"And yet God has not said a word!": Robert Browning and the romantic killer in literature

Robert Browning's dramatic monologues often characterize the darker aspect of romantic love through speakers who demonstrate their devotion to violence. Exploring the innovations in discourse, Browning gives his narrators voices that allow them to speak from an ancient literary tradition. For Browning's speakers, words make the silencing of the lover either the act of ultimate devotion or the result of disappointed expectations. The narrator speaks of the absence of God, as when Porphyria's lover holds her body to him: "and yet God has not said a word!" With the poet's strong speech---in all his attractiveness, his destructive display of love and his dismissal of God---Browning has helped to create a discourse that has sculpted the literary force of the romantic killer. Three novelists in particular employ the literary force of Browning's experiments: Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter novels. Intertextual comparisons among these narratives delineate how Robert Browning's innovation of the seductive antihero has persisted in literature.