Browning's Pygmalion and the revenge of Galatea. (Robert Browning)

in Tennyson's "The Gardener's Daughter; or, The Pictures" (1842), in which the elderly speaker tells his auditors to view a picture of his dead lover: "Raise thy soul; / Make thine heart ready with thine eyes: the time / Is come to raise the veil. Behold her there, / As I beheld her ere she knew my heart." The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd ed., ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols. (London: Longman, 1987), 1:267-70. See Ian Jack, Browning's Major Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 92-93. It seems to me that while Browning's poem may take in this reminiscence of Tennyson's, both derive ultimately from Shakespeare's play.

I will make an Eve, be the artist that began her, Shaped her to his mind!

"Women and Roses," 47-48(1)

In Browning's poetry, the creative act is epitomized by a male artist's desire to immortalize his feminine ideal. For these male artists, the creation of woman represents the primal scene of aesthetic production: it is not simply the human but the feminine subject who is the image and end of creative endeavour: "I always see the garden and God there / A-making man's wife" ("Fra Lippo Lippi," 266-67). Man, succeeding to the position of the anthropomorphic and masculine deity, becomes the maker of his own match. Woman, rather than being a subject in her own right, functions as the device that completes man's lack, simultaneously reflecting him back to himself in a reassuring fullness. The poems' male actors, whether genuine or aspirant artists, have constant recourse to a vocabulary that frames their female partners as art-objects, and the repetition of this pattern raises the question of whether Browning exposes or colludes with this identification.

U. C. Knoepflmacher opened this debate with the well-supported contention that Browning ironizes the Romantic epipsyche in his poetry, revealing the extent to which woman as other is narcissistically conceived as a prop, extension, or guarantor of male identity.(2) Carol Christ's slightly later examination, "The Feminine Subject in Victorian Poetry," adopts a more suspicious tone. Having made the entirely legitimate claim that, "like Tennyson, Browning associates woman with the poetical character," she proceeds to assert the significance of woman in Browning's poetry as the focus of the male and frequently murderous gaze--"Browning's . . . male characters seek to appropriate a woman of their desire."(3) She suggests, however, that this appropriation is part of the poets own larger project: "Fearful of the feminization of culture, the poet of the period strove to make the female subject bear his name."(4) Thus she reads the struggle of Browning's male protagonists to control, master, fix the women of their desire as a reflection of his own creative anxiety: "Browning reveals and obscures the erotic transgression of the artist by controlling the looks of others."(5) The taming of the woman's own gaze, the control of her license to survey, is as much the preoccupation of the poet as it is that of his male monologuists. "The female subject satisfies the desire to look and be looked at, while it shields the creator from direct regard."(6) This view, a more sophisticated version of that critical rationale which reads Browning's dramatis personae as masks for his own desires, is problematic. Although Christ acknowledges Knoepflmacher, her perceptions seem to jar with his judgment of ironization. If Browning is in league with his male monologuists, to what extent can his project be ironic? And does he endorse the views of his male protagonists; does he really believe that the poetical character can be appropriated in this way? Christs alliance of poet with his monologuists makes her miss the fact that the strategies of appropriation pictured in the poems are severely flawed, fail even, that the poems stage the very impossibility of appropriation. Isn't 'poetical character' something that exceeds mans grasp? Surely the ironization that Knoepflmacher remarks is most powerfully in force when Browning yokes sexuality and art, and thus emphasizes the very fabrication of male fantasy and its constituent role in a masculine myth of creativity?

Although critics have spoken of Browning's obsession with the myth of Andromeda's rescue by Perseus, this story seems to me to be a reaction to a larger mythic influence and one in which the poet shows that preservation by the male is not necessarily synonymous with rescue and liberation.(7) For Browning's real compulsion is Ovid's story of Pygmalion who, disgusted by the women he sees about him, sculpts his ideal woman, and then falls hopelessly in love with the statue he has created. The goddess Venus at last takes pity on him and animates the statue so that it can become his flesh and blood bride.(8) Browning lays bare the misogyny of Ovid's Pygmalion, for whom no living woman is good enough. His poems show how male subjects, threatened by woman's independent spirit, replace her with statues, pictures, prostheses, corpses, which seem to them more than acceptable substitutes for the real thing. Browning's male speakers typically invert Ovid's myth, reducing a woman, even through her death, to a composition of their own creating. They desire feminine simulacra, static art-objects, whose fixed value will reflect their self-estimation. Yet these attempts are always equivocally presented as, time and time again, Browning shows us their fatuity. We see exposed the confusion of values that allows these speakers their justifications. But not only is the error of judgment made plain; increasingly, as he explores the myth, Browning reveals how the speakers plan goes askew. The female subject consistently eludes her captor, unmasks the poverty of his suppositions, or returns to haunt him. Allied spectres of memory and history cloud his presentations, while intermittent moments of vision and the recognition of the repressed disturb the reader's apprehensions. Art-objects cannot be fixed any more than human beings; contexts change them, and no artist or owner can control the divergent responses they may arouse in the viewer. Just so, Browning shows that what Christ calls "poetical character," and what I would call imaginative energy, cannot be subject to possession; can only be glimpsed, fleetingly experienced, not permanently stayed; that it is always in excess of prescription and delimitation.

"Porphyria's Lover," one of the earliest of Browning's monologues, is an assured critique through myth, through literary revision, of a form of appropriation typified by a male speakers narcissistic sexual mastery of a woman.(9) It accumulates its power by borrowing from the Pygmalion story not once but twice. Browning's parodic "good minute" (36) centers the poem whose second half macabrely reverses the action of the first in which Porphyria appears as actor. Porphyria enters the poem as the dominant partner, the maker and doer, while her sullen lover is silent and recalcitrantly passive. She composes the scene, even choreographing his posture, in order to rouse his response, to "bring him to life" again. All this is narrated, crucially and with a certain amount of implied criticism, by the lover, whose sudden inversion of the roles and attitudes might initially be seen to be a kind of rough justice: the woman has manipulated him, now he turns the tables on her. The problem with this neat symmetry is that he has produced it, and to accept it overlooks the fact that we see Porphyria only through his eyes. His picture of her as free agent is conditioned by his subliminal resentment of her autonomy: she is a rich girl selfishly indulging a whim at a poor mans expense, Marie Antoinette playing the cottager in her spare time, a seductress, an agent provocateur. Various identifiable oppositions--male and female, active and passive, rich and poor, socialite and solitary--are manipulated by the speaker in an attempt to upset more disturbing oppositions such as aggressor and victim, life and death, art and murder. In spite of the speaker's camouflage, the difference between himself and Porphyria is that however self-centered he may represent her behavior to be, her intent is to arouse and awaken and his is to fix and preserve. The lovers narrative impresses us with its linear recounting of events, but we need to remember the importance of reading backwards, and thus credit the speakers retrospective reading of Porphyria as his attempt to rationalize, to recast her as a reflection of himself. Porphyria's lover is a Pygmalion who thus continues to work his designs on the body of his beloved long after he has achieved his end, not only by his projection of his desire as her "will" (53); for while she features as his dead Galatea, he makes her also a version of himself, a lesser Pygmalion.