Analysis of Browning's Dramatic Monologues
Write a five-page analysis on one of the following topics. Your essay should have a good introduction that lays out the themes you will be touching on, as well as a good conclusion para. You will need to include at least two scholarly resources (an essay or journal article from Library resources, or from www(dot)victorianweb(dot)org) in your paper with correct citations and a works cited page. These scholarly essays should be read through and incorporated thoughtfully into your analysis, using a key quote or two. Poetry needs to be cited with lines intact and separate and include line numbers. Use textual details in your analysis in a strategic way, to enhance a point you are making. Please edit your papers well; check for faulty sentence construction and other grammar-related issues.
Paper is due on July 25th by 11:59 PM as an email attachment. Please adhere to this deadline.
Robert Browning has been discussed as a poet who “was interested in exposing the devious ways in which our minds work and the complexity of our motives.” Analyze “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess” through the lens of the above statement.
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Compare the ideas of womanhood in Tennyson’s “Lady of Shallot” and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” Consider the ways in which a male and female poet depict women’s struggles to define their identities through their protagonists. Are these depictions challenging of patriarchy or do they uphold the standard of a passive, pure woman (set up by Ellis etc.).
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Analysis of Browning's dramatic Monologues
Introduction
Browning has been a prominent poetic figure of the Victorian Era. His poetic achievements are chiefly associated with the development of Dramatic Monologues. A dramatic monologue is a speech by an individual narrator about some significant incident in his life, vividly picturized in one scene. Browning raised it to a revolutionary point through the artful characterization, the multiplex composition of the subject, and the revelation of the psychological nature of the narrator through his comments, circumstances, the events described, or the inference of the poem. Most of his dramatic monologues are the psychological analysis of the speaker. In "My Last Duchess" and " Porphyria’s Lover” too, he has revealed a few aspects of human psychology. Both these works share common themes of objectification of women, control and manipulation, love and sexuality, violence and control. These dramatic monologues have exposed how deviously human minds work and how complex their motives could be. The following analysis reveals how these two poems uncover these human psychologies.
Analysis
A lunatic lover narrates the monologue of Porphyria's lover. A man of unsound mind who is relentless in doing anything to keep Porphyria’s love to himself. The severe weather condition performs well in describing the severe condition of the narrator himself since he is narrating the incident after he has killed Porphyria due to his ruthless desire of controlling the lady.
The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake: (lines 1-4) (Browning)
These tempestuous words make the environment gloomy, giving the reader glimpses of the violence that is to come. Porphyria arrives at the speaker's cottage in an attire that describes her to belong to an upper class, and the speaker is presented as one of her workers. Porphyria initiates sexual activity, as shown in the lines when she brushed her yellow hair off and placed the head of her lover on her white shoulder.
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there, (lines 17-19) (Browning)
Treatment shows her desire for possession of her lover that makes her break all the boundaries and come to him. The narrator describes his obsession with her love saying.
Happy and proud; at last, I knew.
Porphyria worshipped me (lines 32 -33) (Browning)
The words worship and Proud explain how, in her love trance, he starts viewing himself as a God. However, he fears that she was a feeble creature bound to the ties of society and will never be able to release those ties for his love. Frustration builds up in his mind over his unattainability of her, and this feeling of helplessness makes him a Thanatos. He describes his anguish and debates upon what he could do to preserve the sanctity of her love for himself only, describing the atrocious and complex motives behind his hideous action. Thus the violent climax, which reveals the devious aspects of the human psychology of love, violence, and possession, arrives as a shock to the reader when the narrator’s desire gets unleashed.
I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string, I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. (lines 37-41) (Browning)
Right in the middle of the tender moment of love and pride, the narrator suddenly decides to kill the woman he loved by strangling her with her hair. He does so to restrict her to himself, showing the complexity of motives in the human mind. His desire to freeze and bind her tender, warm love and the exquisiteness of the moment shows his fervor and frenzy infatuation, which acts as a complex motive to perversion. This obsession leads to the fiendish pleasure he derives from her strangulation. The illicit act suggests an insane discipline and disorderliness of a paranoid, which exposes the devious ways the human mind works led by the complexity of these motives.
Perhaps the most controversial part is revealed at the end of the monologue when the psychopath lover tries to justify his violence by attributing it to Porphyria’s “one wish” to fully possess him. The idea of happiness is delivered.........................