Indirectness, rhetoric and interpretative use: communicative strategies in Browning's My Last Duchess

Abstract

In this article I use a relevance theory framework to examine the intricacies of the communicative situation at work in Browning's My Last Duchess. I focus on the rhetorical nature of indirectness, as well as suggesting that the relevance-theoretic concepts of interpretive and echoic use can provide a useful means of re-theorising the use of voice in literature. In particular I show that authorial distance from the Duke of Ferrara's monologue in My Last Duchess can be accounted for in the same way as a speaker's dissociation from propositions expressed in ironic utterances. In addition I explore the ambivalent potential of both irony and authorial distance. I argue that relevance theory, in its recognition of the possible disjunction between what is said and what is communicated, is a model which overcomes some of the inadequacies of earlier pragmatic approaches to literature.