British Literature
Annotated Bibliography
April 16, 2015
My Last Duchess
Thesis: Robert Browning’s “ My last Duchess,” is not a romantic love story about the sudden death of a Duke’s wife. Instead it’s about an insecure and psychotic Duke who feels entitled to everything including his wife and kills her. Browning explores the mind of a lunatic and presenting his audience how men with power can basically get away with almost anything. he analyses issues of feminism, domestic violence, and a disorderly structure of Victorian society through his work in “My Last Duchess.”
Allingham, Philip. “Browning's Portrait of a Renaissance Man: Alphonso II D' este, Duke of Ferrara, in "My Last Duchess.” The Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/authors/rb/duchess/pva313.html In Robert Browning’s, “The Last Duchess,” his main character, the Duke, can be described …show more content…
Little does the Duchess know that she has a certain power that the Duck does not posses which angers him and demands for that power to be taken away from her. There are two kinds of power that are observable in Browning’s poem. The first which the Duke possess, is the power over someone and having the ability to control them and demean to a point where they believe you know more than them. The Duke seeks to poses the Duchess’s behavior, as he is displease and intimated by it. The second, which the Duchess possesses, is the potential and independence to do what she wants to do without seeking to poses her husband; she just wants to be independent and to think on her own. These powers are notable because they show what both of the characters value and even though the Duke has authority over her the Duchess she wins ultimately by not giving into his manipulation; sadly dying because of that