Home-Thoughts, from Abroad. Life in a Love. Meeting at Night. Porphyria's Lover. The Lost Leader. The Patriot. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of every Shakespeare play. Sign Up. But Browning has more in mind than simply creating a colorful character and placing him in a picturesque historical scene.
Rather, the specific historical setting of the poem harbors much significance: the Italian Renaissance held a particular fascination for Browning and his contemporaries, for it represented the flowering of the aesthetic and the human alongside, or in some cases in the place of, the religious and the moral. Thus the temporal setting allows Browning to again explore sex, violence, and aesthetics as all entangled, complicating and confusing each other: the lushness of the language belies the fact that the Duchess was punished for her natural sexuality.
The desperate need to do this mirrors the efforts of Victorian society to mold the behavior—gsexual and otherwise—gof individuals. For people confronted with an increasingly complex and anonymous modern world, this impulse comes naturally: to control would seem to be to conserve and stabilize.
Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. The reader is directed to imagine the Duke walking with the envoy through his art gallery and the Duke stops to show him a painting of his last Duchess that is presently covered by a curtain. This curtain is the first reference to the Dukes selfish, jealous, and protective traits.
The Duke uses the curtain as a method of controlling his wife, even after her death. Other men admiring her beauty was unacceptable, so by hiding the painting behind a curtain, he controls who is allowed to gaze upon her. This demonstrates that the Duke was extremely jealous and could not stand to have his wife admired by other men. The Duke is not happy with the manner in which his wife portrayed herself around others. The Duke states that the Duchess was easily pleased by a compliment and through small favors from a servant or other insignificant people, a quality that the Duke could not tolerate.
Duke himself; known to be a controlling man. This is a hint that the Duke will control his wife just as Neptune controls the sea horse. This monologue as spoken by the Duke represents many definitive traits that the Duke encompasses in his character. The manner in which he views his deceased Duchess demonstrates his egotistical view of himself. His selfish, jealous, protective, greedy, paranoid persona is displayed by his act of killing his wife.
He could not control his Duchess as he wanted so his arrogance and his shallowness got the better of him until he could no longer do anything except kill her. The painting represents a wife that he can control until the day he died. Unintentionally the duke exposes his own vices while pointing out the follies of his former spouse. The Duke reveals …show more content… Although he is on his best behaviour, the Duke of Ferrara demonstrates many sociopathic tendencies as he recalls the time he shared with his now dead Duchess.
Even in death the Duke wishes to hide her away behind the curtain where no other man could admire or see her beauty without the permission of the Duke. The Duke then resumes an earlier conversation regarding wedding arrangements, and points out other work of art, a bronze statue of Neptune taming a sea-horse by Claus of Innsbruck, thus making his late wife nothing but just another piece of art.
The arrogance of the duke was best exhibited by subtle comments that he made throughout his speech. He scoffed at the idea that his former duchess could rank "My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name …. With anybody 's gift" lines Here, the duke made it sound as if he was being generous when he agreed to marry his wife.
He felt that she should have recognized more clearly what a wonderful gift he had given her. Just a moment later, he reasserts his superiority by stating that "I choose …… Never to stoop" lines The duke feels that he is too important to even be bothered with small annoyances. He will not stoop to the lowness of asking his wife to cease a behavior that is obviously upsetting him. Instead, he orders someone else to kill her because even the act of killing her is beneath …show more content… In his monologue describing a painting of his former wife, the duke introduces us to his dark and sinister qualities.
By giving us the Duke of Ferrara as an example, Robert Browning subtly condemns the nobility for their poor. Show More. Read More. King Kreon's Compromise In Antigone Words 2 Pages Although he makes this decree with intentions to unite the city, his unwillingness to compromise with Antigone on the matter is childish and stubborn.
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