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

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Recommended: Shakespeare’s obsession with madness

Love is a topic that is known worldwide and is greatly debated each and every day. Although not everyone knows what love is, it’s is constantly incorporated in literature. All of the best poets and writers know how to utilize that concept and does it well. Jane Brody explains the importance of love when she writes: “When people fall in love and decide to marry, the expectation is nearly always that love and marriage and the happiness they bring will last; as the vows say, till death do us part.” One of the oddest forms of this writing is from Robert Browning’s texts My Last Duchess and Porphyria’s Lover. In My Last Duchess a man is talking to the painting of his wife, and describing how their love went cold. Porphyria’s Lover is about a couple who works in an odd way, but ends even worse. Through careful analysis of Robert Browning’s two dramatic monologues, the similarities of them include mental instability within the speaker along with strange love that is portrayed but they differ by the extremity of their actions.
First of all, both of Browning’s texts incorporate the idea of mental instability through the speakers. The famous quote is stated as: “Love is mad.” For the two texts presented, that definitely applies. Particularly in My Last Duchess, madness can be clearly assessed when the speaker begins to talk to his deceased wife’s portrait. This craze is described when Browning writes: “There she stands as if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet the company below, then.” (pg. 980 lines 47-48) He talks to the painting as though she was alive, which is just one example of craziness. Maria C. Lamia from Psychology Today expands on this concept when she writes: “When love involves an initial state of bliss, it can ...

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...imes.com/2013/01/14/ that-loving-feeling-takes-a-lot-of-work/>. This provided great information. Cherry, Kendra. "What Is Love?" About.com. About.com, 2014. Web. 11 Apr. 2014.
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This provided great information.
Lamia, Maria C. "Blissful Love Can Make You Sick or Crazy." Psychology Today.
Psychology Today, 5 Feb. 2012. Web. 11 Apr. 2014.

201202/blissful-love-can-make-you-sick-or-crazy>. This provided great information. Mace, David R. "Marital Intimacy and the Deadly Love-Anger Cycle." Online
Library. Online Library, 8 June 2007. Web. 11 Apr. 2014.

abstract>. This provided great information.

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