The Victorian era, the period of the nineteenth century when Queen Victoria ruled England, was a time in which there were many advances and changes that occurred in English society. Robert Browning was one of the leading poets of this time, and many of his poems contain the theme of violence, focusing especially on violence against women. Browning’s use of violence in his poetry is symbolic of the oppression of women during this time period by their husbands and society. This oppression is seen through the examination of two of Browning’s most well-known poems, “My Last Duchess” and “Porphyria’s Lover”.
Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is a poem written in dramatic monologue in which a Duke in Renaissance Italy shows the servant of his future wife a painting of his former wife, and recounts the circumstances which lead to her death. Duke …show more content…
.violence within the Victorian home suggests that it was a relatively common feature of domestic life, and occurred within families from a wide range of economic and social positions” (491). Wife beating became an extremely common practice during the nineteenth century, and rarely did a husband ever get in trouble for doing so. The reason for the increase in violence came from “a widespread belief among ordinary people, male and female, that it was every man’s ‘right’ to beat his wife so long as it was to ‘correct her’ if she did anything to annoy or upset him or refused to obey his orders” (Wojtczak). During this period, women were supposed to stay in their “domestic spheres” in which they fulfilled the stereotypical duties of raising the children and talking care of the home, while the men had the “public sphere” of business, commerce, and politics (Abrams 2). A women lost nearly all her rights when she married her husband and was legally seen as his property. Frances Power Cobbe, in her article “Wife Torture in England,” reinforces this idea when she writes that, “the whole relation between the sexes in the class we are