대화시에서 극적 독백으로 : 브라우닝의 『폴린』

초록

This paper aims to investigate Browning's generic experimentation taking place in Pauline . Although the poem has been entertaining relatively low critical attention due to its incoherence, it merits close analysis in the context of the generic development that transforms a conversation poem into a dramatic monologue. Browning's Pauline resembles the conversation poem in that its speaker focuses on his own mental movement and invokes a female auditor in order to confess his feelings and thoughts. Yet, the speaker, who clearly shows the tendency toward self-supremacy in the beginning, increasingly realizes his own limit in connecting with the outer world. The speaker's clear self-consciousness inserted later into the text renders the poem “double-voiced.” In addition, through the footnote added by Pauline in the middle of the text, the poem reveals a striking discrepancy between the speaker's utterance and the female auditor's reaction. Pauline in this poem does not function merely as a silent, passive recipient of the speaker's monologue; rather, she becomes a reader and a critic, who possesses the potential to dialogize the poetic text. Pauline displays its author's ambivalent view of Romanic poethood as well as the inherited poetic form. Diverging from the generic features of the conversation poem, it foreshadows the emergence of the dramatic monologue in Browning's later poetry.

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