One of the best poets in the Victorian era was Robert Browning. Browning wrote many poems including Porphyria’s Lover, and My Last Duchess. These two texts were very controversial and still are. In a way these are still controversial texts and make people question Browning as a person and his sanity. In My Last Duchess this man is showing his “lovers” agent his house and his 900 year old name, really showing off. He shows the agent a portrait of a beautiful woman and starts talking about her. How she was too happy and to flirtatious, in his mind, and so he had her killed… Then he just goes on and says he wants to meet the new woman he is going to marry. Porphyria’s Lover takes a very strange twist. The writer is talking about this woman, Porphyria,
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These women weren’t of the same status. One was a duchess a wife. She wasn’t just some lover but must have meant something to this guy if he took the time to marry her and spend quite a bit of money on her. The other was a girlfriend. It is interesting that they talk about her “soiled” gloves; they use the word in a very interesting way. They could be talking about how they got dirty, or maybe they were hinting on the word soiled like the girl was the one soiled or not pure. So really she could be of very low status, a prostitute maybe. The men were of a completely different class. One was a duke; very rich and had a 900 year old name as he kept saying. He just married any woman he wanted and money wasn’t an issue. Now Porphyria’s lover lived outside of town. He lived in a cottage by a lake in the middle of the woods. What about motivation? Well we really only have half. The duke thought that the girl was to happy or flirted way too much. He may have said something to her. “Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, whene’er I passes her; but who passed without much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together.” (My Last Duchess lines 43-46) “Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl, and laid her soiled gloves by, untied her hat and let the damp hair fall, and, last, she sat down by my side and called me.” (Porphyria’s Lover lines
These women weren’t of the same status. One was a duchess a wife. She wasn’t just some lover but must have meant something to this guy if he took the time to marry her and spend quite a bit of money on her. The other was a girlfriend. It is interesting that they talk about her “soiled” gloves; they use the word in a very interesting way. They could be talking about how they got dirty, or maybe they were hinting on the word soiled like the girl was the one soiled or not pure. So really she could be of very low status, a prostitute maybe. The men were of a completely different class. One was a duke; very rich and had a 900 year old name as he kept saying. He just married any woman he wanted and money wasn’t an issue. Now Porphyria’s lover lived outside of town. He lived in a cottage by a lake in the middle of the woods. What about motivation? Well we really only have half. The duke thought that the girl was to happy or flirted way too much. He may have said something to her. “Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, whene’er I passes her; but who passed without much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together.” (My Last Duchess lines 43-46) “Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl, and laid her soiled gloves by, untied her hat and let the damp hair fall, and, last, she sat down by my side and called me.” (Porphyria’s Lover lines