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THE HOLISTIC TRUTH OF MEMORY AND TESTIMONY IN THE RING AND THE BOOK

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2013

J. Stephen Addcox
J. Stephen Addcox*
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Extract

The questions that The Ring and Book (1868–69) raises regarding truth, perception, and testimony have long concerned critics. However, few critics have given particular focus to the role that memory plays in the poem. While The Ring and the Book was not the first piece of literature to offer different narrations of the same event, Robert Browning's introduction of at least ten iterations or perspectives (depending on how you count) of the same narrative within one work remains unique. The legal system is very much in view throughout the text of the poem, and so the nature of testimony as a component of the legal process is integral to our consideration of The Ring and the Book. Specifically, shifting attitudes about legal testimony in the nineteenth century make memory particularly important for any study of testimony in the poem. In his multivolume work The Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827), Jeremy Bentham gives special consideration to the composition of testimony, which he argues consists of four elements: perception, judgment, memory, and expression (155). Bentham's work recognized that testimony was not a simple matter of truth and falsehood, but that the faculties of the witness were intimately intertwined with testimony. However, contemporary critics have tended to focus on perception and expression (language), while memory has remained mostly unexamined.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 329 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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