SOURCE: Gregory, Melissa Valiska. “Robert Browning and the Lure of the Violent Lyric Voice: Domestic Violence and the Dramatic Monologue.” Victorian Poetry 38, no. 4 (winter 2000): 491-510.

In the following essay, Gregory maintains that The Ring and the Book provides insight to the problem of domestic violence in the Victorian period.

Although the study of Victorian poetry may not be teetering on the brink of extinction, contemporary literary scholars have tended to work through their primary concerns in novels rather than poetry when it comes to questions of nineteenth-century domestic ideology. Like Nancy Armstrong, who argues in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) that “the gender of representation is … bound … to the institution of the novel,” academic critics repeatedly position the novel as the most effective testing ground for hypotheses regarding Victorian culture and domesticity.¹ This essay, by contrast, situates Victorian poetry, and Robert Browning's dramatic monologues in particular, within the analysis...