The Use of Introspection in Robert Browning's Early Poetry

Abstract

This study argues that there is a striking resemblance between Robert Browning’s early poetry and “introspection,” which is the psychological method of self-examination or first-person observation of one’s own mental and emotional processes, used by the Victorian psychologists. This dissertation also claims that Browning uses the psychological method of introspection to represent various human psychological states of the main characters in his Pauline (1833), Paracelsus (1835), and Sordello (1840). These works are examples of the introspective poetry of the nineteenth-century “psychological school of poetry.” Accordingly, this dissertation analyses these poems in three main chapters by pursuing the different methods that Browning used in the portrayal of the human soul to obtain an insight into the changes in the inner world of humans and to achieve a realistic representation of it. The endeavour of the main characters in Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello to achieve self-knowledge through self-analysis and how they are represented as introspective individuals are scrutinised in these chapters. Furthermore, as an individual of the Victorian culture, Browning’s use of the matters of self-consciousness, the first and/or third-person speech, and subjectivity and objectivity—that were discussed and used in the discourse of introspection—to examine the images of the self and subjective experience are studied and illustrated in the analyses of the works. In these analyses, scientific studies conducted by leading figures in Victorian psychology, and definitions used and discussed by them, are also used in discussing the manner in which Browning represented “the development of the human soul.”