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摘 要

作为英国维多利亚时代最著名的诗人之一，罗伯特·勃朗宁不仅是一位精通“戏剧独白”这种诗化的表现形式的大师，还连接着英国、美国两个国家，因为他的诗作起先在祖国英国并不十分流行，反而在北美大陆收获了很高的声誉和一大批读者、研究者。鉴于此，研究勃朗宁，就意味着研究那一时期英美两国的文学、文化与历史。本文结合文化与文学层面的美国主义内涵以及多元文化主义，研究勃朗宁诗歌作品中所体现的多元文化思想在现当代美国的接受程度并分析其原因；采用的研究方法主要为历史文献梳理、理论阐释和文本分析等。

勃朗宁的多元文化主义思想表现在三个方面：丰富的异域文化元素、泛人性论思想和对文化中心主义的批判。三者之间存在一定的联系：丰富的异域意象使诗人得以从广泛而有代表性的戏剧人物身上总结出具有泛人性论特点的主题（很大程度上表现为作者对精神性的重视），而关心整个人类的福祉也催生了诗人对不公正现象的批判（例如殖民主义）。分析勃朗宁在美国被读者接受的两个阶段时，双方各有特点：第一个阶段美国读者对其的解读多关注他（当时仅传入美国）的几首诗，评价也是赞誉多过批评；而在第二阶段，对诗作的评论更为客观、角度更加多样，诗人自身的公众形象及其带来的社会影响也得到了较大关注。勃朗宁的多元文化主义之所以在美国社会产生了较大的影响，部分原因就在于其与超验主义的内在相关性，以及与“熔炉理论”的微妙关系（后者在美国族裔同化理论体系中占有重要地位）。

关键词： 罗伯特·勃朗宁；多元文化主义；超验主义；熔炉理论

Contents

Acknowledgements i

Abstract ii

摘要 iii

Introduction 1

Chapter One The Multiculturalism in Browning’s Works 6

1.1 Multicultural Images in Browning’s Works 6

1.2 Universal Humanity in Browning’s Works 12

1.3 Anti-Ethnocentric and Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Browning’s Works 14

Chapter Two Two Stages of Browning’s Acceptance in America 17

2.1 During the Westward Movement: Prosodic Greatness and Obscurity 17

2.2 After the Westward Movement: A Multi-Faceted Poet 19

Chapter Three Relationship of Browning’s Multiculturalism and Americanism 21

3.1 Similarity with Transcendentalism 21

3.2 Echoes in the Melting-Pot Theory 23

Conclusion 25

Works Cited 26

Introduction

1. Background of the Study

As one of the best-known British poets during the Victorian era (1837-1901), Robert Browning is unique in many ways: his original themes, groundbreaking writing skills, eccentric styles, and sometimes obscure wording. Unlike many other British poets at that time who followed “the Great Tradition” and focused on the flourishing England, Browning was “calmly and sedately universal,” casting his attention on the European and the American continents and on other nations and races. Brilliant and learned, he mastered six languages and frequently drew into his poems a large quantity of foreign vocabulary and jargons. As Melville Anderson used to comment in The Dial (1888), “he is more Italian than English, more Greek than Italian, more Browning than Greek.”^[1] Browning’s multiculturalism found itself unfit in the Victorian England where nationalism (or, cultural imperialism) prevailed, and that is why the poet was poorly favored by British critics at first.

Nevertheless, Robert Browning was more popular in the United States. His poems reached the American readers in the 1840s, when the whole country was immersed in Transcendentalism led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose speech, The American Scholar (1837), was regarded as a declaration of independence from the dominance of British culture by American intellectuals, calling for and attaching greater importance to cultural confidence, self-reliance, and freedom. Under such circumstance, it is no wonder that Browning’s multicultural agenda was accepted by American audiences widely and readily. The first Browning Club was founded in 1877 by American scholar Hiram Corson in Cornell University, and it existed longer than many other similar clubs and research societies that came into being later in England (in 1881), Canada, and other parts of the world.

The Victorian era was a crucial period for both British and American culture. With the Industrial Revolution coming to an end, Britain stepped into its “imperial century” and became the foremost world power. Neo-romanticism, the dominant British literary school at that time, accordingly tended to center on the national interest of British Empire where the sun never sets; therefore, Browning was for a while incompatible with the mainstream ideology of his motherland. In America, the transcendentalist movement, which can be regarded as “the American outgrowth of English Romanticism,” served as a significant cultural event in the formation of the American national character. Meanwhile, the Westward Movement brought in millions of immigrants and ensuing problems with the diversity of the society dramatically increasing. At this critical moment of national integration, Browning’s poetry was introduced into the United States and imposed a profound influence on American culture as a whole. Reconnecting Britain with America in a new sense, Robert Browning was by all means the most significant poet during this historical period, and thus, an examination of his success among American audiences means a lot to the literary, historical and cultural studies of the relationship between these two countries.

On this account, my thesis will analyze the theme of multiculturalism inherent in Robert Browning’s poetry as well as its resonance with Americanism in the fields of literature and culture, and thereupon discuss the overall process of the acceptance of Browning in the United States, its cause and effect, and the mutual influence between these two intellectual trends.

2. Literature Review

Both foreign and Chinese scholars primarily focus on Browning’s dramatic monologue. In his summary of the nature of the dramatic monologue, Roma J. King, Jr. defines it “as dramatic, presenting a fully developed speaker, compelled to communicate to a listener (more adequately developed in some cases than in others); the tone, structure and cadence are colloquial; the unity is a tension produced by the interplay of opposing intellectual and emotional forces.”^[2] Therefore, Park Honan claims that in some of Browning’s best poems, readers can sense the speaker as a completely autonomous individual.^[3] In the same sense, Ralph Rader dramatizes this reading experience in his research essay “The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms” as follows: “We encounter (the speakers) as at the turn of a path we might encounter one person speaking to another in some striking way that catches our attention, so that focusing our attention we begin to infer the speaker’s inner purpose from his words.”^[4]

This is just what the poet wanted to arouse from the readers. In this regard, Browning had a famous statement that his poems were “dramatic in principle” and had “so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine.”^[5] In order to make perfect realistic portrayals of “so many imaginary persons” from so many different countries, Browning employed numerous images of various cultures in his poems, which, not only strengthen his dramatic monologue, but also reflect his multicultural tendency. However, this great variety of exotic images, in a sense, also partly accounts for the charge of obscurity (which is another tag) of Browning’s poetry. Thomas R. Lounsbury, the writer of The Early Literary Career of Robert Browning (1911), for example, seemed quite “annoyed by the more difficult of Browning’ poems,” holding a contention that “men of literary taste object to obscurity,”^[6] as was sharply criticized as irresponsible and ungrateful in The North American Review (1911).

Most Chinese scholars pay immoderate attention to Browning’s dramatic monologue, and from this perspective make further textual analysis of some of his renowned poems (“On the Artistic Style of Browning’s Poetry” by Liu Xinmin, “The Repressed and Distorted Souls of Browning’s Poetry” by Sun Jiurong, “The Women Enclosed: Robert Browning’s Four Dramatic Monologues” by Xü Shufang, etc.) Such textual analysis increases the readability of these poems for sure, yet its shortcoming lies evidently in the excessive focus on details; in other words, it is unable to approach Browning from a panoramic view and thus fails to reveal the underlying thought of his poetry.

Upon these limitations, Meng Xueqin argues in her paper “The Mirror of An Age: Robert Browning’s Impersonal Dramatic Monologue” that the use of dramatic monologues “casts the poet aside,” and with the disappearance of his authoritative voice, the reader is left only with the dramatic characters and their monologues to comprehend and interpret. In this way, the dramatic characters are not objects of depiction, but active story-tellers, and with this impersonal writing style, the world created by his pen becomes multicultural, “conveying the essence of his age at a deeper level.”^[7] As for the cultural connotation of Robert Browning’s poetry, on a massive scale, Liu Chao holds the idea that Browning’s monologues “do not stick to the historical or cultural symbols of certain countries,” but embody multitudinous and epitomized characters in a dramatic way, thus “exploring universal humanity in his poems with a pluralistic cultural view and on the very basis going against the so-called national interests.”^[8] This anti-ethnocentric stance, together with the impersonal writing skill, can be seen as part of his praxis of multiculturalism.

3. Arrangement of the Thesis

Accordingly, the paper is divided into five main parts. The first part is a brief introduction, which includes background of the study, literature review, and thesis arrangement. The second, third and fourth parts are devoted to a thorough-going analysis of Browning’s multiculturalism, its acceptance in America, and the influence: the second part, namely Chapter One, mainly deals with Browning’s multiculturalism in three aspects: multicultural images employed by his poems, his cultural universalism, and his anti-colonialism.

Then the third part deals with the acceptance of Browning’s poetry in America. Coinciding with the Victorian era, the Westward Movement marked as a crucial step in the formation of the country and the nation. So following a chronological order and according to different stages, how Browning was accepted by American readers will be examined based on historical records in newspapers, journals, and so on.

The next part, Chapter Three, proceeds with the discussion of the connection between Browning’s multiculturalism and Americanism, focusing on the similarity between the multicultural agenda and Transcendentalism as well as its comparison with the melting-pot theory.

Chapter One The Multiculturalism in Browning’s Works

1.1 Multicultural Images in Browning’s Works

Browning grew up as a big lover of books, with his paradise being his father’s private library, where great classics in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and many other languages found their way on the shelves. Although basically he lacked formal education in schools, the young poet was brought up in an exceedingly free environment and learned five foreign languages. All these laid a solid foundation for his future exploration and comprehension of foreign cultures, and blessed him with an open mind to accept, appreciate, and apply them in his prosodic career. When composing a poem, Browning usually paid great attention to the time and the place of a particular story, and consciously show the features of that chronotype with diversified yet necessary exotic images.

1.1.1 Italian Images

After he and Elizabeth Barret got married and eloped to Italy in 1846, Browning entered into a golden period of poetry writing. Many eminent works came out in print, such as Men and Women (1855), for which he became well-known, and he also drew the initial inspiration for his twelve-volume classic, The Ring and the Book (1868-69) at that time. In those years (1846-1866), he was enchanted by and mingled with the artistic atmosphere and cultural heritages of Italy, the heartland of Renaissance. No wonder that later on in his life, Browning described Italy as his university.

Before he entered this “university,” the poet had already vividly pictured Italy at its climax of Renaissance in his poem “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church,” which got published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics in 1845. This poem is set in Rome in the sixteenth century, when Italians were eager for works of art. People of nobility not only struggled to make their way into the artistic and literary circles as patrons, but also behaved like discriminating collectors and connoisseurs of fine arts. One example is the Duke in another Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” (1842), who as a zealous collector presents proudly to his visitor one precious piece of his collections, “Neptune” in bronze “taming the sea-horse”, which “Claus of Innsbruck” cast for him; he even believes that his Duchess ought to be his private possession as well. When she is “too soon made glad” by others, the jealous Duke “gave commands,” and then “all smiles stopped together.”(line 22-56) The zeal for artworks grows into crazy possessiveness, and the collector becomes a murderer.

In “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” the Bishop, another senior connoisseur, becomes more and more materialistic at the prospect of his imminent death in order that his tomb may gratify his desire for luxury arts. He is a typical representative of the members of the clergy during the Renaissance. Christianity and Renaissance classicism dramatically conjoin in his wondering consciousness when he tries to arrange for his posthumous monument on the deathbed:

And I shall fill my slab of basalt there,

And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest,

With those nine columns round me, two and two,

The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands:

Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe

As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse.

— Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone,

Put me where I may look at him! True peach,

Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize! (line 25-33)

For the columns, he wants “peach-blossom marble” to prevail over “Old Gandolf,” his predecessor in both life and death. For his slab, he asks for basalt (a hard, dense igneous rock of a glassy appearance, often in leaden or black) at first, and then “antique-black” (Nero antico, a beautiful marble found among Roman ruins, and usually thought to come from ancient Laconia) in order to “contrast my frieze to come beneath.”(55) The building material of the frieze varies from bronze to jasper, and finally to lapis (lapis lazuli, a semiprecious gemstone in blue, violet-blue, or greenish blue). From his choice of gemstones, it is easy for the reader to realize that he is a man of rich knowledge, of sumptuous taste in art, and of endless greed for wealth (even in his afterlife).

Decorations are of great importance as well. The appropriate epitaph has to be “choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word.”(77) Here, “Tully” refers to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B. C.), the great politician and elocutionist in ancient Rome, and Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s letters is commonly regarded as the outset of Renaissance in such domains as humanism, classical Roman culture, and public affairs; and, like every Italian at that time, the Bishop adores Latin and the classic culture it represents. As for the carvings on the frieze, he commands as follows:

The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,

Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance

Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,

The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,

Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan

Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off,

And Moses with the tables… (56-62)

Here, the Bishop’s description is full of conflicting pagan and Christian images. Saint Praxed (Praxedes) was a virgin martyr who helped Christian refugees at the risk of her own life and died by asking God to relieve her of her sufferings, while Pan was the Greek goat-legged god of shepherds who was eager to pursue Nymphs as well as earthly pleasures, not to mention Bacchus, the god of wine. In a similar sense, the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) was Christ’s best striking teaching on earth, yet it is still put together with the erotic farce of “one Pan ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off.” (61) The Bishop’s non-Christian visions reflect the typical attitude towards life held by the Renaissance men: paganism wins out over Christianity, and the temptation of secular pleasure beats Christian asceticism; in other words, humanism provides fresh insight into the materialistic nature of the reality, where God and spirituality are questioned. In this poem, Browning vividly reveals the essential characteristics of Renaissance Italy through the Bishop’s dramatic monologue with exquisite Italian images that he masterly employs throughout the poem.

As it turns out, Italian images in Browning’s poems usually take the form of Renaissance artworks, ranging from magnificent architectures to exquisite clothing of women, which reflect his great enthusiasm about cultural diversity as well as an intellectual exploration of the origin of humanism.

1.1.2 Arabic and Jewish Images

Considered as the Holy City in three major Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Jerusalem plays the vital role as a significant cultural image in western literature as well as Browning’s works. In the poem “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician,” Karshish, the monologist, tells s peculiar story on his journey to Jerusalem.

As a traveling physician, it is naturally justifiable for Karshish, “the pick-up of learning’s crumbs,” to picture for the reader what he passes, sees, feels and experiences:

I have shed sweat enough, left flesh and bone

On many a flinty furlong of this land.

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