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OVERVIEW: This is probably Browning most famous dramatic monologue. It is often used as a prime example of the form. In this poem the speaker, the duke of Ferrara, is addressing a second character, an agent of an unnamed count whose daughter the duke plans to marry. The situation is take from the life of an actual sixteenth-century Italian duke, but Browning has imagined the specific incident. The duke is showing the counts agent a portrait of his first wife. She was a beautiful woman, but to the dukes mind she had too little pride.
He was frequently offended by her courtesy to other of lower rank, and he found her too easily pleased by a compliment or by a small favor from a servant or some other unimportant person. The duke felt that she should derive pleasure essentially only from himself. She should glory in the high social rank into which she had married. The duke could not lower himself (stoop) to tell her what she did that annoyed him.
Instead, he took action, or gave commands. The exact nature of the commands is not made explicit, but whatever they were, the duchess is gone, most likely dead. Now the duke is negotiating the terms of a new marriage agreement. He tells the counts agent about his displeasure with his first wife in order to make clear to the second woman what sort of conduct he will expect from her, but of course he does not stoop to stating his demands explicitly. As the poem ends, the two men turn away from the portrait and go downstairs to join the rest of the company at the dukes palace. As they go, the duke casually points out one of his other works of art, a bronze statue of Neptune.
DETAIL: The Silent Listener in Brownings My Last Duchess Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin [ web How do we read My Last Duchess, one of the most representative dramatic monologues? The old sympathy / judgment model does not seem to work very well. Langbaum, the main proponent of this view, finds that the Dukes immense attractiveness... his conviction of match less superiority, his intelligence, and bland amoral ity, his poise, his taste for art, his manners, overwhelm the envoy, causing him apparently to suspend judgment of the duke, for he raises no demur.
The reader is no less overwhelmed. We suspend moral judg ment because we prefer to participate in the dukes power and freedom, in his hard core of character fiercely loyal to itself. (83) Hazard Adams points out that sympathy does not seem to be the right word for our relationship to the Duke (151 - 52), and Philip Drew protests that suspending our moral judgment should not require an anesthetizing of the moral sense for the duration of the poem (28). Langbaum is right that the intellectual exercise of inferring the real character of the last Duchess from what the Duke says about her to the envoy and then going on to make a moral judgment about him constitutes a large part of our enjoyment of the poem, but that enjoyment is not dependent upon our entering into sympathy with the Duke. Rather, we enter into this scene on the side of the envoy, and at that level we feel the pull of the Dukes commanding rhetoric. In order to read the poem, we must create the scene in imagination, which means losing ourselves within it, forgetting, for the moment, our real, present surroundings in favor of active involvement in the dramatic situation. Our entry is facilitated by its most striking feature, which is the way the Duke so directly addresses us.
His narrative in the center of the poem is carefully framed by the first ten lines and the last ten, in which he addresses someone as you. Because we do not discover until after he has told his tale that this second person is in fact present in the poem, at the moment of our reading we can only assume that it is us to whom he is speaking. (It is true that we eventually discover that this you to whom he is speaking is an envoy from a Count, but this identification is not made until very late in the poem. ) We are slightly disoriented, on a first reading, by that direct address, and we recognize that an effort is being made to suggest that we are the silent partner in a conversation; even the omission of quotation marks helps sustain the illusion that we have encountered a character who is speaking directly to us. Trusting that our curiosity about what is going on in the poem will keep us reading despite our lack of information about the character of the auditor, Browning leaves us only one source for that information, the Dukes monologue. In Brownings My Last Duchess, for example, the dramatic monologue given by the Duke leaves undescribed spaces in which the reader can write the story. In the face of uncertain motives, the recording of spoken words, and the direct address of narrator to listener, I enter into a labyrinth of representation and re-representation, character assessment and judgement.
W. J. T. Mitchells article Representation makes Brownings poem the focus in a discussion of representation in literature.
As a starting point, Mitchell diagrams the dynamic movement between beholder, representation, and maker. Across this axis of communication lies another axis, in which the signifier (be it the words on the page or the dab of paint in Mitchells analysis) meets the signified, the object of the work of art. Mitchell diagrams this structure using the most simple case, in which one dab of paint represents one object: (image pending) Fig. 1. Mitchell, 12. We can, however, complicate Mitchells model.
I immediately take the title of the poem, My Last Duchess, as an indicator of what might be the represented object of Brownings poem. Yet, a coherent image of the duchess eludes me. The duchess is not presented in the words of an omniscient narrator, but in a monologue of a fictional persona, the Duke. The Duke is also representing the painting of his late wife, in which case the poem becomes a representation of a representation. Furthermore, I am stalled by the purposes of the Duke, who may have a motive in choosing memories; that is, the Dukes claim that his fair daughters self, as I avowed/At starting, is my object (52 - 53) suggests the corrupt nature of representation for which there are ulterior motives. I am introduced to the Duke in a similarly indirect way, through his speech to a second party, who never speaks except through what is echoed by the Duke.
In the network of representing and represented, I can isolate no single object represented, but a multitude of signs. My Last Duchess FERRARA Thats my last duchess painted on the wall, 1 Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now: Fr Pandolf's hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands. Will please you sit and look at her?
I said 5 Fr Pandolf by design, for never read Strangers like you that pictured countenance, The depth and passion of its earnest glance, But to myself they turned (since none puts by The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) 10 And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, How such a glance came there; so, not the first Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, twas not Her husbands presence only, called that spot Of joy into the Duchess cheek: perhaps 15 Fr Pandolf chanced to say her mantle laps Over my ladys wrist too much, or Paint Must never hope to reproduce the faint Half-flush that dies along her throat: such stuff Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough 20 For calling up that spot of joy. She had A heart how shall I say? too soon made glad, Too easily impressed; she liked whateer She looked on, and her looks went everywhere. Sir, twas all one! My favor at her breast, 25 The dropping of the daylight in the West, The bough of cherries some officious fool Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule She rode with round the terrace all and each Would draw from her alike the approving speech, 30 Or blush, at least.
She thanked men good! but thanked Somehow I know not how as if she ranked My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name With anybody's gift. Whod stoop to blame This sort of trifling? Even had you skill 35 In speech which I have not to make your will Quite clear to such an one, and say, Just this Or that in you disgusts me; her you miss, Or there exceed the mark and if she let Herself be lessons so, nor plainly set 40 Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse, Een then would be some stooping; and I choose Never to stoop.
Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, Wheneer I passed her; but who passed without Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; 45 Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands As if alive. Will please you rise?
Well meet The company below, then. I repeat, The Count your masters known munificence Is ample warrant that no just pretense 50 Of mine for dowry will be disallowed; Though his fair daughters self, as I avowed At starting, is my object. Nay, well go Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though, Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, 55 Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me! (Mitchell, 17 - 18). Having discovered the absence of a central represented something, I take pleasure in noticing the complexity of unspoken social rules, gender interaction, and status-related power.
As Mitchell notes, one may be fascinated by the display of culture no longer ours; the Duke is already old power to the rising middle class who first heard this poem (20). His pride in a nine-hundred-years-old-name (33) and a bronze statue of Neptune, thought a rarity, (55) speak of upper-class snobbishness. This materialism seems to extend to his wife, as aspects of his possessiveness and need for (but lack of) control emerge in the monologue. A picture of male jealousy emerges in the Dukes criticism that she liked whateer/ She looked on, and her looks went everywhere (24 - 23). At the same time, the inability to communicate revealed in lines 35 - 37 are compounded by the arrogance of lines 41 - 42: Een then would be some stooping; and I choose/Never to stoop. The Duke is an object of ridicule, a mean figure who substitutes brute force I gave commands; /then all smiles stopped together (45 - 46) for the power that his name does not give him.
In this world of status and wealth, the painting is the ultimate metaphor for the possessed and objectified wife. Without lessening my interest in the power struggles between Duke and (dead) duchess, I continue to find meaning in what I think of as the representation theme. Neither reading erases the other, but both are guided by my particular activity of noticing. I make links between concealment's: in the concealment of the duchess, of the details of her death, and of the future of the new wife, I read a play on representation.
The painted image and the Counts representative give the Duke what he cannot get directly. The painting stands for the duchess; yet, it also stands for other things power, control, pleasure, denial. In the same way, my interaction with the poem allows it to present much more than it represents. Continuing to muse over the complexities of the poem, I find myself, a spectator, becoming implicated in the very meanings I unravel. As Mitchell notes, the poem actively invokes the presence of the readers by representing an audience of the Duke. The Counts representative, is, like us, implied but mute.
Consequently, at the moment that I read the poem, it is as if the Duke speaks directly to me. I become audience to his power-hungry motives, with no intermediary of second-hand description. The character of the Duke is revealed to me just as he displays his own wares; the revelation of the duchess is the revelation of the Duke. In other words, individual readers make the work of the poem by becoming involved in a performance.
I am inextricably bound in the meanings created by the poems theatricality, in which Browning combines two kinds of literary representation the brief, sufficient lyric utterance of the poet, and the dramatic speech that would conventionally belong in a more extended representation in order to create a new hybrid genre, the dramatic monologue (19). By collapsing the narrator and the speaker to one voice, Brownings poem complicates my perception of authorial intention. Given not the truths of the poetic genius, but rather the utterances of a fictitious character, I feel as though I were watching a performance by Browning himself. In the words of Mitchell, Browning may be playing a role like that of the duke, showing off his own power by displaying his mastery over representation (21). The implications of these formal characteristics are enormous for the reader.
The invocation of dramatic genres drastically alters the tools that I use in reading the poem. In recognizing the scene laid out before me, I note that the Dukes monologue is spoken, not written, in the fiction of the story. I recall differences between written and oral speech; the characters dialogue in My Last Duchess, is very different from the omniscient third-person narration of other poems. Presented with a character who speaks, I use my own experiences and memories of similar contexts in order to decipher the subtleties of the spoken word. Where does his voice drop? Where does his tone become a snarl?
The ambiguity of these questions, however subtle, invite different answers from each reader and make for a multitude of understandings of the poem. The individual decisions involved in ones interaction with written dramatic monologue make readers a pivotal part in the labyrinth of character assessment, about separate efforts to comprehend the Dukes evil may take different forms. At the same time, hatred for the cruel Duke is only one possible response. I am embarrassed at both the duchess looseness hers was A heart how shall I say? too soon made glad, (22) as well as for the very tactlessness of the Dukes critiques.
When the Duke recounts, Just this/Or that in you disgusts me; her you miss, / Or there exceed the mark' (37 - 39), I cannot help but cringe at his condescension. As Mitchell notes, Browning might have wanted to place his reader in a position of weakness and servitude, forced to hear a repugnant, menacing speech but deprived of any voice or power to counteract it (19 - 20). Moreover, I am uncomfortable in the voyeurism suggested by the none puts by/The curtain I have drawn for you, but I (9 - 10). I learn of the secrecy, the discretion, the obsession surrounding the picture. The virginity of the painting is defiled by the Dukes uncovering of it.
I am implicated in the duchess defilement, since it is my act of reading that leads to her exposure. In conclusion, the particulars of narration and the ambiguities in the story itself move me to make my own version of the poem. First-person narration, addressing readers directly, allows me to insert myself into the performance as a listener / peeping tom / judge . The deciphering of speech invokes a fluid set of codes and experiences that are further conditioned by my own understanding of the Dukes character. In this way there are as many poems as there are readers, since the audience placed in the poem is an infinite variable.
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