“There’s a great text in Galatians”: Episodic Memory in Robert Browning’s Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister and Porphyria’s Lover

Abstract

Episodic memory defines human conduct through mental time travel which allows the individual a choice in decision-making by bringing forth personal past events, as well as future-thinking of a specific situation or creating counterfactual situations in the mind. It holds the capacity to position the individual in the past, future, and conditional states with the aid of autonoetic consciousness which provides the opportunity to consider all aspects of thoughts in order to make decisions. This unique mental time travel which is only provided by episodic memory and not by other memory types, reconstructs an individual’s memories from the past and activates the state of envisioning. In connection to this theory, this article’s aim is to analyse the occurrences of episodic memory in Robert Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” and “Porphyria’s Lover”. The first poem is about a Spanish monk who delivers a soliloquy about the intense dislike he had experienced in the past as he watches his fellow monk Brother Lawrence organize and complete his gardening rounds. As the Spanish monk plots to allure Brother Lawrence into impure feelings which is connected to future-thinking in episodic memory, he also reveals his experiences in the past that had created his hostility towards Brother Lawrence. Another instance of episodic memory is found at the very end of the poem wherein he creates a counterfactual situation. On the other hand, “Porphyria’s Lover” introduces a crime of passion in which an unhealthy obsession of a lover is observed. Robert Browning acquaints the reader with abnormal psychology with his depiction of Porphyria’s serene executioner who reveals the details of the night one step at a time, right up to the act of crime by exposing his episodic memory.