Browning's Presentation of the idea of Love in The Laboratory and My Last Duchess
Robert Browning was born into a wealthy family in 1812 in the suburbs
of London. His education was a mixture of private instruction and
informal schooling. Browning's father had a library of thousands of
books, this helped Browning develop an immense literary knowledge. As
a boy he was intelligent and he cultivated a taste for books and
learned many languages. Browning had a cultured and intellectual
outlook on life, that is reflected in the dramatic monologues we
studied.
Browning wrote two of his most famous poems, 'The Laboratory' and 'My
Last Duchess' at the start of the Victorian era, a time when Britain
was experiencing immense change. The contrast between the rich and the
poor was remarkable. A large percentage of the society was poverty
stricken. Not everything was negative though, the industrialisation of
Britain was a very exciting time; art, technology and science were
major areas of interest for the Victorians. As familiarity of these
topics developed, the topics excited, gained curiosity, became
fashions and energised the country. Browning's poems are infused with
the important subjects of the time, 'The Laboratory' features the idea
of medicine and chemistry and 'My Last Duchess' art. They also include
of timeless themes such as love, hatred and jealousy which are always
relevant, even today.
'The Laboratory' has a subtitle of 'Ancien Regime', this give us the
suggestion that the poem was based in the time just before the French
revolution, this occurred in the eighteenth century. 'My Last Duchess'
is set upon a sixteenth century Du...
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...t of her intention and
social status, 'I dance at the Kings!' This hints of the corruption in
the highest institutions in the country. Although she has money and a
high status, she is still willing to lower herself to get her own way,
as if its for her own entertainment to ruin someone else's life,
unlike the Duke in 'My Last Duchess' to whom, social status and
appearances are everything.
In both the poems, Browning approaches the idea of love in an
unexpected manner. Browning explores the idea of love not as something
that should make you feel good and happy, he doesn't explore the warm
side of love but explores the dark side. Both characters in the poems
show two situations of people that don't respect love. The narrators
both kill in order to get their own way that would not be expected of
a typical love poem.
In the penultimate chapter of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Coverdale offers a “moral” at the end of the narrative that specifically addresses Hollingsworth’s philanthropic and personal failures:
In the article “Courtly Love: Who Needs It?” by E. Jane Burns, the author establishes what would be considered the quintessential female persona as it appears in medieval literature, particularly in the romance genre. She begins by calling attention to the similarities between the expected mannerisms of women in the structure of courtly love and the modern book The Rules. The text is a self-help guide for women who are looking to attract a husband by employing medieval methods of attraction (Burns 23). It employs outdated strategies to encourage women to become unemotional and disinterested, but also subservient, with anticipation of attaining the unwavering affection of a potential suitor. Thereby perpetuating the well-established “ideology
sexually open as men. A woman was only to behave as these two women did
The Human Need for Love Exposed in Frankenstein Written in 1817 by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein is a novel about the "modern Prometheus", the Roman Titian who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. The story takes place in several European countries during the late 1700's. It is the recollection of Victor Frankenstein, a ship captain, about his life. Victor is a student of science and medicine who discovers a way to reanimate dead flesh. In a desire to create the perfect race he constructs a man more powerful than any normal human, but the creation is so deformed and hideous that Victor shuns it.
For many, saying or hearing the word romanticism evokes numerous stereotypical and prejudged definitions and emotions. The biggest reason this probably happens is because of how closely romanticism sounds like romance. The similarity of the sounds and spelling of the two words can lead to some thinking that the two words mean the same thing or are closely related. Although romanticism and romance do share some similarities in their spelling and pronunciation they couldn’t be more different. In the Merriam Webster Dictionary romance is defined as, “a love story”. The Romantic Period was not necessarily a time of true romance and love stories, although love was written about, but was instead a time of extreme emotion expressed in many different ways. One of the many ways emotion was expressed was through the use of supernatural and gothic literature and a lot of it contained horrific subject matter for the time it was written, making it anything but romantic. Expressions of thought and emotion were shown through horror and the supernatural just as much as emotion was expressed through love and romance. Many of the authors during the Romantic period submitted works, “dealing with the supernatural, the weird, and the horrible” (Britannica Online Encyclopedia). In many ways, gothic tales of horror and suspense defined the Romantic period just as much as any other type of literature at the time.
Robert Browning’s "Porphyria’s Lover" contains the methodical ramblings of a lunatic; it is a madman’s monologue that reveals the dark side of human nature. Power and passion coalesce to form the strangulation of the beautiful and innocent Porphyria, and at the same time strangle the reader’s ability to comprehend what is occurring and why it is occurring. The murder’s monologue depicts a heinous crime. The simple fact that the monologue is issued from the murderer himself creates a sense of distrust. There is no doubt that the man is disturbed, but the level of his lunacy remains uncertain. In one short poem, Browning provides an intense glimpse into the mind of a homicidal maniac, while single-handedly destroying the romantic notion of eternal love.
The romantic era in literature was characterized by many different authors, male and female. Jane Austen was only one of many authors in that era, and one of the longest lasting; through her many novels, she shows various views on love and marriage. In Jane Austen’s critically acclaimed novel, Pride and Prejudice, Austen spares no character, male or female, in her criticism of the understood custom that the only route to happiness was marriage.
Both Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “For Annie” and Robert Browning’s poem “Porphyrias Lover” create complex relations between sex and death. In “For Annie” the masochistic storyteller sees sexual excitement as a suffering to be endured and embraces the state that follows as an estimate to death. He is masochists, who takes pleasure in envisioning himself dead and resolves his own sexual worries by visualizing a situation in which he is motionless and immobile, while his lover takes on a maternal role. In Robert Browning’s “Porphyrias Lover,” on the other hand, the speaker is vicious, resolving his problems through murdering his lover and rationalizing his actions in terms of an imagined post-sexual state. Both speakers believe they are honorable figures and victims of their own desires, but both disclose in their diction and imagery the real sexual nature of their problems. In addition, In both poems, death becomes a metaphor for satisfaction whether forced on another or a state realized for oneself.
Treatment of Women in Robert Browning's My Last Duchess and Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress
Another thing the plays have in common is that they both have characters that seem to go mad and lose...
Among the failed and fallen works of man, the mundane, indeed profane, outcome of our history’s cyclic vastation, human affection may finally reign. This is the claim of Browning’s Love Among the Ruins, published in his monumental volume Men & Women, in 1855. Subtler emotions of kindliness and endearment between two persons only take the foreground of our affairs when the brazen dynamo of the days of kings and their mobs collapse in their mad, millenary mill-race. In this poem, Browning’s moment of Love achieves Power in “the quiet-coloured end of evening” after History has run its course, and the land is tired, fallen back to earth, and perhaps back to simpler times: a simpler space, a simpler time, Arcadian, “half-asleep.” However, there is also a sense in the poem that the weight of a rich poetic tradition has collapsed for the post-Romantic generations, and the unfulfilled attainment of the Sublime has left such a desire, or even simply the notion of it, flattened, slowly decaying, covered in English moss and lichen.
men, it was often they had a pretty girl beside them. She would act as
considered to be a groundbreaking forefather of what has become the Romantic genre. His poetry and even paintings have been distinguished as ¨Pre Romantic¨ due to his aid the development of the Romantic Period.
Over the years, the classic man saving the helpless woman routine, has evolved into a more feminist view where the woman saves the man, for example .
Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” circulated in 1798 when the world was changing at a hasty rate. The American War of Independence took place, slavery was abolished and The French Revolution began. Austen disregarded these historical events and chose to highlight social issues she found to be pressing through her romantic fiction. Through Jane’s observations she decided to hone in on the concepts of love and marriage. Many novelists during Austen’s time used numerous metaphors and symbolisms to illustrate people, places and ideas but Jane chose to do the opposite. Austen relied heavily on the character’s behavior and dialogue and also on the insight of the omniscient narrator. In the first volume of “Pride and Prejudice,” Austen’s characters’ behavior and events make it apparent that love and marriage do not always agree.