Comparing My Last Duchess And Porphyria's Lover By Robert Browning

Power is one of the main reasons for our despair. Robert Browning a major English poet who mastered dramatic monologue (Drew, 1) was a very wise man that saw ahead of his time. In “My Last Duchess” and “Porphyria’s Lover” by Robert Browning we see how power turns us from humans to monsters that takes pride in doing horrendous things as long as we get all the power in the end. During a time in which many men were mercilessly oppressing women because they thought they had every right to do so, Browning was courageous enough to speak about this social issue in his very own unique way. The need for power is something within most of us, even if it is in the simplest forms that many of us fail to recognize. Although the Duke in “My Last Duchess”

It is a sickness that sucks that life out of many, and what it leaves behind is unidentifiable. In Porphyria’s Lover, the speaker says after murdering Porphyria “That moment she was mine, mine,” (Browning 36). The speaker’s love for Porphyria is abnormal, he is very possessive of her and his greed to literally fully own her would not be achieved if he did not reduce her to an object. Not only does her reduce her to an object by choking her with her own hair but he also starts referring to her as an object by saying “smiling rosy little head, / So glad it has its utmost will,” (Browning 52-53). The same goes to the Duke who ordered all the smiles of his duchess to be stopped. Finally, gaining his fair of satisfaction when the portrait of his duchess became the only form of her existence, which he had full control of as he admits “since none puts by / the curtains I have drawn for you but I” (Browning 9-10). Both men wanted the impossible from the women that they are with, they wanted them to give up every ounce of freedom they had and the same men did not even bother talking to them about it. We will never have everything we want in this world, even if you were the richest person on the planet. There is always going to be something out of your reach that you really want but does that make it okay for you to lie, steal or even murder someone for it? Never. The belief that what you have

The Duchess seemed to have a very free and happy spirit which the Duke despises for he believes that the gift of his nine hundred years old name should not be treated this way. Moreover, Porphyria seems like a woman who is from a higher social status than her lover (Saminsky 1), and the reader can feel subtle anguish that radiates from the Lover, especially when he said “To set its struggling passion free / From pride, and vainer ties dissever, /And give herself to me forever.” (Browning 23-25). He hates that she is from higher social status and he cannot really do anything to change that, except killing her. It is almost as if he can sense that even if she did cut herself from those vainer ties, he still would not be satisfied. Since the beginning of time, humankind did multiple mistakes and we learn about that through history and literature, yet some of us still manage to commit the same horrifying mistakes, so maybe it is in our nature to do