Robert Browning's Poems My Last Duchess and Porphyria's Lover

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Recommended: women's role in history

The topic of women’s equality to men has been a constant debate throughout the centuries. Women ave fought for equality and have reached many milestones and they are much more equal then they were, especially at the beginning of our nation’s history. This fight for equality has gained more support over the centuries and at this point the two sexes are more equal then they have ever been in the past however, even now, when this nation claims to be a land of equality for all, there is still inequality present. Letters written during the fight for women’s suffrage worded it this way, “Ah! how many of my sex feel in the dominion, thus unrighteously exercised over them, under the gentle appellation of protection, that what they have leaned upon has proved a broken reed at best and oft a spear.”(Grimke) The author will continue on to exclaim that womanhood is a bond because of men who believe the fairer sex to be inferior to them. This was evident in the poet Robert Browning’s poems My Last Duchess and Porphyria’s Lover which are both dramatic monologues expressing the position of a woman in resect to the men in her life. The speakers in both poems speak of a lover or wife who is happy and often smiles, both are jealous, and both kill and attempt to justify their actions in the poems. The poems seem to place women below men but on the underside of this topic they call attention to the disturbing actions that anyone can take or the drastic measures that may take place because of the simple jealousy or an attempt to justify ones actions when they are so clearly wrong.
The speaker of My Last Duchess begins my describing the beauty and happiness that surrounded his Duchess. He explains how kind she was to him and her ability to make all...

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... Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 Apr. 2014. fourth

Odden, Karen. “Browning, Robert (1812–1889).” World Poets. Ed. Ron Padgett. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000. 163-173. Scribner Writers on GVRL. Web. 10 Apr. 2014. fifth

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