Porphyria's Lover vs Alfonso of Ferrara: An Exploration of Browning's Madmen

 by Dawn Sands

Porphyria’s Lover (1836): Porphyria's Lover by Robert Browning | Poetry Foundation

My Last Duchess (1842): https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43768/my-last-duchess

Porphyria’s Lover and My Last Duchess are among Robert Browning’s shorter dramatic monologues, and both revolve around the unprovoked murder of young women by their possessive, envious male partners. My Last Duchess is based on historical events — it is set in Ferrara, in Renaissance Italy; the narrator is considered to be Duke Alfonso di Este, and the duchess in question Lucrezia de Medici, who died under suspicious circumstances aged sixteen in 1561. Meanwhile, the origins of Porphyria’s Lover are far more ambiguous: we are not told the relationship Porphyria has with the narrator, there are no historical clues, and Porphyria as a character is barely explored. Porphyria’s Lover is highly explicit in the narration of the murder, whereas in My Last Duchess it is revealed very subtly, implied briefly and then brushed over. My Last Duchess is a speech, and thus a warning — Alfonso is presenting this monologue to an emissary representing his future duchess — while Porphyria’s Lover relays the narrator’s stream of consciousness as he decides to kill Porphyria. 

Both narrators are highly unreliable in their description of events, each framing themselves as righteous and their actions as justified. In reality, however, they are both extremely needy, jealous characters, who require utmost dedication and worship from their partners and see this one-sided dynamic as the pinnacle of a relationship. Both, therefore, by killing their lovers, force a state in which this dynamic can last forever. Porphyria’s lover seizes the opportunity to freeze the moment at which he perceives that this pinnacle has been reached, whereas Duke Alfonso crafts that pinnacle for himself through an idealistic portrait only he has access to. Both men are murderous misogynists with a warped view of relationship ideals — but of the two, who is more depraved, more dangerous; and of Porphyria and Lucrezia, who reached the more tragic end?

Porphyria’s lover is certainly more spontaneous and erratic than the scheming, calculated Alfonso, making the decision to kill Porphyria on impulse and carrying it out immediately. The poem is sixty lines long; of these sixty lines, it only takes six and a half for the narrator to both decide upon and execute her murder: ‘...While I debated what to do. / That moment she was mine, mine, fair, / Perfectly pure and good: I found / A thing to do, and all her hair / In one long yellow string I wound / Three times her little throat around / And strangled her.’. The indefinite article ‘a’ implies that there were a number of ways in which he could have reacted other than murder, and the phrase ‘thing to do’ intensifies this — it was merely something he did to pass the time. This is further highlighted at the beginning of the poem, where the description hints that had the circumstances been any different, the narrator may not have killed Porphyria at all. In the first few lines, Browning uses pathetic fallacy to illustrate the heavy storm outside, which not only sets the dark tone of the poem but also pinpoints an exact moment at which the murder takes place. This extreme weather sets off a chain of events, in which Porphyria ‘glides’ in from the storm, shuts out the weather, lights the hearth and sits down next to the narrator, deliberately placing his head on her shoulder. She is the sole initiator of the interaction, caring for his every need. The narrator, in turn, takes this as evidence that she ‘worships’ him. The poem goes even further, hinting that he believes the only reason Porphyria doesn’t marry him (‘give herself to me forever’) is due to vanity — she is ‘Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavour, / To set its struggling passion free / From pride’. Despite this belief, instead of being ecstatic that they have finally reached the ideal point in their relationship, he is clearly apprehensive; he does not expect the dynamic to last. It is ambiguous whether he thinks the brief nature of their relationship would be Porphyria’s fault, or his own, though he does state that he is ‘surprised’ to see this worship in her, potentially indicating that he believes Porphyria to be rather non-committal. 

He insists he knows what is best for her, however. Her death is for her own benefit, he assures the reader. In order for her to be happy, he says, she must die in my arms, for otherwise the relationship will not last. From here, he spends the rest of the poem justifying his actions by describing how happy Porphyria appears in her death, describing how her ‘blue eyes laughed without a stain’, and how her ‘smiling little rosy head’ was ‘so glad it had its utmost will’. Not only does he project his own fantasies onto her in life, he does so, too, in death — no corpse can truly be ‘glad’, yet Porphyria’s lover is ridden with certainty that this case is the exception. Chillingly, he misinterprets some of the signs of death for further evidence of devotion, saying that she ‘blushed bright beneath my burning kiss’; blood rushing to the head is a common effect of strangulation, and so what he interprets as a blush is far more likely to be a consequence of what he has done to her. He then rounds off his testimony by gleefully declaring that ‘And yet God has not said a word!’ — though there are many potential interpretations of this line, arguably, he is using God’s silence as further proof that what he did was right.

Therefore, there is definite evidence to suggest that beyond being a murderer, he is not completely sane either, projecting his own addled opinions onto Porphyria in a way that results in tragedy when he lets his narcissism take control. Though he intends that Porphyria’s death secures the relationship for eternity, in reality it would only be a few hours before her body started to rot and all that remained of his former love would be a corpse. A potential reading would suggest that Porphyria is not actually his lover at all, but some form of medical carer — there is undoubtedly evidence that indicates this; she looks after his house, shuts out the storm and lights the fire while he passively looks on, evidently unable to carry out these tasks himself. As readers, we only witness Porphyria through the narrator’s biased lens, so there is a possibility that Porphyria was not ‘murmuring how she loved me’ at all — the verb ‘murmuring’ arguably lacks conviction, implying that there are any number of things she could have been saying to him.

Therefore, Porphyria’s lover certainly seems the more unstable of the two. While the Duke in My Last Duchess has similar narcissistic tendencies, also seeking a way to capture forever the moment at which he has utmost dedication from his wife, his methods are deliberate and calculated, lacking the spontaneity and misguidedness of Porphyria’s lover’s attempt. It is this that I believe makes Duke Alfonso more dangerous than Porphyria’s lover, if less deranged — he is a master of manipulation, masking his lies with eloquence and nobility.

Alfonso’s method of capturing his wife’s affections forever is markedly different from that of Porphyria’s lover — instead of using her physical corpse, he uses a portrait he commissioned of her, which he keeps behind a curtain that ‘none puts by’ besides himself. He is the only one with access to the painting; the beautiful, blushing woman in the portrait is reserved solely for him. Yet he goes on to explain that in life, the reality was very different: she gave out her smile frequently, and to many more people than just her husband. The narrator spends much of his monologue criticising Lucrezia, but the offences he accuses her of are seemingly minute — she was ‘too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed’; she ‘liked whate’er she looked on’; everything she came into contact with ‘would draw alike from her the approving speech / Or blush, at least’. He claims that, despite the genuine appreciation of life that is evidenced in these lines, she is ungrateful: ‘but thanked / Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked / My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name / With anybody’s gift’. Like Porphyria’s lover, Alfonso has a highly self-centred view, wishing to be the very apex of his wife’s attention and accepting nothing less. In the end, ‘this grew; I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.’. It is unclear what it is that 'grew'; perhaps nothing but his own jealousy. He cannot cope with the fact that Lucrezia smiles for anyone but him, believing that, as a husband and a duke, he should be entitled to a singular affection. And thus he kills her, ensuring, by hiding her portrait behind a curtain, that no one but he may ever witness her smile again.

Already, it is evident that Alfonso’s thought processes run far deeper than those of Porphyria’s lover, and are perhaps more perverse, as well. However, the way in which the poem is structured points to a malignancy that runs deeper still. Though usually, the Duke is the only person permitted to look upon the painting, this poem presents an exception — he is exhibiting it to an emissary, the representative of another noble house (the servant of a Count, as is revealed towards the end), and the poem is a speech, in which he relays to the emissary his thoughts surrounding the portrait. To reflect this, Browning’s use of structure, such as the frequent parenthetical phrases, presents a conversational, spontaneous tone, seemingly demonstrating to the listener (and the reader) that this speech was unrehearsed. Furthermore, the final lines of the poem (‘Notice Neptune, though, / Taming a seahorse, thought a rarity, / Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!’) suggest that this description is part of a tour of a larger gallery, and therefore not necessarily something he would normally have prepared beforehand — especially as it is a personal, one-on-one interaction. However, his language is manipulated in a way that indicates this is not the case. Right from the first two lines of the poem, ‘That’s my last duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive’, there are a multitude of deliberately-placed rhetorical features that instantly, yet subtly, assert dominance — the objectifying ‘that’s’; the possessive ‘my’; the reduction of his wife to a painting, establishing that, in his eyes, the two mirror each other exactly. As the poem goes on, he continues to twist his language, slowly revealing his obsessive, coercive behaviour. Like Porphyria’s lover, he projects his own ideas onto others — both the duchess, from whose appreciative attitude he assumes infidelity, and the emissary, whose hypothetical questions he answers before they have been asked. This can be seen in lines 12-13 — ‘so, not the first / Are you to turn and ask thus’ — when in reality, the Duke’s speech is such that the listener has not been able to get a word in edgeways, and did not ‘ask thus’ at all. Despite his assertion of power, Alfonso is careful to present an air of humility, too, claiming that he is inarticulate: ‘Even had you skill / In speech—which I have not—to make your will / Quite clear…’. This is ironic, as it is clear by the level of rhetoric he employs that his ‘skill in speech’ is extraordinarily powerful — more so if you consider that he is, at the same time, making his justification appear spontaneous. When the narrator comes to the moment in the story when he orders Lucrezia’s death, he skims over it, making use of three simple phrases separated by semicolons: ‘This grew; I gave commands; / And all smiles stopped together.’. A simple full stop, a caesura, is inserted into the middle of the line, separating the past from the present yet binding them intrinsically together — and then he continues, ordering the emissary to stand up and leading him away to view the rest of the gallery. The speech comes to an end with Alfonso showing the listener a sculpture of Neptune taming a seahorse, a figure of might, a representation of Alfonso himself, perhaps, which the fictional Claus of Innsbruck created, allegedly, as a personal gift. 

Thus concludes the Duke of Ferrara’s warning — an omen disguised as an art tour, demonstrating to the emissary the chilling fate which may come to his next duchess, while maintaining a facade of respectability and nobility through his carefully-chosen rhetoric. I killed her for a smile, says Alfonso, because she did not obey me. This is what I do to women when they disobey my orders. In contrast, the intentions of Porphyria’s lover seem slightly pathetic. Although it is true that he killed an innocent woman, in a strange way, this seems harmless when compared with the way in which Alfonso twists his audience’s mind to justify murder. Porphyria’s lover is passive for most of the poem; she works around him, and the only real decision the narrator makes is a deranged act of madness, that of killing Porphyria. In this light, one could argue that despite all his justification that it is what Porphyria would have wanted, this narrator is rather unintelligent. He is, indeed, a highly narcissistic, self-centred character, but his capabilities are not that of the Duke in My Last Duchess.

So Porphyria’s lover is more deranged; Duke Alfonso more dangerous. But which of these deaths is more tragic? The two are difficult to compare, as we are not told much about Porphyria, but the tale of Lucrezia de Medici as told through the lens of her obsessive husband is a tragic one. Forced into an arranged marriage as a teenager, as a means of advancing the relationship between two noble houses and for the purpose of providing a duke with an heir, Lucrezia is punished for her youthful sense of joy without attachment; her general appreciation of the world and its beauties seen through sixteen-year-old eyes. As for Porphyria, her tale is a mystery, but we may hope that she is really as supernatural as the narrator seems to think she is, and that maybe she might go on to reincarnate and enjoy a better life beyond the grave.