The Second Sex:
An Analysis of Browning’s Treatment of Women in “My Last Duchess,” and “Porphyria’s Lover”
The poetry of Robert Browning, who lived from 1812 through 1889, is representative of the fact that women have been viewed as the ‘second sex’ since the beginning of time. The inferiority of women changed at the turn of the 20th century, yet women remain an inherent second to men, who are representative of the leader aspect in society and within the majority of traditional households. This fact of women’s nature of being second is not a bad thing at all, some things women are naturally better at than man are, and vice versa. Women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony began the women’s suffrage movement in 1848 at the Seneca
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Browning takes a stance, not very radical for the Victorian Era, that the women should not be bold, promiscuous, or decisive without their male partner at the forefront. This analysis of Browning’s treatment of women is brought about quite simply in each of the lady’s deaths. First, in “My Last Duchess,” the female smiles too much, according to the speaker, and this represents her promiscuity, and smiling at every passing suitor. Her husband did not like this (can we blame him?) so he, assumedly, kills his wife. “I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.” As for “Porphyria’s Lover,” the female enters the room with dominance, she is the only one taking action in the plot for the first three fourths of the poem, all the while her male partner is watching her, stewing. Porphyria sits down next to him, and after a lengthy description of the setting, she, “...put my arm about her waist, / And made her smooth white shoulder bare, / And all her yellow hair displaced, / And, stooping, made my cheek lie there.” In the end, after Porphyria takes the male role in the relationship, the speaker decides what he will do: he strangles his female partner to death with her own hair, revealing her weakness even within herself. Each of the women die for taking actions that are out of the ordinary for women of the Victorian Era, and this reveals Browning’s treatment of
Most people have fallen in love at least once in their lives. I too fall in this category. Just like any Disney movie that you watch, people fall in love with each other, and they get married and live happily ever after right? Wrong! In real life, there are some strange things that can happen, including death, divorce, or other weird things that you never see in Disney movies. Robert Browning’s literary works are great examples of “Non-Fairytale Endings.” Not only does Browning have endings in his stories that aren’t the norm in children movies, but he also has some twisted and interesting things happen in the story of lovers. In Robert Browning’s works, Porphyria’s Lover, and My Last Duchess, the speakers can be both compared and contrasted.
Willingly or grudgingly, the women in Woolf and Browning’s works are regulated to the domestic circle, discouraged from the literary world, and are expected to act as foils to their male counterparts. Without the means to secure financial independence, women are confined to the world of domestic duties. In Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Mary Seton’s “homely” mother is neither a businesswoman nor a magnate on the Stock Exchange. She cannot afford to provide formal education for her daughters or for herself. Without money, the women must toil day and night at home, with no time for conversations about “archaeology, botany, anthropology, physics, the nature of the atom, mathematics, astronomy, relativity, geography” – the subjects of the men’s conversations (26).
Throughout history, women have struggled with, and fought against, oppression. They have been held back and weighed down by the sexist ideas of a male dominated society which has controlled cultural, economic and political ideas and structures. During the mid-1800’s to early 1900’s women became more vocal and rebuked sexism and the role that had been defined for them. Fighting with the powerful written word, women sought a voice, equality amongst men and an identity outside of their family. In many literary writings, especially by women, during the mid-1800’s to early 1900’s, we see symbols of oppression and the search for gender equality in society.
In the early Victorian period, a number of poems were composed which served to highlight a specific troubled spot in society. The poets often wrote for human rights groups and the like in order to convey a message to those members of society who could make a difference, namely, the educated white men. Among these poems is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” This piece deals with a female slave who has killed her newborn son and fled to Pilgrim’s Point, where she speaks of her feelings leading up to the present moment. Another poem, which can be placed in comparison to Browning’s, is Augusta Webster’s “A Castaway,” a dramatic monologue of a prostitute who struggles to justify her lifestyle both to herself and to her reader. In each of these works, the female speaker has acted in a morally questionable manner that initially appears condemnable. However, the issue is not clearly defined; many questions arise as to the motives behind and the circumstances surrounding each woman’s behavior. Do the choices made assert the freedom of each woman? That is to say, is the woman to be held entirely accountable for her actions based on the idea that she has freely chosen to carry them out? Upon careful reading of the two poems in question, the answer becomes much clearer. The choices made by the castaway and the runaway slave are in reality not the uninhibited decisions they at first appear. Restricted on all sides by their respective society’s powerful men, each woman faces very limited options. In each of the poems, the idea of choice (and subsequently, the question of its validity) emerges in the areas of materna...
Elizabeth Barrett Browning follows ideal love by breaking the social conventions of the Victorian age, which is when she wrote the “Sonnets from the Portuguese”. The Victorian age produced a conservative society, where marriage was based on class, age and wealth and women were seen as objects of desire governed by social etiquette. These social conventions are shown to be holding her back, this is conveyed through the quote “Drew me back by the hair”. Social conventions symbolically are portrayed as preventing her from expressing her love emphasising the negative effect that society has on an individual. The result of her not being able to express her love is demonstrated in the allusion “I thought one of how Theocritus had sung of the sweet
The death of the female beloved is the only way deemed possible by the insecure, possessive male to seize her undivided attention. This beloved woman represents the "reflector and guarantor of male identity. Hence, the male anxiety about the woman's independence for her liberty puts his masculine self-estimation at risk" (Maxwell 29). The jealous and controlling males in Robert Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" and "My Last Duchess" possess a fervent desire to fix and monopolize their unconstrained female beloveds. Due to a fear of death, both speakers attempt to achieve control and deny object loss; by turning their lovers (once subjects) into objects, they ultimately attain the role of masterful subject.
It goes on to speak about sympathy in general and how Browning “delighted in making a case for the apparently immoral position”, how he found dramatic monologues the best form to do so, and how he went about it. It keeps going for a couple more pages on things which I will not go into because they have little relevance to any interpretation of “My Last Duchess”.
"Porphyria's Lover" is an exhilarating love story given from a lunatic's point of view. It is the story of a man who is so obsessed with Porphyria that he decides to keep her for himself. The only way he feels he can keep her, though, is by killing her. Robert Browning's poem depicts the separation of social classes and describes the "triumph" of one man over an unjust society. As is often the case in fiction, the speaker of "Porphyria's Lover" does not give accurate information in the story.
awake') seeing as he had a 'heart fit to break'. Both the Duke and the
My Last Duchess by Robert Browning is a dramatic monologue about a duke who is showing the portrait of his first wife, the duchess, to a servant of his future father-in-law, the Count. In a dramatic monologue, the speaker addresses a distinct but silent audience. Through his speech, the speaker unintentionally reveals his own personality. As such, in reading this poem, the reader finds the duke to be self-centered, arrogant, controlling, chauvinistic and a very jealous man. The more he attempted to conceal these traits, however, the more they became evident. There is situational irony (a discrepancy between what the character believes and what the reader knows to be true) in this because the duke does not realize this is what is happening. Instead, he thinks he appears as a powerful and noble aristocrat.
The poem “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning is not as mournful and heartbreaking as the title suggests. In fact, the poem is extremely dramatic and disrespectful towards women, making them seem as if women were dumb foolish objects. Many have wondered about the disposable aspects of women in the 1840’s, and the objective view men had towards them at the time. Browning’s poem portrays the idea of men’s misogynistic views towards women in the 1840’s. At the time when the poem takes place in the 1500’s it was considered the norm to see women as lesser beings .This idea of irrational male dominance in a relationship is also portrayed in the poem “My Last Duchess”, through the inexplicable and irrational actions of the Duke (the speaker of the poem). The Duke is a disrespectful, pretentious, evil man that has the power to dispose of whomever he wishes and the ability to attract and obtain anything and anyone he wants. The Duke is portrayed as a rich, lavish individual with expensive tastes and is known to be a very mysterious and cold hearted man, getting rid of any imperfections towards his self-image. He justifies his actions against his Duchess as reasonable because he claims she did not meet the proper criteria for the prestigious position of being his wife. The narrator sets a questionable, mystery filled mood with all his remarks that suggest he is unpleased with his women and the dark alluding actions he took to address them. Throughout the text he conveys himself as a very prestigi...
The poem “Porphyria’s Lover” By Robert Browning is a rather alarming poem written in first person about the speaker and the relationship he has with a woman named Porphyria. The poem started out innocently enough by describing how Porphyria entered a building soaking wet, took off her things, and then proceeded to build a fire and join her lover (the speaker). But then the speaker starts to show signs of highly abusive behavior when he says, Murmuring how she loved me, Too weak, for all her hearts endeavour, To set its struggling passion free From pride, and vainer ties dissever And give herself to me forever. From this, we can deduce that the speaker feels that Porphyria owes him sex and he is not happy that she does not give it to him willingly.
‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’ are both poems by the Victorian poet Robert Browning. In this essay I will compare these two poems to find similarities and differences.
Porphyria’s Lover is the first short dramatic monologue poem of Robert Browning. It was published in the January 1836. This poem deals with the anormal physchology of mankind that’s why it was really popular in Victorian age. Because Porphyria’s Lover is a unique and a gothic poem. The narrator is talking by himself in the poem. Therefore, the speech situation is first person narrator. In this poem, the poet narrated how he killed his lover who has high standart of living than him. It is about love, obsession and a murder. He killed his lover by strangling her with her long hairs. It is weird that he told in the poem that this murder is approved by god. The poetic persona has a sick physchology in the poem. What poetic persona believes that, because of that he killed her, now she belongs to him for ever. That’s how he perceives love. The poem is complicated but it is easier to read because it has written like a story. The dark athmosphere of the poem reflects the anormal physchology of the poetic persona.
The Victorian period was in 1830-1901, this period was named after Queen Victoria; England’s longest reigning monarch. Britain was the most powerful nation in the world. This period was known for a rather stern morality. A huge changed happened in England; factories were polluting the air, cities were bursting at the seams, feminism was shaking up society, and Darwin’s theory of evolution was assaulting long established religious beliefs. The Victorians were proud of their accomplishments and optimistic about the future, but psychologically there was tension, doubt, and anxiety as people struggled to understand and deal with the great changes they were experiencing. One of the authors known for writing during the Victorian Period was Robert Browning. Robert Browning was a poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic monologues, which made him one of the Victorian poets. Robert died in December 1889. His Poem “Porphyria’s Lover” was published in 1836. This essay will explore three elements of Victorianism in Porphyria’s Lover by Robert Brown...