Robert Browning and the Gothic Imagination

Robert Browning’s poetry frequently exhibits the familiar motifs of Gothic literature but the influence of Gothic on his work has never been systematically explored, perhaps because of the genre’s reputation as merely sensational. This study argues for its centrality in the poet’s development. The legacy of Gothic in the early nineteenth century flowed both directly from eighteenth-century popular novels by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and others, and via the Romantic poets. Its presence was marked by motifs, but just as importantly by mood: terror, the Burkeian sublime, which becomes associated with Romantic transcendence; and horror, Gothic’s darker side, whose images of transgression, ambivalence and disgust are articulated in the writings of Freud and his successors as indicating the return of the repressed. The literary contemporaries of the young Browning were strongly influenced by Gothic, and it is not therefore surprising that we find evidence of its use in his early poetry. Its importance to the poet is two-fold. Firstly its imagery and plot-lines, precisely because of their familiarity, act as what the poet was to call an imaginative ‘alloy’, giving him the means to explore hitherto undeveloped ways of writing about history and psychology. This is why it strongly influenced the development of the dramatic monologue. But Browning’s instrumental deployment of the genre brings with it the underlying Gothic emotions, terror-sublime and horror-disgust, coalescing in the uncanny with its subversion of selfhood, language and time, the very building blocks of the dramatic monologue. My analysis of this profounder aspect of the Gothic imagination interprets Browning’s work largely through the psychoanalytical model of Julia Kristeva. I argue for his increasing awareness of the unconscious sources of the uncanny as evidenced in the symbolic structures of ‘“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”’ and the use of metaphor in The Ring and the Book. In the latter, features of the genre are used to resuscitate and control the poet’s historical sources, drawing on his earlier poetry and the whole Gothic tradition back to Radcliffe and Lewis; while images of terror and horror contribute to an unprecedented character study of the psychology of evil. Despite its importance, however, The Ring and the Book’s influence – as a Gothic-inflected realist narrative – is less obvious than that of ‘Childe Roland’ whose fantasy exploration of Gothic unease has had many successors.