Perspectives On Women In Browning's Poetry
One of the recurring themes in the poetry of Robert Browning, is that
of woman, and it is this that I have chosen to focus on.
In The first of the poems I have chosen to look at, Porphyria's Lover,
Browning initially portrays the female character as the one with the
power, although this in inevitably removed from her.
In the opening lines of the poem:
'The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake'
we gain a sense of forboding as the landscape of the poem seems to
reflect the state of mind of the narrator, this is further explored in
the next two lines where the speaker describes the weather as
spiteful. All the narrator can do at this point in the poem is listen
to the weather outside and he is completely helpless.
'I listened with heart fit to break.'
However when Porphyria enters the poem, she alters the circumstances
by replacing cold with warmth and seems completely unaffected by the
weather even though it is she who has been out in it.
'And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up and all the cottage warm'
Porphyria's actions at this point in the poem seem effortless in
direct contrast to the impotence of her lover.
Porphyria continues to take charge at this point in the poem by
removing the evidence of the wet, cold weather outside, and even when
her lover is unresponsive she manipulates the situation, moving his
arm around her and placing his head upon her shoulder. We see at this
point that her lover is the weaker of the two, but this is soon
altered as in the lines:
'Too weak for all her heart's endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride'
We finally see Porphyria described as weak, ...
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... be
even more attractive to the poet:
'What is far conquers what is near.'
These women are the most perfect in the poets eye as they are whatever
his imagination is capable of creating, they are the perfect
idealistic objectification. These women spring from the poet's
imagination in the moment of the poem being written just as they will
spring from the earth to which he has returned.
'I will make an Eve, be the artist that began her,
Shaped her to his mind'
In Porphyria's Lover and Women And Roses, Browning treats us to two
very different poems where a woman or women are the main subject
matter. However, in both poems we see that the ideal figure of woman
is one who has passed or is yet to be born as then she is able to
exist in the most perfect state possible, not that of a real person
with flaws and free will, but in that of a pure fantasy.
In the nineteenth century domestic, maternal women were considered the ideal. Several authors challenged this ideal while others glorified it and showed it as completely pragmatic. After all, who better to raise and feed the family than the one who is responsible for giving life to them? Louisa May Alcott shows her primary female figure in Transcendental Wild Oats, Hope Lamb, in a strong traditional female role. Hope is arguably the strongest character in the story and serves as an alternative to the typical modern feminist society promotes today. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Zenobia is the heroine who to a great extend runs the commune. She is bold physically, spiritually and intellectually. She is very much different from Hope Lamb, but in many crucial ways, they are all too similar.
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.
Thinking about history and Genocides, we want to imagine the enemies as being somehow different from us. Take watching a film, for instance, you’re watching an action film with a villain or killer. We consider them to be different from us we are scared of them, we look at the differently than a “normal” human. We tend to think of the enemies in history to be the same as the villain or killer in a movie. We perceive this because we don’t want to assume that any normal human being is capable of committing a Genocide. As a society, we believe we are different from the chaos in the world. Christopher Browning’s book, Ordinary Men: Reserved Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland, portrayed the story from the opposite viewpoint. Everyday
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
Shakespeare, Browning and Duffy all create four very similar characters female characters which are considered to be disturbed. This is due to the fact that they all went against the expectations of society in their respected eras. The speaker in ‘The Laboratory’ as well as Havisham and Medusa in Duffy’s monologues are all considered to be “disturbed” because of their common motives: jealousy and revenge. Despite these similarities, Lady Macbeth’s main motive is her hunger for power. This subverted expectations of females as they were supposed to be loyal to their male partners and shouldn’t want to take their power. In this essay I will talk about their desire for power and revenge, and why this has lead them to be portrayed in such a disturbed manner and how this goes against people’s expectations.
I read a critical article on Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”. I confess it was harder to find something in the NCLC’s than I would’ve thought. There was a considerable accumulation of critiques on Browning’s work, but very little on “My Last Duchess”.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a novel filled with many symbolic references that reflect not only the issues/concerns of the Puritan era but also of similar issues of his own time period, which Hawthorne reveals his personal opinions on. One example of said issues evident in his work is the Puritan society’s view/treatment of women, which he appears to express contempt for through the use of his character Hester Prynne. However, even though Hawthorne appears to not be in favor of how the Puritan government perceives/deals with women, he also doesn’t seem to be willing to allow the equally involved patriarchal system to be challenged or abolished since it works in a man’s favor and at times he even concurs with society in terms
Womanhood in The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame Sans Merci and Mariana by Keats
However, it is irresponsible to assert that the narrator “learnt” the misogynist outlook solely from the Brotherhood, but rather, the disdain at the women is deemed as a general societal fashion at the time, because the narrator’s attitude toward women remains constant if we recall his reaction in the “battle royal” scene. Much ink is spilled when the narrator sees the blonde in the ballroom. He “desire to spit on her”; “destroy her” and even “murder her” (Ellison 19). However, if we scrutinize the scene more carefully, it is underlined that the narrator’s feeling is remarkably conflicting. As a matter of fact, the narrator is also “strongly attracted”; he also wants to “caress her” and “love her” (Ellison 19) in the scene. Apparently, the
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on March 6, 1806, in Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England. She was the eldest of eleven children born of Edward and Mary Moulton-Barrett (DISCovering Authors). Her father was a “possessive and autocratic man loved by his children even though he rigidly controlled their lives” (Encyclopedia of World Biography). Although he forbid his daughters to marry, he always managed to encourage their scholarly pursuits (DISCovering Authors). Her mother, Mary Graham-Clarke, was a prosperous woman who earned their wealth from a sugar plantation in Jamaica (EXPLORING Poetry). When Elizabeth was “three years old, the family moved to Hope End in Herefordshire,, and she spent the next twenty-three years of her life in this minareted country house overlooking a lake” (Hayter).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning is an English Poet of the Romantic Movement who read various number of Shakespeare’s plays and many different passages from Paradise Lost before the age of 10. As a child, Elizabeth suffered from lung ailment and spinal injury that had plagued her for the rest of her life, but that didn’t stop her from completing her education, and writing numerous amount of sonnets and poems. When she was living under her father’s tyrannical rule, she bitterly opposed slavery and her siblings being sent away to Jamaica by writing the poem, The Seraphim and Other Poems, that expresses the Christian sentiments in the form of Greek tragedy. In 1846, the couple, Elizabeth and Robert, eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, in which helped
It was a tale of two lovers uniting in the night to express their affection and devotion. So how exactly did this tale of love, end in cruel, cold-blooded murder? Good evening and welcome to Poetry Break Down, I’m your host Mary Doe. Tonight, we will delve into the fascinating world of classic Victorian literature. Under the microscope is canonized poet, the late Robert Browning. Browning’s poetry was a reflection of his life and times living in Victorian England. Later on this evening we will analyze just how his times came to play a major role in some of his greatest works, in particular his revered poem Porphyria’s Lover. Released in 1836 (Catherine Maxwell, 1993, p.27), this esteemed text follows the murder of beloved Porphyria, the lover of the enigmatic speaker who, after inviting her to his cottage for a romantic rendezvous, strangles her. Stay tuned, for tonight we explore just how this poem come to be a perfect representation of a society that was obsessed with the dominate preoccupation of male dominance.
The Portrayal of Women in American Literature Throughout American Literature, women have been depicted in many different ways. The portrayal of women in American Literature is often influenced by an author's personal experience or a frequent societal stereotype of women and their position. Often times, male authors interpret society’s views of women in a completely different way than a female author would. While F. Scott Fitzgerald may have represented his main female character as a victim in the 1920’s, Zora Neale Hurston portrays her as a strong, free-spirited, and independent woman only a decade later in the 1930’s. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's, The Great Gatsby, the main female character, Daisy Buchanan, is portrayed by, Nick, the narrator, only by her superficial qualities.
Do you believe that women of this present generation have always received the same level of respect as they receive now? Today, women are treated exceptionally well as compared to their counterparts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and treated even better than those in the very early years of America. Women in the past were restricted from freedoms and rights; their individuality was stripped and they were constantly forced to meet the constraining view of a “traditional” America. In contrast, women of modern America are granted a level of recognition and respect unexplored by American women of previous generations.
In Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “Fra Lippo Lippi” we as the readers are presented with a lot of background information about the speaker itself. This monologue overall subjects a monk/painter of Renaissance Italy. I find this monologue very interesting because of the fact that Browning uses sarcasm and witty personality in his favor at the beginning of the poem. The trait of the authorities being overzealous in the monk’s eyes is what charms the beginning first half of the monologue. For this writing assignment, I will analyze specific lines of 1-60; I believe the monk reveals a lot about himself as a character in the very first half of the poem which is why I find this of significance. While analyzing these specific lines, I will also describe how these lines help us as readers better understand this character in question.