Comparing Isabella And Eve Of St. Agnes

At the center of almost every tragic narrative there is an act committed that disrupts the equilibrium of the story, as a result of the characters’ hamartia. This act is generally the source of the characters’ shame, but this is all dependant on their own disposition. If they are inherently good, bad or both, this affects the way they and the reader respond - either with shame or without. Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ is arguably entirely based around the Loman family’s collective shame, whereas whether or not Keats’ character’s in the poems ‘Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘Isabella’ feel any is decidedly more unclear.

The choices that Madeline and Porphyro make in the ‘Eve of St Agnes’ - going against their families wishes, Porphyro dubiously manipulating
The villains of the piece, Isabella’s brothers, murder her lover Lorenzo in cold blood, before fleeing Florence and leaving their sister to mourn her loss alone. The brothers have the typical characteristics of any villain: they are spoilt as they gained their wealth “from ancestral merchandise”, they are cruel not only to their sister but also their factory workers, shown by the torturous imagery of “sharp racks at work to pinch and peel” and, most importantly, they do not take responsibility for their crimes. The narrator questions this lack of shame by repeating the question “Why were they proud?” in the sixteenth stanza, and takes this further by making the last image the reader sees of Lorenzo be “flushed with love”, thus heightening the tragedy of his death. This sets the reader up to despise the brothers and empathise with the grief-stricken Isabella, who “withers, like a palm” and eventually dies. With the line “So the two brothers and their murdered man” the narrator foreshadows Lorenzo’s death, forcing the reader to both see the living man and the corpse simultaneously, and makes us feel almost shamefully complicit in his