Robert Browning began to write poetry while still quite young, influenced
by Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose radicalism urged a rethinking of modern society.
He lived and wrote during a time of major societal and intellectual
upheaval, and his poems reflect this world. England was becoming urban, and
newspapers daily assaulted the senses with tales of crime and lust in the city.
Many people began to lose faith in religion as various new scientific theories shook
society - most notably Darwin’s theory of evolution, and many questioned the
old bases of morality. Religion and science were shifting in their roles, as was art: artists and critics were moving
toward what would become the “art for art’s sake” movement at the end of the
nineteenth century. Browning during this period of cultural upheavals writes poems exploring the relationship of
morality to art, and the conflict between aesthetics and didacticism. Mid- 19th-century
Britain experienced economic turmoil as well: wealth and consumption were on
the rise at the same time that poverty soared, and the need to reconcile these
two facts finds an analogue in the struggle to decide between material beauty (
luxurious furnishings, decorations, ornament, and clothing) and morality (concern
for the poor). Browning explores these issues in his poetry, though many are
set in the Renaissance or other distant historical periods, so achieving
relevance while never becoming moralistic or overly strident.
Browning’s most important poetic message regards the new conditions of
urban living. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the once-rural British
population had become centered in large cities, after the changes wrought by
the Industrial Revolution. So many people living in such close quarters meant
that poverty, violence, and sex were part of everyday life. People felt fewer restrictions
on their behavior and could act in total
anonymity, without any monitoring by acquaintances and families. The absence of
family and community ties meant new-found personal independence, but it also
meant the loss of a social safety net, a sense of freedom mixed with a sense of
insecurity.
The mid-nineteenth century also saw the
rapid growth of newspapers filled with
stories of violence and carnality. The overstimulation of city life led,
according to many theorists, to a sort of numbness, therefore many writers now
felt that in order to provoke an emotional reaction they had to compete with
the excitements of everyday life, to shock their audience in new and
sensational ways. Violence became a sort of aesthetic choice for many writers: in
many of Browning’s poems, violence, along with sex, becomes the symbol of the
modern urban-dwelling condition.
The apparent moral decay of Victorian society and a renewed interest in
religion, led to a morally conservative backlash. Victorian prudery arose as an
attempt to control things, an attempt to bring things back to the way they once
were: everything came under moral scrutiny, even art and literature. Many of
Browning’s poems feature painters and other artists and try to work out the
relationship between art and morality: the moral message of art, its immorality, the contradictory aims of aesthetics and ethics .
In exploring these issues, Browning uses the dramatic monologue. A dramatic
monologue is a poem with a speaker clearly separate from the poet, who speaks
to an implied audience that, while silent, remains present in the scene. The
purpose of the monologue is not to make a statement about its subject matter,
but to develop the character of the speaker. It provides a play-space and an
alternative persona with which he can explore controversial ideas. He often
further distances himself by employing historical characters, particularly from
the Italian Renaissance. During the Renaissance in Italy art assumed a new
humanism and began to separate from religion; concentrations of social power
reached an extreme. This temporal setting gives Browning a good analogue for
exploring issues of art and morality and for looking at the ways in which social
power could be used and misused, and to explore forms of consciousness and
self-representation.
Multiple Perspectives on Single Events
The dramatic monologue verse form allow readers to enter into the minds of
various characters and to see an event from that character’s perspective.
Understanding the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of a character not only
gives readers a sense of sympathy for the characters but also helps readers
understand the multiplicity of perspectives that make up the truth: the nature
of truth or reality fluctuates, depending on one’s perspective or view of the
situation. Multiple perspectives illustrate the idea that no one sensibility or
perspective sees the whole story and no two people see the same events in the
same way.
The Purposes of Art
In his dramatic monologues about artists his characters speculate on the
purposes of art.
The Relationship Between Art and Morality
Throughout his work, Browning tried to answer questions about an artist’s
responsibilities and to describe the relationship between art and morality. He
questioned whether artists had an obligation to be moral and whether artists
should pass judgment on their characters and creations. Unlike many of his
contemporaries, Browning populated his poems with evil people, who commit
crimes and sins ranging from hatred to murder. In “My Last Duchess,” the
speaker gets away with his wife’s murder since neither his audience (in the
poem) nor his creator judges or criticizes him. The responsibility of judging
the character’s morality is left to readers, who find the duke of Ferrara a
vicious and evil person even as he takes us on a tour of his art gallery.
Medieval and Renaissance European Settings
Browning set many of his poems in medieval and Renaissance Europe, most
often in Italy. The remoteness of the
time period and location allowed Browning to critique and explore contemporary
issues without fear of alienating his readers.
Psychological Portraits
Dramatic monologues feature a solitary speaker addressing at least one
silent unnamed person, and they provide
interesting snapshots of the speakers and their personalities. In order to understand the speakers and their
psychologies, readers must carefully pay attention to word choice, to logical
progression, and to the use of figures of speech, including metaphors
or analogies: the speaker of “My Last Duchess” confesses to murdering his wife,
even though he never expresses his guilt. Grotesque Images
Unlike other Victorian poets, Browning filled his poetry with images of
ugliness, violence, and the bizarre. Like Dickens, Browning created characters
who were capable of great evil.
Symbols
Taste
Browning’s interest in culture, including art and architecture, appears
throughout his work in depictions of his characters’ aesthetic tastes. His
characters’ preferences in art, music, and literature reveal important clues
about their natures and moral worth. For instance, the duke of Ferrara, the
speaker of “My Last Duchess,” concludes the poem by pointing out a statue he
commissioned of Neptune taming a sea monster. The duke’s preference for this
sculpture directly corresponds to the type of man he is—that is, the type of
man who would have his wife killed but still stare lovingly and longingly at
her portrait.
Evil and Violence
Synonyms for, images of, and symbols of evil and violence abound in
Browning’s poetry. Symbols of evil and violence allowed Browning to explore all
aspects of human psychology, including the base and evil aspects that don’t
normally appear in poetry.
