self.

Around a seventeenth-century Roman murder trial Browning brings various
individual consciousnesses together. These individual consciousnesses in turn bring in
various fomts of cultural ﬁction. Institutions and social practices, such as law, religion,
politics, gender, class, and commerce, are interwoven and inscribed in these forms of
consciousness. The concept and formation of the self is not independent of these institutions
and practices. The self is formed through institutions and social practices, and the
institutions and practices are, in turn, created and maintained by the collective working of
various institutionalized selves. In this way, the self, and institutions and social practices,
become interdependent. This chapter will examine the interdependency of the two as
structured in Guido’s sexual politics.

Both Guido’s ﬁrst monologue and Pompilia’s monologue focus on the gender
politics of both seventeenth-century Roman society and Browning’s Victorian society.
Through the contrasting views of the two speakers on the gender relationship within the
institution of marriage, Browning explores the question of ﬁction and its coercive power
in contemporary sexual politics. Guido’s monologue is obviously a strong expression of
male sexual ideologies in seventeenth-century Roman society, which were no less
pervasive in Browning’s Victorian England. In spite of its well-polished rhetoric,
Guido’s monologue reveals that his utopian patriarchal vision is built on “nothingness,” a
“ﬁction”; it lays bare that the clustering ideas of his sexual ideology, such as his “right”

as a husband, his “honor” as a patriarchal authority, are only “culturally” formulated

67

“ﬁctions” whose validity is constantly threatened and subject to examination and scrutiny
throughout the poem.

Though these ﬁctions could not be said to have any referent whatsoever in the
world, they do exercise a coercive power on human thoughts and acts, as illustrated
Guido’s killing of Pompilia when he believes that his “honor”——a sign of his sexual
ideology whose referents he fails to establish in his monologue—is violated by Pomilia.
Fiction is an important element in human epistemology that allows one to open up the
future. However, as Browning makes efforts to show in this poem, ﬁction can also
prevent one from perceiving the real material conditions of social existence, and real
human relations, when it incorporates, or is incorporated into, (or both), the social
relation of domination and power. Guido’s ﬁction of honor, through which Guido claims
privilege as an aristocrat in a classed society and patriarchal authority as a husband in the
institution of marriage, ultimately helps solidify the structure of class distinction and
patriarchal authority.

Pompilia’s monologue is not free from the pressure of the coercive power of
ﬁction, either. However, her monologue also suggests that there can be a way of
breaking away from the restraints and limits that ﬁctions impose on human thoughts and
acts. It is in the Marxist idea of “praxis,” a constitutive activity in process, Browning
suggests, where man works on the world. By constant dialectic re-negotiation between
subject and object, one can free oneself, even if only partially, from the pressure of
ﬁction, ﬁlling the gap that ﬁction might create between the two. Interestingly, the long
poem of The Ring and the Book consists of only two main actions: Pompilia’s escape

from the house of Guido, and Guido’s act of killing of her. While Guido’s act is a

68

desperate extension of his ﬁction of honor, Pompilia’s escape is an act of breaking the
very structure of Guido’s ﬁction, even though the tragic end of her attempt casts doubt on
the possibility of it. Pompilia’s monologue exposes how Guido’s oppressive ﬁction is
formed through various institutional entities that serve as producers of the contemporary
ruling ideologies. Thus, the two middle monologues of the poem provide an important
polemic on the gender politics, which I will discuss in detail hereafter.

The word honor becomes an important catchword through which Browning
examines the question of ﬁction and its coercive power in sexual politics. Honor in
Guido’s ﬁrst monologue forms the very nucleus of his sexual ideology. With reference
to his honor Guido asserts his patriarchal authority as husband in the institution of
marriage. The monologue presents Guido defending his act of killing Pompilia in front
of judges. He justiﬁes his act on the basis of honoris causa. Guido maintains that he had
to kill Pomilia when she hurt his “honor,” and challenged his patriarchal authority by
violating her female code of submission and obedience. The word honor refers to a
ﬁctitious entity, as Bentham discusses in The Theory of Fictions, whose counterpart
cannot be found in the world. Bentham remarks, “every ﬁctitious entity bears some
relation to some real entity, and cannot otherwise be understood than in so far as that
relation is perceived.” 2 Fiction is “the mode of representation,”3 as Bentham aptly
deﬁnes. As a representation, a ﬁction bears some structural relations to the political,
economic, and cultural structures of a society, reﬂecting the values, judgments, and

opinions of those individuals involved in the creation and maintenance of those structures.
A ﬁction is a highly elusive entity. A ﬁction is ﬁctitious in that it does not have

its counterpart in the world, but at the same time it is material since it represents reality.

69

A ﬁction is a mediated reality. What adds to the elusiveness of ﬁction is that it owes its
existence to language. Bentham asserts that “To language, then—to language alone—it
is, that ﬁctitious entities owe their existence; their impossible, yet indispensable
existence.” 4 Language creates the ﬁction and sustains it in its signifying system, and
only within its signifying system, a ﬁction acquires its materiality. Isobel Armstrong
paraphrases Bentham by saying that, “by exhaustive redescribing, metaphorising, and
linguistic substitution you can point to the ﬁctional entity by reference to the real entity
and demonstrate the structural relationship of the ﬁctional to the real entity.” 5 The
structural relationship between the ﬁctional and the real that language establishes is an
ideological representation of material social reality.

In The Ring and the Book Browning exhaustively explores the problem of the
relationship between language and ideology. Critics often point out the modernity of the
poem. The modernity of the poem lies largely in the fact that in his exploration into the
question of ﬁction, Browning ventures into the question of language in human
epistemology, which was one of the central concerns of poetics from the Victorian
onward. Accordingly, the question of language becomes central in the politics of ﬁction.
As Browning illustrates throughout the poem, a ﬁction is created and maintained through
language; language establishes the structural relationship of the ﬁctional to the real
entities. Since the established structural relationship between the ﬁctional and the real is
an ideological representation of material social reality, the poem relates the question of

ﬁction and ideology to the linguistic question of sign and signiﬁed, and to its discursive

practices. Terry Eagleton’s on-going interest in the question of ideology provides many

70

insightﬁil observations on the question of ideology. Denouncing two extremes in the
discussion of ideology, Eagleton draws on one important deﬁnition of ideology:
But there is a third way between thinking of ideology as disembodied ideas on the
one hand, as nothing but a matter of certain behaviour patterns on the other hand.
This is to regard ideology as a discursive practice or semiotic phenomenon. And
this at once emphasizes its materiality (since signs are material entities), and
preserves the sense that it is essentially concerned with meanings. Talk of signs
and discourses is inherently social and practical, whereas terms like
‘consciousness’ are residues of an idealist tradition of thought.6
The View of ideology as a discursive practice is surely one important aspect of The Ring
and the Book that Browning consistently addresses. Eagleton contends, “instead of
holding in empiricist vein that words ‘stand for’ concepts, we now tend to see ‘having a
concept’ as the capacity to use words in particular ways.” 7 The analysis of discursive
practices in the poem, especially how some important key words are used in particular
ways, proves to be a very productive reading of the poem. As a sign, honor does not
have a ﬁxed signiﬁed; its referent constantly shifts from “soul” to “things”, to
“privilege,” etc. Guido’s honor is essentially a ﬁction. Nevertheless, Guido makes
efforts to ﬁx this unstable sign of honor and its ever— shifting referents onto his class
privilege in a classed society and his patriarchal authority in marriage. What
characterizes his monologue is an ideological intervention and control of language in a
public dimension to reinforce the existing social relation of power and domination. In the
ideological control of language certain particular interpretations of a sign always matter

especially. Guido’s own statement attests to this point. Guido overtly reminds his

71

listeners: “There ’s irregular deed: you want no more / Than right interpretation of the
same” (V. 113-4), or again, “And read me right the riddle. Since right must be!” (V.
1239) For Guido, truth is only a matter of interpretation, of how you describe it.
Browning’s double use of the word “right”——right also referring to Guido’s right as a
husband and patriarch in the institution of marriage—implies that Guido’s right as such is
only a culturally formulated ﬁction.

As already mentioned, the word honor forms the nucleus of Guido’s ideological
assertion. Guido makes an elaborate argument to ﬁx the referent of honor onto his noble
blood in a classed society and onto his patriarchal authority in the institution of marriage.
However, the epistemological ground Guido’ language game treads is very unstable.
Guido’s honor does not seem to have any referents independent of the language game he
plays, belying his efforts. From the very beginning of his monologue, Guido’s language
game aims to conﬁrm and re-enforce his ideologically formed self. Guido begins his
monologue with the indication of his class. He insinuatingly complains of the torture
exercised on his body; “Noblemen were exempt, the vulgar thought, / From racking; but,
since law thinks otherwise, / I have been put to the rack: all ’s over now” (V. 12-4).
Soon he adds that a far more serious threat to his self-identity than the bodily harm was
Pompilia’s challenge to his patriarchal authority:

Four years have I been operated on

I’ the soul, do you see-——its sense or tremulous part——

My self—respect, my care for a good name,

Pride in an old one, love of kindred—just

A mother, brothers, sisters, and the like,

That looked up to my face when days were dim,

And fancied they found light there—no one spot,

Foppishly sensitive, but has paid its pang.

That, not this you now oblige me with,

That was the Vigil-torment, if you please! (V. 29-3 8)
Honor does not just form his self-identity but governs the whole of his human
relationships. Honor is not only his “soul” and “self-respect,” but also “light” for his
family members. Honor is not just a personal sign for Guido but it becomes an
interpersonal sign that involves others. Guido extends the signiﬁcation of honor to a
much broader social dimension so that his personal sign of honor becomes an
interpersonal sign for others and the world. For Guido, therefore, the ﬁction of honor
intervenes in the terms he sets for his relations with others and the world. He reminds his
listeners of his noble blood, “I am representative of a great line, / One of the ﬁrst of the
old families / In Arezzo, ancientest of Tuscan towns” (V. 140-2), and claims that he is a
“born ﬁsh with gill and ﬁn / Fit for deep sea” (V. 172-3). Here Guido tries to ﬁnd a
referent for his honor in his noble blood. For Guido, class is what makes him “the real
thing” (IV. 351). Despite the fact that class division is only a culturally formulated social
condition, Guido and others believe it is an a priori condition of human existence. This
notion of honor is so immersed in Guido’s self-identity that he believes his honor can
claim certain rights over the world. The speaker of Half-Rome, who shares Guido’s
ﬁction of honor, clearly articulates it:

Count Guido Franceschini the Arentine

Was head of an old noble house enough,

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Not over-rich, you can’t have everything,

But such a man as riches rub against,

Readily stick to,--one with a right to them

Born in the blood: ’t was in his very brow

Always to knit itself against the world,

Beforehand so, when that world stinted due

Service and suit: the world ducks and defers. (H. 278-86; italics are mine)

Guido claims that, since he is a “Born ﬁsh with gill and ﬁn / Fit for the deep sea” (V.
170), he can impose his right over the world. However Guido ﬁnds that his signiﬁcation
of class clashes with the world. “The world ducks and defers” (II. 280), and Guido ﬁnds
himself “now left ﬂap bare-backed / In slush and sand, a show to crawlers vile / Reared
of the low-tide” (V. 172-5). This clearly indicates that his signiﬁcation of class is only a
subjective ﬁction. And the antithetical relationship between Guido and the world puts the
politics of subjective ﬁction under scrutiny.

Interestingly, Guido’s ﬁction of honor assumes the very institutional form that
Bentham condemns in his theory of ﬁction: the legal institution. Guido’s ﬁction is
fundamentally legal in nature in that it assumes various forms of legal contracts between
Guido and God, and Guido and society, and Guido and Pompilia, etc. As early as the
1830’s, Browning already looked into the question of legal ﬁction. The speaker of
“Johannes Agricola in Meditation” claims that he is one of the elected whose salvation is
predetermined by God:

Ere suns and moons could wax and wane,

Ere stars were thundergirt, or piled

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The heavens, God thought on me his child;
Ordained a life for me, arrayed
Its circmnstances every one
To the minutest; ay, God said
This head this band should rest upon
Thus, ere he fashioned star or sun.
And having thus created me,
Thus rooted me, he bade me grow,
Guiltless for ever, like a tree
That buds and blooms, nor seeks to know
The law by which it prospers so:
But sure that thought and word and deed
All go to swell his love for me,
Me, made because that love had need
Of something irreversibly
Pledged solely its content to be. (13-30)
However, nowhere in the poem can it be found that God also agrees with Agricola.
Nevertheless, Agricola’s subjective world of ﬁction rejects any other possible
relationships between God and, not only himself, but also others:
For as I lie, smiled on, ﬁlll-fed
By unexhausted power to bless,
I gaze below on hell’s ﬁerce bed,

And those its waves of flame oppress,

Swanning in ghastly wretchedness;
Whose life on earth aspired to be
One altar-smoke, so purel—to win
If not love like God’s love for me,
At least to keep his anger in;
And all their striving turned to sin.
Priest, doctor, hermit, monk grown white
With prayer, the broken-hearted nun,
The martyr, the wan acolyte,
The incense-swinging child,--undone
Before God fashioned star or sun! (41-55)
The validity of his private contract with God is maintained only by an aggressive
rejection of other possibilities. In The Ring and the Book Browning explores this politics
of ﬁction with much more depth and complexity. Guido’s monologue is built on a legal
ﬁction, on a certain contract between himself and the world, and also between himself
and Pompilia, which revolves around the word honor. Despite his effort, Guido fails to
prove that his noble blood has any intrinsic value through which he can claim certain
rights over the world. So later he “Admit[s] that honor is a privilege” (V. 460), a
culturally formed condition. Instead of having any intrinsic value, it has only an
exchange value: “privilege worth what? / Why, worth the market-price” (V. 461-2),
which he exchanges with Pompilia’s beauty and wealth. That honor has only an
exchange value is an important critique of Guido’s ﬁction of honor. Just as the exchange

value is culturally formed and is constantly subject to the ﬂuctuation of the markets “now

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up, now down” (V. 462), the poem tries to show, so Guido’s a noble man and a
patriarchal authority is only a ﬁction culturally formulated and, therefore, subject to
reconsideration.

An ideology is overall a uniﬁed view of social reality. Individuals are born into
certain ideologically formed social orders, and these preexisting social orders lead them
to assume certain forms of social relations that are felt by them to be natural ways of life.
By assuming the ideologically invested social roles, individuals live out the ideologies
and, furthermore, re-enforce them. Guido’s ﬁrst monologue clearly illustrates this point.
Guido’s ﬁction of honor forces him to assume various social roles; “The eldest son and
heir and prop o’ the house, / So do you see your duty?” (V, 212-3) Guido plays various
institutional roles. As the head of an ancient noble house he represents the aristocracy in
a classed society; he has served in the Church for thirty years; he defends himself in the
court of law; as a husband, he sustains the institution of marriage; and also he participates
in the market system in the exchange of his honor for Pompilia’s wealth. These various
social roles that Guido assumes are all invested with institutional languages.

One thing the poem extensively addresses is the role of institutions maintaining
certain relations of power and domination. As illustrated in Guido’s case, an individual
consciousness is formed through institutions, and the consciousness formed this way, in
turn, contributes to solidify the validity of those institutions, and to maintain the existing
social order. Guido appropriates and incorporates various institutional discourses; he
identiﬁes honor with, and describes it through various institutions. Despite their different
social functions, institutions are interconnected in creating a pseudo reality, a ﬁction.

They function collectively to maintain the overall hegemonic superstructure of a society.

Working collectively, the various institutions Guido appropriates present a uniﬁed reality
to him, creating his ﬁction of honor. One dangerous aspect of ﬁctions formed in this way
is that they tend to promote the existing social order and forms of human relations.

Guido’s ﬁction of honor needs, for its continued existence, a condition of
timelessness, stasis, and ahistory; it fundamentally lives in the past. It cannot
accommodate the dynamics of the present. As his second monologue clearly illustrates,
Guido’s ﬁction of honor lives in the past. In the monologue Guido expresses his
yearning for a time when his ﬁction of honor was naturally accepted:

Were not we put into a beaten path,

Bid pace the world, we nobles born and bred,

We body of friends with each his scutcheon full

Of old achievement and impunity,--

Taking the laugh of mom and 801’s salute

As forth we fared, pricked on to breathe our steeds

And take equestrian sport over the green

Under the blue, across the crop,--what care?

If we went prancing up hill and down dale,

In and out of the level and the straight,

By the bit of pleasant byeway, where was harm?

Still Sol salutes me and the morning laughs:

I see my grandsire’s hoof-prints,--point the spot

Where he drew rein, slipped saddle, and stabbed knave

For daring throw gibe-much less, stone—from pale:

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Then back, and on, and up with the cavalcade.

Just so wend we, now canter, now converse,

Till, ’mid the jauncing pride and jaunty port,

Something of a sudden jerks at somebody—

A dagger is out, a ﬂashing cut and thrust,

Because I play some prank my grandsire played,

And here I sprawl: where is the company? Gone! (XI. 91-112)
One striking aspect about this passage is the sheer violence that is hidden under a
seemingly pleasant, idyllic veneer: “A dagger is out, a ﬂashing cut and thrust.” At
various points the poem implies the violence by which the ﬁction is sustained. As I will
discuss later, Guido’s killing of Pompilia is an illustration of such violence. The speaker
of Half-Rome shares Guido’s ﬁction of honor of patriarchal authority; his interest in the
wounds inﬂicted on Pompilia’s parents, and his fascination with the weapon used in the
murder, are other signs of the violence through which Guido’s ﬁction is maintained.
As implied in Guido’s rumination on the past, Guido’s ﬁction yearns for a timelessness, a
condition of static continuity, against which the story of his monologue is running.
Herbert Tucker insightfully points out, “Typically Browning’s monologists tell the story
of a yearning alter the condition of lyric, a condition that is itself in turn unimaginable
except as the object of, or pretext for, the yearning that impels the story plotted against
it.” 8 Both of Guido’s monologues yearn for “the condition of lyric.” At the end of his
ﬁrst monologue Guido presents his utopian vision of society, where men can freely
exercise their patriarchal authority with impunity, just as he is about to be punished for

exercising that authority. And in the second monologue, Guido, being aware of the

approach of the Death machine, makes efforts to create a self that he hopes will survive it.
Guido’s ﬁction of honor yearns for a condition of timelessness, but his yearning is
betrayed by history, and his ﬁction clashes with the world.

Irnportantly the contradictions Tucker ﬁnds in Browning’s monologuists’
yearning for the condition of the lyric indicates that a subjective ﬁction, which yearns for
a condition of timelessness, of a stasis, cannot accommodate changing social realities.
Interestingly the various characters Browning creates in his poetry, both historical and
imaginary, are ones whose lives are set at times of great social transition. In “Karshish”
the scientiﬁc mind of Karshish, an Arabic physician, is being challenged by the mystical
case of Lazarus. “Cleon” dramatizes the conﬂict between Hellenism and Hebraism.
Cleon, a Greek intellectual, yearns for something that goes beyond his world of pagan
civilization, however, eventually he refuses to accept the teachings of a “barbarian,” Paul.
In both poems, a subjective world of ﬁction is brought under scrutiny and examination
when it faces a great social transition. So it is in the Ring and the Book.

The dissolution of the strict social stratiﬁcation of which Guido complains
indicates that Guido’s Roman society was undergoing a great social transition, just as
Browning’s England was. The rapid development of the capitalistic mode of production
and the rise of the bourgeoisie were introducing a new kind of social stratiﬁcation into
Guido’s Roman society, as the speaker of Tertium Quid notices:

And social class should choose among, these cits.

Yet there ’5 a latitude: exceptional white

Amid the general brown 0’ the species, lurks

A burgess nearly an aristocrat,

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Legitimately in reach: look out for him!

What banker, merchant, has seen better days,

What second-rate painter a—pushing up,

Poet a-slipping down, shall bid the best

For this young beauty with the thumping purse?

Alack, were it but one of such as these

So like the real thing that they pass for it,

All had gone well! (IV. 341-52)
The speaker hardly conceals his discomfort about the rise of other social classes, about
the fact that other social classes pass for “the real thing.” Under the newly forming
society, Guido’s ﬁction of honor, his belief in the intrinsic value of noble blood and its
rights, faces a serious challenge. Guido claims that he, as a “Born ﬁsh with gill and ﬁn /
Fit for the deep sea,” is entitled to succeed in the world. However, he ﬁnds the world
continues to avoid fulﬁlling its part of the contract:

I waited thirty years, may it please the Court:

Saw meanwhile many a denizen o’ the dung

Hop, skip, jump o’er my shoulder, make him wings

And ﬂy aloft,--succeed, in the usual phrase. (V. 292-5)
His father’s lackey succeeds in the world, Guido complains, while he is ignored by his
father’s chaplain’s nephew who became Chamberlain. After spending thirty years in the
service of the Church in Rome, assuming some minor orders, Guido ﬁnds that his life in
Rome does not sustain his ﬁction. The growing decline of his household in Arezzo

implies that his ﬁction of honor in noble blood has been doomed from the beginning. As

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mentioned above, the poem is set at the time when the capitalistic mode of production
was fast replacing the old society, changing the whole social stratiﬁcation. The inevitable
transition makes it impossible for Guido to sustain his ﬁction of honor. As a residual
ideology under the newly forming society, Guido’s honor still exercises its hegemonic
inﬂuence, yet it is giving way to the emerging principle of a capitalistic society: the
commodity culture. When Guido realizes that his belief in the intrinsic value of honor
and its right over the world cannot be sustained any more, he embraces the emergent
principle of his society as a solution to his dilemma:

On the other hand, bid this buffoonery cease,

Admit that honour is a privilege,

The question follows, privilege worth what?

Why, worth the market-price,--now up, now down,

Just so with this as with all other ware:

Therefore essay the market, sell your name,

Style and condition to who buys them best! (V. 459-65)
Guido admits that the honor of blood does not have any intrinsic value through which he
can claim any rights over the world. Whatever inﬂuence it may still exercise is supported
only by tradition and customs. Thus, to revive his ﬁction of honor, Guido actively
embraces the emerging principle of commodity culture, replacing the ﬁction of intrinsic
value with that of exchange value.

As mentioned before, Guido makes efforts to establish the structural relationship
of his ﬁction to reality. Every ﬁctional entity bears some relation to reality, as Bentham

points out. By exhaustive linguistic reconstruction and rearrangement, one can point to a

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ﬁctional entity by reference to some real entity and demonstrate the structural
relationship of the ﬁctional to the real entity. Through a series of linguistic processes of
deconstruction and construction, Guido’s honor is transformed from a quite abstract
entity into a commodity, something that can be exchanged. At Paolo’s suggestion for
marriage, Guido transforms the use value of honor, which he has believed in hitherto,
into exchange value. He presents honor as something that can be sold and bought; honor
is “worth market-price” (V. 462). So Guido claims, “Mere rank against mere wealth——
some youth beside, / Some beauty too, thrown into the bargain” (V. 475-6), and again,
“Essence of this same bargain, blank and bare, / Being the exchange of quality for
wealth” (V. 501-2). This signiﬁcation of honor as an exchange value is also shared with
Pietro and Violante. They also think honor is something that they bargain for in
exchange with their wealth, as Guido points out, “They hungered in the hearts of them to
gain-- / Incorporation with nobility thus / In word and deed: for that they gave me
wealt ” (V. 514-6).

The marriage and tragic fate of Pompilia is a symbolic representation of
commodity culture in its dehumanizing nature. For both Guido and the Comparinis, the
1 marriage is nothing other than exchange of commodities, wealth for noble blood: “coin
paid, bargain struck and business done” (11. 379). Guido’s gender politics clearly
demonstrate that commodity culture is fundamentally supported and maintained by
institutional discourses, including law and religion, that form the speciﬁc social reality of
power and domination in a society. Various institutional entities are interlocked together,
each serving as a referent for others. About his marriage Guido explains:

Purchase and sale being thus so plain a point,

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How of a certain soul bound up, may-be,

I’ the barter with the body and money-bag?

From the bride’s soul what is it you expect?

Why, loyalty and obedience,--wish and will

To settle and suit her fresh and plastic mind

To the novel, not disadvantageous mould!

Father and mother shall the woman leave,

Cleave to the husband, be it for weal or woe:

There is law: what sets this law aside

In my particular case? (V. 574-84)
The passage draws on some characteristic aspects of Guido’s gender politics. A closer
look into his gender politics reveals how a ﬁction as ideology is created and sustained.
Fiction becomes “real” to one when it is believed to be a part of real forms of human
relationships; it exercises its coercive power when it gives itself a resemblance of reality.
Guido’s central concern in his monologue is to establish the structural relationship of his
ﬁction to what he believes are real human relations. Interestingly, the very institutional
entities to which Guido makes efforts to establish his ﬁction of honor are nothing other
than other forms of ﬁctions ideologically constructed to sustain the existing relations of
power and domination.

As a hegemonic superstructure, an institution is a representation, not a
presentation, of actual human relations; it is a representation by proxy. As mentioned
before, ﬁction is created and maintained by language. One thing Guido’s monologue

clearly demonstrates is that his ﬁction of honor, his politics of gender relationships, does

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not have any referents outside of the various institutional “discourses” that he adopts to
justify it. What is important to note here is the reciprocal relationship between Guido’s
ﬁction of honor and institutional entities. A closer examination of Guido’s monologue
clearly demonstrates that his sexual ideology is sustained by an exhaustive appropriation
of various institutional discourses. Into his own institutional discourse of marriage and
gender relations, Guido brings in other institutional discourses, especially those of
commerce, law, and religion, and he attempts to establish a referent for honor in them.
Guido’s sexual ideology is reinforced by these institutional discourses, and as we shall
see in the examination of legal and religious discourses of the poem, the other
institutional discourses are, in turn, reinforced by Guido’s sexual ideology.
Guido is born into the institutional discourses of his society and lives them out,
and so they form Guido’s consciousness. In turn, Guido fortiﬁes the validity of the
institutions by living them as realities. In other words, they are interdependent. In this
way various institutional discourses in the poem create an elaborate linguistic web where
they collectively function as the hegemonic superstructure of society, reinforcing each
other. This aspect is clearly demonstrated in Guido’s assuming the role of other
institutions. When his patriarchal authority is challenged by Pompilia, Guido casts
himself as the agent of both law and Church, and kills Pompilia. Guido reminds the court
that, “ ’t is law I look. / I began life by hanging to the law, / To the law it is I hang till life
shall end” (V. 1749-51). It is ironic, though, that he, who assumed Law itself in killing
Pompilia, is now under the scrutiny of law:
Do you blame us that we turn Law’s instruments,

Not mere self-seekers,--mind the public weal,

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Nor make the private good our sole concern? (VIII. 882-84)
Aware of this situation, Guido discards law and assumes the role of another important
institution, the Church. “No more of law: a voice beyond the law / Enters my heart, Quis

est pro Donino?”(V. 1548-9) He contends that he was a mere executioner of God’s will in

killing Pompilia:
I did
God’s bidding and man’s duty, breathe free;
Look you to the rest! I heard Himself prescribe,
That great Physician, and dared lance the core
Of the bad ulcer; and the rage abates,
I am myself and whole now. (V. 1702-6)
The connectedness of various institutions is more clearly revealed in the marriage
between Guido and Pompilia. At Paolo’s suggestion Guido decides to marry Pompilia.
Paolo says, “all the Honours in your ﬁst, / Countship, Househeadship,--how have you
misdealt! / Way, in the ﬁrst place, these will marry a man!” (111. 434-6: italics are mine).
The marriage becomes a symbolic representation of the hegemonic superstructure in
which various institutional authorities converge together. By transforming use value into
exchange value, Guido’s ﬁction of honor reinforces the principles of commerce which
are becoming more and more pervasive in Guido’s Roman society and in Browning’s
Victorian society. Various words used to describe the marriage—bargain, coin,
transaction, trafﬁc, market, proﬁt, etc—clearly demonstrate this point.
The marriage also brings in legal discourse. As the title page of The Old Yellow

Book suggests, the story of Guido and Pompilia is fundamentally a legal one that

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highlights the disputes about a husband’s right over his wife. Religious discourse also
forms an important part of Guido’s sexual politics. The whole idea of the marriage was
conceived and conducted through the act of a priest, Paolo. It implies that the Church
helps to engender and promote a male-oriented sexual ideology. The victimization of
women by the Church is repeatedly implied throughout the poem. For instance, the
speaker of Half-Rome quotes Paolo, “Mothers, wives, and maids, / These be the tools
wherewith priests manage men” (IV. 503-4). As one of the inﬂuential institutions of
contemporary Roman society, the Church constantly preys on women. Even
Caponsacchi himself, before he met Pompilia, was preying on women: “diligent at my
post / Where beauty and fashion rule” (VI. 346-7).

As mentioned before, Guido’s patriarchal authority is a part of the collective
networking of various institutional authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical. These
institutional authorities are joined together to reinforce Guido’s patriarchal authority.
When Pompilia ﬁnds her married life in Guido’s house unbearable, she asks the
Archbishop of Arezzo for help:

I sought help, the Archbishop smiled,

Inquiring into privacies of life,

--Said I was blameable—(he stands for God)

Nowise entitled to exemption there.

Then I obeyed,--as surely had obeyed
Were the injunction “Since your husband bids,
“Swallow the burning coal he proffers you!”

But I did wrong, and he gave me wrong advice

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Though he were thrice Archbishop,-—that, I know!—

Now I have got to die and see things clear. (VII. 724-33)
But Pompilia soon realizes that, like the institution of marriage, the Church is just another
institution that demands the submission of women. The two institutions are structurally
joined together in forming a structure of oppression, as clearly indicated when Guido
unknowingly points out that the Church “Whereof indeed was marriage made the type: /
The Church may show her insubordinate, / As marriage her refractory This— / I take
to be the Church’s mode, and mine” (V. 727-9, 742-3). Pompilia deplores, “My heart
died out at the Archbishop’s smile; / --It seemed so stale and worn a way 0’ the world”
(VII. 788-9). After she fails to get the help from the Archbishop, this time she appeals to
the Governor of Arezzo, the secular authority:

To the Governor, as I say,--scarce opened lip

When—the cold cruel snicker close behind—

Guido was on my trace, already there,

Exchanged nod and wink for shrug and smile,

And I—pushed back to him and, for my pains

Paid with... (VH. 1276-81)
Thus, both secular and ecclesiastical authorities are joined in solidifying Guido’s
patriarchal authority, creating a network of signiﬁcation for Guido’s honor.

An important aspect of Guido’s patriarchal society that the poem draws on is that
men control the language in society. According to Dale Spencer, “men control the
language, control the media, control the gatekeeping institutions of publishing and

criticism: they control what Marx would call the ‘means of mental production’, but the

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interests they represent are those of men rather than those of capital.”9 This aspect is
addressed in the poem at some extent. Pompilia’s tragedy is aggravated by her illiteracy.
In The Ring and the Book knowledge of letters becomes an important means of
controlling women. Caponsacchi in his institutionalized church uses his ability to
compose madrigals as a means of preying on rich women. The question of letters
allegedly exchanged between Pompilia and Caponsacchi is another instance of men using
language to oppress women. If Pompilia’s claim that she does not know how to read and
write is true--though it is not clear in the poem whether Pomplia actually wrote the letters,
it is obvious that Guido uses his knowledge of letters to oppress Pompilia. A more
obvious instance is the case of a priest who refuses to write a letter for Pompilia. After
she failed to get help from the Archbishop and the Governor of Arezzo, Pompilia asks a
priest to write a letter to her. parents, but in the end he refuses to do it: “The good ﬁiar/
Promised as much at the moment; but, alack, / Night brings discretion” (III. 1027-9).
Pompilia perceives that the language controlled by men also can simplify and distort the
story of her life:

I am just seventeen years and ﬁve months old,

And, if I lived on day more, three full weeks;

’T is writ in Lucina, all my names

At length, so many names for one poor child,

--Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela

Pompilia Comparini,--laughable!

Also ’t is writ that I was married there

Four years ago: and they will add, I hope,

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When they insert my death, a word or two,»

Omitting all about the mode of death,-- (VII. 1-11; italics are mine)

The ofﬁcial record of her life story does not say why and how she died, how she suffered.
The record would be a male version of her life story—laughable from her point of
view—omitting the story of her tragedy, how Guido’s patriarchal society is responsible
for her premature death.

The Ring and the Book makes an exhaustive investigation into the question of
how a ﬁction is created and maintained. However, through the monologues of Pompilia
and Caponsacchi the poem also addresses the question of how to break away from the
pressures and limits imposed by ideologies. While Guido makes efforts to solidify his
ﬁction of honor as the patriarchal authority in the institution of marriage, by
appropriating various other institutional languages, Pompilia directly challenges Guido’s
terms in describing gender relationship:

So with my husband,--just such a surprise,

Such a mistake, in that relationship!

Everyone says that husbands love their wives,

Guard them and guide them, give them happiness;

’T is duty, law, pleasure, religion: well,

You see how much of this come true in mine!

People indeed would fain have somehow proved

He was no husband: he did not hear,

Or would not wait, and so has killed us all. (VII. 150-8; italics are mine)

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99 6‘

The very words, “duty,” “law, pleasure,” and “religion,” also appear repeatedly
throughout Guido’s monologue. However, Guido uses them to justify his patriarchal
authority in the institution of marriage. Guido believes that it is Pompilia’s duty to
“afford me [him] pleasure” (V.7l9). Female submission is a natural law; since a secular
marriage is a type of the holy marriage between Christ and the Church, his patriarchal
authority in marriage is approved by religion. Pompilia negates Guido’s language of
gender relationship and his sexual politics by deﬁning the period of her marriage to
Guido simply as a dark blank or a terriﬁc dream:

And so an end! Because a blank begins

From when, at the word, she kissed me hard and hot,

And took me back to where my father leaned

Opposite Guido—who stood eyeing him,

As eyes the butcher the cast panting ox

That feels his fate is come, nor struggles more,--

While Paul looked archly on, pricked brow at whiles

And said “Count Guido, take your lawful wife

“Until death part you!”

All since is one blank,

Over and ended; a terriﬁc dream. (VII. 574-85)
The “blank” or a nightmarish “dream” Pompilia has to go through within the institution
of marriage is partly caused by the dehumanizing commodity culture. As mentioned
before, the marriage between Guido and Pompilia is a symbolic representation of

commodity culture, and its dehumanizing nature is exposed. Interestingly, both Guido

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and Pompilia claim that they were passively led into the marriage, which was essentially
nothing other than an exchange of commodity, the name of Franceschini for Pompilia’s
wealth. Hardly understanding the dehumanizing nature of commodity culture, Pompilia
is helplessly led into the marriage by her mother and Paolo:

«Well, I no more saw sense in what she said

Than a lamb does in people clipping wool;

Only lay down and let myself be clipped.

And when next day the cavalier who came—. .

When he proved Guido Franceschini. . ..

And when he took my hand and made a smile——

Why, the uncomfortableness of it all

Seemed hardly more important in the case

That,--when one give you, say, a coin to spend,--

Its newness or its oldness; if the piece

Weigh properly and buy you what you wish,

No matter whether you get grime or glare!

Men take the coin, return you grapes and ﬁgs.

Here, marriage was the coin, a dirty piece

Would purchase me the praise of those I loved:

About what else should I concern myself?

So, hardly knowing what a husband meant,

I supposed this or any man would serve,

No whit the worse for being so uncouth. (VH. 386-412)

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Pompilia’s tragic fate in the institution of marriage clearly illustrates the dehumanizing
nature of commodity culture, which she realizes at the cost of her life. Interestingly both
Guido and Pompilia liken marriage to a coin, the very essence of commodity culture and
the medium of exchange. While Guido actively embraces the principle of commodity
culture by transforming his honor, as his “soul” and “self-respect,” into something to be
sold, Pompilia realizes, much too late, that what really matters in human relationships is
the very soul and self-respect that Guido has discarded. Naively she has assumed that,
just as a coin serves its purpose whether it is clean or dirty, so “any man would serve” in
marriage. When Paolo and Violante strike the deal for the marriage, they leave out the
one key question that both Guido and Pompilia ultimately raise:

“No blush at the avowal you dared buy

“A girl beseems your granddaughter,

“Like ox or ass? Are ﬂesh and blood a ware?

“Are heart and soul a chattel? (V. 426-29)
Answers from both Guido and Pompilia to this question clearly separate them from each
other. From the beginning Guido seems to be quite clear about the nature of their
marriage: “There my husband never used deceit / He never did by speech nor act imply /
“Because of our soul’s yearning Let us become one ﬂesh, being in one soul!” (VII.
772-8) Guido’s ﬁction of honor is so immersed in the commodity culture that he takes it
for granted that, when he makes the bargain, he buys not just Pompilia’s body but her
love, submissiveness, and obedience, as well. He contends:

I ’ll say—the law ’s the law:

With a wife I look to ﬁnd all wifeliness,

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As when I buy, timber and twig, a tree—

I buy the song 0’ the nightingale inside.

Such was the pack: Pompilia from the ﬁrst

Broke it, refused from the beginning day

Either in body or soul to cleave to mine. (V. 603 -9)
Commodity culture reduces a human being to a commodity, as illustrated in Guido’s
treatment of Pompilia. One thing important to note in Guido’s claim to his right as a
husband over Pompilia is that the claim is invested with the form of a legal contract.
Asserting that “the law’s law,” Guido contends that when he exchanged his name for
Pompilia’s wealth, he bought her submission and obedience, too. Here, once again, the
poem raises the very question of the Benthamite legal ﬁction. Not surprisingly, The Ring

9,

and the Book is strewn with various terms of legal nature, such as “obligation, “law,”
“duty,” “pact,” “right,” etc. By examining how these ﬁctional entities exercise a coercive
power on Guido and others, Browning directs the attention of readers to the politics of
various cultural ﬁctions existent in his contemporary society.

Guido’s monologue dramatizes the contemporary cultural ﬁctions in gender
relationships as invested with legal discourse. Guido claims that as a husband he has a
God-given right over Pompilia’s body and soul, “the anterior right, / The God’s-gift to
mankind” (V. 1574-5). He also mentions on many occasions a certain form of legal
contract in which Pompilia is obligated to be submissive both in body and soul. He
claims that it was Pompilia who broke the law that a wife should be submissive to a

husband, “I should obey my spouse like Christ” (VII. 450). But what his monologue

ultimately reveals is that his rights within the institution of marriage are only a customary

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law that a patriarchal society one-sidedly enforces; they have no intrinsic referent as he
claims. One thing that Guido does not mention is that it was not Pompilia herself who
agreed to Guido’s terms of marriage; the marriage between Guido and Pompilia was
negotiated between Violante and Paolo, a proxy of Guido. Pompilia was blindly led into
the marriage, as she notes about Violante’s instructions on the marriage, “When she told
me this, / --Well, I no more saw sense in what she said / Than a lamb does in people
clipping wool. / Only lay down and let myself be clipped” (VII. 385-88). Pompilia has
never agreed to Guido’s terms of marriage. Therefore, Guido’s legal claim on his right in
the marriage is just a ﬁction. Though Guido brings up a number of legal terms to justify
his claim, it is only a culturally formed habit and norm and that a wife should be
submissive to a husband both in body and soul in marriage.

Nevertheless, Guido asserts that “right is right” (V. 1578). What is problematic
here is that only half of mankind, men, enjoy and exercise such right, “the God’ gift to
mankind” (italics are mine). Guido, in his monologue, never raises a doubt about the
validity of such a structure of oppression, but simply exercises it with aggression,
asserting that right is right:

The obligation I incurred was just

To practise my mastery, prove my mastership:--

Pompilia’s duty was—submit herself,

Afford me pleasure, perhaps cure my bile. (V. 716-9)

Guido never seems to understand that the exercise of his patriarchal authority can be an
enormous oppression to Pompilia. In his monologue the structure of oppression is taken

for granted, naturally accepted and further promoted.

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In his other monologue Guido seems to be aware of the problems of the
Oppression that his ﬁction of honor dictates. At the beginning of his second monologue
Guido confesses:

How I see all my folly at a glance!

“ A man requires a woman and a wife”:

There was my folly; I believed the saw.

I knew that just myself concerned myself,

Yet needs must look for what I seemed to lack,

In a woman,—why, the woman ’s in the man!

Fools we are, how we learn things when too late!

Overmuch life turns round my woman-side:

The male and female in me, mixed before,

Settle of a sudden: I ’m my wife out right

In this unmanly appetite for truth,

This careless courage as to consequence,

This instantaneous sight through things and through,

This voluble rhetoric, if you please,—’t is she!

Here you have that Pompilia whom I slew,

Also the folly for which I slew her! (XI. 158-76)

However, it is soon revealed that Guido’s “woman-side” and “this unmanly appetite for
truth” did not lead him to the recognition of the oppressive structure that his ﬁction of
nothingness dictates. The woman-side in him is, it turns out, only meant to induce his

volubility—“This voluble rhetoric, if you please,—’t is she!”—,which the rest of his

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monologue well illustrates. Also, as I will explain in my discussion of the question of
language in the poem, his unmanly appetite for truth is only meant to undermine the
Pope’s religious institution that threatens his life and create a self that will survive his
approaching death. What governs both of his monologues is simply the aggressive
exertion of his ﬁction.

A ﬁction is sustained by aggression, as Browning suggests in “Johannes Agricola
in Meditation.” The title of the poem suggests a lack of action in the poem. God loved
Agricola even before the creation of the world. His salvation is predestined by God, so
there is nothing left for him to do. But nowhere in the poem is it indicated that others,
including God, agree with him. His belief in his predestined salvation is a ﬁction.
Nevertheless, Agricola sustains the ﬁction of his predestined salvation by denying
aggressively other possibilities in the relation between God and himself, and also God
and others. One can ﬁnd a similar pattern of aggression in Guido’s ﬁction of honor.
Throughout his ﬁrst monologue Guido constantly makes efforts to portray himself as a
passive ﬁgure who simply assumes various roles that he claims society prescribes to him:
“You know the course I was free to take? / I took just that which let me serve the Church,
I gave all my labour in body and soul” (V. 1791-3). Even about his marriage to Pompilia
Guido emphasizes his passivity: “Done! He proposed all, I accepted all” (V. 421).
However, what is hidden behind this seeming passivity is his aggressive exertion of his
ﬁction of honor. Throughout his ﬁrst monologue Guido’s ﬁction of honor faces a series
of crises. His self-identity is so immersed in his ﬁction of honor that when his ﬁction of
honor is faced with a crisis, his self-identity is also threatened. Therefore, to maintain a

uniﬁed self-identity he must aggressively exert his ﬁction of honor.

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The crisis in self that Guido experiences in his ﬁrst monologue is fundamentally
caused by the nothingness, the empty referents, of his ﬁction of honor. His early ﬁction
of honor, the intrinsic value of his noble blood, is seriously challenged when his life in
Rome, about three decades long, fails to fulﬁll what he believes the rightful claims of his
noble blood over the world. His ﬁction was losing its ground. For his life to be
something meaningful his blood has to mean something. In desperation, therefore, Guido
translates the intrinsic value of his blood into an exchange value and exchanges the name
of Franceschini with Pompilia’s wealth. Through this marriage his ﬁction of honor is
temporarily restored. However, when Pompilia escapes from his house his ﬁction of
honor once again faces a crisis. Guido’s self-identity is so institutionalized that
Pomplia’s breaking of the patriarchal code of female submission and obedience in the
institution of marriage undermines to a great extent the very ground of his subjectivity.
Then, Guido’s killing of Pompilia is a desperate act to restore his self-identity that has
been temporarily jeopardized by her. When he went back to Arezzo without killing
Pompilia and Caponsacchi at the inn of Castelnuovo where they were found together, he
was laughed at and becomes the text the world preaches on. Only after he killed
Pompilia did he restore his self-identity and feel secure:

I heard Himself prescribe,

That great Physician, and dared lance the core

Of the bad ulcer; and the rage abates,

I am myself and whole now: I prove cured

By the eyes that see, the ears that hear again,

The limbs that have releamed their youthful play,

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The healthy taste of food and feel of clothes

And taking to our common life once more,

All that now urges my defense from death. (V. 1704-12)
Guido needs his ﬁction to sustain a uniﬁed self. Furthermore, his self-identity is so
institutionalized that self and institutions are indivisibly connected in his ﬁction of honor.
Therefore, when institutions are against him, his self faces a crisis. As mentioned above,
Pompilia’s revolt in the institution of marriage threatens Guido’s institutionalized self-
identity. More seriously, though Guido’s ﬁction of honor is built on the institutions of
religion and law to a great extent, Guido ﬁnds that these very institutions have become a
threat to him. Guido claims that God has given him his right over Pompilia’s body and
soul, but the Pope ultimately condemns his body and soul. Guido assumes the institution
of law itself in killing Pompilia, but he now ﬁnds himself defending his life in the court
of law. The very institutions upon which his ﬁction of honor is structured are now
threatening to nullify his institutionalized self-identity. Therefore, to sustain his self-
identity Guido needs to have his ﬁction back:

Absolve, then, me, law’s mere executant!

Protect your own defender,--save me, Sirs!

Give me my life, give me my liberty,

My good name and my civic rights again!

It would be too fond, too complacent play

Into the hands 0’ the devil, should we lose

The game here, I for God: a soldier-bee

That yields his life, exenterate with the stroke

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O’ the sting that saves the hive. I need that life. (V. 2003-11)
Guido desperately needs his old life back to sustain his self—the life in which his ﬁction
of honor and those various social institutions are harmoniously united together in creating
a seamless whole of reality and of his self-identity. So he pleads:

Will the Court of its charity teach poor me

Anxious to learn, of any way i’ the world,

Allowed by custom and convenience, save

This same which, taught from my youth, I trod?

Take me along with you; where was the wrong step?

If what I gave in barter, style and state

All that hangs to Franceschinihood,

Were worthless,--why, society goes to ground,

Its rules are idiot’s-rambling. Honour of birth,--

Of that has no value, cannot buy

Something with value of another sort,

You’ve no reward nor punishment to give

I’ the giving or the taking honour; straight

Your social fabric, pinnacle to base,

Comes down a—clatter like a house of cards. (V. 431-45)
Guido contends that his ﬁction of honor is essential to society. This passage disguised in
the rhetoric of public welfare barely conceals the crisis his subjectivity faces. If his
ﬁction of honor, “all that hangs to F ranceschinihood,” goes to ground, his whole

subjectivity collapses like a house of cards, even before society does.

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From the beginning Guido’s ﬁction of his patriarchal authority in the institution of
marriage is maintained by an aggressive denying of the fact that such authority is only
culturally formed. Asserting that “law is law,” Guido exercises his patriarchal authority
by force:

Oh, if I dared but speak!

Must I speak? I am blamed that I forwent

A way to make my husband’s favour come.

That is true: I was ﬁrm, withstood, refused...

«Women as you are, how can I ﬁnd the words? (VH. 716-20)

Guido’s lovemaking to Pompilia by force is a symbolic representation of the violence
that the patriarchal society exercises. Both his ﬁction of honor and his self-identity
hinged on it are sustained through an aggressive, violent exercise of his claimed legal
rights in the institution of marriage. As mentioned before, Guido’s ﬁction of honor is so
immersed in the institutionalized commodity culture that he believes in, when he
exchanges his name for Pompilia and her wealth, he also buys her submissiveness and
obedience, which Pompilia refuses to give:

This wife of mine was of another mood—

Would not begin the lie that ends with truth,

Nor feign the love that brings real love about.

Wherefore I judged, sentenced and punished her. (XI. 1429-32)

Love in Guido’s ﬁction is based on female submission, not on mutual affection. And he
believes that love in the institution of marriage begins with such female submissiveness:

“lie that ends with truth.” Guido’s institutionalized marriage nulliﬁes “love” in any

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ordinary sense of the word: “love, a little word / Whereof we have not heard one
syllable” (V. 667-8). Pompilia directly challenges Guido’s institutionalized love in
marriage and from the very beginning of their marriage Pompilia refuses Guido’s
loveless lovemaking. This refusal threatens not just Guido’s patriarchal authority in the
institution of marriage but his self-identity itself as well.

At the end of his ﬁrst monologue, Guido presents a utopian vision of patriarchal
society that he wants to share with his son:

And when, in times made better through your brave

Decision now,--might but Utopia be!—

Rome rife with honest women and strong men,

Manners reformed, old habits back once more,

Customs that recognize the standard worth,--

The wholesome household rule in force again,

Husbands once more God’s representative,

Wives like the typical Spouse once more, and Priests

No longer men of Belial, with no aim

At leading silly women captive, but

Of rising to such duties as ours now,--

Then I will set my son at my right-hand

And tell his father’s story to this point,

Adding “The task seemed superhuman, still

“I dared and did it, trusting God and law:

'9,

“And they approved of me: give praise to both

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And if, for answer, he shall st00p to kiss

My hand, and peradventure start thereat,--

I engage to smile... (V. 2037-55)
Guido’s ut0pian vision is in reality a dark vision where the structure of oppression
continues to exist. Furthermore, it is implied in the passage, omen-like, that Guido’s
ﬁction of honor is likely to be inherited to his son: “for answer, he shall stoop to kiss /
My hand.” Pompilia’s breaking out of the house of Guido is important in that she
challenges and actually breaks the very structure of oppression Guido’s patriarchal
society exercises on women.

Guido’s utopian vision of patriarchal society is directly challenged by Pompilia.
She intentionally names her new-bom son after “a new saint to begin anew” (V11. 1030)--
“Gaetano, for a reason” (VII. 30). By naming her son after the newest saint she hopes for
a new social order in which a more equal gender relationship is possible. What needs to
be noted in Pompilia’s monologue is that she actively breaks away from Guido’s house of
oppression. While Guido’s killing of Pompilia purposes to maintain and further promote
the patriarchal structure of oppression, Pompilia’s act denounces the very structure. As
Ann Brady correctly points out, both Pompilia and Caponsacchi discard the role imposed
on them by society.10 After she talks to the Archbishop, Pompilia temporarily follows his
advice to be submissive to Guido—“swallow the burning coal he proffers you” (VII. 730)
——but she soon realizes that it would only extend the oppressive structure that constantly
victimizes women in the institute of maniage. She asserts, “he gave me wrong advice /
Though he were thrice Archbishop,--that, I know!— / Now I have got to die and see

things clear” (VII. 731-2). All along her monologue she describes the period of her

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marriage as “sheer dreaming and impossibility” (VII. 112), and she declares to
Caponsacchi:

And the way to end dream is to break them, stand,

Walk, go: then help me stand, walk and go! (VI. 820-1)
Probably, this passage is the most important message that the poem tries to convey. To
break the structure of oppression is to act. To act helps not only Pompilia but also
Caponsacchi. By participating in Pompilia’s act of escape Caponsacchi is able to free
himself from his alienated labor within the institutionalized church. They both free
themselves from the coercion of the institutions of marriage and of religion, respectively.
It is doubtful, however, whether Browning truly believed it possible to entirely free one
from the pressures and limits that the dominant social relations of power dictate. As
Pompilia insightfully perceives that “So we are made, such difference in minds, / Such
difference too in eyes that see the minds” (VII. 918-9), all human thoughts and acts are
inescapably entrapped in various forms of ﬁction. Thus Pompilia realizes that the
creation of a new social order in which a more equal gender relation is possible is not
allowed in this world:

Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit,

Mere imitation of the inimitable:

In heaven we have the real and true and sure

I is there they neither marry nor are given

In marriage but are as the angels: right,

Oh how right that is, how like Jesus Christ

To say that! Marriage-making for the earth,

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With gold so much,--birth, power, repute so much,

Or beauty, youth so much, in lack of these! (V 1]. 1824-32)
She deplores that such cultural entities as “birth, power, repute, beauty, or youth”
exercise a coercive power on human thoughts and acts. As implied in the fact that
Pompilia’s freedom from Guido is soon ended tragically, the poem seems to suggest that
no human being is free from the pressures and limits that various forms of cultural
ﬁctions or ideologies dictate. Thus, Pompilia says, “I withdraw from earth and man / To

my own soul, compose myself for God” (X. 1769-70).

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‘. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London & New
York: Routledge, 1993), 291.

2. Jeremy Bentham, The Theory of Fictions, inserted in G.K. Ogden, Bentham ’s Theory
of Fictions (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.: 1932), 12.

3. Ibid.,13.
4 .
. Ibid., 15.

. Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, 150.
. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London & New York: Verso, 1991), 194.

7. Ibid., 193-4.

8. Herbert F. Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric,” inserted in
Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1985),
eds. Chaviva Hosek & Patricia Parker, 230.

9. See Michele Barrett, The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (Stanford, Cal.:
Stanford University Press, 1991), 10.

10. See Ann Brady, Pompilia : A Feminist Reading of Robert Browning ’s The Ring and
the Book (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988), 73

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CHAPTER THREE

LEGAL FICTION IN ARCHANGELI AND BOTTINI

As indicated in its title page that the poet persona quotes in full, the central
framework of The Old Yellow Book is about a legal dispute over a husband’s right to
punish an adulterous wife: “A Roman murder-case /. .. / Wherein it is disputed if, and
when, / Husbands may kill adulterous wives, yet ’scape / The customary forfeit” (I. 130).
Also the legal debate over Pompilia’s origin of birth and her status as a rightful heiress to
the Comparinis forms an important part of The Old Yellow Book. Although the legal
issues in The Old Yellow Book are transformed into poetry in The Ring and the Book, the
legal discourse still forms the central framework of the poem. What characterizes the
legal discourse of The Ring and the Book is the Benthmite legal ﬁction, the politics of
nothingness. Bentham’s main concern in his theory of ﬁction was that in the court of law
ﬁctional entities that do not have any counterparts in the world are presented and
accepted as if they were real entities through the power of language, which led to his
strenuous efforts to reform the English legal system. But Bentham’s insights towards the
coercive power of ﬁctional entities on human thoughts and acts are not limited to the
legal world only; the politics of ﬁction can be found in other social and institutional
practices, as Browning shows in The Ring and the Book. The poem extensively explores
the various forms of ﬁction in Victorian society and their politics. In this chapter, I will
look into the question of ﬁction in legal discourse as presented in The Ring and the Book,

especially in the monologues of the two lawyers, Archangeli and Bottini.

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As mentioned before, The Ring and the Book as a whole addresses the question of
the Benthamite ﬁctions built around gender relations in seventeenth century Roman
society. The politics of nothingness treads on the delicate grounds of epistemology and
representation. An important Victorian critic W. Fox, a mentor to young Browning,
noticed the importance of Bentham’s theory of ﬁction. Citing Fox, Isobel Armstrong,
summarizes the critic’s insightful observation on the nature of legal ﬁction:

The writer of the Bentham article is at pains to show, ﬁrst that Bentham

condemned legal language because its eloquence was aesthetic, and secondly that

legal ﬁctions are the products of this aesthetic language. Forms of words are
substituted for arguments and forms of words begin to have an autonomous
life of their own which depends on ‘the music of maxim, absorbing the whole
imagination.1
The most dangerous aspect of this aestheticism, which both Bentham and Fox point out,
is that it conceals nothingness, the empty referent, upon which a legal discourse is
constructed. By weaving a meticulous linguistic web, aestheticism renders the verbal
structure a seamless whole, and this seamlessness often makes it difﬁcult to perceive that
the verbal structure is built on empty referent.

The two lawyers’ monologues dramatize this politics of nothingness. At the
beginning of his speech, Bottini explains his legal argument by making an analogy to
painting. In painting the Holy Family, Bottini contends, a painter should be concerned
with:

Not those fragmentary studied facts

Which answer to the outward frame and ﬂesh—

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Not his nose, not this eyebrow, the other fact

Of man’s staff, women’s stole or infant’s clout,

But 10, a spirit-birth conceived of ﬂesh,

Truth rare and real, not transcripts, fact and false. (IX.102-7)
Bottini’s analogy to painting provides some important clues that help the reader to
understand the politics of legal discourse in the poem. As implied by the analogy of law
to painting, what characterizes the two lawyers’ legal discourse is aestheticism.
Archangeli’s numerous mentioning of his interest in poetry and various poetic allusions
strewn in his monologue, along with his excessive use of Latin, clearly demonstrate how
pervasive his aestheticism is in his legal argument. Another important aspect of legal
ﬁction that Bottini’s analogy reveals is the very delicate, often dangerous,
epistemological ground it treads on. The two lawyers’ legal discourse shows how truth
and knowledge can be problematic, as in other forms of ﬁction in the poem. Bottini
contends that what is more important in painting is not fragmentary facts but the
transformation of these facts into an aesthetic form, “a spirit-birth.” Archangeli also
characterizes the lawyer as “kingly alchemist” who transforms brass into gold. Likewise
Bottini reverses the ordinary differentiation between fact and non-fact. For him, “studied
facts” are “fact and false” while the aesthetic creation or spirit is “truth rare and real.”
Here Bottini brings legal ﬁction onto a very delicate epistemological ground.

The two lawyers build their cases circumstantially: “Thus circumstantially evolve
we facts” (VIII. 139). In their circumstantially constructed ﬁctions, facts do not have
ﬁxed meanings. Therefore, any relation between a sign and its referent is unstable and

becomes problematic. When the referent does not have a ﬁxed meaning but

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circumstantially evolves, the sign also becomes unﬁxed. It can be manipulated without
restrictions by anyone who uses it, as long as it maintains coherence in a given context.
Therefore, what matters in a legal ﬁction is a plausible interpretation, not facts, as
Archangeli says, “Explaining matters, not denying them!” (VIII. 315), and also Bottini,
“Right reading of the riddle” (IX. 670).

The most problematic aspect of the Benthamite legal ﬁction is that “legal ﬁctions
are the product of aesthetic language,” something the two lawyers’ monologues clearly
illustrate. One thing that the readers of their monologues come to be constantly aware of
is that their legal ﬁction is primarily a verbal construction. At the beginning of his
monologue Bottini expresses his desire to “enliven speech with many a ﬂower / Refuses
obstinate to blow in print, / As wildings planted in a prim parterre” (IX. 3-5). And
Archangeli exults after he ﬁnishes his argument for Guido’s defense:

Done! 1’ the rough, i’ the rough! But done! And, lo,

Landed and stranded my monster of defence—

Leviathan into nose whereof

I have put ﬁsh-hook, pierced his jaw with thorn,

And given him to my maidens for a play! (VIII. 1737-42)

As Bentham himself strenuously reminds us, the legal ﬁction is created and sustained by
aesthetic language, and the two lawyers’ monologues reveal the problems of aesthetic
language at its most grotesque. The reason why Bentham condemns this aesthetic
language is, as‘both Fox and Armstrong point out, because in legal ﬁction “forms of
words are substituted for arguments and forms of words begin to have an autonomous

life of their own.” The two monologues are characterized exactly by this problem of

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aesthetic language. The verbal structure of legal discourse, a monster of speech, is a live
one, and it has an autonomous life and often moves according to its own whims. Even
though Archangeli could manage to ﬁsh-hook the monster of speech, “Leviathan,” he can
hardly hold it under control. When the verbal construction is working through its own set
of rules and principles, it no longer becomes a sign of something that it refers to; it
becomes a ﬁction, signifying nothing.

Although the two lawyers’ primary concern similarly lies in creating a seamless
verbal whole, they adopt different aesthetic principles. While Archangeli makes efforts
to tame a monster of speech through Latin, Bottini resorts to the classicism of painting
and to various pagan mythologies. As a critic points out, well over a half of Archangeli’s
whole speech is made up of his experiment with Latin phrases.2 Archangeli says, “Law
is pork substratum of the fry, / Goose-foot and cock’s-comb are Latinity,--/ And in this
case, if circumstance assist, / We ’11 garnish law with idiom, never fear!” (VIII. 152-5)
So Archangeli resorts to Latin at every point in his speech. At the very beginning of his
argument he tries ﬁve different Latin phrases for the ﬁrst three words of his argument,
“Count Guido married.” Understandably, he uses Latin phrases to impress judges with
his knowledge of the language, so to win the case for Guido. However, his use of Latin
goes to a much deeper level. At one point Archangeli asserts:

Better we lost the cause than lacked the gird

At the F isc’s Latin, lost the Judge’s laugh!

It ’s Venturini that decides for style. (VIII. 216-8)

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The use of Latin for Archangeli becomes the governing principle of his monologue. In
spite of the fact that Guido used a knife in killing Pompilia, Archangeli’s being engrossed
with Latin compels him to try other weapons that would produce better Latin phrases:

Bottini is a beast, one barbarous:

Look out for him when he attempts to say

“Armed with pistol, Guido followed her!”

Will not I be beforehand with my F isc,

Cut away phrase by phrase from underfoot!

Guido Pompliam—Guido thus his wife

Following with igneous engine, shall I have?

Armis munitus igneis persequens—

Arma sulphurea gestans, sulphury arms,

Or, might one style a pistol—popping piece?

Armatus breviori sclopulo?

We ’11 let him have been armed so, though it make

Somewhat against us: I had thought to own——

Provided with a simple travelling-sword,

Ense solummodo viatorio

Instructus: but we ’1] grant the pistol here. (VIH. 200-15)
Here in Archangeli’s legal ﬁction, as Fox criticizes, “forms of words are substituted for
arguments,” concealing the nothingness of it. What barely keeps Archangeli from
completely being lost in Latin is the dire reality that he has to compose a legal defense for

Guido.

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While Latin becomes the dominant aesthetic language in Archangeli’s legal
ﬁction, Bottini’s monologue is characterized by classicism and pagan mythology.
Throughout his monologue Bottini makes numerous pagan references, including Phryne,
Hebe, Hymen, Cupid, Vulcan, Hesione, Jove, Hercules, Myrtillus, Amaryllis, Ulysses,
Phoebus, and Icarus, and he compares Pompilia to Dido, Venus, Helen, Lucretia, etc.
Like Archangeli, Bottini attempts to impress his judges with his broad knowledge of
classical literature. But soon, ironically, his exorbitant classicism reveals that his legal
argument is based on empty referents. At one point Bottini himself becomes aware of
the irrelevance of his pagan references and some possible dangers of using them in front
of Christian judges:

If I entangle me

With my similitudes,--if wax wings melt,

And earthward down I drop, not mine the fault:

Blame your beneﬁcence, 0 Court, 0 sun,

Whereof the beamy smile affects my ﬂight!

What matter, so Pompilia’s fame revive

I’ the warmth that proves the bane of Icarus? (IX. 576-82)

The two lawyers’ monologue show that both aesthetic ﬁction and aesthetic language—
they are two sides of a coin-—are joined together in the construction of a seamless legal
discourse. The question of making a seamless whole governs their entire monologues.
Bottini deplores the fact that his chance to present a perfect legal argument was robbed
from him by Pompilia’s confession of her affair with Caponsacchi, which was brieﬂy

mentioned in Tertium Quid. Bottini realizes that Pompilia’s lingering on life, rather than

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an instant death, and her confession of the affair contradicts the legal ﬁction that he is
trying to build:

But me, forsooth—as, in the very act

Of both confession and (what followed close)

Subsequent talk, chatter and gossipry,

Babble to sympathizing he and she

Whoever chose besiege her dying bed,«

As this were found at variance with my tale,

Falsiﬁed all I have adduced for truth,

Admitted not one peccadillo here,

Pretended to perfection, ﬁrst and last,

0’ the whole procedure—perfect in the end,

Perfect i’ the means, perfect in everything,

Leaving a lawyer nothing to excuse,

«A ﬂight, impossible to Adamic ﬂesh,

Just to be fancied, scarcely to be wished,

And, anyhow, unpleadable in court! (IX. 1430-45)
This clearly illustrates how a legal ﬁction is built on nothingness, an empty referent. A
legal ﬁction can survive only in idealistic dimensions. Pompilia’s lingering life and her
interaction with other people contradict the aesthetic whole that Bottini wishes to create.
As Bottini’s monologue testiﬁes, a legal ﬁction is not willing to or is incompetent to

accommodate the dynamics of real material human relations.

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Archangeli’s monologue exposes the problem of aesthetic ﬁction in an even more
grotesque state than that of Bottini’s. Like Bottini, Archangeli’s primary concern is to
create a seamless, aesthetic whole of a legal argument. To his great regret, Archangeli
realizes that the confession of murder by one of Guido’s accomplices takes away his
chance to create the seamless legal argument he has been dreaming of:

So, doubtless, had I needed argue here

But for the full confession round and sound!

Thus might you wrong some kingly alchemist,«

Whose concern should not be with showing brass

Transmuted into gold, but triumphing,

Rather, about his gold changed out of brass,

Not vulgarly to the mere sight and touch,

But in idea, the spiritual display,

The apparition buoyed by winged words

Hovering above its birth-place in the brain,«

Thus would you wrong this excellent personage (VIH. 383-93)

The analogy of a kingly alchemist betrays the politics of legal ﬁction in its grotesque
state. Archangeli contends that legal argument should not be concerned with showing
how brass turns into gold but with triumphing about the aesthetic artifact of gold. This
indicates an undeniable sign of reiﬁcation in legal discourse. It exposes the complete
detachment of legal discourse from the real material conditions upon which it is based.
Just as Bottini’s legal ﬁction values “a spirit-birth” more than “fragmentary studied

facts,” so Archangeli’s is more concerned with “idea and spiritual display” than it is with

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“sight and touch,” its material base. Archangeli’s “apparition buoyed by winged words”
is nothing other than an aesthetic ﬁction conjured by that power of language, one
completely detached from its material base.

The foremost reason why both Bentham and Fox condemn legal ﬁction is that it is
based on nothingness. John Hill Burton notes that “a Fiction of law may be deﬁned in
general as saying something exists which does not exist, and acting as if it exist; or vice
versa.” 3 The two lawyers’ aesthetic ﬁction in legal discourse is dangerous because it
conceals the very nothingness of its content. In his criticism of legal ﬁction Fox goes
much deeper than Bentham. While Bentham “actually justiﬁes legal ﬁctions
aesthetically on the grounds of their internal coherence, though he condemns its
nothingness,” Fox totally denounces them as the mere “construction of an independent

system artiﬁcially deduced out of its own technical principles etc.”4

The replacement of
material contents with purely technical principles in legal ﬁction—Archangeli’s Latin
and Bottini’s classicism—or, the substitution of forms of words for arguments, as the
critic puts it, creates an idealistic system of signiﬁcation independent of a material base,
such as Archangeli’s “the apparition buoyed by winged words.” Fox’s criticism of
aesthetic ﬁction is important because he reminds us that “ﬁctions intervene in the world
however aesthetic they may seem,”5 as Archangeli’s aesthetic legal ﬁction proves, when
it actually propagates Guido’s oppressive patriarchy.

Bentham’s original attack on ﬁctional entities was against the English legal
system where ﬁctions are presented and accepted as if they were real entities. However,

Bentham’s insights into legal ﬁction go far beyond the courts of law. As Browning

exhaustively addresses in The Ring and the Book, the ﬁction of nothingness and its

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coercive power on human thoughts and acts can be found in various social and
institutional practices. Furthermore, a ﬁction in any given social or institutional practice
is indissoluably interconnected with other social or institutional ﬁctions, as the tvm
lawyers’ monologues illustrate. This problematic nature of the politics of nothingness is
clearly revealed when Archangeli builds his defense around a ﬁctional entity, Guido’s
honor. Archangeli bases his defense on causa honoris: “Honoris causa; thus we make
our stand” (VIII. 425), and “we did all and some, / Little and much, adjunct and principal,
/ Causa honoris ”(VIII. 1475-8). Archangeli, like Guido, claims that Guido had to kill
Pompilia because his honor was injured by her:

So, Vindicatio,«here begins the speech!—

Honoris causa; thus we make our stand:

Honour in us had injury, we prove

It is enough, authorities declare,

If the result, the deed in question now,

Be caused by conﬁdence that injury

Is veritable and no ﬁgment: since,

What, though proved fancy afterward, seemed fact

At the time, they argue shall excuse result.

That which we do, persuaded of good cause

For what we do, hold justiﬁablel— . (VIII. 424-36)
In The Ring and the Book, the word honor becomes one of the key words by which
Browning investigates the politics of ﬁction. Honor in this poem is a symbol of

oppressive patriarchal authorities. When Archangeli bases his defense on Guido’s

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injured honor, one important thing that he leaves out, as Guido also does in his
monologue, is the evidence of the presence of honor in the world as a real entity, and of
any harm done to it. Contrary to Guido’s claim on its intrinsic value, his honor is a
ﬁction in the sense that it is a culturally formed entity whose existence is maintained only
by customs and habits. Nevertheless, honor exerts inﬂuence on the thoughts and actions
of Guido and others; it leads Guido to kill Pompilia when he believes it was violated.
Advocates of Guido claim that honor is God’s gift to man and they cite various
ecclesiastical and secular authorities to support their claim, and in doing so they once
again betray that honor is just a cultural ﬁction maintained only through tradition and
customs. One thing that Browning makes efforts to show in the poem is that the referents
of honor cannot be found anywhere else than in the very cultural structures that enforce
such ﬁctional entities as honor, as part of their hegemonic domination and control.
Throughout Archangeli’s monologue, honor is associated with different
institutional entities. Like Guido, Archangeli makes efforts to establish the referent of
honor in various institutional entities, especially law, religion, and gender relations, so
that a multiplicity of relationships may solidify the validity of honor. Thus, honor in his
monologue is in ﬂux, constantly changing its referent. Honor is “A gift of God” (459),
“honour proved the life and soul of us” (477), “Honour is man’s supreme good” (585), or
“the thing we lost, we found” (1050). Each deﬁnition of honor bears some structural
relation to existing institutional entities. However, each institutional entity to which
Archangeli resorts to prove the presence of honor does not provide a single uniﬁed
referent of honor. This creates a very interesting situation in his monologue. On the one

hand, when a sign does not have a ﬁxed referent, its meaning can be manipulated and

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controlled for a certain purpose in a given context. So Archangeli constantly changes the
meaning of honor to prove Guido’s injured honor. On the other hand, when a sign does
not have any ﬁxed meaning, it does not prOperly serve as a sign at all. Realizing this,
Archangeli makes efforts, with little success, to ﬁx the meaning of honor onto a single
referent. Thus Archangeli’s monologue alternates between a constructive and a
deconstructive legal discourse. The unstableness of the sign of “honor” creates some
tension in his monologue and this tension, in turn, exposes the politics of ﬁction. I will
now discuss this aspect in some detail.

Archangeli begins his defense of Guido’s honor by describing it as a natural giﬁ
of God:

Therefore we shall demonstrate ﬁrst of all

That Honour is a gift of God to man

Precious beyond compare: which natural sense

Of human rectitude and purity,«

Which white, man’s soul is born with,--brooks no touch:

Therefore, the sensitivest spot of all,

Wounded by any warfare breathed from black,

Is,«honour within honour, like the eye

Centred i’ the ball,«the honour of our wife. (VIII. 45 8-66)
Here Archangeli claims that honor is something that God has given to man. But given to
men or to all human beings? Obviously women are not given such a gift from God;
honor is what men’s souls are born with. A wife’s honor, as the honor within man’s

honor, should exist and be preserved intact for the sake of husband. This claim obviously

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reﬂects the male-dominant gender ideology that was prevalent both in Guido’s Roman
society and Browning’s Victorian society. One thing that Browning in this poem makes
efforts to show is that what is perceived as the proper relation between husband and wife
in the institution of marriage is only culturally formed and sustained by an aggressive
exertion of male sexual ideology. In spite of his assertive claim, Archangeli fails to
establish the referent of Guido’s honor outside the institutional entities, particularly of
religion and marriage, where the existing patriarchal authorities are endorsed. Here, a
ﬁction is justiﬁed by other ﬁctions, not by real material life conditions. As discussed in
the previous chapter, Guido’s ﬁction of honor cannot accommodate the dynamics of
material life process. His initial claim for the intrinsic value of his noble blood and for
his rights over the world is not sustained when his efforts of many years to carve out his
name of Franceschini in Rome fails to bear fruit. And his later claim for the exchange
value of his noble blood to be worth a good marriage for himself is also shattered when
Pompilia refuses to be submissive and challenges his patriarchal authority. His ﬁction of
honor can be sustained only in a static world of status quo that attempts to maintain the
existing relations of domination and power.

Some of those things that make Guido’s patriarchal society “natural” to Guido
and Archangeli are tradition and custom. Archangeli insightfully observes:

Civilization bows to decency,

The acknowledged use and wont: ’t is manners,«mind

But yet imperative law,«which make the man.

Thus do we pay the proper compliment

To rank, and that society of Rome,

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Hath so obliged us by its interest,
Taken our client’s part instinctively,
As unaware defending it own cause. (VIII. 742-49)
Archangeli asserts that “the acknowledged use and wont” makes man. Here he makes a
very insightful observation regarding how individual subjectivity is formed through
various forms of hegemonic inﬁltration. Traditions and habituated customs subtly lead
one to accept certain ideological structures as “natural” and make him live them out. The
pressures and limits that traditions and customs exert can be “mild” and often unnoticed,
compared to any rigid, forceful intervention from the dominant structures of power in a
society. Yet their inﬂuence is as deep as any ideological dictates; thus, Archangeli says
that it is “yet imperative law.”
Tradition plays an important role in sustaining the various ﬁctions that the poem
addresses. Raymond Williams points out that tradition is much more than “the surviving
past.” He explains:
For tradition is in practice the most evident expression of the dominant and
hegemonic pressures and limits. It is always more than an inert historicized
segment; indeed it is the most powerful practical means of incorporation. What
we have to see is not just a ‘tradition’ but a selective tradition: an intentionally
selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then
powerﬁilly operative in the process of social and cultural deﬁnition and
identiﬁcation... From a whole possible area of past and present, in a particular
culture, certain meanings and practices are selected for emphasis and certain other

meanings and practices are neglected or excluded. Yet, within a particular

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hegemony, and as one of its decisive processes, this selection is presented and
usually successfully passed off as ‘tradition’, ‘the signiﬁcant past’. What has then
to be said about any tradition is that it is in this sense an aspect of contemporary
social and cultural organization, in the interest of the dominance of a speciﬁc
class. It is a version of the past which is intended to connect with and ratify the
present. What it offers in practice is a sense of predisposed continuity.6
Tradition is an integral part of the ruling ideologies and the hegemonic control
and intervention. The most important aspect of tradition is that it is always a process of
selecting the past to shape the present. “From a whole possible area of past and present
certain meanings and practices” that will reinforce, or can be incorporated into, the
existing relations of domination and power are “selected.” Archangeli’s legal discourse
exposes this very aspect of hegemonic intervention. Asking “What dictum doth Society
lay down / I ’ the case of one who hath a faithless wife? / Wherewithal should the husband
cleanse his way? / Be patient and forgive?” (VIII. 750-53), Archangeli searches past texts,
tales and anecdotes. To justify Guido’s act of killing Pompilia, Archangeli searches out
examples of husband’s revenged honor. Not only Thoedoric’s household law and
Scaliger’s book of Table-talk, but also he ﬁnds:
Therefore set forth at large the ancient law!
Superabundant the examples be
To pick and choose ﬁom. The Athenian Code,
Solon ’s, the name is serviceable,«then,
The Laws of the Twelve Tables, that ﬁfteenth,«

“Romulus” likewise rolls out round and large;

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The Julian; the Cornelian; Gracchus’ Law:

So old a chime, the bells ring of themselves!

Speriti can set the going if be please. (VIII. 568-576)

From the vast records of the past, Archangeli selects and cites those legal authorities that
will reinforce Guido’s sexual ﬁction of a husband’s honor. And this selective tradition
helps re-enforce the existing relation of power and domination by naturalizing Guido’s
honor as a husband in the existing gender relations of male domination and female
subjection.

In his discussion of tradition Williams observes that “the effective establishment
of a selective tradition can be said to depend on identiﬁable institutions,”7 though not
entirely on them. As one of the most substantial and material instances of the
superstructural formation of a society, the institution functions as the principal means
through which the ruling ideologies are disseminated, and for this reason it serves the
interest of the dominant social classes. The Church in The Ring and the Book is a good
example of such an institution. After he cites some secular authorities for avenging his
honor, Archangeli next tries to establish the referent of Guido’s honor in ecclesiastical
tradition:

All that was long ago declared as law

By the natural revelation, stands conﬁrmed

By Apostle and Evangelist and Saint,--

To-wit—that Honour is man’s supreme good. (VIII. 582-5)

Archangeli brings out various ﬁgures from religious texts that resemble the image of

Guido, including Saint Jerome, Solomon in Proverbs, Saint Bernard in Epistle to his

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nephew, Saint Paul, etc. And he asserts, “Was ever portrait limned so like the life? / / -
That of Samson in the Sacred Text / That ’s not so much the portrait as the man! /
Samson in Gaza was the antetype of / Guido at Rome: observe the Nazarite!” (VIII. 637-
43). In this way, the various texts, both secular and ecclesiastic, serve as the referents of
Archangeli’s legal discourse. Law, religion, marriage and tradition form a web of
signiﬁcation for Guido’s injured honor. In this web of signiﬁcation each ﬁctional entity
serves as the referent for the other, and in their network of cross-reference each ﬁction
reinforces, and, in turn, is reinforced by, the other ﬁction.

In spite of this interdependency, each institutional discourse competes with
another for dominance, subverting the others. Though Archangeli’s legal ﬁction is
ratiﬁed by other institutional ﬁctions, it is, at the same time, subverted by them.
Archangeli seeks to justify Guido’s killing from various authorities, both secular and
ecclesiastical, claiming that a primitive revenge to any harm done to man’s honor is
man’s natural law. But he soon realizes that these authorities are at odds with one anther.
Though different institutional entities are interlocked to validate certain meanings and
practices, no single institutional authority functions as the absolute dispenser of truth.
Thus, about the proper punishment of an adulterous wife, Archangeli ﬁnds highly
contradictory evidence:

“The doom of the adulterous wife was death,

Stoning by Moses’ law. “Nay, stone her not,

“Put her away!” next legislates our Lord;

And last of all, “Nor yet divorce a wife”

Ordains the Church, “she typiﬁes ourself,

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“The Bride not fault shall cause to fall from Christ.”

«Where do I ﬁnd my proper punishment

For my adulterous wife, I humbly ask

Of my infallible Pope,--who now remits

Even the divorce allowed by Christ in lieu

Of lapidation Moses licensed me?

The Gospel checks the Law which throws the stone,

The Church tears the divorce-bill Gospel grants:

Shall wives sin and enjoy impunity? (VIII. 710-17)
The killing of Pompilia, which Archangeli ﬁnds that both natural and Mosaic laws justify,
is condemned by Christ’s Gospel. The Pope renounces Guido’s request for divorce from
an adulterous wife, which the Gospel allows. This contradiction in the various authorities
which Archangeli draws on greatly destabilizes the sign of honor his legal ﬁction
attempts to establish. Since Guido’s honor does not have its referent outside institutional
discourses, the contradiction among institutional discourses seriously threatens
Arcangeli’s legal argument. Not only does it spoil his dream of creating a seamless legal
argument, further, it exposes that his legal discourse is based on empty referents. Thus
Archangeli’s legal ﬁction needs to have one undivided voice from Law, Gospel, and the
Church:

What proﬁt me the fulness of the days,

The ﬁnal dispensation, I demand,

“But who hath barred thee primitive revenge,

“Which, like ﬁre damped and dammed up, burns more ﬁerce?

125

“Use thy natural privilege of man. . ..

Law, Gospel and the Church,«ﬁ'om these we leap

To the very last revealment, easy rule

Beﬁtting the well-bom and thorough-bred

O’ the happy day we live in, not the dark

0’ the early rude and acom-eating race. (VIH. 718-35)

However, contrary to his wish, the various authorities that his legal ﬁction attempts to
incorporate, actually undermine the congruity of his ﬁction. Characteristically, his entire
monologue is divided between two incompatible discursive tendencies. On the one hand,
he continuously brings in various institutional authorities to prove Guido’s injured honor.
However, the more he searches for them, the more subverting and contradictory he ﬁnds
these institutional entities are. Thus Archangeli’s legal discourse ﬂuctuates between a
constructive and a deconstructive process in establishing the referent of Guido’s honor,
and this double-edged process reveals many of the gaps and contradictions in his legal
ﬁction that aims to be a seamless whole.

The double-edged process of construction and deconstruction in legal discourse is
also found in Bottini’s monologue. As mentioned before, the legal discourse in the poem
is characterized by aesthetic ﬁction and aesthetic language. Bottini’s legal ﬁction tries to
depict Pompilia as a saint to make his defense of Pompilia an aesthetically seamless
whole: “paint Pompilia .../ A faultless nature in a ﬂawless form” (1X. 192-5). He
continues:

First, infancy, pellucid as a pearl;

Then childhood—«stone which, dew-drop a the ﬁrst,

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(An old conjecture) sucks, by dint of gaze,

Blue from the sky and turns to sapphire so:

Yet both these gems eclipsed by, last and best,

Womanliness and wifehood opaline,

Its milk-while pallor,--chastity,«sufﬁlsed

With here and there a tint and hint of ﬂame,--

Desire,«the lapidary loves toe ﬁnd.

Such jewels bind conspicuously they brow,

Pompilia, infant, child, maid, woman, wife—-

Crown the ideal in our earth at last! (IX. 199-210)
However, this lyrical depiction of Pompilia does not last long. Soon Bottini realizes that
his legal discourse is at odds with his misogynic notion of woman that compels him to
believe Pompilia’s guilt. Thus Bottini’s sexual ideology constantly subverts his legal
discourse:

Must I speak my mind?

Far better had Pompilia died 0’ the spot

Than found a tongue to wag and shame the law,

Shame most of all herself,«could ﬁiendship fail

And advocacy lie less on the alert:

But no, they shall protect her to the end! (IX. 1450-55)
Bottini constantly suffers from a divided«legal vs. sexual--consciousness regarding
Pompilia. On the one hand, his legal discourse makes an effort to establish Pompilia’s

innocence. On the other hand, he can hardly suppress his belief in Pompilia’s improper

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behavior within the institution of marriage. “Prepare to ﬁnd that, lamb-like, she too
frisks— / O’ the weaker sex, my lords, the weaker sex” (IX. 224-5), he continues, “what
is beauty’s sure concomitant, / Nay, intimate essential character, / But melting wiles,
deliciousest deceits, / the whole redoubted arrnoury of love?” (IX. 229-32). Therefore,
Bottini unconsciously brings into his legal argument various subtexts from Archangeli’s

,9 66

monologue through his frequent use of “if's. What if the adversary’s charge be just”
(IX. 258), “What if the charge be true?” (IX. 301), “Grant the tale / O’ husband, which is
false, were proved and true” (IX. 443-4), or “Were the ﬁction fact” (IX. 653). Bottini’s
monologue constantly sways between two opposites. In this way, like Archangeli’s
monologue, Bottini’s legal discourse continues a double-edged process of construction
and deconstruction, exposing gaps and contradictions in a seemingly seamless whole.

As mentioned before, the two lawyers’ monologues in The Ring and the Book
address the Benthamite question of legal ﬁction. The monologues are fundamentally
characterized by their aesthetic language and principles. As both Bentham and Fox point
out, this aestheticism in legal discourse is dangerous because it presents certain social
meanings and practices in an aesthetic whole and this seamless wholeness often conceals
this ﬁctionality. Archangeli’s legal aestheticism on Guido’s causa honoris, naturalizes
Guido’s ﬁction of honor in the institution of marriage; aestheticism in legal discourse
helps reinforce the existing social relation of domination and power. Nevertheless, every
ideological exertion leaves certain gaps and contradictions in it, as both of the lawyers’

monologues illustrate. These gaps and contradictions ultimately reveal the ﬁctionality of

it, which opens up the possibility of a new future.

128

'. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London & New
York: Routledge, 1993), 149.

2 . Mary Sullivan, Browning ’s Voices in The Ring and the Book: A Study of Method and
Meaning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 106.

3. See C. K. Ogden, Bentham '3 Theory of Fictions (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.:
1932), xvii. -

4. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London & New
York: Routledge, 1993), 150.

5.1bid., 149-50.

6. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford & New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 115.

7. Ibid.,117.

129

CHAPTER FOUR

RELIGIOUS FICTION IN THE POPE AND CAPONSACCHI

In the monologues of the P0pe and Canon Caponsacchi, Browning explores the
politics of nothingness in another major Victorian cultural ﬁction: ﬁction in religious
discourse. At the beginning of his monologue, sitting in front of all the documents
concerning Guido’s murder trial, the Pope asserts his certainty and belief in Guido’s
guilt: “The case is over, judgment at an end, / And all things done now and irrevocable: /
A mere dead man is Franceschini here” (X. 208-10). The rest of his monologue, however,
which stretches over two thousand lines, substantially undermines his belief and assertion.
Contrary to his claim, for the Pope, like other monologuists in the poem, it is not easy to
ﬁnd a truth about the murder case from what he calls “this multifarious mass of words
and deeds” (X. 262). Thus his monologue reveals certain tensions and contradictions,
and the nature of these tensions and contractions are quite problematic.

The Pope’s monologue explores the conﬂicts between “transcendental a priori
knowledge and empirical a posteriori knowledge,” as Armstrong notes.1 In the post-
Kantian condition man does not know the world as it is, but the world is known to him as
he knows it. Knowledge is representation, not the thing in itself, and the thing in itself is
“unknowable.” The post-Kantian condition is bifurcated into transcendental a priori
knowledge and empirical a posteriori knowledge. The religious discourse of the Pope
explores the question of the relationship between the two. As the Pope’s monologue
clearly demonstrates, transcendent a priori knowledge, though its referent cannot be

established in the real world, exercises inﬂuence on human thoughts and actions. Thus

130

his religious discourse once again raises the question of Benthamite ﬁction and its
coercive power.

Like other monologues, the Pope’s monologue exposes the politics of nothingness.
Kant’s notion of the transcendental a priori may, at ﬁrst sight, seem to be an anti-
idealistic philosophy in that he assumes something that exists outside of man, a “thing-in-
itself.” However, this thing-in-itself, unlike the Marxist sense of the term which means a
material base, is a purely idealistic conceptual entity, and it is “unknowable.” It is a
ﬁction whose referent cannot be found in the world. The Pope’s monologue addresses
this question of the a priori in religion.

The Pope’s notion of God as a transcendental a priori is a Benthamite ﬁction in
the sense that he cannot establish its referent in this world. Nevertheless, the Pope’s God
deeply governs his thoughts and actions; based on it, the Pope condemns Guido. At the
same time, his notion of God as a transcendental a priori is constantly subverted and
threatened by other voices that regard God as empirical a posteriori. So his monologue
exposes some tensions and contradictions between God as product and God as process.
However, the conﬂict between God as a transcendental a priori and God as an empirical a
posteriori is different from the dialectic tension between subject and object in Marxist
thinking. Since the Kantian notion of thing-in-itself«the transcendental a priori«is not
material base as in the Marxist sense of the term, which is knowable rather than
unknowable, the tension created by the conﬂicts between God as transcendental a priori
and God as empirical a posteriori does not become a step towards dialectic interaction

between subject and object. Rather, the tension remains in the realm of ﬁction.

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As already mentioned, the question of knowledge and truth becomes a central
issue in the religious ﬁction of the Pope. The often quoted passage from the Pope’s
monologue clearly sums up the epistemological problems he faces:

Truth, nowhere, lies yet everywhere in these——

Not absolutely in a portion, yet

Evolvible ﬁom the whole: evolved at last

Painfully, held tenaciously by me. (X. 229-32)

The Pope is sitting in front of all the documents related to Guido’s trial for murder,
“pleadings and counter-pleading, ﬁgure of facts / Besides fact’s self” (X. 216-7). Each
document contains a certain portion of truth about the case, but truth does not reside there
in absolute condition. The Pope is sure of Guido’s guilt. By examining all the materials
collectively, certainly the Pope is in a better position to know the truth than are other
characters in the poem. However, this does not mean that he gets to the whole truth
about the case, since he also brings his own ideologically limited conditions into his labor
on the case. As illustrated by the various contradictions his monologue reveals when it is
juxtaposed with other monologues in the poem, his monologue is just another version of
the case, “held tenaciously by me[him],” rather than the ultimate truth. In The Ring and
the Book, truth and knowledge are an elusive entity. This aspect of the poem is embodied
in the structure of the poem itself. The monologues in the poem are the products of
different individual consciousnesses, and they are collected and narrated by a poet
persona and presented for readers to examine, and the whole poem was created by one
individual consciousness, Browning the poet himself. That the reader also does not get

the whole truth is implied in the structure of poem itself. So the poem makes truth and

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knowledge ever elusive. What Browning suggests through this structure of the poem is
the necessity of a dialectic process in human epistemology. Knowledge and truth do not
exist as ﬁnal products but only within the dialectic process of human labor in the world.
Thus Slinn correctly points out, “Browning emphasises not truth as product, but truth as
process, truth in the making, and in that process truth is both subverted by language and
produced by it.”2

The Pope’s monologue brings up the questions of ﬁction, representation, post-
Kantian conditions, and ideology together. The Pope bases his judgment of the case upon
his knowledge of God as transcendental a priori. However this position is constantly
undermined by the possibility of God as empirical a posteriori. Since the Pope’s belief in
the transcendental God cannot be empirically experienced, his monologue, as does
Caponsacchi’s, raises the question of Benthamite ﬁction in a religious discourse. His
monologue is pervaded with tension and contradiction created by the two possibilities of
God. However, as mentioned before, the tension and contradiction in his religious
discourse do not seem to lead to a dialectic process between subject and object, towards
understanding of the real material base of human existence; they remain in the realm of
the ﬁction of God as transcendental a priori. It seems that the Pope’s knowledge of God
as transcendental a priori is something thrust upon him as a part of hegemonic and
ideological control and intervention.

The Pope bases his decision to condemn Guido on his Christian belief. He is
convinced of the transcendental existence of God in its absolute entirety:

Existent somewhere, somehow, as a whole;

Here, as a whole proportioned to our sense,--

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There, (which is nowhere, speech must babble thus!)

In the absolute immensity, the whole

Appreciable solely by Thyself,-- (X. 1316-20)

However, as the source of his entire thoughts and actions, the Pope’s God is not free from
the question of Benthamite ﬁction. In spite of his claim, the Pope’s God, as a sign, does
not have its referent in the world; his existence cannot be proved empirically. In this
sense the existence of God is a ﬁction. For the Pope, as for everybody else, God exists
only as a representation, and yet he cannot be presented. Even if the Pope is convinced
of the absolute existence of God somewhere as a whole, the only God that is available for
him is a represented God. As the Pope himself admits that “O Thou,--as represented here
to me / In such conception as my soul allows,« / Under Thy measureless, my atom
width!” (X. 1308-10), God is represented only as he as a human being understands Him:

Here, by the little mind of man, reduced

To littleness that suits his faculty,

In the degree appreciable too;

Between Thee and ourselves—nay even, again,

Below us, to the extreme of the minute. (X. 1321-5)

The problem of ﬁction and representation raises a series of epistemological
questions in the POpe’s monologue. From the beginning of his monologue the Pope
emphasizes that he is sitting in the seat of judgment as a representative of God, not as an
ordinary human being. He, “sitting in his stead, Vice-gerent here” (X. 162), judges

Guido:

In God’s name! Once more on this earth of God’s,

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While twilight last and time wherein to work,

I take His staff with my uncertain hand,

And stay my six and fourscore years, my due

Labour, and sorrow, on His judgrnent-seat,

And forthwith think, speak, act, in place of Him——

The Pope for Christ. (X. 163-9)
The Pope’s claim that as the Vicegerent of God he “think[s], speak[s], act[s], in place of
Him” does not free him from the epistemological question of representation. Although
the Pope claims that he thinks, speaks, acts, in place of Him, he is not the God himself.
He is only representing Him. Therefore, though he is “sitting in his stead, Vicegerent
here,” he in reality judges Guido as a human being: “I must give judgment on my own
behoot” (X. 161). This situation necessarily raises some important epistemological
questions. What is the representation for him? Does everything that he thinks, speaks,
and acts come from God? Or is there some thinking, speaking, and acting of his own,
since God is represented only as he understands Him? The Pope is convinced of the
existence of God in this entirety and immensity, yet, at one point, the Pope himself asks
the same epistemological questions:

Yet my poor spark had for its source, the sun;

Thither I sent the great looks which compel

Light from its fount: all that I do and am

Comes from the truth, or seen or else surmised,

Remembered or divined, as mere man may:

I know just so, nor otherwise. As I know,

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I speak,--what should I know, then, and how speak

Were there a wild mistake of eye or brain

As to recorded governance above?

If my own breath, only blew coal alight

I styled celestial and the moming-star?

I, who in this world act resolvedly,

Dispose of men, their bodies and their souls,

As they acknowledge or gainsay the light

I show them,«shall I too lack courage?—leave

I, too, the post of me, like those I blame? (X. 1285-1300)

As the Pope himself clearly states, his knowledge of God, as the transcendental a priori,
is only one that “mere man may” have. This creates a serious problem in his religious
discourse. Though he is convinced of the existence of God as transcendental a priori, he
cannot establish the referent of God in this world in its absoluteness, but only in human
representation. Thus God is only a ﬁction. Nevertheless, the point is that the ﬁction of
God governs his thoughts and actions and becomes the source of his decision to dispose
of Guido.

The POpe’s epistemological question directly relates the poem to the Benthamite
question of ﬁction and its coercive power on human thought and action. The Pope
decides to dispose of the bodies and souls of the ﬁve men accused of killing Pompilia.
Though he asserts the certainty of Guido’s guilt, his position is constantly subverted by
the epistemological ambiguity that his representation of God raises:

Some surmise,

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Perchance, that since man’s wit is fallible,

Mine may fail here? Suppose it so,«what then?

Say,--Guido, I count guilty, there ’5 no babe

80 guiltless, for I misconceive the man! (X. 237-41)
The Pope judges Guido as a representative of God, but God is represented only as he, the
Pope, a human being, understands Him. One possible way out of the epistemological
question that his representation of God raises is to attribute every human condition to
God’s pre-deterrnination, the transcendental act of God. The Bible says, “even the very
hairs of your head are all numbered” (Mathew 10:30). The Pope asserts:

Choice of the world, choice of the thing I am,

Both emanate alike from Thy dreadful play

Of operation outside this our sphere

Where things are classed and counted small or great,--

Incomprehensibly the choice is Thine!

Therefore I bow my head and take Thy place. (X. 1342-7)
The Pope reminds God that “this one earth, out of all multitude / Of peopled worlds, as
stars are now supposed,-- / Was chosen... / For stage and scene of Thy transcendental
act” (X. 1336-40). Equally implied is that he, out of the multitudes of people on the earth,
was chosen as the Pope, according to God’s pre-determined intention: “Thy dreadful play
of operation.” Also implied is that the entire thoughts and actions of his are within God’s
Plan, then, “The thing I [the Pope] is” includes the way he “think[s], speak[s], act[s], in

place of Him.” If all human thoughts and actions, the way we think, speak and act, are

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within God’s plan, man is free from any consequences that his thought or action might
cause. Thus the Pope recalls an episode:

If, as I walk in a rough country-side,

Peasants of mine cry, “Thou art he can help,

“Lord of the land and counted wise to boot:

“Look at our brother, strangling in his foam,

“He fell so where we ﬁnd him,«prove thy worth!”

I may presume, pronounce, “A frenzy-ﬁt,

“A falling-sickness or a fever-stroke!

“Breathe a vein, copiously let blood at once!”

So perishes the patient, and anon

I hear my peasants,--“All was error, lord!

“Our story, thy prescription: for there crawled

“In due time from our hapless brother’s breast

“The serpent which had stung him: bleeding slew

“Whom a prompt cordial had restored to health.”

What other should say than “God so willed:

“Mankind is ignorant, a man am I:

“Call my ignorance my sorrow, not my sin!” (X. 243-59)
Attributing every human thought and act and any consequences rising from it to God’s

Will is a way of constructing God as an absolute, transcendental a priori, and so of

escaping the epistemological dilemma discussed above.

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However, the religious discourse in the poem is much more complicated than is
suggested in the above passage of the Pope’s. The Pope’s monologue is full of doubt and
misgivings about his decision regarding Guido’s fate and constantly ﬂuctuates between a
constructive and a deconstructive process. Though he makes efforts to construct the
transcendental God, a deconstructive process is present from the very beginning of his
monologue. The episode of the seventh Pope Stephen’s judgment about Formosus and
the repeated reversals by the following popes clearly demonstrate how shaky the
epistemological ground of his religious discourse is. Stephen condemns Formosus,
whose decision his successor Romanus reverses. Romanus’ decision, in turn, is reversed
by Theodore, and John, the next pope, condemns Stephen’s decision. Sergius, the next
pope reverses John’s decision and reafﬁrms Stephen, but ﬁnally the Church reinstates
Formosus’ holiness. Therefore, the Pope asks:

Which of the judgments was infallible?

Which of my predecessors spoke for God?

And what availed Formosus that this cursed,

That blessed, and then this other cursed again?

John judged thus

When, sitting in his stead, Vice-gerent here,

I must give judgment on my own behoof.

So worked the predecessors: now, my turn! (X. 151-162)

Though the Pope makes efforts to ﬁx the referent of God in the transcendental a priori,

and also to attribute all human conditions to God’s pre-deterrnination, this episode

seriously undermines his efforts. The series of reversals among the popes not only

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undermines the authority of popedom itself, but also the validity of God as a
transcendental a priori, since the popes themselves were representing God on earth. It
suggests that the Pope’s notion of God as transcendental a priori is only a ﬁction
culturally formed.

As a whole, The Ring and the Book is an inquiry into the nature of knowledge and
truth in Victorian epistemology. As mentioned before, the Pope’s monologue illustrates
the conﬂicts between transcendental a priori knowledge and empirical a posteriori
knowledge. As will be discussed with reference to Caponsacchi’s monologue,
Caponsacchi attempts to solve the conﬂicts by appropriating Pompilia as the ﬁgure of
Madonna. Unfortunately for the P0pe, it is not an easy task to solve the conﬂicts. The
difﬁculty comes from the two incompatible possibilities of truth and knowledge as
summarized in the following passage:

...this may be surmised,

The other is revealed,—whether a fact,

Absolute, abstract, independent truth,

Historic, not reduced to suit man’s mind,—

Or only truth reverberate, changed, made pass

A spectrum into mind, the narrow eye, —

The same and not the same, else unconceived (X. 1387-93)

One is “absolute, abstract and independent truth,” and the other is “truth reverberate,

Changed, made pass a spectrum into mind.” Through a double-edged process of

construction and deconstruction, the Pope’s religious discourse develops two different

notions of God: God as product and God as process, an idealistic and an empirical notion

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of God, respectively. The Pope’s Christian belief leads him to presume the absolute,
independent, transcendental existence of God. His presence is timeless and unchangeable.
However, the referent of God as transcendental a priori cannot be established in this
world; he can only be represented as human mind perceives it: “made pass / A spectrum
into mind, the narrow eye.” Thus, the Pope observes:

Man’s mind, what is it but a convex glass

Wherein are gathered all the scattered points

Picked out of the immensity of sky,

To re-unite there, be our heaven for earth ,

Our known unknown, our God revealed to man?” (X. 1311-15)
His religious discourse admits that what is empirically available for man is God
represented “as suits our sense” (X. 1771). The represented God, though based on the-
absolute God, is not the same, “The same and not the same” (X. 1393). This situation
forces him to admit, with reluctance, the possibility of God historically made: God as
process. God represented by man as suits his sense is subject to historical changes, as
human senses are changed. This notion of God is still idealistic, yet it allows human
involvement and initiative. The possibility of God as process is suggested by the passage
from Euripides the Pope quotes:

“How nearly did I guess at that Paul knew?

“How closely come, in what I represent

“As duty, to his doctrine yet a blank?

“I saw that there are, ﬁrst and above all,

“The hidden forces, blind necessities,

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“Named Nature, but thing’s self unconceived:

“There follow,--how dependent upon these,

“We know not, how imposed above ourselves,

“We well know,--what I name the gods, a power

“Various or one: for great and strong and good

“Is there, and little, weak and bad there too,

“Wisdom and folly: say, these make no God,--

“What is it else that rules outside man’s self?

“The forces and necessity grow God,«

“The beings so contrarious that seemed gods,

“Prove just His operation manifold

“And multiforrn, translated, as must be,

“Into intelligible shape so far

“As suit our sense and sets us free to feel. (X.l724-71)
Euripides seriously undermines the Pope’s notion of God as product. His explanation of
the nature of religious development suggests that the Christian God the Pope embraces
may not be an absolute entity, but just another stage in the long chain of the development
of religion. Euripides contends, before God--“the thing’s self”--was known, people
assigned various forms of power to “the hidden forces and blind necessities” of Nature
and worshipped them, and these forces and necessities grew into God. That these various
forms of gods are only the manifold operations of God is the realization provided by the

latest light of human understanding. It is the result of rearranging the past according to

the present.

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In her discussion of Browning’s poetry, Mary Ellis Gibson notes that in
Browning’s poetry “history becomes the given within which a poet ﬁnds and makes
whatever order is possible.” 3 If I may borrow Gibson’s phrasing, history is the given
within which people ﬁnd and make whatever forms of religious order. Euripides’ gods
are not ﬁxed, timeless, transcendental entities; they constantly change their character as
human senses are changed. Thus each historical stage hosts different forms of gods,
constantly adjusting previous held religious beliefs. Euripides continues:

Why then, my scheme, your better knowledge broke,

Presently re-adjusts itself, the small

Proportioned largelier, parts and whole named new:

So much, no more two thousand years have done! (X. 1777-80)

Euripides supports and, at the same time, subverts the Pope’s teleological view. The
continual growth of the knowledge of religion suggests that the Pope’s God may be
superior to any other gods of the past. But at the same time, it also suggests the
possibility that his God could also be replaced by another form of god in the future. God
himself may be just another rung in the long chain of religious evolution. Thus,
Euripides’s view of God as process becomes a threat to the Pope’s efforts to ﬁx God as
product. The Pope himself admits the possibility Euripides suggests:

As we broke up the old faith of the world,

Have we, next age, to break up this the new——

Faith, in the thing, grown faith in the report——

Whence need to bravely disbelieve report

Through increased faith i’ the thing reports belie?

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Must we deny,«do they, these Molinists,

At peril of their body and their soul, «

Recognized truths, obedient to some truth

Unrecognized yet, but perceptible?~

Correct the portrait by the living face,

Man’s God, by God’s God in the mind of man? (X. 1864-1875)

Here the Pope touches the very problems that his notion of God as product raises. He
realizes that God may not be a ﬁxed, transcendental entity, and we do not have a portrait
of God as already made which will prevail timelessly and transcendentally. We can only
keep correcting the portrait in a given historical context as best as possible as our senses
allow us, and keep creating newer images of God, as Euripides argues.

The conﬂicts between God as product and God as process in the Pope’s
monologue reveal the post-Kantian epistemological conditions in which truth and
knowledge are not something absolute and timeless, but are known to us only as we know
them. The Pope makes a strenuous effort to ﬁx God into a transcendental a priori, but
With little success. His monologue is pervaded with tensions created by the two
incompatible existences of God. However, as mentioned before, the tension does not
seem to lead to a dialectic process that would help us to understand the material reality of
our existence. The Pope ultimately gives up correcting his portrait of God as a
transcendental a priori and remains in the realm of ﬁction of God whose referent he fails
to ﬁnd. A truly Marxist view of truth and knowledge suggests that truth and knowledge

can only be found in man’s constant labor in the world, in the dialectic process between

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man and the world. And one possibility of this dialectic process is found in the

monologue of Canon Caponsacchi.

Like the monologue of the Pope, Caponsacchi’s monologue addresses the
question of ﬁction and representation in a religious context. The same conﬂict between
transcendental a priori knowledge and empirical a posteriori knowledge poses an
epistemological dilemma for Caponsacchi. When Caponsacchi feels the contradictions
and gaps between the two, his life in the institution of religion becomes an alienated labor.
While the Pope does not seem to resolve the conﬂicts, Caponsacchi attempts to overcome
them by substituting Pompilia, a living human being, for Madonna, a transcendental a
priori. His act of helping Pompilia , a ﬁgure of the Lady in suffering, also helps himself,
since it closes a gap that was causing his alienated labor in the Church.

Caponsacchi claims that, like Guido, he lived a life, according to social roles
prescribed for him by society—in his case, as an aristocrat and a priest. As a younger son
of a family nobler than Guido’s, Caponsacchi was proposed to be a priest in memory of a
saintly bishop who was one of his prominent ancestors. Like Guido, Caponsacchi
passively treads the life prescribed for him:

For his sake, how it was I had a right

To the self-same ofﬁce, bishop in the egg,

So, grew i’ the garb and prattled in the school,

Was made to expect, from infancy almost,

The proper mood o’ the priest. (VI. 257-61)

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The Church he is entering to serve is a reiﬁed form of religious institution. As discussed
before, the Pope’s monologue presumes the existence of God as transcendental a priori,
though it may turn out to be a ﬁction. However, the Church that Caponsacchi enters does
not even have the ﬁction. What replaces the ﬁction of God as transcendental a priori is
an institution as an ideological and hegemonic apparatus. When Caponsacchi hesitates,
“when I must read the vows, / Declare the world renounced / ... leap into / Over the ledge
into the other life” (VI. 262-5), he is told by the Bishop that the Church no longer
requires the heroic renunciation of previous ages; rather, it embraces the world:

“Renounce the world? Nay, keep and give it us!

“Let us have you, and boast of what you bring.

“We want the pick 0’ the earth to practise with,

“Not its offscouring, halt and deaf and blind

“In soul and body. There ’s rubble-stone

“Unﬁt for the front 0’ the building, stuff to stow

“In a gap behind and keep us weather-tight;

“There is porphyry for the prominent place. Good lack! (VI. 309-16)
One traditional way of maintaining the ﬁction of God as transcendental a priori has been
the antithetic relationship of the Church to the world, or holiness to worldliness.
However, the Bishop blurs the distinction.

While the Pope’s religious discourse makes efforts to reinstate the thing-in-itself
in the Kantian sense, God as transcendental a priori, the Bishop replaces it with the world.
As implied in the Bishop’s illustration of how Jews replace the holy name of God with a

jumbled set of consonants and vowels, the Church can function as an institution without

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concerning itself with the referent of God. At one level, the Bishop’s explanation
subverts the Pope’s transcendental God, suggesting that the Pope’s God is only a ﬁction.
However, the Bishops’ replacement of God with the world is not meant to overcome the
limits of the Pope’s ﬁction of God. Rather, it is a replacement of one form of ﬁction with
another. The Church gives up God as a priori and becomes an ideologically secularized
religious institution. The Bishop encourages Caponsacchi by saying that the Church can
beneﬁt from his talent of employing language:
Cultivate

“Assiduous that superior gift you have

“Of making madrigals—{who told me? Ah!)

“Get done a Marinesque Adoniad straight

“With a pulse 0’ the blood a-pricking, here and there,

“That may tell the lady ‘And he ’s ours!’ ” (VI. 330-5)
The Bishop explains that “language could be employed for social and institutional
purposes without a referential truth,” as Slinn has pointed out.4 As a reiﬁed institution,
the Bishop’s church serves the rich, and preys on women: “Priests play with women,
maids, wives, and mothers” (IV. 465). The reiﬁcation of the church as a religious
institution without the referent of God helps maintain existing human relations, especially
gender relationships. Also as proved by Paolo’s act on Violante and Pompilia, the reiﬁed
church exercises hegemonic pressure and domination, preying on women: “Mothers,
wives, and maids, / These be the tools wherewith priests manage men” (IV. 503-4). Like

Guido who accepts without question what the existing structure of society prescribes for

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him, Caponsacchi also accepts the terms that the Bishop explains and becomes a priest in
the secularized church:

So I became a priest: those terms changed all,

I was good enough for that, nor cheated so;

I could have lived thus and still hold head erect.

Now you see why I may have been before

A ﬁibble and coxcomb, yet priest, break word

Nowise, to make you disbelieve me now.

I need that you should know my truth. Well, then,

According to prescription did I live,

«Conformed myself, both read the breviary

And wrote the rhymes, was punctual to my place

I’ the Pieve, and diligent at my post

Where beauty and fashion rule. I throve apace,

Sub-deacon, Canon, the authority

For delicate play at tarocs, and arbiter

O’ the magnitude of fan-mounts. (VI. 336-50)
Caponsacchi serves in the secularized church, “where beauty and fashion rule,” writing
rhymes for rich women using his gift of composing madrigals. While the two lawyers’
aesthetic language in the poem serves to conceal the nothingness of their legal ﬁction,
Caponsacchi’s employment of his aesthetic language helps the Church to function as an
Oppressive social structure that victimizes women. After he spent some years in the

secularized Church, Caponsacchi ﬁnds his prescribed life in it unfulﬁlling and

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experiences a spiritual emptiness. Just as the Pope suffers from the contradictions
between transcendental a priori of God and empirical a posteriori of God, so does
Caponsacchi feel a gap between what the institution of God is and what it should be. His
chance encounter with Pompilia serves as a catalyst that makes him realize his alienated
labor for the Church:

One evening I was sitting in a muse

Over the opened “Summa,” darkened round

By the mid-March twilight, thing how my life

Had shaken under me,«broke short indeed

And showed the gap ’twixt what is, what should be,«

And into what abysm the soul may slip,

Leave aspiration here, achievement there,

Lacking omnipotence to connect extremes—

Thinking moreover ...oh, thinking, if you like,

How utterly dissociated was I

A priest and celibate, from the sad strange wife

Of Guido,«just as an instance to the point,

Nought more,«how I had a whole store of strengths

Eating into my heart, which craved employ,

And she, perhaps, need of a ﬁnger’s help,«

And yet there was no way in the wide world

To stretch out mine and so relieve myself. (VI. 483-99)

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A chance encounter with “A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad” (VI. 399),
makes him realize the alienation of his life in the Church. After he perceives a gap
between “what it should be” and “what it is,” Caponsacchi makes efforts to reinstate God
in his life in the priesthood. However, this does not mean that he, like the Pope, tries to
reinstate God as a ﬁction, that is, God as transcendental a priori whose counterpart cannot
be found in the world, rather, he ﬁnds the referent of God, “omnipotence to connect [the
two] extremes,” in Pompilia. As implied in the above passage, Caponsacchi overcomes
the gap by unifying two other extremes, Madonna and Pompilia.

While the contradiction for the P0pe between God as product and God as process
remains unresolved, because his God as transcendental a priori is “unknowable,”
Caponsacchi is able to resolve the contradiction by establishing the referent of God in
something “knowable,” that is, by identifying Pompilia with the ﬁgure of Madonna. That
Caponsacchi sees Pompilia as the ﬁgure of the Madonna is revealed at their very ﬁrst
meeting:

...I saw her enter, stand, and seat herself

A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad.

It was when, in our cathedral once,

As I got yawningly through matin-song,

I saw facchini bear a burden up,

Base it on the hi gh-altar, break away

A board or two, and leave the thing inside

Lofty and lone: and 10, when next I looked,

There was the Rafael! (VI. 398-406)

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When Caponsacchi first sees Pompilia, he sees the ﬁgure of the Madonna in her.
However, the image of Pompilia as Madonna is a ﬁction. Pompilia, “the illicit offspring
of a common trull” (III. 208), as the speaker of Tertium Quid puts it, is only a human
being. Caponsacchi himself knows this fact clearly: “Assured myself that she was ﬂesh
and blood” (VI. 708). Nevertheless, Caponsacchi holds to this ﬁction because his chance
encounter with her provides an outlet for him for spiritual renewal and overcoming the
alienation of his life in the Church. After he sees her, he decides “Never to write a
canzonet any more” (VI. 467), and prepares for Rome. For Caponsacchi, a ﬁction
becomes an important way of opening his life to a new future. Although Browning is
wary of the negative inﬂuences of ﬁction throughout the entire poem, ﬁction is an
important means of opening up the future. The positive role of a ﬁction in human
existence is also demonstrated by the letters that Guido claims are written by
Caponsacchi and Pompilia. Caponsacchi and Pompilia meet again and head for Rome
through the letters passed between them indirectly by the hands of others. The letters are
very elusive entities. They are the real in that they are physical entities, but, at the same
time, they are ﬁctions in that they are ﬁctitious in their contents. The ﬁctitious contents
lead them into an encounter that changes their lives forever, and thus ﬁction helps change
the present and open up the future.

Nevertheless, Caponsacchi’s monologue is not free from the politics of ﬁction
that The Ring and the Book as a whole addresses. As mentioned before, the image of
Pompilia as Madonna is a ﬁction, though there obviously exists some common
characteristics in them; especially that they are both ladies of sorrow. Caponsacchi is

well aware of this, but he actively appropriates the ﬁction of Pompilia as Madonna to

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escape from spiritual emptiness. When Caponsacchi sees Pompilia again at her window,
he sees a Madonna:
... there at the window stood,

F rarned in its black square length, with lamp in hand,

Pompilia; the same great, grave, griefful air

As stand i’ the dusk, on altar that I know,

Left alone with one moonbearn in her cell,

Our Lady of all Sorrows. Ere I knelt—

Assured myself that she was ﬂesh and blood——

She had looked one look and vanished. (VI. 702-9)
Pompilia, “A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad,” is idealized as the “Lady of
Sorrows.” However, Caponsacchi is well aware of the vulnerability of his ﬁction of
Pompilia. He realizes that his recognition of Pompilia as Madonna and his belief in
Pompilia’s innocence can be seen by others merely as his personal perception. Aware of
this insecurity, Caponsacchi actively appropriates Pompilia into his discourse and
emphasizes that they mutually recognized each other’s truth:

Pompilia spoke, and I at once received,

Accepted my own fact, my miracle

Self-authorized and self-explained,«she chose

To summon me and signify her choice.

. As I
Recognized her, at potency of truth,

So she, by the crystalline soul, knew me,

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Never mistook the signs. (VI. 918-33)

By appropriating Pompilia, Caponsacchi validates his personal perception. What has
been “self-authorized and self-explained” becomes “fact.” He has her say to him, “For
now the dream gets to involve yourself” (VI. 862). Throughout his monologue,
Caponsacchi repeatedly emphasizes that his truth was also recognized by Pompilia, and
his claim is conﬁrmed in Pompilia’s monologue. Her monologue is also strewn with her
own conﬁrmations of Caponsacchi’s truth: “This time I felt like Mary, had my babe /
Lying a little on my breast like hers” (VH. 1692-3). Intersubjective mutual recognition is
adopted as an important way of validating personal perception.

As I discussed in the reading of Pompilia’s monologue, Pompilia also actively
appropriates Caponsacchi in her monologue to justify her ﬂight from Guido. Describing
Caponsacchi as a ﬁgure of St. George, she veriﬁes Caponsacchi’s claim: “He was mine,
he is mine, he will be mine” (1457), “I know you” (1473), “Oh, he understands!” (1792),
or “Why explain? / What I see, oh, he sees and how much more!” (1804-5). The mutual
recognition between them validates Caponsacchi’s ﬁction of Pompilia. Caponsacchi
asserts, “I am a priest. / Duty to God is to her” (VI. 1028). By identifying Pompilia as
Madonna and obeying her, Caponsacchi at once ﬁlls the gap from which he was suffering.
Thus the ﬁction of Pompilia changes Caponsacchi’s life, and ﬁction works positively this
time:

God and man, and what duty I owe both,--

I dare to say I have confront these

In thought: but no such faculty helped here.

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I put forth no thought,«powerless, all that night

I paced the city: it was the ﬁrst Spring.

By invasion I lay passive to,

In rushed new things, the old way were rapt away;

Alike abolished-«the imprisonment

Of the outside air, the inside weight 0’ the world

That pulled me down. . ..

Into another state, under new rule

I knew myself was passing swift and sure. (VI. 942-65)
Caponsacchi believes that he owes his duty to both “God and man.” His act of helping
Pompilia allows him to simultaneously fulﬁll his duty to both, and, furthermore, that act
transforms him. What is signiﬁcant in his monologue is that he acts. Caponascchi
confesses he has confronted his duty in thoughts before. He now realizes that thoughts
alone do not bring any change. By participating in Pompilia’s act of ﬂight, Caponsacchi
frees himself from his alienated life in the Church, just as Pompilia escapes Guido’s
house, a symbol of oppressive patriarchy. When he decides to go to Rome for spiritual
renewal, he is told that:

...’t was my patron spoke abrupt,

in altered guise. “Young man, can it be true

“That after all your promise of sound fruit,

“You have kept away from Countess young or old

“And gone play truant in church all day long?

“Are you turning Molinist?” I answered quick:

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“Sir, what if I turned Christian? It might be. (VI. 468-7 4)

Caponsacchi, “Who, priest and trained to live my whole life long / On beauty and
splendour, solely at their source” (VI. 122-3), rejects his culturally constructed self-
identity as a priest in a hegemonic religious institution. He challenges the Bishop’s
institutionalized deﬁnition of a Christian, and tries to free himself from playing the
puppet ﬁgure who plays a socially imposed role without questioning its validity. Ann
Brady correctly observes that both Caponsacchi and Pompilia, “discard and transcend a
role imposed by their respective institutions—«marriage and the church.”5 It is his ﬁction
of Pompilia that helps him to do so. In Pompilia God and man are united, and thus he
fulﬁlls his duty to both God and man in his act of helping her.

Caponsacchi and Pompilia validate each other’s truth through mutual recognition.
However, they ﬁnd that their mutual recognition does not free them from the public
suspicion that it was from love, physical attraction, not the noble cause they claim, that
they are drawn together. As Pompilia insightfully perceives, “So we are made, such
difference in minds, / Such difference too in eyes that see the minds” (VII. 918-9), their
mutual validation does not go beyond themselves. Therefore, Caponsacchi repeatedly
emphasizes, “You know this is not love, Sirs,—-—it is faith” (VI. 1193). And he claims that
their mutual recognition comes from a much nobler source than from mere physical
attraction, that is, from God’s will:

Sirs, I obeyed. Obedience was too strange, ——

This new thing that had been struck into me

By the look 0’ the lady, —-to dare disobey

The ﬁrst authoritative word. ’T was God’s. (VI. 1010-13)

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Or again:

«That when at the last we did rush each on each,

By no chance but because God willed it so—

The spark of truth was struck from out our souls——

Made all of me, descried in the ﬁrst glance,

Seem fair and honest and permissible love,

0’ the good and true—as the ﬁrst glance told me

There was no duty patent in the world.

Like daring try be good and true myself,

Leaving the shows of things to the Lord of Show

And Prince 0’ the Power of the Air. (VI. 1812-21)
That Caponsacchi places the source of his action in God’s will exposes an internalized
problem in his ﬁction of Pompilia as Madonna. It certainly helps justify his irregular
action——“Caponsacchi In cape and sword a cavalier confessed” (V. 1049-51), and it
strengthens the coherence of his ﬁction. However, it diminishes the meaning of their
actions as praxis. As mentioned in the previous discussion of Guido’s ﬁction of honor,
the escape of Pompilia and Caponsacchi is signiﬁcant in that it breaks Guido’s oppressive
structure of patriarchal authority, while Guido’s act of killing Pompilia is a desperate
attempt to restore it. However, it is not clear whether both Caponsacchi and Pompilia
understand the full meaning of their actions. Their act of escaping from Guido’s house is
a direct challenge to the existing social order of oppression and domination. With the
help of Caponsacchi, Pompilia frees herself from Guido’s oppression, while

Caponsacchi’s ﬁction of Pompilia liberates him from his alienated labor in the institution

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of the Church. However, by attributing the source of their action to God, they both
eliminate any human initiatives in their actions, and this dilutes the ultimate meaning of
their actions.

As demonstrated in the Pope’s monologue, the question of human initiative in the
religious discourse of the poem never seems to be resolved. Probably the POpe is the
only character in the poem, other than Pompilia and Caponsacchi, who perceives the
oppressive nature of Guido’s patriarchal authority. However, his own epistemological
problem, the unresolved contradiction between God as transcendental a priori and God as
empirical a posteriori, hinders him from catching the full meaning of their act. He
ultimately approves Pompilia and Caponsacchi’s act. But he cannot suppress his
misgivings about all human ways and deeds. The P0pe believes that, as denoted by the
nature of human language, human beings are constantly subject to lies and
contaminations of the truth. He observes:

He, the Truth is, too,

The Word. We men, in our degree, may know

There, simply, instantaneously, as here

After long time and amid many lies,

Whatever we dare think we know indeed

«That I am I, as He is He,«what else?

But be man’s method for man’s life at least! (X. 376-82)

The Pope ﬁnds an irreconcilable gulf between God’s way and Man’s way: “I am I, as He
is He.” He asserts that “But be man’s method for man’s life at least!” What exactly this

man 's method should be is one of the central questions his religious discourse raises. At

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one point, the Pope seems to suggest a dialectic interaction between man and the world
by admitting that life is but a process of “correct[ing] the portrait by the living face.”
However, for him, it soon turns out that man’s method has less to do with a truly dialectic
process of man’s labor in the world than a teleological emanation of God’s truth. The
Pope claims:

This life is training and a passage; pass,«

Still, we march over some ﬂat obstacle

We made give way before us; solid truth

In front of it, what motion for the world?

The moral sense grows but by exercise.

’T is even as man grew probatively

Initiated in Godship, set to make

A fairer moral world than this he ﬁnds,

Guess now what shall be known hereafter. (X. 1411-19)
For the Pope, the whole of human condition is initiated by God and whatever progress
human beings manage to make is a teleological emanation of God’s Truth. Thus, he
asserts that “Life is probation and the earth no goal / But starting-point of man” (X. 1436-
7). However, this teleological notion of God is not sustained by his empirical experience
of God. The Pope is despondent that Christian belief under his rule is degenerating.
Sitting as the head of the Church at the end of the century, the Pope even fears that
Christianity might become utterly extinct with his death: “Do we not end, the century and

I?” (X. 1902) The gap between his belief in the teleological emanation of God’s truth

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and the present state of Christianity cannot be removed further. Thus, he faces the
coming age with dread and uncertainty:

what whispers me of times to come?

What if it be the mission of that age

My death will usher into life, to shake

This torpor of assurance from our creed,

Re-introduce the doubt discarded, bring

That formidable danger back, we drove

Long ago to the distance and the dark? (X. 1852-7)
The Pope is almost near his death, and he cannot ﬁnd any evidence that man’s moral
senses are growing. It is through his active appropriation of the act of Pompilia and
Caponsacchi that he attempts to escape the dilemma he faces. Just as Caponsacchi
needed Pompilia to ﬁll the gap he was experiencing, the Pope also needs to appropriate
Pompilia to conﬁrm his belief in the teleological emanation of God’s Truth. For his sake,
Pompilia has to be innocent and pure:

It was not given Pompilia to know much,

Speak much, to write a book, to move mankind,

Be memorized by who records my time.

Yet if in purity and patience, if

In faith held fast despite the plucking ﬁend,

Safe like the Signet stone with the new name

That saints are known by...

If there be any virtue, any praise, —-

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Then will this woman-child have proved-«who know?

Just the one prize vouchsafed unworthy me,

Seven years a gardener of the untoward ground,

Itill,«this earth, my sweat and blood manure

All the long day that barrenly grows dusk:

At least one blossom makes me proud at eve

Born ’mid briers of my enclosure! (X. 1020-35)
He also approves Caponsacchi: “Well done! / Be glad thou hast let light into the world /
Through that irregular breach 0’ the boundary” (X. 1204-6). Their act conﬁrms the
Pope’s teleological religious belief. However, at the same time, the irregular deed of
Caponsacchi greatly threatens the authority of the Church where he is sitting as the head
of it. Caponsacchi’s act of playing a cavalier, as Guido phrases it, is a breach of the
normal boundary of a priest. But the poem suggests that such a breach is important
because it is an act of “correct[ing] the portrait by the living face.” While the Pope is
holding on to his ﬁxed portrait of God, this a priori image of God that is fundamentally a
ﬁction, Caponsacchi corrects the portrait by the living face of Pompilia. Thus for him
God does not exist just as an a priori, but as an a posteriori process in which he constantly
corrects his portrait. By correcting the portrait of Madonna by Pompilia’s face
Caponsacchi transforms the Pope’s ﬁction into praxis, a constitutive activity that brings
change to the human subject and to the world. And this praxis is important in that it can
bring a change to the world. Just as Pompilia’s act of walking out of Guido’s house is an

actual step towards breaking the oppressive structure of Guido’s patriarchal authority,

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Caponsacchi’s participation in Pompilia’s act is an important movement towards stopping
the exploitation of women by the Bishop’s secularized Church.

Though he approves the actions of Pompilia and Caponsacchi, the Pope himself
fails to correct his own portrait of God; his ﬁction of the transcendental God dictates to
him to remain with the timeless, unchanging God as product. His approval of
Caponsacchi’s irregular deed implies the very possibility of God as process:

What wonder if the novel claim had clashed

With old requirement, seemed to supersede

Too much customary law? But, brave,

Thou at ﬁrst prompting of what I call God,

And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend,

Accept the obligation laid on thee. (X. 1070-75)

But the Pope does not seem to go beyond the boundary of “customary law.” In an
important way the Pope’s monologue is Browning’s critique of the church for remaining
a reiﬁed institution. For Browning, such a reiﬁed institution helps solidify the existing
relations of domination and power, and helps maintain the present, rather than open up a
new future. One important thing that The Ring and the Book addresses is the importance
of praxis as realized in the act of Pompilia and Caponsacchi. The Pope himself realizes
his lack of act:

If this were sad to see in just the sage

Who should profess so much, perform no more,

What is it then suspected in that Power

Who undertook to make and made the world,

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Devised and did effect man, body an soul,

Ordained salvation for them both, and yet

Well, is the thing we see, salvation? (X. 1624-30; italics are mine)
This passage suggests that even the essence of God which he believes lies in actual labor-
--acting and performing; God actually made the world and effected man. At various
points of the poem, Browning draws on the lack of action in the institutionalized church;
the archbishop ignores Pompila’s plea for help, the governor sends her back to Guido’s
house and the priest refuses to write a letter for her. By this, importantly, Browning
suggests that, when we do not act to change the present, existing relations of power and
domination, a new future cannot be realized.

Without praxis, a constitutive activity, the Pope’s notion of God as transcendental
a priori remains a ﬁction. While Caponsacchi ﬁnds the referent of God in Pompilia and
makes efforts to “correct the portrait by the living face,” the Pope hesitates to accept
“men’s method.” At one point, the young Pope, like Caponsacchi, seems to be aware of
the importance of men’s method:

Antonio Pignatelli, thou

My ancient self, who wast no POpe so long

But studiedst God and man, the many years. . ..

Thou, not Pope but the mere old man 0’ the world,

Supposed inquisitive and dispassionate,

Wilt thou, the one whose speech I somewhat trust,

Question the after-me, this self now Pope,

Hear his procedure, criticize his work? (X. 383-97)

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“This [old] self now Pope” is near his death and now muses over his early life sitting
alone in his study at twilight on a gray winder day. Unlike his early self who studied
both God and man alike, this old Pope is characterized by his unwillingness to correct the
portrait of his a priori God by man’s method. Thus, unlike in Caponsacchi, for him the
question of the bifurcation of a priori and a posteriori God is not resolved in praxis.

Many of Browning’s poems dramatize a condition of conﬂict that is not resolved
in praxis. “Pictor Ingotus” is one good example. On the surface level, the poem
dramatizes the conﬂicts between two different artistic principles. However, on a deeper
level, the poem draws on the very same conﬂicts between the Pope’s a priori
transcendental portrait and Caponsacchi’s a posteriori empirical portrait. The poem
begins with the painter persona’s comparison of himself with the other young painter who
people praise so much. The painter believes himself no less talented than the young painter:
“I could have painted pictures like that youth’s” (1). In yearning for the fame and popularity
that the young painter enjoys, the painter fantasizes that he himself has reached the hearts of
many people through his pictures:

Nor will I say I have not dreamed (how well!)

Of going -- I, in each new picture, -- forth,

As, making new hearts beat and bosoms swell,

To Pope or Kaiser, East, West, South, or North,

Bound for the cahnly-satisﬁed great State,

Or glad aspiring little burgh, it went

Oh, thus to live, I and my picture, linked

With love about, and praise, till life should end,

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And then not go heaven, but linger here,

Here on my earth, earth’s every man my ﬁiend. (25-39)
However, he soon realizes that to reach out to other people is to allow them to judge and
criticize his pictures, to bring his subjective world under scrutiny and inspection. The
painter is horriﬁed by such a possibility:

Who summoned those cold faces that begun

To press on men and judge me? Though I stooped

Shrinking, as from the soldiery a nun,

They drew me forth, and spite of me. .. enough...

And where they live needs must our pictures live

And see their faces, listen to their prate,

Partakers of their daily pettiness,

Discussed of, - ‘This I love, or this I hate,

This likes more, and this affects me less!’ (46-56)
The painter decides to remain in his subjective world and to “paint / These endless cloisters
and eternal aisles / With the same series, Virgins, Babe and Saint (58-60).” However, the
subjective world of ﬁction does not always give him a uniﬁed reality, and his
consciousness is constantly haunted by the thought of the other painter. He experiences
that “at whiles / My [his] heart sinks” (57-8) and he ﬁnd his life “monotonous” (58). But
he sticks to his ﬁction—“I chose my portion” (57) —comforting himself with the fact
that “The sanctuary’s gloom at least shall ward / Vain tongues from where my pictures
stand apart” (64-65). A similar pattern of the politics of ﬁction is repeated in the Pope’s

monologue. The Pope seems to be aware of the possibility that his notion of an a priori

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transcendental God is a ﬁction. His notion of God as product is constantly subverted by
the possibility of God as process, whose portrait is not ﬁxed but has to be corrected by
the living face. But he refuses to accept and act upon it. Reﬂecting on Caponsacchi’s act,
his men 's'method, and the possibility of God as process, the Pope confesses:
I

Put no such dreadful question to myself,

Within whose circle of experience burns

The central truth, Power, Wisdom, Goodness,--God. (X. 1631-4)
Thus, throughout his monologue the conﬂicts between his notion of God as product and

the possibility of God as process remain unresolved.

165

1. Isobel Armstrong, “The Problems of Representation in The Ring and the Book: Politics,
Aesthetics, Language,” from Browning e Venezia (Persosa: 1991), 228.

2. E. Warwick Slinn, The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry (London: MacMillan,
1991), 123.

3 . Mary Ellis Gibson, History and the Prism of Art: Browning ’s Poetic Experiments
(Columbus: Ohio State University, 1987), 7.

4. Slinn, The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry, 158.

5 . Ann Brady, Pompilia: A Feminist Reading of Robert Browning ’s The Ring and the
Book (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988), 73.

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CHAPTER FIVE

PROBLEMS OF LANGUAGE

One of the recurring themes in Browning’s poetry is the problem of language and its
relationship to truth. Throughout Browning’s poetic development the subject of language
has been explored in various forms in different poems. In early poems like Paracelsus and
Sordello, the question of language is explored by the light of Romantic idealism, where
language is described as an imperfect, limited medium or a mere impediment to truth. Truth
resides in self, and language is incompetent or helpless in translating the speaking subject’s
inner feelings or truth. Here for Browning, the ideal form of language is the one that fully
conveys the inner feelings or truth without distortion. However, in his later poems,
especially in The Ring and the Book, language becomes much more complex than his early
poems would suggest. Browning in The Ring and the Book presents a post-modemist notion
of language: there is no ﬁxed relation between sign and signiﬁed and also there is no subject
independent of language. In the poem Browning also explores the Bakhtinian notion that
every use of language is ideological: “Without signs there is no ideology.”l In The Ring and
the Book human language, as opposed to God’s, which is all Truth, still continues to be false,
but language plays an essential role in man’s working on the world since it mediates
between subject and object. Furthermore, Browning suggests, language becomes an
important means of opening a new future by reordering and restructuring the present. In this
respect language retains important political implications in Browning’s later poetry. In this
chapter I will discuss Browning’s extensive exploration into the question of language,

focusing on Guido’s second monologue.

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As often pointed out by critics, one thing that Browning’s poetry is fundamentally
concerned with is the unavailability of truth. In Browning’s poetry, truth retains only
temporal validity. Especially in the structure of The Ring and the Book itself, it is implied
that truth is less a ﬁnal product than a process. However, what has been little discussed in
this line of critical readings is the question of how language contributes to such a condition
of truth. In Browning’s poetry, at the very center of the question of truth, lies the problem of
language. In an important article on Browning’s language, Allan Dale observes, “language
is involved in or reﬂects this general problem of unavailability of truth.”2 In Browning’s
poetry, language and truth are two sides of the same coin. Browning’s concern with the
question of language can be found from his earliest poems. In Paracelsus the protagonist
asserts:

Truth is in ourselves; it takes no rise

From outward things, whate’er you may believe.

There is an inmost centre in us all,

Where truth abides in fulness; and around,

Wall upon wall, the gross ﬂesh hems it in,

This perfect, clear perception—which is truth.

A bafﬂing and perverting carnal mesh

Binds it, and makes all error: and to KNOW

Rather consists in opening out a way

Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,

Than in effecting entry for a light

Supposed to be without. Watch narrowly

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The demonstration of a truth, its birth,

And you trace back the efﬂuence to its spring

And source within us. (I. 726-740)

Paracelsus believes “There is an inmost center in us all, / Where truth abides in fulness.”
When truth resides within ourselves, language is only an impediment to truth, because it is
unable to fully translate the inner truth. Sordello, from Browning’s important early poem,
claims, “I feel, am what I feel, know what I feel; / So much is true to me” (Sordello, VI.
435-6). For both Paracelsus and Sordello, the self is the sole originator of truth. This
idealistic notion of self presupposes a self as a ﬁxed, timeless and complete entity that
stands apart from society, community, and history. However, Browning’s later poems,
including The Ring and the Book, show that truth, self, and language are much more
complex entities than Paracelsus believes; Paracelsus’ idealistic notion of truth and self is
only a delusion. Truth resides neither within man alone nor solely in the world, rather it
exists in the on-going process wherein man lives out his material social reality. And in this
process language plays a vital role.

One of the central issues in Victorian epistemology was, as David Shaw identiﬁes,
the seemingly unresolvable opposition between subjective idealism and objective
empiricism.3 At the center of the conﬂict lies the role, and capacity, of the hmnan mind in
ﬁnding or further generating truth and knowledge. David Shaw paraphrases the opposition
by the two optical metaphors for the human mind. The ﬁrst metaphor is the poet’s mind as
“a self-reﬂecting mirror or kaleidoscope” which operates independent of the world. The
other metaphor is the poet’s mind as “a transparent, unrefracting window” through which

the poet simply records whatever objects or phenomena he sees. In the latter, the human

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mind passively records impressions of the objective world captured upon it. On the other
hand, the former model emphasizes the active role of the mind in constructing reality.
Browning seems to have been familiar with the question. The two poetic faculties he
discusses in Essay on Shelley, respectively, the subjective and the objective, are little
different from the two Victorian epistemological metaphors for the human mind which
Shaw explains. Considering that these two metaphors were widely used in nineteenth-
century philosophy and poetics, Browning’s discussion of the two poetic faculties in his
essay may be nothing new. What is unique and important to note in Browning is that he
addresses the same epistemological question via his vigorous exploration into the question
of language, its role in human epistemology and its relationship to truth, as best illustrated in
The Ring and the Book. It is not clear from his essay which of the two metaphors Browning
prefers as the correct explanation of the workings of the human mind. By saying that “the
subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of every age,”4 he seems to lean
toward the self-reﬂecting human mind, but his emphasis on dramatic poetry indicates that he
assigns no less importance to the objective representation of the world. As one can sumrise
from the essay, Browning refuses to endorse either of them as the correct epistemological
explanation, and at the same time, does not deny either of them. Thus, in The Ring and the
Book Browning assigns a much more vital role to language than he did in his previous
works.

Browning’s notion of language can be, I think, best Slumised by reading the Pope’s
monologue and Guido’s second monologue together. In The Ring and the Book, one can
ﬁnd two contradictory attitudes toward language: both distrust and conﬁrmation of the role

of language in human life, and the poem constantly ﬂuctuates between the two. Again,

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Paracelsus, in Browning’s early poem, believes that truth resides in the self and that
language is inadequate or incapable of translating that inner truth. Like Paracelsus, the P0pe
dismisses human language for its falsehood. Sitting in front of the various documents
related to Guido’s murder trial, the Pope realizes that it is not an easy task to ﬁnd truth from
“this multifarious mass of words and deeds” (X. 263). He is convinced that this difﬁculty
originates in the false nature of human language. For him, truth can never be found in
human language but only in God’s. Human language is a degenerated form of God’s ideal
language:
Let

Each level have its language! Heaven speaks ﬁrst

To the angel, then the angel tames the word

Down to the ear of Tobit: he, in turn,

Diminishes the message to his dog,

And ﬁnally that dog ﬁnds how the ﬂea

(Which else, importunate, might check his speed)

Shall learn its hunger must have holiday

By application of his tongue or paw:

So many varied sorts of language here,

Each following each with pace to match the step,

Haud passibus aequis! (VIII. 1508-19)
As a degraded form of God’s language, human language is characterized by its falseness.

The Pope deplores that human beings tend to lie even “without the least incumbency to lie”

171

(X. 364), and he ﬁrmly believes that human beings are simply made that way: “He lies, it is
the method of a man!” (X. 370) He continues:

Therefore these ﬁlthy rags of speech, this coil

Of statement, cement, query and response,

Tatters all too contaminate for use,

Have no renewing: He, the Truth, is, too,

The Word. We men, in our degree, may know

There, simply, instantaneously, as here

After long time and amid many lies,

Whatever we dare think we know indeed

«That I am I, as He is He,--what else?

But be man’s method for man’s life at least! (X. 373-382)
However, the Pope’s monologue, like other monologues in the poem, is a curious mixture of
a strong denunciation of human language and an ultimate, though unwilling, acceptance of it.
The Pope’s condemnation of human language is based on its power to create ﬁctions. As
Bentham reminds us, it is through language that ﬁctions are created and maintained.
Browning shares Bentham’s concern about the conjuring power of language and his distrust
of its black magic. But the Pope realizes that God’s language cannot penetrate down to the
human level, so that humanity is destined to have its own language: “Be man’s method for
man’s life at least!” The POpe ultimately accepts human language. Despite his awareness
of its false nature, he realizes that he is dependent on it. Out of the pile of human
testimonies, which he believes are all mere lies, he has to generate his testimony about

Guido’s fate. Out of the mass of false words the Pope creates an elaborate verbal

172

construction in which he condemns Guido and asserts Pompilia’s innocence. His own
judgment in writing regarding Guido’s fate is just another human testimony, so it is subject
to the same lie as any others’. Nevertheless, he has to believe the truth of his own language
at the human level to be able to assert his own ﬁction of God as a transcendental a priori,
whose language is all Truth.

The Pope’s assertion, “Be man’s method for man’s life at least!,” in the previously
quoted passage provides an important clue towards an understanding of Browning’s notion
of language. It opens up the possibility that Browning sees language as a constitutive entity
that mediates the dialectic interaction between the human subject and the world, rather than
a ﬁxed entity given to man by God in a degraded form. This quite materialistic
understanding of language relates Browning to some of most current discussions of
language. Browning’s understanding of language is quite materialistic in that he considers
language as the shaping power for both subjectivity and the world. Raymond Williams’
cultural materialism is, I think, probably the most signiﬁcant Marxist contribution to
thinking about language after the Bakhtin school. In Marxism and Literature Raymond
Williams notes:

A deﬁnition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a deﬁnition of human

beings in the world. The received major categories—‘world’, ‘reality’, ‘nature’,

‘human’———may be counterposed or related to the category of ‘language’, but it is

now a commonplace to observe that all categories, including the category ‘language’

are themselves constructions of language.5
Williams’ materialistic approach to language--a fundamentally Marxist approach--

focuses on grasping language in its concrete circumstances, and in its constitutive process,

173

f’_

not in abstract ways. For Williams, social reality is a constitutive process in which
diverse social practices are indissolubly interlocked together, composing a complex
whole. In this process language plays a vital role. For him, language is praxis, a
constitutive activity and a shaping force in social production. To his regret, though,
language as such has not been fully emphasized.

In Marxism and Literature Williams begins his redeﬁnition of language by
tracing the history of language studies. He points out that, traditionally, language has
been treated as a “reﬂection” of reality, as a distinctive and separable entity from reality:

In the previously dominant tradition, through all its variations, ‘language’ and

‘reality’ had been decisively separated, so that philosophical inquiry was from the

beginning an inquiry into the connections between these apparently separate

orders... The radical distinction between ‘language’ and ‘reality’, as between

‘consciousness’ and ‘material world’, corresponding to actual and practical

divisions between ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ activity, had become so habitual that

serious attention seemed naturally concentrated on the exceptionally complicated
consequent relations and connections.6
Nevertheless, there have been some attempts, Williams points out, to see language as a
constitutive faculty. According to Williams, Vico made one important contribution
towards understanding language as such:

...the whole question of the distinction between ‘language’ and ‘reality’ was

eventually forced into consciousness, initially in a surprising way.... Vico

proposed his criterion that we can have full knowledge only of what we can

ourselves make or do. In one decisive respect this response was reactionary.

174

Since men have not in any obvious sense made the physical world, a powerful
new conception of scientiﬁc knowledge was ruled out a priori and was, as before,
reserved to God. Yet on the other hand by insisting that we can understand
society because we have made it, indeed that we understand it not abstractly but
in the very process of making it, and that the activity of language is central in this
process, Vico opened a whole new dimension.7
Vico explains language in three stages of schematic development: divine, heroic, and
human. Human language may be a degraded form of divine and heroic languages. But
language at the hlunan level operates as a shaping force for both subjectivity and the
world. For Vico, knowledge cannot be separated from language. He believes “that
knowledge is bound up in human reason, passion, and imagination; that human beings
function in social groups and are limited by historical circumstances; and that all these
conditions are expressed in their language.”8 For Vico, “language reveals the process of
reason, passion, and imagination, as well as the social conventions and historical
circumstances that shape our concerns.”9 Herder also saw language as “constitutively
human,” Williams points out, opposing “any notion of language being given to man (as
by God), or of language being added to man, as a special kind of acquisition or tool.”10
To Williams’ regret, both Vico’s and Herder’s understanding of language as a
constitutive activity did not survive. Linguistics has adopted a variety of perspectives
that persisted in seeing language as an object, not as a constitutive activity. For example,
both William Jones’ classiﬁcation of languages by “families,” and the development of
comparative philology, which focused on the study of written languages, and on

discovering certain “laws” governing different languages, fail to grasp language in its

175

constitutive process. Saussure’s structural linguistics was an especially crucial
deveIOpment in this trend in linguistics. Saussure’s suggestion of a social system of
language (langue) and individual utterance (parole) is a powerful concept, but
unfortunately, it excludes the idea of language in its speciﬁc, active, and constitutive
forms.H
It was Marx and Engels who resumed the trail that Vico and Herder were
following from a materialist perspective. In The German Ideology Marx and Engels
observes that:
.. man also possesses ‘consciousness’: but, even so, not ‘pure’ consciousness.
From the start the ‘spirit’ is afﬂicted with the curse of being ‘burdened’ with
matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air,
sounds, in short of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is
practical consciousness, as it exists for other men, and for that reason is really
beginning to exist for me personally as well; for language, like consciousness,
only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.12
For Marx and Engels, language, as practical consciousness, intervenes and mediates the
continuing social process of men’s production and reproduction of daily life
The Marxist material understanding of language as the shaping power for both the
human subject and the world is strongly embraced in Browning’s poetry. As mentioned
before, The Ring and the Book as a whole is simultaneous denunciation and conﬁrmation of
human language. The constant interplay between these two contradictory attitudes towards
language creates a dynamic tension that refuses to see language as a static entity. In the last

book of the poem, the poet persona quotes Fra Celestino’s text:

176

I demand assent

To the enunciation of my text

In face of one proof more that ‘God is true

And every man a liar’—that who trusts

To human testimony for a fact

Gets this sole fact—himself is proved a fool;

Man’s speech being false, if but by consequence

That only strength is true: while man is weak,

And, since truth seems reserved for heaven not earth,

Plagued here by earth’s prerogative of lies,

Should learn to love and long for what, one day,

Approved by life’s probation, he may speak. (XII. 598-609)
Here the poet persona suggests that human language, unlike God’s word, is not able to
generate truth. However, the same poet persona claims in the ﬁrst book of the poem that
human language is capable of ﬁnding or generating truth. The often quoted ring metaphor
clearly demonstrates how language mediates subject and object. The poet persona ﬁnds by
chance a collection of some documents related to Guido’s murder trial, bound together, and
he claims:

Now, as the ingot, ere the ring was forged,

Lay gold, (beseech you, hold that ﬁgure fast!)

So, in this book lay absolutely truth,

Fanciless fact, the documents indeed. (1. 141-4)

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Although he claims that the book contains absolute truth, the truth in its raw condition is
meaningless unless it is worked on by the poet. The objective world becomes meaningful
only when it is worked on by man, who brings some changes to it through his labor.
Therefore, the poet contends that the raw truth of the book needs to be worked out through
the application of the poet’s “fancy,” as he calls it:

Well, now; there ’3 nothing in nor out o’ the world

Good except truth: yet this, the something else,

What ’3 this then, which proves good yet seems untrue?

This that I mixed with truth, motions of mine

That quickened, made the inertrless malleable

O’ the gold was not mine,«what ’3 name for this?

Are means to the end, themselves in part the end?

Is ﬁction which makes fact alive, fact too?

The somehow may be thishow. (I. 698-706)
Human labor is primarily a means toward the production and reproduction of life. But the
poet asks, “Are means to the end, themselves in part the end?” (704). Karl Marx contends
that the very act of laboring toward an end itself is also an end in itself:

For in the ﬁrst place labour, life-activity, productive life itself, appears to man

merely as a means of satisfying a need—the need to maintain the physical existence.

Yet the productive life is the life of species. It is life-engendering life. The whole

character of a species—its species character—is contained in the character of its life-

activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species character. Life itself appears

only as a means to life.13

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And at the center of human labor there is language. Language, by mediating between the
raw materials, the documents, and the poet persona’s own imagination, creates a ring of
signiﬁcation:

But his work ended, once the thing a ring

Oh, there ’5 repristination! Just a spurt

O’ the proper ﬁery acid o’er the face,

And forth the alloy unfastened ﬂies in fume;

While, self-sufﬁcient now, the shape remains,

The rondure brave, the lilied loveliness,

Gold as it was, is, shall be evennore:

Prime nature with an added artistry—

No carat lost, and you have gained a ring.

What of it? ’T is a ﬁgure, a symbol, say;

A thing’s sign: now for the thing signiﬁed. (I. 22-32)
The ring refers to the repristinated narratives of the old book that the poet enlivens in his
imagination. It is a sign, a signiﬁcation. For Browning, both sign and signiﬁed do not exist
outside the ring of signiﬁcation. He does not deny the existence of the objective world: “in
this book lay absolutely truth, / Fanciless fact, the documents indeed.” What he emphasizes
is that that the objective world is known to man only through language, through the ring of
signiﬁcation. Therefore, at the beginning of the poem the poet persona asks, “For how else
know we save by the worth of word?” (I. 837) Human language, as both the Pope and

Bentham remind, may be false. But one cannot reach to the thing itself without going

179

 

     
  
 

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through language. 80, after the long and tortuous “multifarious mass of words and deeds”
(X. 263), the poet persona conﬁrms his initial question:

This one lesson, that our human speech is naught,

And human testimony false, our frame

And human estimation words and wind.

Why take the artistic way to prove so much?

Because, it is the glory and the good of Art,

That Art remains the one way possible

Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least. (XII. 841-4)

The poet persona asserts that human language is false. As Bentham believes, language
plays a key role in creating a ﬁction; it creates ﬁctional entities that exercise coercive power
on thoughts and actions. At the same time, however, it is through language-«art as the most
gloriﬁed form of language—«that he can reach the truth. In spite of its falseness, language is
the only possible way of speaking truth.

This simultaneous denouncement and conﬁrmation of language becomes
characteristic of The Ring and the Book as a whole. Guido’s two monologues address
directly the multiple questions of language discussed above. The ﬁrst monologue
demonstrates how Guido’s conception of self is shaped by language. Guido perceives
himself through various institutions, such as law and religion; he cannot establish the
referent of his ﬁction of honor, which represents his class distinction and patriarchal
authority, outside the institutions with which he identiﬁes himself. His whole perception of
self is nothing other than the reordering and restructuring of various institutional discourses.

His second monologue, however, exposes his ﬁction of honor, and also his perception of

180

 

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self based on it, as nothing but culturally formed realities, created by language. When
Guido realizes that the very institutions he identiﬁed with before have become a threat to his
life, his perception of self faces a crisis. So he denies the very signifying system that
sustained his ﬁction of honor in his ﬁrst monologues, and attempts to create a new self
outside of it. In this process, his monologue ultimately demonstrates that his ﬁction, his
self-concept, is only a creation of language.

Like his ﬁrst monologue, his second monologue extensively addresses this
capacity of language to reorder and restructure reality—but from a quite different
direction. Upon hearing that the Pope has refused to pardon him, a pardon which Guido
requested on the grounds that he once served in the Church, he realizes that the various
institutions whose language be appropriated to save himself in his ﬁrst monologue have
turned against him. Therefore, rather than relying on the same institutional languages,
this time Guido denounces these very institutions by exposing that their existence is only
by the black magic of language. Guido claims that an institution stands only as the
product of a language game, rather than as an entity of any intrinsic validity. Denying his
former self created through various institutional languages, he resorts to the power of
language to create another self that is independent of the threatening institutions.

Conﬁned in his prison cell and visited by two priests sent by the Pope, Guido
plays one last language game with the world. At the beginning of his monologue Guido
adOpts the same strategy he tried in his ﬁrst monologue to save his life. That is, his act
of killing was only meant to beneﬁt the public weal:

All honest Rome approved my part;

Whoever owned wife, sister, daughter,--nay,

181

      
 

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Mistress,«had any shadow of any right

That looks like right, and, all the more resolved,

Held it with tooth and nail,--these manly men

Approved! I being for Rome, Rome was for me. (XI. 39-44)

Guido pleads by reminding them that he was one of them, a priest in the institution that
threatens his life now, but he soon realizes that they are sent there by the P0pe to hear his
confession, not to free him. “Friends, we used to ﬁisk: / What of this sudden slash in a
friend’s face, / This cut across our good companionship” (XI. 87-9), and he asks, “the law
0’ game is changed?” (X1. 116) Guido decides to stop pleading, and throughout the rest
of his monologue he plays his language games against the institutional languages that
condemn him now. Guido talks to his hardly responsive visitors from dawn to sunset
until the Messenger of Death ﬁnally arrives. The presence of the visitors is for him only
an inducement to bring out his game of language: “Let me talk, / Or leave me, at your
pleasure! talk I must: / What is your visit but my lure to talk?” (XI. 130-2), or “You use
your ears, / I use my tongue” (XI. 136-7).

One thing that is striking in Guido’s second monologue is the sharp contrast
between his intense consciousness of approaching death and his increasing volubility and
energy with which he is holding on to life:

Is it not terrible, I entreat you, Sirs?—

With manifold and plenitudinous life,

Prompt at death’s menace to give blow for threat,

Answer his “Be thou not!” by “Thus I am!”—

Terrible so to be alive yet die?

182

 

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How I live, howl see! So, ——how I speak!

Lucidity of soul unlocks the lips:

I never had the words at will before. (XI. 153-60)

The awareness of approaching death catalyzes Guido’s language game. In his ﬁrst
monologue Guido maintains an undivided self-identity as he identiﬁes himself through
various institutions. However, when he realizes that the very institutions that he
appropriated for his defense are now turned against him, his institutionalized perception
of self faces an enormous crisis. As Lisa O’Connor correctly points out, faced with this
crisis, Guido tries to “create a self with which to face and endure death?“ The creation
of the new self is made possible through a creative power of language, “the ability of
language to reorder and restructure,” as Armstrong notes. ’5 Thus, the question of
language becomes a central concern in Guido’s second monologue. In her insightﬁrl
article, O’Conner observes that “Guido’s second monologue becomes less a portrayal of
the problematics of salvation than a ﬁnal dramatizing of the problematics of using
language to free and to construct a self.”“’ When his last appeal to the Pope has failed, he
deconstructs the institutional language of the Pope and constructs a new self outside
institutions, aided only by the conjuring power of language.

Guido’s efforts to create a self outside of institutions, interestingly, begins with
denying the validity of the institutional entities around which he previously built his ﬁction
of honor. To the priests who would not lend a helping hand to his plea for life, Guido
declares:

Sirs, truth shall save it, since no lies assist!

Hear the truth, you, whatever you style yourselves,

183

 

  

   
  
  
    

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Civilization and society!

Come, one good grapple, I with the world! (XI. 461-4)

In Guido’s ﬁrst monologue both “civilization” and “society” are important words with
which he builds his ﬁction of honor. Guido claims that man’s honor is indispensable to
society and that he followed faithfully what society asked him to do. Even the killing of
Pompilia was part of it. Now Guido realizes that this very civilization and society have
become a threat to him. Law ﬁnds him guilty, and as a last resort he appeals to the
Church, which, represented by the Pope, condemns him and denies a pardon. Upon
realizing this, Guido attempts to undermine the ecclesiastical authority by showing that
institutions are only a language game, and he decides to play his own language game:
“one good grapple, I with the world.”

Institutions collectively participate in forming a web of signiﬁcation through
which the dominant social relations are maintained and disseminated. However, at the
same time, in this web of signiﬁcation these institutions emulate each other for
dominance. Guido’s language game appropriates, and at the same time, nulliﬁes the
multi-lateral relations in which institutions coordinate and emulate each other. Guido
reminds his listeners that each institution is supposed to play a different social role: “Law
being harshness, Gospel only love” (X1. 372). By this distinction he attempts to
undermine the Church’s authority for punishment. Guido claims that, “I have the best of
the battle: that’s a fact, / / What though half Rome condemned me? Half approved /. ..
/ All Rome, 1’ the main, acquitting me” (XI. 390-4). Even when Law approves his act, he
asks, how does the Church, which should be all love, condemn him?

Christ’s maxim is—one soul outweighs the world:

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Civilization and society!

Come, one good grapple, I with the world! (XI. 461-4)

In Guido’s ﬁrst monologue both “civilization” and “society” are important words with
which he builds his ﬁction of honor. Guido claims that man’s honor is indispensable to
society and that he followed faithfully what society asked him to do. Even the killing of
Pompilia was part of it. Now Guido realizes that this very civilization and society have
become a threat to him. Law ﬁnds him guilty, and as a last resort he appeals to the
Church, which, represented by the Pope, condemns him and denies a pardon. Upon
realizing this, Guido attempts to undermine the ecclesiastical authority by showing that
institutions are only a language game, and he decides to play his own language game:
“one good grapple, I with the world.”

Institutions collectively participate in forming a web of signiﬁcation through
which the dominant social relations are maintained and disseminated. However, at the
same time, in this web of signiﬁcation these institutions emulate each other for
dominance. Guido’s language game appropriates, and at the same time, nulliﬁes the
multi-lateral relations in which institutions coordinate and emulate each other. Guido
reminds his listeners that each institution is supposed to play a different social role: “Law
being harshness, Gospel only love” (X1. 372). By this distinction he attempts to
undermine the Church’s authority for punishment. Guido claims that, “I have the best of
the battle: that’s a fact, / / What though half Rome condemned me? Half approved /. ..
/ All Rome, i’ the main, acquitting me” (XI. 390-4). Even when Law approves his act, he
asks, how does the Church, which should be all love, condemn him?

Christ’s maxim is—one soul outweighs the world:

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Respite me, save a soul, then, curse the world!

“No,” venerable sire, I hear you smirk,

“No: for Christ’s gospel changes names, not things,

“Renews the obsolete, does nothing more!

“Our ﬁre-new gospel is re-tinkered law,

“Our mercy, justice,--Jove’s rechristened God. (XI. 359-65)

Since Gospel assumes the place of Law, Guido reasons, the Church is only a changed
name for Law, rather than a separate intrinsic referent of God. Guido contends that, just
as law is a culturally formed social contract (see XI. 515-534), so the Church is only a
culturally formed entity. Asserting “if ever was such faith at all / Born in the world... ‘T
is dead of age, ludicrously dead” (XI. 558-61), Guido claims that the institution is only a
matter of manipulation of language.

Here Guido, once again, raises the question of the Benthamite fiction. According
to Guido, Christianity, as a sign, does not have any signiﬁed; it is based on an empty
referent. Just as the black mark the Pope ﬁnds in Guido is only a ﬁgure of speech, so the
Church, as the Bishop explains in Caponsacchi’s monologue, sustains itself by
manipulating language in a social dimension. The Church in Guido’s Roman society
serves as the ultimate dispenser of judgement and truth, representing the universal truth
of God. By playing his own language game Guido, interestingly, happens to reach a very
insightful understanding of the nature of institutional discourse, which Lefort explains:

The discourse inscribed in the institution maintains the illusion of an essence of

society, staves off the double threat that weighs upon the established order by

virtue of the fact that it is divided and the fact that it is historical; it imposes itself

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as a discourse rational in itself, a closed discourse which, masking the conditions

of its own engendering, claims to reveal that of the empirical social reality. ’7
Although the Pope claims that the Church represents the universal truth of God, Guido
argues, it is only a culturally formed institution. It does not have any referent but the
Pope’s ﬁction of God as transcendental a priori. The Pope’s Church is sustained by
signifying conventions, literary manipulation, and metaphoric uses of language, such as
the images of wolf and sheep that Guido later deconstructs. Thus Guido contends that it
would not change a thing even if faith were replaced by unfaith, and society would
remain the same as before:

Conversely unbelief, faith’s opposite—

Set it to work on life unﬂinchingly,

Yet give no symptom of an outward change:

Why should thing change because men disbelieve

What’s incompatible, in the whited tomb,

With bones and rotteness one inch below?

What saintly act is done in Rome to-day

But might be prompted by the devil,«“is”

I say not,--“has been, and again may be,”——

I do say, full i’ the face 0’ the cruciﬁx

You try to stop my mouth with! Off with it! ‘

Look in your heart, if your soul have eyes!

Unbelief still might work the wires and move

Man, machine, to play a faithﬁrl part. (XI. 599-613)

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Guido attempts to nullify the Christian authority that threatens his life by blurring the
distinction between faith and unfaith. This is made possible by the conjuring power of
language, which he makes the most of, and he is elated over his achievement:

But, 10, I wave wand, made the false to the true!

Here ’5 Rome believes in Christianity!

What an explosion, how the fragments ﬂy

Of what was surface, mask and make-believe! (XI. 622-25)
Guido performs his black magic of language by dismantling a dichotomous framework
through which the Church exercises its institutional authorities. Guido attacks the
dichotomies of good vs. evil and sheep vs. wolf which the Pope uses to condemn Guido.
In his monologue the Pope harshly condemns Guido, saying Guido once served in the
Church and yet committed the act of a wolf: “I ﬁnd this black mark impinge the man, /
That he believes in just the vile of life” (X. 511-2), or “The wolf feast on their heart, the
larnb-like child his prey” (X. 559). The Pope frequently uses the dichotomous metaphors
of wolf vs. sheep or lamb, and shepherd vs. thief. Guido realizes that an institution like
the Pope’s church imposes its power through a metaphoric use of language. As it is not
true that there is really a black mark on his body that denotes his evilness, Guido
concludes that all institutions are not based on real entities. Their existence is only a
matter of linguistic manipulation, of how to impart meaning through an institutionalized
signifying system. By blurring the very metaphoric distinction that the Pope uses, Guido
attempts to escape the institutional power that threatens him:

Your self-styled shepherd thieves!

A thief—and how thieves hate the wolves we know:

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Damage to theft, damage to thrift, all ’3 one!

The red hand is sworn foe of the black jaw.

That’s only natural , that’s right enough:

But why the wolf should compliment the thief

With shepherd’s title, bark out life in thanks,

And, spiteless, lick the prong that spits him,--eh,

Cardinal? My Abate, scarcely thus!

There, let my sheepskin-garb, a curse on ’t, go—

Leave my teeth free if I must show my shag! (XI. 434-44)
Guido dismantles the traditional metaphor of the Pope as the “Vicar of the Lord, /
Shepherd of the ﬂock” (400-1). Guido describes the Pope as “the thief with shepherd’s
title,” and contends, “His pleasure is to turn staff, use the point, / And thrust the
shuddering sheep he calls the wolf, / Back and back, down and down to where hell
gapesl” (404-6). And through a series of deconstruction of the Pope’s language, Guido
ultimately detaches himself from the institution that threatens his life:

I think I never was at any time

A Christian, as you nickname all the world,

Me among others: truce to nonsense now!

Name me, a primitive religionist— (XI. 1916-19)
An undercurrent of Guido’s game of language is a trace of the alienated condition of
Guido’s institutionalized self. In The Ring and the Book one can ﬁnd various forms of
alienation in institutionalized labor. The early Caponshacchi in the institution of the

Church, Pompilia in the institution of marriage, the two lawyers in the institution of law--

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all suffer from dissatisfaction and alienation within their institutions. Guido’s ﬁction of
honor also suffers from the gap between his utopian vision of patriarchal authority and its
reality as Pompilia nulliﬁes it. The Pope’s refusal to pardon him completely ends his
hope for regaining his authority and fulﬁlling his utopian vision. Guido’s
institutionalized self faces a serious crisis:
You preached long and loud

On high-days, “Take our doctrine upon trust!

Into the mill-house with you! Grind our com,

Relish our chaff, and let the green grass grow!”

I tried chaff, found I famished on such fare,

So made this mad rush at the mill-house-door,

Buried my head upon to the ears in dew,

browsed on the best: for which you brain me, Sirs!

Be it so. I conceived of life that way,

And still declare—life, without absolute use

Of the actual sweet therein, is death, not life.

Give me,—paydown,—not promise, which is air,—

Something that ’5 out of life and better still,

Make sure reward, make certain punishment,

Entice me, scare me, —-I ’ll forgo this life;

Otherwise, no!—the less that words mere wind,

Would cheat me of some minutes while they plague,

Baulk fulness of revenge here,—blame yourselves

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For this eruption of the pent-up soul

You prisoned ﬁrst and played with afterward! (XI. 1478-97)
Guido’s pent-up soul erupts through his endless talking. One thing that is striking in
Guido’s second monologue is his fascination with the power of language to reorder and
restructure the past and the present, as indicated by the volubility and energy he brings
into his talking. Guido elates, “1 wave a wand and bring to pass / In a moment, in the
twinkle of an eye, / / And bid it operate, have ﬁlll effect / On every circumstance of
life” (XI. 587-93), and again, “1 wave wand, made the false to the true!” (X1. 622) This
awareness of the power of language provides Guido an outlet to “the pent-up soul”
(1498) of his institutionalized self when the very institution fails him:

My nature, when the outrage was too gross,

Widened itself an outlet over-wide

By way of answer, sought its own relief

With more ﬁre and brimstone than you wished.

All your own doing: preachers, blame yourselves! (XI. 1515-9)
Guido’s nature widens itself and creates a self that exists independent of the institutions
that threaten him. As mentioned before, Guido is sharply conscious of his approaching
death, as revealed in his frequent mention of the death machine he will soon face: “his
brand-new engine,”(125) and “the engine,”(254) and again “the engine”(309). Against
this inevitable fate, he desires to create a self that will survive this death with the help of
the conjuring power of language. Guido discards the image of himself as a lost sheep,
“one soul outweighs the world,” and depicts himself as a wolf. The wolf image is an

important metaphor in Guido’s game of language. O’Connor points out, “this image of

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wolf becomes the major image upon which he begins to create an identity of
himself.“8 With the power of language to reorder and restructure through various
metaphors, Guido creates the wolf image, a whole self, a self that will survive the
approaching death by completely denying the Christian idea of the hell:

Let me turn wolf, be whole, and sate, for once,-——

Wallow in what is now a wolﬁshness

Coerced too much by the humanity

That ’5 half of me as well! Grow out of man,

Glut the wolf-nature,— what remains but grow

Into the man again, be man indeed

And all man? Do I ring the changes right?

Deformed, transformed, reformed, informed, conformed!

The honest instinct, pent and crossed through life,

Let surge by death into a visible ﬂow

Of rupture. (XI. 2056-66)
One thing that Guido’s language game extensively addresses is the idea that self is
formed through language, and that self is not a ﬁxed entity. His monologue clearly
demonstrates how a self is formed through language. Guido’s self, in his ﬁrst monologue,
does not exist anywhere else than in the various institutional languages he appropriates
for his ﬁction of honor, especially legal, religious, and sexual discourse. In his second
monologue Guido creates a different self by reordering and restructuring the various
institutional discourses. When he is denied of any future, Guido reshufﬂes and blurs the

metaphoric opposition and creates a new future for himself through the wolf image.

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Guido is fascinated with this power of language and makes the most of it. Thus, for
Guido, language becomes an important means of opening up the ﬁlture. As to the
creativity of language, Armstrong notes:

Language, intervening in the world, is the prerequisite for action. The constructs

of ‘the forgery of language’ are essential motivating factors in choice and

action because their very ﬁctionality Opens up an imaginatively possible future.

This imagined future is a linguistic moment, made unconsciously and riskily out

of the repetitions of past thought and action, past memory and desire and past

language, but conditions the beyond, a ﬁctional continuity made out of a radically
unstable discontinuity but nevertheless providing the ground for action. No action,
right or wrong, can occur without the creativity of language.19
Language reorders and restructures the past and opens up the future. Guido’s opens up a
new future for himself by reordering and restructuring the metaphors through which
institutions impart their institutional meanings. Thus, Guido’s second monologue
celebrates the creativity of language. However, at the same time, it also addresses and
focuses on the problems of the very creativity of language.

Guido is fascinated with the power of language and he! exploits its power to save
his life, but he succeeds only temporarily. As I discussed before, The Ring and the Book
as a whole addresses the role of language in creating ﬁctional entities that exercise a
coercive power on human thoughts and actions. And importantly, Guido’s second
monologue addresses the problems of the hedonistic laissez-faire-ism that operates within
the reahn of language and also of Millite subjective expressionism. Herbert Tucker

observes, “Typically Browning’s monologuists tell the story of a yearning after a

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condition of lyric, a condition that is itself in turn unimaginable except as the object of, or
pretext for, the yearning that impels the story plotted against it.”20 Guido’s second
monologue reﬂects exactly this situation. No matter whether or not the wolf image of
Guido achieves the condition of lyric, it is the future condition that the present is
constantly undermining. The wolf image is only a product of his yearning for life that
was propelled by approaching death. His language game cannot stop the coming of
death. He yearns for the strength of the wolf that his language has conjured; however, in
reality he is helpless against the approaching death. It is only a trick of ﬁction and word-
play. Thus, Guido confesses, “All’s but a ﬂourish, ﬁgure of rhetoric!” (851), a rhetoric
he uses to save his life. This aspect is more clearly revealed in his realization that the
signiﬁcation of the wolf image does not go beyond himself. His two listeners are hardly
responsive. More importantly Guido realizes that Pompilia is still alive and that she also
speaks of her own story differently from his:

The worst ’5 in store: thus hindered, haled this way

To Rome again by hangdog, whom I ﬁnd I

Here, still to ﬁght with, but my pale frail wife?. ..

She too must shimmer through the gloom o’ the grave,

Come and confront me—not at j udgrnent-seat

Where I could twist her soul, as erst her ﬂesh,

And turn her truth into a lie,«but there,

0’ the death-bed, with God’s hand between us both,

Striking me dumb, and helping her to speak,

Tell her own story her own way, and turn

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My plausibility to nothingness! (XI. 1675-89)
Guido’s language game ultimately exposes that his wolf-self is only a ﬁction that cannot
claim materiality for itself. Thus Guido’s monologue addresses the question of ﬁction

and language in a chaotic circular way.

194

 

 

1. V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA &
London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 9.

2. Peter Allan Dale, “Paracelsus and Sordello: Trying the Stuff of Language,” Victorian
Poetry, Vol. 18, No.4, Winter, 1980, 360.

3. See W. David Shaw, “The Optic metaphor: Victorian Poetics and the Theory of
anoledege,” Victorian Poetry, vol. 24, no. 1, Spring 1989.

4 . Robert Browning, “Essay on Shelley,” The Works of Robert Browning, vol. XII, (New
York: Fred DeFau: 1910), 288.

5. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford & New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 21.

6. Ibid., 22.
7. Ibid., 23.

8. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present (Boston:
Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1990), eds. P. Bizzell & B. Herzberg, p. 647.

9. Ibid., 711.
10. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 24.
”. See ibid., 25-28.

'2. K. Marx & F. Engels, The German Ideology (London, 1969), 19.

'3. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, from Herbert Tucker,

The Marx-Engels Reader (New York & London: Norton, 1978), 75-76.

’4. Lisa O’Connor, “The Construction of a Self: Guido and Metaphor in Book XI Of The
Ring and the Book,” from Browning Centenary Essays: Special Edition of A UMLA, eds.
Simon Petch & Warwick Slinn, AUMLA, vol. 71 (May 1989), 139.

15. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London & New

York: Routledge, 1993), 35.
‘6. O’Connor, AUMLA, 139.

‘7. Quoted in John Thompson, Studies in the Theory ofIdeology (Berkeley & L.A., Cal.:
University of California Press, 1984), 25.

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’9. Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, 299
20. Herbert Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric” in Lyric

Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, eds. Chaviva Hosek & Patricia Parker, (Ithaca & London:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 230.

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CONCLUSION

CORRECTING THE PORTRAIT BY THE LIVING FACE

As discussed in the previous chapters, the fundamental question that the
monologues of The Ring and the Book raise is the Benthamite ﬁction and its coercive
power. In the poem, Browning makes an exhaustive investigation of prevalent Victorian
institutional and cultural ﬁctions. Guido’s monologue exposes the politics of
contemporary patriarchal gender ideology. Guido’s supposed right over Pompilia
within the institution of marriage turns out to be just a culturally constructed ﬁction. By
deconstructing the word honor, the very gist of Guido’s ﬁction, the poem suggests the
possibility that the whole social structure of a patriarchal society is built on ﬁction. The
two lawyers’ monologues also draw on the politics of nothingness. Law, “The patent
truth-extracting process” (I. 1114) is, the poem suggests, nothing other than an
employment of aesthetic language at an institutional level for certain purposes, concealing
the emptiness of its content. The poem also brings religion under scrutiny. The Pope
makes efforts to prove the transcendental a priori status of God. However, his notion of
God as product is constantly subverted by the possibility of God as process, ultimately
implying that his God is just another ﬁctional entity.

Nevertheless, and despite its empty referent, a ﬁction exercises coercive power on
human thoughts and actions since it is presented as the seamless whole of reality. More
importantly, the poem suggests, a ﬁction is dangerous because it tends to help reinforce
the existing relations of power and domination in a society. A ﬁction presents an

ideologically ﬁxed set of meanings and values, investing itself with naturalness,

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legitimacy, and universality. Both Guido and Archangeli contend that a husband’s
honor, or right, is God’s gift, a natural law supported by custom and tradition. The
Pope’s religious ﬁction presents a timeless, transcendental a priori God, who stands apart
ﬁ'om history.

At the center of the Benthamite theory of ﬁction lies the question of language.
A ﬁction is created and sustained by the conjuring power of language. The Pope
insightfully perceives that human language is apt to be false and capable of distorting
reality. One thing that the poem extensively addresses is the various discursive practices
in which language helps support the existing relations of domination and power.
Archangeli’s aesthetic language conceals the empty referent of Guido’s honor and
justiﬁes Guido’s oppressive patriarchal authority. Caponsacchi’s employment Of artistic
language in the secularized institution of Church victimizes women.

However, the dramatic nature in The Ring and the Book brings the politics of
ﬁction under scrutiny and inspection. One thing that readers of Victorian poetry are
constantly reminded of is the presence Of different poetic voices, whether heard or
unheard, and the conﬂicts or struggles among them, implied or expressed. The presence
of multiple voices and their internal dialogues or debates characterizes Victorian poetry as
fundamentally dramatic. Dramatic poetry brings a subject-centered expressionism into
the public arena of discourse where its validity is tested. Browning’s dramatic poetry
forces the reader to follow two kinds Of reading, subjective and objective, respectively.
The subjective reading overhears the subject-centered, expressive, and psychological
voice that a speaking subject utters. On the other hand, the objective reading looks into

how this subjective utterance is seen and understood by other parties present or implied in

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the poem, or by the reader. These two readings create certain tensions or conﬂicts
between them, which bring the subjective expressionism under scrutiny and inspection.
The unique dramatic structure in The Ring and the Book creates multiple rings of
hermeneutic circles where any set of meanings, values, and ideas are only temporarily
validated and constantly subverted by other ones. In these hermeneutic circles any
meaning may be considered, not as a product, but as a process. Many critics have
noticed this aspect in Browning’s poetry. Clyde Ryals observes that “What concerns
Browning is not so much meaning as the possibility Of meaning For him meaning is
neither absent nor ﬁxed: it is always becoming, realizing itself and being realized in
different styles, forms, and perspectives.”1 Warwick Slinn remarks, “Browning’s poem
demonstrates the way meaning is temporal and contingent, subject to the appropriation of

”2 Herbert Tucker also sees “his art as a fabric, or

forms and the shifting of contexts.
maze, of dialectic and ﬁctive structures that unravels itself.”3 Browning’s understanding
of truth as a process is important because any attempts to see truth as a ﬁnished, ﬁxed
entity ultimately approve and help maintain the status quo of a society.

These critics’ observations provide a valuable clue towards an understanding of
Browning’s poetry. However, I do not think that Browning’s poetry is merely concerned
with a creative process itself in art that endlessly churns out different meanings, as these
critics seem to believe. Rather, Browning’s poetry is more concerned with the way
certain meanings are constructed and presented and the way they inﬂuence human
thoughts and actions. This is why it is necessary to direct our attention to the question

of ﬁction and ideology in reading Browning’s poetry. Meaning is always constructed

within speciﬁc material conditions and social contexts; furthermore, no meaning exists

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independently from the social relations of domination and power. In The Ring and the
Book Browning brings together different forms of individual consciousness and
investigates them in their material conditions, demonstrating that “the individual
consciousness is a social-ideological fact,” as V.N. Volosinov points out.4

Not surprisingly, in The Ring and the Book no character is free from the dictates
of ﬁction, and the unique structure of the poem implies that the same is true for readers.
Browning may have regarded this as the very condition of human existence.
Nevertheless, Browning does not seem to see this condition of human existence with
pessimism only. At one point the Pope asks what the meaning of this world is:

Is this our ultimate stage, or starting-place

To try man’s foot, if it will creep or climb,

’Mid obstacles in seeming, points that prove

Advantage for who vaults from low to high

And makes the stumbling-block a stepping stone? (X. 409-13)
In his Essay on Shelley, Browning seems to give his own answer to this question:

For it is with this world, as starting-point and basis alike, that we shall

always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be learned and

thrown aside, but reverted to and releamed. The spiritual

comprehension may be subtilized, but the raw material it operates upon
should remain.5
Human consciousnesses are inescapably intertwined with ﬁctions, and no truth is

available in its absolute condition in this world. Browning believes that any search for

truth should begin with this very world. By a continuous readjustment of our limited

200

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understanding of the world, one can get closer to the truth, the real material conditions of
social existence. Thus for Browning the world has to be constantly “reverted to and
relearned.” Armstrong seems to best summarize this aspect in Browning’s poetry:

Democratic realism, elitist idealism, are alike the provisional and

contradictory construction of cultural ﬁctions. The point of the

monologues is that people live and experience them: imagination shapes

and is shaped by them; they determine choices, and yet they cannot be

extracted as ‘pure’ forms of thought or experience from the language

and conditions in which they are produced. Ideology cannot get

outside itself. But what we can do is to participate in the endless

process of redeﬁnition.6
By participating in the endless process of redeﬁnition of the world, one can get closer to
the understanding of the real material conditions of existence. What one perceives as
truth in this process of redeﬁnition, however dynamic and regenerative this process may
be, may still conceal the real material conditions; it continues to be a ﬁction. The
material conditions of existence are constantly on the move and always ahead of human
understanding; they can never be grasped in their completeness. Nevertheless,
Browning suggests, the endless process of redeﬁnition itself is the only way by which one
can get close to them.

For most Victorians, their age was one of great social change. Faced with such
unprecedented social change, Browning and his contemporaries may have desired and
searched for certain timeless, ﬁxed absolute truths. But Browning insightfully perceives

that such truths are not available in this world; knowledge and truth in this world are not

201

   
   
       
  
   
    

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given as portraits already completed. All we can do is just to make an endless
redeﬁnition of the world in search for them, “correct[ing] the portrait by the living face”

(X. 1873), as the Pope muses.

202

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given as portraits already completed. All we can do is just to make an endless
redeﬁnition of the world in search for them, “correct[ing] the portrait by the living face”

(X. 1873), as the Pope muses.

202

 

 

  
  
 

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given as portraits already completed. All we can do is just to make an endless
redeﬁnition of the world in search for them, “correct[ing] the portrait by the living face”

(X. 1873), as the Pope muses.

202

 

 

1. Clyde De L. Ryals, Becoming Browning: The Poems and Plays of Robert Browning,

1833-1846 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), 253-4.

2. E. Warwick Slinn, The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry (London: MacMillan,
1991), 140.

3. Quoted from Patricia O’Neill, Robert Browning and T wentieth-Century Criticism
(Columbia: Camden House, 1995), 119.

4. V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA & London:
Harvard University Press, 1998), 9.

5. Robert Browning, Robert Browning 's Complete Works (New York: Fred DeFau,
1910), XII, 288.

6. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London & New
York: Routledge, 1993), 308.

203

 

 

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Selected Bibliography
1. Primary Works
Browning, Robert. The Works of Robert Browning. Ed. F.G. Kenyon. London: Smith &

Elder. 1912.

----. Robert Browning ’s Complete Works. New York: Fred DeFau. 1910.

11. Secondary Works

Althusser, Louis. For Marx. New York: Pantheon Books. 1969.
----. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. 1971.
Altick, Richard. Victorian People and Ideas. New York & London: Norton. 1973.

Armstrong, Isobel. “The Ring and the Book: The Uses of Prolixity.” The Major
Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1969. 177-

97.
----. Victorian Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry 1830-1870. London: Athlone Press. 1972.
----. “Directions in Browning Criticism.” Browning Society Notes. 2 (July 1972): 41 -3.
---~. Ed. Writers and Their Background: Robert Browning. London: Bell. 1974.

----. Language as Living Form in Nineteenth Century Poetry. Sussex: Harvester Press.
1982.

----. “Problem of Representation in The Ring and the Book: Politics, Aesthetics,
Language.” Perosa, Browning e Venezia, 1990.

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London & New York: Routledge.
1993.

Barrett, Michele. The Politics of Poetry: From Marx to Foucault. Stanford, Cal.:
Stanford University Press. 1991.

204

 

. o

A 1 lg“- T} ‘2'.) “w.“ 3“
v _ ‘ . ,— < 1
' -~n.~:;:~a-m¢. 1

0

I

‘ i ' "’ r‘ebma

 

33“!) :[l—c'dOri“
‘ u’i ' .3351!ng

 

"I “WNW!

1..- m.W W m m» «at smos \a mamas“: ”Q. "
5’ :T- i :‘r_-_—:'~k:;r:‘. '[m 1' ‘ -. ._<

 

- \

     
     
   
          

l
v

yew ,

 

 

Bentham, Jeremy. The Theory of Fictions. Inserted in G.K. Ogden. Bentham ’5 Theory
Of Fictions. New York: Harcourt & Brace. 1932.

----. The Principles of Morals and Legislation. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus. 1988.

Bizzell, P. & Herzberg, B. Eds. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times
to the Present. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press. 1990.

Bloom, Harold. “Reading Browning.” Poetics of Inﬂuence. Ed. John Hallander. New
Haven: Henry R. Schawab. 1988. 175-86.

Brady, Ann P. Pompilia: A Feminist Reading of Robert Browning ’s The Ring and the
Book. Athens: Ohio University Press. 1988.

Bristow, Joseph. Ed. The Victorian Poet: Poetics and Persona. London: Croom Helm.
1987.

Brook, Cleanth. The Well- Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich. 1974.

Buckler, William E. Poetry and Truth in Robert Browning ’s The Ring and the Book.
New York & London: New York University Press. 1985.

Chapman, Raymond. The Sense of the Past in Victorian Literature. London: Croom
Helm. 1986.

Carlyle, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Carlyle in Thirty Volumes. London: Chapman
Hall. ,

Crowder, Ashby. “Browning and Women.” Studies in Browning and His Circle. 14
(1986): 91-134.

Cunningham, Valentine. “Tradition as Debris and the Debris of Tradition in the poetry
of Robert Browning.” Eds. Roland Hagenbuchle & Laura Skanera. Poetry and
Epistemology: Turning Point in the History of Poetic Knowledge, Papers from the
International Poetry Symposium Eichstatt 1983. Regensburg, Germany: Verlag
Friedrich Pustet. 1986: 168-81.

Dale, Peter Allan. The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold, Pater.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 1983.

----. “Paracelsus and Sordello: Trying the Stuff of Language.” Victorian Poetry. 18.
No.4. (Winter 1980): 359-69.

205

 

 

 

  
   
    

111:8 _t\(\ﬁ'.>\1l»‘lm"

."".'..‘. I} 1.4 M‘U‘ult-R ‘R a "'I Y.
" - Z 1;}1Nﬂbn0-lb9a:

‘ .
r

s

, .‘nu-I

urn-173.“.

. . ""LH

 

‘.
. . . . 1.. WE" 39'?in
. ,' H ’ "
, , 111.3?)
5
, z " l
. - u - ,xrm')
.’ ‘11-”: l
‘ ..mgym-mu’)
.~. ~l. 515-: ' '
‘g' nun-w 1:1“.3- '
,1 ..-..v,--m«+.m.x\
52,1 “(111)515th

. -1 ; ~ -. -. .a m Alla-Km ”"1
..:.,:.~.';.'::: 1 Eng-muff Wit-M M i X

  

DeVane, William Clyde. A Browning Handbook. New York: Appleton-Century—Croﬁs.
1935.

Drew, Philip. The Poetry of Robert Browning: A Critical Introduction. London:
Methuen. 1970.

----. An Annotated Bibliography of Robert Browning. New York: Harvester
Wheatsheaf. 1990.

Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London:
Verso. 1975.

----. Ideology: An Introduction. London & New York: Verso. 1991.

----. Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of
California Press. 1976.

Erickson, Lee. Robert Browning: His Poetry and His Audiences. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press. 1984.

Flowers, Betty. Browning and Modern Tradition. London: MacMillan. 1976.

Gibson, Mary Ellis. History and the Prism of Art: Robert Browning ’s Poetic
Experiment. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1987.

~---. Ed. Critical Essays on Robert Browning. New York: G.K. Hall. 1992.

Irvine, William and Honan, Park. The Ring, the Book, and the Poet. New York:
McGraw-Hill. 1974.

Hicks, Malcom. “Through a Glass Darkly: Contemporary Criticism on Robert
Browning.” Critical Quarterly. 23 (Spring 1981): 73-8.

Houghton, Walter. The Victorian Frame of Mind [830-1870. New Haven: Yale
University Press. 1957.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconsciousness: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1981.

Johnson, E.D.H. “Robert Browning’s Pluralistic Universe: A Reading of The Ring and
the Book.” University of Toronto Quarterly (October, 1961): 20-41.

—---. The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry: Sources of the Poetic Imagination in
Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold. Hamden, Conn: Archon. 1963.

206

 

 

     

      
  

‘ '1':‘ tmuml‘h‘; ‘
""1" ' ""43th

~l’51u'o-w.
«av
v t“ 1"”: -o.
r « . Y»:
15“: 'wk ,n 7'
. , , " j..._ ‘1 noe: r9101};
' fm‘l :00“ m1 -

   

 

”W was an to mum

Langbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern
Literary Tradition. Harrnondsworth: Penguin Books. 1957.

----. The World from Below: Essays on Modern Literature and Culture. London:
University of Wisconsin Press. 1987.

Latane, David. Browning ’s Sordello and the Aesthetics of Diﬂiculty. University of
Victoria. 1987.

Losberg, Jonathan. Fictions of Consciousness: Mill, Newman, and the Reading of
Victorian Prose. New Brunswick & London: Rutgers University Press. 1986.

Lucas, John. Ed. Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century. London: Methuen.
1971.

Martin, Loy D. Browning ’s Dramatic Monologues and the Post-Romantic Subject.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1985.

Maynard, John. “Review.” Victorian Poetry. 26 (Winter 1988): 445-54.

McGann, Jerome J. “Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century.” Studies in English
Literature, 17: 754-5.

Mill, J .S. Utilitarianism and Other Essays: J.S. Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Ed. Alan
Ryan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1987.

Morse, David. High Victorian Culture. New York: New York University Press. 1993.

Munich, Adrienne A. Andromeda 's Chains: Gender and Interpretation in Victorian
Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press. 1989.

O’Connor, Lisa. “The Construction of a Self: Guido and Metaphor in Book XI of the
Ring and the Book.” Eds. Simon Petch &Warwick Slinn. Browning Centenary
Essays: Special Editions of A UMLA. A UMLA . 71 (May 1989): 138-58.

Ogden, C.K. Bentham ’s Theory of Fictions. New York: Harcourt, Brace. 1932.

O’Neill, Patricia. Robert Browning and T wentieth-Century Criticism. Columbia, SC:
Camden House. 1995.

Peckham, Morse. “Historiography and The Ring and the Book.” Victorian Poetry. 4
(1968): 243-58.

----. Victorian Revolutionaries: Speculations on Some Heroes of a Culture Crisis. New
York: George Braziller. 1970.

207

 

: 1")‘1 ..

  
 
    

if 1 1|"; {6.19.31‘0'0‘88

'~’.' .m‘l manmeiWh

p

"u. L..u \"s'Ir’I'M-‘N 24 9“\M I.

met .

3’ {“30“ “L! "I“

Q

1'. 1:]! -7
‘ z..' )- 7’1.‘i 1:1.)A‘O
who}; Haunts.)

 

 

Petch, Simon. “Browning’s Roman Lawyers.” Eds. Simon Petch &Warwick Slinn.
Browning Centenary Essays: Special Editions of A UMLA. AUMLA. 71 (May
1989): 109-38.

Reiman, Donald & Powers, Sharon. Eds. Shelley ’s Poetry and Prose. New York &
London: Norton. 1977.

Rigg, Patricia. “Legal ‘Repristination’ in The Ring and the Book.” Browning Institute
Studies. 18. (1990): 113-30.

Ryals. Clyde de L. Becoming Browning: The Poems and Plays of Robert Browning,
1833-1846. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1983.

Rylance, Rick. Ed. Debating Texts: A Reader in T wentieth-Century Literary Theory
and Method. Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire & Philadelphia: Open University
Press. 1987.

Shaw, David W. The Lucid Veil: Poetic Truth in Victorian Age. London: Athlone. 1987.

-—--. “The Optic Metaphor: Victorian Poetics and the Theory of Knowledge.” Victorian
Poetry. 24 (Spring 1989): 293-325.

Shelley, P.B. & Peacock, T. A Defence of Poetry & The Four Ages of Poetry. The
Bobbs-Merrill. 1965.

Sinﬁeld, Alan. Alfred Tennyson. Oxford & New York: Basil Blackwell. 1986.
Slinn, Warwick. The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry. London: MacMillan. 1991.
----. Browning and the Fictions of Identity. London: MacMillan.1982.

Stone, Marjorie. “Dickens, Bentham, and the Fictions of the Law: A Victorian
Controversy and Its Consequences.” Victorian Studies. (Autumn 1985): 125-54.

Stratton, Jon. Writing Sites: A Genealogy of the Postmodern World. Ann Arbor, Mich:
University of Michigan Press. 1990.

Sullivan, Mary Rose. Browning ’5 Voices in The Ring and the Book: A Study of Method
and Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1969.

Sussman, Herbert. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early
Victorian Literature and Art. London: Cambridge University Press. 1995.

208

 

 

 

 

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Thompson, John. Studies in the Theory of Ideology. Berkeley & L.A: University of
California Press. 1984.

Tucker, Herbert. Browning ’s Beginnings: The Art of Discourse. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press. 1980.

----. “Dramatic Monologues and the Overhearing Lyric.” Lyric Poetry: Beyond New
Criticism. Eds. Chaviva Hosek & Patricia Parker. Ithaca & London: Cornell
University Press. 1985.

----. “Browning’s Lyric Intentions.” Critical Inquiry. 7 (Winter 1980): 275-96.

Tucker, Robert. C. Ed. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York & London: Norton. 1978.

Vico, Giambattista. The New Science. Trans. Bergin, T. & Fisch, M. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press. 1948.

Volosinov, V.N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, Mass.:
HarvardUniversity Press. 1973.

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1 780-1950. New York: Columbia University
Press. 1958.

----. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1977.

Woolford, John. Browning: The Revisionary. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1988.

209

 

 

 

 

     
  
 

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understanding of the world, one can get closer to the truth, the real material conditions of
social existence. Thus for Browning the world has to be constantly “reverted to and
relearned.” Armstrong seems to best summarize this aspect in Browning’s poetry:

Democratic realism, elitist idealism, are alike the provisional and

contradictory construction of cultural ﬁctions. The point of the

monologues is that people live and experience them: imagination shapes

and is shaped by them; they determine choices, and yet they cannot be

extracted as ‘pure’ forms of thought or experience from the language

and conditions in which they are produced. Ideology cannot get

outside itself. But what we can do is to participate in the endless

process of redeﬁnition.6
By participating in the endless process of redeﬁnition of the world, one can get closer to
the understanding of the real material conditions of existence. What one perceives as
truth in this process of redeﬁnition, however dynamic and regenerative this process may
be, may still conceal the real material conditions; it continues to be a ﬁction. The
material conditions of existence are constantly on the move and always ahead of human
understanding; they can never be grasped in their completeness. Nevertheless,
Browning suggests, the endless process of redeﬁnition itself is the only way by which one
can get close to them.

For most Victorians, their age was one of great social change. Faced with such
unprecedented social change, Browning and his contemporaries may have desired and
searched for certain timeless, ﬁxed absolute truths. But Browning insightfully perceives

that such truths are not available in this world; knowledge and truth in this world are not

201

 

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given as portraits already completed. All we can do is just to make an endless
redeﬁnition of the world in search for them, “correct[ing] the portrait by the living face”

(X. 1873), as the Pope muses.

202

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1. Clyde De L. Ryals, Becoming Browning: The Poems and Plays of Robert Browning,

1833-1846 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), 253-4.
2. E. Warwick Slinn, The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry (London: MacMillan,
1991), 140.

3. Quoted from Patricia O’Neill, Robert Browning and Twentieth-Century Criticism
(Columbia: Camden House, 1995), 119.

4. V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA & London:
Harvard University Press, 1998), 9.
5. Robert Browning, Robert Browning ’5 Complete Works (New York: Fred DeFau,
1910), XII, 288.

6. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London & New
York: Routledge, 1993), 308.

203

 

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Selected Bibliography
1. Primary Works
Browning, Robert. The Works of Robert Browning. Ed. F .G. Kenyon. London: Smith &

Elder. 1912.

----. Robert Browning ’s Complete Works. New York: Fred DeFau. 1910.

II. Secondary Works

Althusser, Louis. For Marx. New York: Pantheon Books. 1969.
----. Lenin and Philos0phy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. 1971.
Altick, Richard. Victorian People and Ideas. New York & London: Norton. 1973.

Armstrong, Isobel. “The Ring and the Book: The Uses of Prolixity." The Major
Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1969. 177-

97.

----. Victorian Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry [830-18 70. London: Athlone Press. 1972.
----. “Directions in Browning Criticism.” Browning Society Notes. 2 (July 1972): 41-3.
----. Ed. Writers and Their Background: Robert Browning. London: Bell. 1974.

----. Language as Living Form in Nineteenth Century Poetry. Sussex: Harvester Press.
1982.

----. “Problem of Representation in The Ring and the Book: Politics, Aesthetics,
Language.” Perosa, Browning e Venezia, 1990.

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London & New York: Routledge.
1993.

Barrett, Michele. The Politics of Poetry: From Marx to Foucault. Stanford, Cal.:
Stanford University Press. 1991.

204

 

 

uz-a' w ch as as? .mdoﬂ 3am

Si"! .Wabl'ﬂ

-. . ‘ 1m: u-n'i', nyh‘h .‘--

rut-9.4”.) ll

 

Bentham, Jeremy. The Theory of Fictions. Inserted in G.K. Ogden. Bentham ’s Theory
Of Fictions. New York: Harcourt & Brace. 1932.

----. The Principles of Morals and Legislation. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus. 1988.

Bizzell, P. & Herzberg, B. Eds. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times
to the Present. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press. 1990.

Bloom, Harold. “Reading Browning.” Poetics of Inﬂuence. Ed. John Hallander. New
Haven: Henry R. Schawab. 1988. 175-86.

Brady, Ann P. Pompilia: A Feminist Reading of Robert Browning ’s The Ring and the
Book. Athens: Ohio University Press. 1988.

Bristow, Joseph. Ed. The Victorian Poet: Poetics and Persona. London: Croom Helm.
1987.

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