Vail Hall

Professor Hague

English 370

November 1, 2013

“The Laboratory-Ancien Régime” by Robert Browning, published in 1844, is a dramatic monologue set in France. Said to be set during the reign of Louis XIV, the poem relates closely to actual events during this period. As described by the title the monologue is set in a chemist’s laboratory. The speaker, a jealous woman, is plotting a murder while the chemist listens silently. This makes the chemist the listener, fitting of the dramatic monologue format.  This poem reveals the speakers all-consuming jealousy and her plans to use the chemist to seek her revenge. 

Immediately in stanza one the speaker reveals her murderous desire. Robert Browning starts stanza one by creating an ominous setting. Lines one through three create the image of a dark, unsettling laboratory. The speaker wears some sort of protective glass mask that allows her to “…gaze thro’ these faint smokes curling whitely,” (2). She then speaks to the person who works in the eerie lab or who “…pliest thy trade in this devil’s-smithy—“(3). Line three really drives home the ominous feel of the setting in the laboratory, and explains the chemist, who operates his evil trade in secrecy. A smithy is a place where a certain line of work is performed for example a blacksmith’s smithy is a stable. Thus, a devil’s-smithy is where the devil performs his work. Browning uses the idea of the devil’s-smithy to portray both the evil and confidentiality of the chemists work. With the setting in place the speaker reveals her murderous desire in line four by asking the chemist “Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?” (4). Here the speaker divulges her need for the chemist in her plot to murder another women. The speaker’s question to the chemist and the word, prithee, which is Old English for please, demonstrate her absolute desire for the chemists help. Stanza one gives the poem the setting of the dim, menacing laboratory and reveals the speaker and her plot to use the chemist’s ability to produce a poison that will kill another women.

Stanza two gives reason to why the speaker wishes to carry out murder on this other woman and just how bad she wants to. Line five sums up the speakers reason for her desire to kill. “He is with her, and they know that I know” (5) says it all, the plot to murder is fueled by jealousy. A man that the speaker longs to be with is seeing another women and the speaker wishes to dispose of this women by poisoning her. In lines six through eight the speaker’s emotions begin taking affect, she seems to be building up rage. Her jealousy is taking toll on her sanity. “Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow/While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear” (7-8). Browning repeats the words they, laugh and at me throughout lines seven and eight. These lines utilize repetition to portray that the speaker is losing her sanity. The repetition gives the sense of urgency and that her jealousy is the only thing on her mind. Stanza two develops jealousy as the speaker’s motive to kill and that she is displaying a loss of sanity.

               There is a shift in the speaker’s attention in the next stanzas, three through five. Now that she has stopped her jealous rant the speaker begins observing the laboratories’ contents.  She claims she is in no hurry and says she “Better sit thus, and observe thy strange things,” (11). As she observes she begins to greatly admire all the chemist’s belongings. “And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue, / Sure to taste sweetly,--is that poison too? / Had I but all of them, thee and thy treasures,” (15-17). In her admiration of the strange contents of the laboratory she begins to understand all the power that these poisonous ingredients have and she then perceives them as treasures. These stanzas give more insight into how the speaker is seemingly becoming obsessed with the deadly ingredients of the lab and how easily they can kill.

               Stanza six is where the speaker truly becomes consumed by her desire to commit murder with the chemist’s many poisons. The speaker falls into a sort of fantasy. In this fantasy the speaker sees the simplicity of murder using the lethal power of the laboratories ingredients. “Soon, at the King’s, a mere lozenge to give, / And Pauline should have just thirty minutes to live!” (21-22). Her first fantasy is to use a lozenge, a small pill, to kill a woman named Pauline. She is amazed and animated about the ease of killing Pauline with just a small pill. Continuing to visualize simple plots to murder the speaker moves on to a woman named Elise. Her strategy to dispose of Elise is to light a simple yet fatal pastile, a type of incense. Browning interjects the poem with these fantasies to other women beside her original target to expose the speaker’s almost complete loss of sanity and all-consuming yearning to murder. The abrupt fantasy in stanza six is used well to communicate that the speaker is being overtaking by her evil desires.

               In stanzas seven and eight the speaker starts to become impatient with and disapproving of the chemists work. “Quick—is it finished?” (25) is a clear indication of the speakers patients being tested. She went from fantasizing directly into criticizing. The speaker complains “…The colour’s too grim!” (25). She wished it to be more of an appetizing color to entice her target to drink up. This hurried, hectic feel of the speaker that Browning creates, again leads the reader to comprehend the insanity of the speaker.

               The speaker is critical of the chemist’s work again in stanza eight. “What a drop! She’s not little, no minion like me!” (29), she claims the dosage of poison is far too small. The speaker describes the women she wishes to assassinate by comparing her to the minion likes stature she thinks she has, minion here means small and gentle. Here it seems the speaker is becoming delusional. She says the other woman’s size is” … why she ensnared him:” (30). The speaker really believes the other woman’s girth was what allowed her to trap this man that the speaker desires. At the end of stanza eight, line thirty-two, the speaker slyly complements the woman. She refers to the woman’s pulse as being magnificent although she wishes to “—say, “no!” (31), to it and stop its beating or its “come-and-go” (32). Browning is indeed trying to fashion the speaker as having all attributes of insanity. She is driven by jealousy, fantasizes of murdering targets she hadn’t originally planned to kill, is impatient, excessively critical, and then she complements the pulse of the women she is plotting to murder. Browning has fitted her with all the workings of someone gone mad.

               The speaker shifts subjects again in stanza nine. She recollects the previous night’s espionage. As the speaker recalls the events she admits to an impossible attempt to murder. This takes the reader to the beginnings of her insanity, she said “My own eyes to bear on her so, that I thought / Could I keep them one half minute fixed, she would fall…” (34-35). Thinking that by staring at someone they might fall dead is madness. This confession is how Browning brings the reader back to the start of the speaker’s murderous obsession. He brings the reader here to show how the speaker’s enthusiasm is a result of her feeling that she finally has something that can carry out the evil deed. Stanza nine is utilized as a way to let the reader sympathize with the speaker. Browning draws out the sympathy from the reader by portraying the poison as a long awaited victory after previously failed attempts of murder.

               Stanza ten reveals how wicked the speaker is. “Not that I bid you spare her pain; / Let death be felt and proof remain:” (37-38) these two lines capture the speaker’s evil. She wants pain, agony, and suffering for her target. Use of alliteration is used in line 39, “Brand, burn up, bite into its grace—“(39). As the speaker describes how she wants her targets death to be painful, the alliteration here produces, again, the effect of madness taking over the speaker. The repetitive feel of line 39 exhibits the obsession of the speaker.

               Impatience of the speaker is found, again, at the beginning of stanza eleven, “Is it done?” (41).   She then orders the chemist to take her mask off and not worry about her safety, “…Take my mask off! Nay, be not morose:” (41). The speaker is feeling powerful here with her abrupt orders and feeling of immunity from the poison. In line forty-two the speaker explains that she refuses to keep her mask on because “…this prevents seeing it close:” (42). She has paid so much, “my whole fortune’s fee” (43), for this poison that she won’t go without seeing her targets death up close. Browning goes to provide more evidence that the speaker is delusional in line 44 when she says, “If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?” (44). The speaker sees herself as being almost immune to the poison once her target consumes it.

               The final stanza, twelve, expresses for the final time the overwhelming desire the speaker has to possess the power of the poison. “Now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill, / You may kiss me, old man, on my mouth if you will!” (45). The speaker offers her fortune to the chemist and even a romantic offer of a kiss in return for the poison. Browning portrays the speaker as willing to give up anything as long as she gets her poison to kill her target. The last two lines of the poem, “But brush this dust off me, lest horror it brings/ Ere I know it—next moment I dance at the kings.” (47-48) leaves the reader knowing that the speaker is leaving for the king’s drunk with power and prepared to commit her crime.

               In the critical essay, “The Dramatic Monologue: Sympathy versus Judgment,” by Robert Langbaum, Langbaum describes how Browning creates a conflict in the interpretive listener as whether they should sympathize with or judge the speaker. In this poem Browning creates that very conflict in the reader. The insanity of the speaker is seemingly very apparent but Browning creates room for sympathy. Jealousy is something that everyone has felt, not likely to this extent, but everyone knows how it feels and Browning taps into that to make the reader see the speaker’s perspective. An understanding of the speaker’s desires develops in the readers mind and the conflict between sympathizing with jealousy and judging the immoral desire to murder is created in the reader’s interpretive cognition.  Browning purposely creates this conflict to leave the reader thinking about what they would do and what would be the right thing to do if faced with such all-consuming jealousy.

               The theme of jealousy in the poem is something that can be carried through to the 21^st century. Technology today is something that makes it very easy to become jealous.  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media let people who wouldn’t usually be in constant contact the ability to stay in touch.  Many people today stay connected with ex-boyfriends or girlfriends.  It is easy to become jealous or spy on others’ lives much like the speaker did in the poem. Much like the glass mask, and poison in the poem people can hide behind their computers to become powerful and hurt other people.  Jealousy is a significant theme throughout the Victorian era and continues to be today.   

              

Works Cited

Browning, Robert. “The Laboratory.” Robert Browning’s Poetry. Ed. James Loucks and Andrew Stauffer. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007. Print.

Langbaum, Robert. “The Dramatic Monologue: Sympathy versus Judgment.”  Robert Browning’s Poetry. Ed. James Loucks and Andrew Stauffer. New York: W.W. Nor& Company, Inc., 2007. Print.