A Play on Sympathy and Judgment

Robert Langbaum, the author of "The Dramatic Monologue: Sympathy versus Judgment," focuses on the idea of dramatic monologues within the first portion of his criticism. A dramatic monologue is defined as, "a literary form in which a character, addressing a silent auditor at a critical moment, reveals himself or herself and the dramatic situation" (Random 1). Langbaum states that a dramatic monologue "must have not only a speaker other than the poet but also a listener, an occasion, and some interplay between speaker and listener" (Langbaum 524).  One of Langbaum's main points about the dramatic monologue is that many individuals are just able to distinguish these works from other forms of poetry and in turn over generalize dramatic monologues as a whole (Langbaum 523). Unfortunately, what has happened is that individuals have lost understanding of the monologue and have become very narrow minded about any poems that are related to this form of poetry. Langbaum uses some of Robert Browning's poems to venture inside dramatic monologues. He also uses the poems as a way to display the sympathetic and judgmental aspects behind the dramatic monologue.
One of the poems that Langbaum uses within his criticism is My Last Duchess. Browning's poem is about a duke who murders his duchess because he could not overcome his pride and talk with her about what she had been doing that had been irritating him. With this poem Langbaum really begins to dissect how dramatic
monologues work with or against our judgment and sympathy. For example, the readers that could relate to the duke, experienced their "moral judgment" being erased because it played no part in their initial response to the duke and his situation; initially these individuals were sympathizing with the duke (Langbaum 528).  Langbaum states that he chose My Last Duchess "to illustrate the working of sympathy, just because the duke's egregious villainy makes especially apparent the split between moral judgment and our actual feeling for him" (531). What Langbaum means by this is that while morally we know that we should not feel any sympathy for a man who has just killed his duchess, we do because Browning writes his monologue well enough that it puts us in the duke's situation, instead of leaving us as outsiders looking in.
Langbaum believes that the readers of well written dramatic monologues start to understand the speaker of the monologue by "sympathizing with him, and yet by remaining aware of the moral judgment we have suspended for the sake of understanding" (533). Browning was one of the first authors to use the form of the dramatic monologue within his poetry. Today we are now studying Browning's poetry as a way to venture inside the dramatic monologue and discover first-hand how they pull on our emotions and erase our moral judgment.


Works Cited:

Langbaum, Robert."The Dramatic Monologue: Sympathy versus Judgment." Robert Browning's Poetry.      

          Ed. James F. Loucks and Andrew M. Stauffer. second ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
           2007. 523-42. Print. 

Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary. "The Free Dictionary." Dramatic Monologue: 

         Definition. Farlex, 2010. Web. 20 Aug. 2013.
       <http://www.thefreedictionary.com   /dramatic+monologue>.

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