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jakery1
jakery1
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How does dramatic irony work in Browning's "My Last Duchess"?

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Posted by jakery1 on Tuesday December 2, 2008 at 9:53 AM and tagged with browning, dramatic irony, dramatic monologue, duchess, duke, information, my last duchess, poem, presentation, speaker.

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  1. robertwilliam

    The way Browning used the dramatic monologue was very often hugely ironic, simply in the way it was deployed. The form gives you a - usually, at least - uninterrupted monologue in a character's voice, and, in Browning monologues, as the voice continues talking, they usual reveal more than they want to reveal. As the reader continues to "listen" to the voice, they find out things the voice didn't want them to know.

    So, for example, in "My Last Duchess", there's a sense that the Duke (the speaker) tells us rather more than he intends. Would he really want us to know that he felt like this about his dead wife:

                                          Just this
    Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
    Or there exceed the mark

    Would he really want to reveal to us, even if it is in an oblique way that "all smiles stopped together"?

    The poem is packed full of questions. What happened to the Last Duchess - has this man killed her? Does this weird, controlling man not seem to prefer his dead wife "looking as though she were alive" in a painting, rather than actually alive?

    The fundamental dramatic irony of the poem is that the way we feel about the Duke on listening to the poem is not at all the one he intends as he speaks it!

    Sources:
    http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/victorian/authors/rb/duchess.html

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    Posted by robertwilliam on Tuesday December 2, 2008 at 5:09 PM