Relationships Between Women and Men in Browning's Poems
Robert Browning is described as ‘a love poet who was acutely aware of
how women and men can be separated by jealousy or the passing of
time’. In studying his poetry, what did you notice about the
relationships he explores? What is revealed about the time in which
Browning was writing?
The ‘Love Poet’ Robert Browning was born in London in 1812. In 1846
Browning married the poet Elizabeth Barrett and eloped with her to
Italy. After Elizabeth’s death he returned to England and continued to
publish a great number of poems and plays. His best poetry was
written, however, in the years that he spent in Italy with his wife.
He died in 1889.
Browning’s time period was a lot different than today’s culture and
social behaviour; this is obvious in his poems. The relationships
between a male and a female were much more formal. The male brought
money into the house, he would work and socialise. For the wealthy
men, it was often they had a pretty girl beside them. She would act as
a pleasant book cover, covering the intelligent dominant man. In
Browning’s poems, however, the characters are often men and women
caught at moments of anxiety and obsession. Since they tend to reveal
more than they actually intend, the interest of the poems lies in
discovering what lies beneath the words that are actually spoken. This
relates to Robert Browning’s description as ‘a love poet who was
acutely aware of how women and men can be separated by jealously or
the passing of time’.
I will be studying five of Browning’s poems including: My Last Duchess,
a dramatic monologue in which the Duke speaks to an imaginary listener
about a painting of his last duchess. Porphyria’s Lo...
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...s absence of a female
voice may suggest a representation of a specifically male identity
through the speaker. On the other hand, doubts remain whether he
intended to psychoanalyse the male identity for a particular poem, as
no female voice exists for a comparison.
The central problem in Browning's love poetry is invariably one of
communication between the sexes. The intangible influences that
encourage or destroy intimacy between men and women elicit all his
skill in psychological analysis; for love exists in and through human
intuitions. Reference has already been made to the poet's belief that
destined lovers recognize each other on first sight. But these moments
of full and perfect communion are precarious; and, save for the most
exceptional cases, the initial harmony does not survive social
pressures or the importunities of individual temperament.
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.
French writer Victor Hugo, was banished by Napoleon III, emperor of France, for writings that were critical to the government. In April of 1857, English Poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote a letter to Napoleon, which she never mailed. Imploring Napoleon to excuse Hugo for writing a furious letter to the government.
The Role of Women in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Go Tell It On the Mountain
Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland was a book that took us back to the horror of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a mass killing of Jews in Germany that was led by Adolf Hitler. Hitler wanted to get rid of all of the Jews in Europe because he thought they were an inferior race. So Hitler would gather the men who were going to have the job of killing the Jews and they were called the “Ordinary Men”. In this book Browning does a great job showing who the ordinary men were and how the ordinary men turned into killers. The Ordinary men were men in the german army who had the job of killing innocent Jews daily. The men didn’t have a choice in this decision of killing the jews.
War Changes People is an age old saying, but what makes an ordinary man go from average Joe to blood thirsty Nazis? As Browning, explains in her book “Ordinary Men”, the loss of humanity does not happen over night. The combination of War, racism, and “constant propaganda and indoctrination”, were key factors in understanding the assimilation of these men into the Nazi ideology (Browning, 186). Browning does a great job of contrasting the Reserve Police Battalion 101’s Massaacre at Józeów to later experiences which allows the audience can see these factors slowly coming into effect when reading the transition from reluctant compliance to enthusiastic killer.
"There are no extraordinary men... just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are faced to deal with" (William Halsey). The same can be said about volatile men. This is the quote Christopher R. Browning thought of when he named this book. The men of the 101st battalion were rarely faced with decisions. Even if it had been proposed by Trapp the morning of Jozefow that "any of the older men who did not feel up to the task that lay before them could step out" (Browning, chapter 7, pg. 57), he didn't actually allow them any time to truly think about it. He brought it up moments before they were about to go out to the slaughter. They were blind-sided and the men who didn't want to risk the future of their jobs as policemen or the men that didn't want to look weak in front of their peers were ushered into a massacre unlike that they could have ever imagined. But because they were all basically forced to give killing a shot, it only allowed them to adapt to war easier. The job that the men of the 101st had to carry out continued to get easier as they adapted to the climate of the war by creating rules for themselves. These ordinary men were no longer in an ordinary situation.
Herman Melville wrote some of the most widely read works in the history of literature during the late nineteenth century. He has become a writer with whom the romantic era is associated and a man whose works have become a standard by which modern literature is judged. One of his most well-known and widely studied short pieces of fiction is a story entitled, simply, Billy Budd. In this short story, Melville tells the tale of Billy Budd, a somewhat out-of-place stuttering sailor who is too innocent for his own good. This enchanting tale, while inevitably entertaining, holds beneath it many layers of interpretive depth and among these layers of interpretation, an idea that has been entertained in the literature of many other romantic writers. Melville uses a literary technique of developing two characters that are complete opposites in all aspects and contrasting them throughout the narrative, thus allowing their own personalities to adversely compliment each other. Melville also uses this tactic in another well-known short story, Bartleby the Scrivener. Much like Melville's two stories, another romantic writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, uses this tactic in his short story, The Artist of the Beautiful when he creates two completely different characters who vie for the same woman's love. Both writers use the contrary characters to represent the different facets of the human personality. Using this idea and many others, these romantic writers, Melville and Hawthorne, created works with depth of meaning that were both interesting to read and even more intriguing to interpret.
They were expected to do take on the accepted role of a woman. In most cases, a
The author Henry James called Nathaniel Hawthorne “the most valuable example of American genius”, expressing the widely held belief that he was the most significant fiction writer of the antebellum period. (The Norton Anthology of American Literature) Will we recognize an example, a certain expository shape, to Hawthorne 's representation of the puritan woman, and to his depiction of relationships to a great extent? I think the answer is, decidedly, yes it is clearly distinguished, a few years prior, by Nina Baym in her hash-settling paper "Impeded Nature: Nathaniel Hawthorne as Feminist." Baym contends that a considerable lot of the stories we most esteem and regularly instruct make a managed examination out of and an effective assault upon-male
Love is the ubiquitous force that drives all people in life. If people did not want, give, or receive love, they would never experience life because it is the force that completes a person. Although it often seems absent, people constantly strive for this ever-present force as a means of acceptance. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is an influential poet who describes the necessity of love in her book of poems Sonnets from the Portuguese. In her poems, she writes about love based on her relationship with her husband – a relationship shared by a pure, passionate love. Browning centers her life and happiness around her husband and her love for him. This life and pure happiness is dependent on their love, and she expresses this outpouring and reliance of her love through her poetry. She uses imaginative literary devices to strengthen her argument for the necessity of love in one’s life. The necessity of love is a major theme in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 43” and “Sonnet 29.”
sexually open as men. A woman was only to behave as these two women did
This is where the role of the monster comes in, it wants a female for
During the nineteenth century, women were regarded as ornaments “momentary toys of passion” to the society and properties to be traded within marriage, therefore, Victorian moralists repressed female sexuality. As a result, for a woman to admit she even had sexual desires was considered sinful, let alone acting on those desires - like Porphyria did - was borderline criminal. Moreover, when Porphyria “glided in” she “untied her hat and let her damp hair fall”. Victorian moralists referred to female fornicators as ‘fallen’ women. Additionally, committing adultery was also a sin as it went against one of the Ten Commandments “Thou shall not commit adultery”, therefore, Porphyria ‘letting her hair fall’ could symbolise the boundaries she had willingly chosen to overstep by coming to meet her lover.
Robert Browning's poem "Meeting at Night" is essentially a narrative of a man who is journeying to meet his lover. The man recounts his journey as he undertakes it, mentioning or observing different portions of the trip, each in turn. One by one, he briefly describes his surroundings as he passes by them, merely noting them as if they bear only fleeting significance to him. However, although his descriptions are unpretentious and abruptly forgotten as he continues onward toward his goal, each line of the poem contains striking imagery. In fact, it should be noted that this poem consists entirely of imagery. Every line depicts a scene of the landscape that Browning's narrator encounters; that is, at least, until he finally reaches his destination, when his focus is diverted to his lover. Throughout the entire poem he offers no personal insight or reflection on his situation, and he instead is content to merely report his perceptions and observations as they come and go. Although each of these little vignettes is of seemingly small consequence in itself, these individual images are each portrayed with remarkable style and feeling, and Browning skillfully strings these images together to elicit specific feelings and reactions from his readers. His masterful application of imagery, mood, and dynamic movement serve to shape the poem's emotion in such a way that the reader can tap into a plentiful well of information pertaining to the state of the speaker and his emotions -- information that initially goes unnoticed from a strictly literal observation.
Robert Browning’s poem, ‘Andrea del Sarto’ presents the reader with his views on the painter’s life, an artist who has lost faith in the Parnassian ideal of living for art, and now has to use art as a living. The poem looks at the darker side of the painter when he was older, and expresses a lot about Browning as well, and how he thought his work was perceived, and the context of his life and times. The poem covers many ideas and themes, which not only create a powerful poem, but also create commentary from Browning’s prerogative of his own situation. The poem epitomizes Browning’s work, looking at a real figure in history, from Browning’s own perspective, in a real state of affairs. Although ‘Del Sarto’ might have been regarded as ‘The Faultless painter’ in his time, on the inside he had to repress a struggle. As historian Vasari pointed out, a ‘certain timidity of spirit’ that stopped him from gaining true recognition as one of the greats alongside ‘Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo’. This could be said to express Browning’s view of audience, since his wife was much more successful than him. In this essay I will be looking at the poem, and how it relates to Browning and the time it was written in.