Porphyria's Lover Essay

Although, economically Victorians enjoyed greater material wealth and possessions through technological advancement (Black 522) and, culturally the Victorians widely enjoyed their materialism and consumerism, some predicted that the modern cultural condition would be a human catastrophe (Black 502). The Victorians enjoyed their relationship to their possessions although that was the means by which they were alienated and themselves objectified. For the Victorians, material wealth was a convenient method differentiating character and individuality. Victorian poet Robert Browning’s poems posit a modern world of death and meaninglessness. Browning was critical of the society in which he lived. He saw beneath the surface of things, getting in touch

Relations between Victorian men and women became distorted by the material ideology of the Victorians. Material happiness is so dominant in Victorian ethical debate that the tendency is to frame all debates in terms of materialistic decisions. Problems are framed in terms of ownership of materials. In “Porphyria’s Lover,” the “Lover” describes how he murdered Porphyria, apparently in order to make her “give herself to me forever,” to possess her finally and totally. To preserve a moment when “at last I knew / Porphyria worshipped me”: “That moment she was mine, mine, fair, / Perfectly pure and good: I found / A thing to do ... / And strangled her”. Although the Lover’s act would usually not be considered an act of love, in the speaker’s corrupt mind, it is. The ideology of the speaker’s mind is the ideology of the modern world. In “Porphyria’s Lover,” the Lover can only be sure she is his alone if she is dead. By killing her, he has finally solved his problem, which has been transformed into a simpler material problem to be solved. Although the sexes in the poem show a man reducing the woman to a material object, the sexes could be reversed and have the same meaning in terms of the ideology of