Comparing My Last Duchess 'And' Porphyria's Lover

“Through the years detailed attention has been given to the lyric, epic, short-story, drama, novel, and other literary forms, but comparatively few references have been made to the dramatic monologue.”(Sessions). A dramatic monologue is a poem where the speaker reveals parts of their character while making a speech or telling a narrative. Robert Browning, in his time, was considered a genius when it came to writing these dramatic monologues. Ruth Miller and Robert Greenburg both agree that,“ Robert Browning, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, was a master of the dramatic monologue and did much to develop its possibilities…”. Two of Browning’s most notable works are his poems My Last Duchess and Porphyria’s Lover. While both tales have different stories, they contain a multitude of similarities. In My Last Duchess and Porphyria’s Lover the similarities are the dominant males and the murder of a loved one, and the difference is that one was a crime of passion and the other of jealousy.

Since the Victorian era was male-dominated, it’s no surprise that the women in the poems are talked about as if they are lesser than the men. Shifra Hochberg writes that her interpretation of the poem was that it,“...encompasses the related desire for power…”. The men in both poems feel the need to establish their power by killing the women that love them. In My Last Duchess, the speaker ominously tells the lawyer,“...as if she ranked My gift of a nine-hundred-year-old name With anybody’s gift…”(32-34). Then in Porphyria’s Lover the speaker asserts his dominance with this line,“I propped her head up as before, Only, this time my shoulder bore Her head…”(49-51). They both feel the need to prove to their ladies that they must always be the center of attention and must be the most important thing in the