My Last Duchess Essay

“My Last Duchess,” Browning’s dramatic monologue centers thematically on a Renaissance Duke’s obsession with overpowering his Duchess. His desire to dominate reached ta an extent where he reduced her to nothingness, captured in a painting. The poem, though about a Renaissance man, reflects completely a Victorian masculine attitude toward women. The main character of the poem that indulges into the monologue is a misogynist man who is unable to bear with any act of agency performed by women. In the poem, even the smile of the Duchess makes the Duke obsessive and aggressive. This leads to her murder through which Duke believes he has controlled all her smiles and locked them in a picture. His act of murdering proves him to be a tyrant misogynist. …show more content…
From the very beginning, the use of pronoun “my” reduces her to an object murdered by the Duke in his unconscious desire to subdue her agency. His desire to silence her is not unnatural, specially taken in reference to the Victorian world where men were literally taught to overpower women. They were taught that they did not need to become strong because they were naturally and inherently strong and their manhood lay in subduing women. This subjugation held in it a desire to shape a woman according to a man’s will. She was an object created to please men by coming into a shape that men desired to see women in.
The Duke, in trying to establish his masculinity, unconsciously tries to lesson her. Is character is that of a man who is unwilling to let women live in their own ways. He is obsessed with his own ways and believes them to be superior. Duke’s character is arrogant and patriarchal is that sense. He believes that women should behave in a particular way defined by society and that if they don’t do that, they need to be tamed like animals are. Duke tries to tame Duchess like that If she