‘God a tame confederate’: Irony in Pippa Passes

Abstract

The literary problems associated with impersonal narration are now well known, and the extensive arguments which have developed about such works as A Portrait of the Artist or The Turn of the Screw should make changing interpretations of Pippa Passes less surprising. This experimental work, with its hybrid elements of picaresque, stage play and monologue,¹ and its varied tonal qualities from the opening lyrical splendour to Bluphocks’ cynical doggerel, demands of its reader the same balancing of sympathetic involvement and ironic judgement as leads to so much of the ambiguity in modern literature. The difficulty of interpretation, however, is not just that caused by the disequilibrium between sympathy and judgement which has been the subject of debate about dramatic monologues;² the problem also involves the role of illusion in defining identity and a dramatic method which uses irony as a means of unity. Structurally, Browning brings together two essentially different approaches, the expressive and the mimetic, or the lyric and the dramatic, juxtaposing the single vision of an isolated mind with the multiple views of the social world. It has always been recognised that this method causes a problem in unity, but what has not been so obvious is the nature of the ironic vision which Browning provides for his reader.