Examining Loss in Augusta Webster's Dramatic Monologues

The dramatic monologue speaker occupies a specific role in the world of literature—they are made to be unmade. This disintegration of self occurs in countless ways, though it appears most frequently in the psychology of the genre’s speakers. It is not often that a reader will come across a dramatic monologue that conveys a message of positive change in the speaker’s selfhood—rather we read stories of women losing themselves in their marriage, men losing themselves in maniacal devotions to the idea of love, mirrors absorbing the image of self and rarely reflecting anything of self-worth. Put quite plainly, the dramatic monologue is not a genre of promise but one of harsh authorial contemplations on how best to test the limits of the self.