The Vagina Monologues

The narrators of “Porphyria’s Lover” and “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” are both mad, but the madness manifests itself differently. Both narrators act irrationally towards one person, and that person becomes an object of their wrath. However, the narrator’s madness in “Porphyria’s Lover” ends in violence, while the monk’s madness in “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” manifests itself in an irrational hatred of a fellow monk. While the depictions of madness differ in how they are displayed,…

Cousin Kate & the Seduction In this Essay I will compare and contrast two poems ‘The Seduction’ by Eileen McAuley and ‘Cousin Kate’ by Christina Rossetti. I will also support my ideas with quotations. Cousin Kate was written in the 19th century and The Seduction was written near the end of the 1900’s. This contributes to one of the differences I will be discussing in my essay The Seduction is about a teenage girl who goes to a party. She meets a boy and falls head over heels in love with him but…

deeper subliminal meaning; that it reflects his own dysfunctionality. Simultaneously, alliteration and assonance are present throughout the entire poem, giving a series of smooth transitions from line to line, despite the Count actually being in a monologue for the entire poem. Robert Browning used the A-B rhyme scheme throughout “My Last Duchess” to intentionally pair with the assonance of the O’s of each word being stretched. This gives giving the appearance of deliberate, slow speech from the…

Introduction to Author Oscar Wilde was a Anglo- English author, playwright, novelist, critic and poet. He was a popular literary figure in late Victorian England, known for his brilliant wit, flamboyant style. After graduating from Oxford University, he lectured as a poet, art critic and a leading proponent of the principles of aestheticism which emphasized aesthetic values more than moral or social themes. This doctrine can be clearly summarized by the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’. In 1890, he…

The characters portrayed by Browning in his dramatic monologues are various and often rise from the world of the Italian Renaissance. From the artist Fra Lippo Lippi who has become a monk without his will, to Andrea del Sarto, a great painter who has subordinated his art to the demands of an exploitative wife, Browning manages to reveal the true value of art. The pictures of great artists blended with historical detail are embodied in his poems. Vasari’s Lives of the artistsis the source of the…

Life is full of love and hate. Love is widely considered the beautiful side of life, while hate is thought of as the ugly side. With this popular view on love, people might not realize the evil it can imbed in those who experience it. Robert Browning’s poems “My Last Duchess” and “Porphyria’s Lover” both depict how the speakers commit terrible acts when their possessive and obsessive love towards their women becomes too strong. The speakers of the poems both kill their lovers as they share a…

Browning’s poem, “My Last Duchess” is about a powerful Duke and his late wife. He is showing a portrait painted on the wall of his duchess and describing her to someone. The portrait seems to be full-length and highly realistic because the duke remarks that “there she stands” (4). The duke immediately seems somewhat sinister. He even speaks of the duchess as if she were a possession referring to her as “[his] last duchess” throughout the poem. The poem both begins and ends with the Duke…

Love is a manical thing. Sometimes it can push people to do things that they normally wouldn’t do. Robert Browning writes about how love can change people. In “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning, he tells about how a man became to irrationally afraid that he killed his wife. In “Porphyria's Lover” by Robert Browning, a girl wanders into the woods and finds a man who would then kill her. There are many comparisons and contrasts you can pull from Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and…

of the English language. It may not attribute the same altitude of wickedness found in "My Last Duchess", but the aspiration to eternally preserve an obsessive relationship is on the other hand the same. Robert Browning’s is a compelling dramatic monologue that evokes a sense of oppression, obsession,…

sure to keep her always in his control. Thus, both poems show men’s morality and physically shutting off by a woman’s action force them to only fulfill their own desires. And to top it off, let’s approach Browning’s poem’s originality: dramatic monologue. Not only does both speakers seems to also be a man that killed their wife for their own sake, they also seem pleased to the fact that they died by their hands. Along with that, both speaker speak rather negatively of their subjects whence…