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... ial restrictions on his love affair, and the subsequent limitations on Porphyria's love for him. Therefore, the speaker's distance from the world outside becomes also an inability to respond to Porphyria upon her entrance; he sits in the cottage wanting only her love, without need of explanation, so that when he is spoken to, "no voice replied" (15). Soon, Porphyria's gift of comforting warmth within the storm exacerbates his obsession to the point of insanity-driven violence. This is a very revealing stage. The violent love shines out in its total brilliance.
He takes a string of her hair and winds it around his beloveds neck three times the line is so blatantly clear; he is going to kill her he is going to kill the one thing he would be willing to die for! Three times her little throat around, And strangled her. The over mounting horror has been cleverly dealt with the next line in which the lover reveals his conviction of his belief that she felt no pain. First he says, No pain felt she; And then as if to substantiate his view he adds I am quite sure she felt no pain. This line perhaps encompasses the whole love of the lover. his belief that what he desires would be the same thing desired by his beloved.
Somehow the line acts as a balm to the stressful event maybe. Such is the intensity his conviction that may be the reader is even drawn to the belief that this is the right to thing to do. Or maybe this line in a way sanctifies the whole act. His strong faith in his conviction exudes a feeling of satisfaction and consummation as well on the part of the lover. But seen in another light the speaker's lust for precedence over other forces in Porphyria's life evidently leads to her fatal end. His ecstasy at her new, momentary devotion leaves him at the gate of attaining his dream, but without any sense of trajectory: "Porphyria worshipped me; surprise / Made my heart swell, and still it grew / While I debated what to do" (33 - 35).
On the instantaneous realization of Porphyria's love, the speaker's requited passion and rational mind still stand separate to some extent. However, it is not long before his heated desire to keep her "Perfectly pure and good" (37) lead him to find "A thing to do" (38). The narrator's being situated above social law, if but only once, proves to be so stunningly empowering that he loses rational ability to decipher anything but a self-centered whim. The complacency of Browning's speaker in carrying out his murderous deed ironically reflects the complacency of society towards the sexual, aesthetic, and sensual pleasures of life. Exhibiting no definite regret beyond the weariness of having taken what was the only available path, the speaker points to the painlessness of his lover's necessary death: "No pain felt she; / I am quite sure she felt no pain" (41 - 42). However, Browning's presenting the reader with an unreliable narrator serves only to intensify the psychological effects of his unrequited love, and says nothing for the supposed convictions and yearnings of Porphyria.
While Porphyria finds her way to the speaker through the symbolically oppressive weather of the outside world, the speaker kills her upon realizing not only society's restrictions on their relationship, and maybe also his belief of Porphyria's own unwillingness to love him fully but for the present moment. Browning presents the justifiability of the murder only through the stricken eyes of the narrator; while the poet points to social confines as the cause of the speaker's insanity, he does not discount the narrator's moral responsibility for the deed. The next actions that follow this act also amplify these notions. He opened the lids of her eyes and saw them as laugh as freshly and sweetly as they were before. Such was the intensity of his love for her that he could not see any change that the violent blow of death had brought on her, but does this at nay stage justify the murder. Calmly he untied the firm hold of her tresses around her neck and passionately kissed her on her cheek.
It is evident that the social barriers had made his love hinge on madness. For him that moment is forever when Porphyria was his own. But under all these charges of insanity, the intensity of his love is undeniable as he propped his darlings head on his shoulder and as they sat in that calm he realizes that may be this was what Porphyria wanted too and so both had the love they wanted such was the union that not even the heavens had not said a word. Thus in freezing the moment and liberating the two of them from social structures, Browning distorts the deed to a point where it appears to be a divine event foreseen even by God. In toying with Porphyria's dead body, the narrator relates not the coldness of sudden death, nor the warmth of sitting with his love, but the blazing, untouchable serenity of enacted passion: "her cheek once more / Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss" (49). In the moment of Porphyria's death, the existence of her heated love for the speaker appears to him to be so infallible that God cannot even intervene: "All night long we have not stirred, / And yet God has not said a word!" (59 - 60).
Browning presents the viewpoint of a speaker educated in the divine workings of an ultimate force, yet the long-stifled yearnings of an unjustly socialized man color the intensity of the situation. In Browning's dramatic monologue, God's hand of judgment shifts away from the murderer himself and onto the culture that first inhibited the speaker's rational thought. Browning's characterization of a nameless speaker in "Porphyria's Lover" forms an unexpectedly conclusive response towards the sensual numbness of Victorian society. While the suggested insanity of the speaker would traditionally indicate the narrator's unreliability in a moral sense, Browning constructs the isolated scene such that the lover's emotional internalization is not only understandable, but divinely justified. The musings and actions of this unreliable narrator serve to illustrate the consequence of society's confines in a shockingly violent release. Through naturally flowing language, this poetic account of burning emotion within a setting of tranquil domesticity presents the all-consuming power of human sensuality in its bleakest attempt to override social structures.
added SALMAN
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Research essay sample on Social Structures Three Times
