There is here a problem of framing, of bordering and delimitation, whose analysis must be very. finely detailed if it wishes to ascertain the effects of fiction.

---Jacques Derrida, "Le facteur de la verite"

If we are to approach a text, it must have an edge.

---Jacques Derrida, "Living On: Border Lines"

The interaction of creativity with interpretation concerned Robert Browning throughout a career in which he made the dramatic monologue converge sound, silence and audition, as well as image and vision. Reading such a poem is like being drawn into it, having to side with its personae, while feeling extraneous or beside the point; more than sympathy or.judgment, these alternatives lead readers to self-reflection, to seeing themselves shifting between the center and the border of some artistic design. Nevertheless, as many readings of "My Last Duchess" show, "this most dramatically paragonal of all ekphrastic poems" (Heffernan 144) undermines such a simple scheme of moving or fixing readers. This dramatic monologue, arguably Browning's premier work, adds a pictorial, fourth dimension to the usual pattern of speaker and silent auditor in a momentous, reader-monitored situation. Eyeing the poem's nested utterances, we do not actually see fictitious Fra Pandolf's imaginary portrait of the "last Duchess" (line 1), whose peerless "looks" (24) from inside an iconic "wonder" (3) will supposedly imprint the envoy. Yet the painted work, surrounded by discourse and history, is invaluable as a touchstone--a paragon-- for appraising readers, who "turn" (9, 13), or change, to Browning or his personae. Our cognition of "My Last Duchess" is parergonal (i.e., framed and framing), like the Duke of Ferrara's intention to finish his wife as a person and as an objet d'art. But also like him, we find art turns on--pivoting, resisting, and starting--interpretive possession, which is what we own that enthralls or inhabits us. The printed poem is a stable verbal icon, but it becomes metamorphic if we gain the duke's grace, the envoy's hearing, the duchess's fixed glance, and Fra Pandolf's gifted words to draw it out.

Browning learned from his earlier Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello to make his poetry less introverted, more collaborative. Although "My Last Duchess" is complete before us, our work supplements Browning's. By removing himself as the center of attention, the poet allows us to replace him when reading is keen and trim. That is, strong readers possess a character that puts our work at the cutting edge of language, which nevertheless resists all displays of finishing. Reading, although susceptible to elimination, marks off those openings and surfaces where a poem passes for us or is about us. We achieve this complicity with the poet by seeing through the eyes of characters who shape the dramatic circumstances, while we also register, experience, and cross their limits. One result of dissolving lines between paragon and parergon, or cynosure and scope, is that we glimpse "truth / Beyond mere imagery on the wall" (The Ring and the Book 12:858-59). The drama within "My Last Duchess" turns out(ward) to shatter the poem as a mere typographical replica of the "last Duchess" "That's. . . painted on the wall" (1, emphasis added). The duke minds Fra Pandolf's work, however good it may be, less for its potent image than for its (un)canny pretext; Browning's outstanding poem, too, is iconographic, another speaking picture which we heed, while it sizes us up as critical guests. At the start of their respective careers, a Renaissance aristocrat (whose best art may be showing his art) and a Victorian poet are discovering "That Art remains the one way possible / Of speaking truth, to mouths like [theirs], at least" (The Ring and the Book 12:839-40). Art "speaking truth" evokes critical dialogue, our wandering looks and unstoppable smiles. Our exposing "My Last Duchess" to interpretive light and its characters to the dust of history transfigures the duke's action when he "puts by / The curtain" (9-10) covering a work of art. We also are uncovered by having to change how we view ourselves and our stance in relation to an artist and the work of art.

The union of painted image with dramatic utterance induces an almost ghostly experience--convivial, dizzying, transcendent, factitious--for not only the duke's sole guest but also Browning's audience. The craft of dramatic monologues can be disorienting as we try to reconcile our physical sensations of sound and type, besides our moral-aesthetic attitudes. Julia Wedgwood, for example, in a letter to Browning (February 21, 1869) struggles with The Ring and the Book, particularly the dual representation of the villainous Guido Franceschini, in terms that apply to the structure of "My Last Duchess":

I feel, after finishing the Poem, as if I could not contemplate it without a sort of a squint. Or rather (for you, of all men, ought to have patience with an elaborate simile) it seems to me that a somewhat slight picture has been put into an elaborately carved frame which represents the same subject under a rather different point of view. I look at the Picture and I see a certain incident; I look at the frame and I see the same incident treated in a more ambitious style and with much greater fullness of detail. The result is that one hesitates which to look at.(Curle 169-70)

The text requires from Wedgwood "a sort of a squint" in order to correlate complex dramatic narratives with prime, eidetic events. A similar self-doubt or perceptual double-take occurs when a reader of "My Last Duchess" alternates between a historical "beyond" and a literary corpus. The lines appear polymorphic, like geometric shapes reversing figure and ground or inside and outside. The last duchess, an eidolon, could not revise herself to please the duke, but from their mismatch (her gaiety with his gravity) Browning makes a poetic paradigm. Fra Pandolf's portrait of her, including the duke's words, reflects how Browning turns us inside out: what adjoins reading to creative work--object and process--is the sensation of discovering a matchless frame that keeps us in trim.

Browning frames the poem in several ways: linking the notice taken of the "Duchess painted on the wall" (1) with the duke's command to "Notice" a bronze statue of"Neptune. . . / Taming a sea-horse" (54-55); linking polite questions or requests, "Will't please you sit and look at her?" (5) and "Will't please you rise?" (47); linking Fra Pandolf and the count's delegate as (dis)qualified speakers; and linking a "now" of aesthetic judgment with a "then" of marital prerogative.[1] When we understand the point of comparing the less than picture-perfect duchess to Fra Pandolf's rendition of her, we also get the picture of the count's expendable daughter as a framing and framed "object" (53), no longer an illegible figure at the margins of discourse. The duke's unhappy past with his former mate, however, is never far from the center of Browning's poem, even when we realize that a future duchess is his "object." A shadowy figure in the duke's self-portrait, the count's daughter is still obscured, a marked woman, in the new foreground; she is already virtually disembodied, compared to the last duchess, who is so attractive that we have to reorient ourselves toward the poem in the few moments left before it ends.

The duke's aristocratic standards cause him to think his last duchess, with "A heart . . . too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed" (22-23), was undiscriminating, indiscreet, "trifling" (35). The mark against her--as well as on her--is a "spot of joy" (14-15, 21) that he cannot countenance because it is a synecdoche or token of a vital, yet somehow alien, personality: it was "as if she ranked / [His] gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name / With anybody's gift" (32-34). The duchess's inattention to her proud spouse contests his self-image as a paragon. His answer to this paragone (i.e., competition) between their incompatible tastes is to have her "painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive" (1-2), epitomizing her pretense. Thus the art he owns corresponds to her previous artfulness--when "her looks went everywhere" (24), when her evaluations made "all one" (25), and when "Much the same smile" (45) did not favor him. His final gift to her was when he "gave commands," which transformed her "same smile" into "all smiles" (46). This proves he knows the difference between being common and being absolute. Further, through Fra Pandolf's artistry her passage from curiosity to superiority--often a hermeneutic ideal--illustrates to the legate not only how "she stands" (4, 46), but also how to enforce any duchess's deportment.

In command of drawing the curtain on the duchess, the duke tries to limit her scope to himself and a few privileged others. Browning's comparable mastery of illusion, echo, and intention makes "My Last Duchess" a perceptual challenge which none can read without blinking. To prove their sharpness is close to matching Browning's, critics need to realize, for example, that the duke's exhibition is not just a working trope: "It's curtains for her." Browning further cites painting and literature as sister arts. Parrhasius bested Zeuxis, famous for a trompel'oeil of grapes, by drawing a curtain. And Shakespeare's Twelfth Night offers Browning a fit dramatic model when Olivia answers Viola: "Have you any commission from your lord to negotiate with my face? You are now out of your text. But we will draw the curtain and show you the picture" (1.5.218-20). Browning's best improvising readers have the duchess's joy and roving eyes, whereas the duke's blindness while he covers her type is a "mark," or sign, of high seriousness. Readers with an "approving speech, / Or blush, at least" (30-31), have the privilege of answering "My Last Duchess" with more than a blank stare, which is the look of critics frustrated by any "sort of trifling" (35).

Fra Pandolf's portrait of the duchess exemplifies for the duke her hamartia, being so lively that she "miss[es]" or "exceed[s] the mark" (38-39) he draws for decorum. The duke can "call / That piece a wonder, now" (2-3), because linking his commentary with her verisimilar figure allows him to emblemize her, while continuing to understate his attitudes about her improprieties. He can cut a figure and expose her through an even more reticent medium, yet "he becomes the victim of his own aesthetic sensibility . . forever bound to the portrait through his endless gloss upon it" (Baines 30). His "call" is performative, not just constative: his speech act makes the "piece" what it is, beyond the artist's humble actions and courteous "stuff" (19). We may be similarly bound to "My Last Duchess," depending on whether what we call it is for or against our trimming gloss. Like a critic who vainly aims to supplant Browning's artistry, the arrogant, jealous duke appears to be redoing the painter's craft and double-exposing the duchess's "pictured countenance" (7) because he could not stand her egregious disregard for rank. Thus, he sketches her as a painted woman to make himself an artist manque; his living/dead subject now "stands" on his terms, not hers or Fra Pandolf's. Recalling her coy life-style for the envoy, he can finally claim his own creative privilege because "There she stands / As if alive" (46-47), silent testimony to the visitor of the host's marital, aesthetic, and interpretive command.

The duke, emphatically saying "Fra Pandolf' by design" (6), tries to impress his guest with the artist's credentials; we're thinking "Fra, who?" and perhaps imagining some artistic monstrosity. Yet Browning teases readers familiar with art history. Does the duke lack taste and therefore foolishly overrate unrenowned Pandolf and the portrait, which only our mind's eye sees? The historical frame of "My Last Duchess" implies that Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara's Este family (distinguished art patrons and collectors) could not be so mistaken about the qualities of the painter and his work? When we study a retitled poem that in a blink of an eye breaks from its hermetic bounds, we find ourselves at an impasse between factual record of Renaissance Ferrara and Browning's imaginative representation of humbug. When we know that Browning originally called the poem "I. Italy" (1842) and renamed it "My Last Duchess: Ferrara" (1849), is it any wonder his redesign frames literary critique differently? In this new setting, we might wish that the "last Duchess" (emphasis added) has no successor, if the count loves his daughter more than social advancement. Nevertheless, the actual Duke of Ferrara does get another wife (Barbara of Austria). Like the duke himself, readers find that the "looks" of reality are more upsetting than the way art looks. Thus, given how much Alfonso disliked his mate, we might further conjecture-in order to pass meaning(fully) between life and mime-sis--that his vengeance includes hiring a nobody to paint "such an one" (37), a beau ideal. Since she disregarded his "favour at her breast" (25) and his "nine-hundred-years-old name" (33), he favors commissioning an artist who finishes her portrait in "a da)," (4).[3] This would "make [the duke's] will / Quite clear" (3637) about temper, temporizing and taste. Our revisionist stance toward the historical reputation of Alfonso II d'Este--framing him as a mere philistine or villain--helps to hone our critical edge so that it is closer to a poet's text, always sharp and already advanced (Derrida, "Living On" 83).

Browning structures "My Last Duchess" by deferring information about a prospective marriage that will affect our ability to distinguish the subject, or main work, of the duke's design, from the apparently ornamental, secondary by work. Such artistic composition illustrates that "[t] he frame. . . becomes not the borderline between the inside and the outside, but precisely what subverts the applicability of the inside/outside polarity to the act of interpretation" (Johnson 128). Alfonso focuses so narrowly on the portrait and its subject's typical impertinence in the first 47 lines of the monologue that initial readers are unaware of his immediate marital "object": the "self" of another wife, who ought not to test him by comparing his "presence" (14) with "anybody's gift" (34). His account of the duchess, vis-a-vis Fra Pandolf's painting of her and what we learn of the monologic situation, gives edgy readers the sensation of gazing at dimensional figures and suddenly seeing them reverse positions--center/margin, ergon/parergon, master/subordinate, paragon/delinquent, cynosure/supplement. Alfonso's parenthetical monologue diverts us from his plans, provided "My Last Duchess" is strange; still it impinges on our consciousness just as the duchess continues to interpose with "looks." The poem, by Browning's design, represents a summational digression or interjection.[4] As we reread more acutely, we can reshape the monologue--turning it inside out or realigning Alfonso's by-passage with his direction--so that we are almost a match for him. We learn, as the duchess cannot but as the envoy must, that being a paragon requires good form ant] no distractions.

In the duke's pattern--where image is everything--there can be no rivals: for being "such an one," thus violating etiquette, the duchess earns his wrath; he "gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together" (45-46). Browning's wry art makes us smile if we realize that for the nonce an archaism ("an one") phonemically and solecistically represents the duke trying to reduce his blundering, incomparable wife to a "none." Such a Boeotian rule of the duchess and a recreative contest with Fra Pandolf (who is no Michelangelo, Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, Moroni, Bronzino, or Bastianino)[5] are spoiled, nonetheless. The framing duke, who by artifice has the power on occasion to draw a curtain over the work of a no one, has been framed poetically as ineffectual and anonymous:

Ironically,. . . the ostensibly male-authorized text of the portrait subverts male authority, effecting a double displacement--a displacement that, itself, displaces. The living Duchess is shifted and relocated onto an icon, becoming a countertext which then deconstructs the Duke's authority to textualize. (Hochberg 80)

Although Alfonso claims to have regained command of his last dnchess, she still has him spellbound. "In effect, Fra Pandolf has been too proficient," says Sanford Pinsker; ". . . the Duke now finds himself in the curious position of having engineered a Pyrrhic victory indeed . . .. [T]he smile-of-Art disturbs the Duke in a manner that does not differ significantly from the smile-of-Fact. . ." (72, 73). As a ghost of her former self, the duchess will be exorcized from Alfonso's consciousness only when he can replace marital subjects to serve him as objects; then neither one of the duchesses will be "such an one," and their media need not concern him. For him the center of attention and discourse remains complicated by what he cannot marginalize or frame: the fearless asymmetry of the last duchess. Browning illustrates here the "contingencies of framing," that is, when "no totalization of the bordering can even occur. The frames are always enframed; and therefore enframed by a given piece of what they contain" (Derrida, "Lefacteur"485, 485n). Through reprisal against his former wife and rehearsal of the next one, the duke stands to regain his authority. However, the monologic structure subverts and dovetails all relationships by implicating not only personae but also those of us who "never read . . . . My Last Duchess" without feeling we will remain "strangers" (6-7) to the poet's angular art, while "'here [we] miss, / Or there exceed the mark'" (38-39).

Framing his former wife is also a way for the duke to prevent the count's daughter from misprizing him. His absolute rule will allow him to prescribe her behavior, but he depends on the count's emissary to convey his indelicate hints about propriety better than he could verbally respond to the last duchess's miscues. The envoy is politely "Will't"-ed to replace his host as the object of the duchess's "earnest glance," which still affects one who views Fret Pandolf's "piece" and hears what happens to a vulgar"piece" who resists. Moreover, presumably the delegate's standing with "such an one," with this Renaissance paragon, who experiments with him "as un homme moyen sensual" (Ingersoll, "Perversions" 75-76), includes a protocol of knowing when to be quiet, which he does for as long as Browning permits us to eavesdrop. The climax of their brief association is the envoy's being verbally enervated in front of a disfigured and muted woman; analysis gets us to talk, however. His reduction to a silent, disembodied textual figure will further erase the last duchess as a remarkable woman with whom he is temporarily joined. Simultaneously, the monologue extricates him from an obscure verbal margin where he has something to say.

With this look-but-don 't-talk attitude, the envoy finds that he is "not the first" (12) to be drawn to what is "painted on the wall"; then he is redrawn, or re-"turned" (9, 13), by the duke's voice to the perspective of "strangers" who can "never read" without assistance from the master's critical voice. Alfonso uses his troped guest to illustrate how he wants to be treated. The envoy adopts this protocol of reading by conforming his senses to the duke's will, even if this means being diverted visually and aurally for a few minutes from the task of gaining attention for the count's "munificence." Nevertheless, to complete the picture of his "just pretence / . . . for dowry" (50-51), which has been sketched already, Duke Alfonso dismisses the "known munificence" and the unknown female "object" as foregone conclusions; they are not worth his whole attention, which is how he wants any duchess to be. The monologue tests the envoy's eyes and ears to determine his qualifications for cutting a woman down to size. Meeting the dead, atropic duchess's "earnest glance" (8), which is paradoxically momentary and lingering, the envoy's gaze cuts a bargain between the duke and count, who trade in women's bodies. The envoy is a mute agent of a framing that encloses a "fair" woman, yet also makes her ornament the duke's self-creation. This next duchess will soon be, like her nixed predecessor, no more than a shade of her "self" in a palace of art where the pattern of femininity is losing its color.

The count's daughter, as a married yet marred woman who minds her "looks" and "approving speech" (30), will know without coaxing that she is "a rarity" (like Clans of Innsbruck's bronze statue of ducal Neptune taming a seahorse) only to the extent she submerges her "self." By means of a final reference to another artifact, the duke serves "notice" again that his having to "tame" another wife will prolong the contest between his supremacy and women's secondary work. This objet d'art in-Alfonso's possession reinforces the frame around his will and around Browning's poem. Moreover, the illustration of control again points readers beyond the heterocosm of"My Last Duchess" to a locus classicus, Virgil's Aeneid, which shows Neptune as a ruler calming a stormy sea induced by the goddess, Juno.[6] The fictitious Claus of Innsbruck has an artistic re-presentation "for" the incomparable, innominate duke; for readers, however, Robert Browning allusively recovers a literary, gift more ancient than his speaker's "nine-hundred-years-old name."[7] The duke has something "cast in bronze" (56) that implies closure; but the-verbal arts perplex him because they are less fixed and less exclusive. His monologue attempts to limit the grounds of discourse. Browning nevertheless realizes that one feature of language's "rarity" (55) is its equivocal might: to "exceed the mark," or not even reach it, even when the lines are set.s Literary analysis too, which is an empowering yet liminal art, is both against us and "for" us in our "Taming" (55). Unlike the envoy, forced to be a quiet go-between in this porous frontier between two men, two women, and several artists, real and imaginary, readers must find special voices to rate"My Last Duchess." In this dramatic place, where drawing a curtain reveals the effect of a painter's grand "perhaps" (15), silence and critical talk are as precious as any fine art.

While looking through Fra Pandolf's craft to the woman beyond it, the envoy also receives lessons in communication. Her "approving speech" is framed by the laconic duke's monitory words--put in others' mouths--which both violate and elevate their authority. An allegedly immodest woman's silence and a faintly modest man's voice surround this auditor, who has to look a certain way to see "That" which the poem conceals. However, readers can see that Browning frames the text and many lines pronominally. He also moves Alfonso's "I"'s side-to-side, only twice centering them vis-a-vis speech (22, 36). The duchess's expressive eyes might account for the envoy's losing his voice, but momentarily he can imagine having the duke's sharp tongue and the duchess's ear:

Even had you skill
In speech--(which I have not)--to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, 'Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark'--and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
--E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. (35-43)

Dashes and parenthesis tie a modifying side remark in a double knot. This graphic style typographically offsets the enjambed "skill/In speech," reconstructs the duke's jamb, and centers a severe, upright 'T' that sets the character apart from the surrounding marks. Alfonso's remarkable gloss is skillful yet clumsy, suiting its rhetorical occasion. To "make [his] will / Quite dear to" this special envoy, "some stooping" may be (par)ergonomically, as well as politically, correct. Browning's craft, in what is rightly called "the phenomenon of a trompe d'oreille" (Berman 67), is less a work of hiding art than an unworking of the virgule that artificially separates verses and women.

The duke is speaking to someone who is "not the first" (12) to inquire about the way the duchess looks, now that she is "painted on the wall"; but to explain her mien could jeopardize his eminence. During the sitting, "Her husband's presence" was not the only "cause" (20) of the duchess's "spot of joy" (14-15, 21). He is still beside himself while recalling how he was a peripheral, third-person figure when the painter's remarks, perhaps inadvertent, drew out the duchess's character. Fra Pandolf, whose addressee is indeterminate, elicited a facial expression from his true "object"; this obliqueness from an artist, who apparently is no stranger to reading women, constitutes part of the "wonder" that is a painting and a poem. But any discounting, however slight, of his ducal "presence" is enough to trigger resentment in Browning's speaker, for whom this scene typifies his marital troubles. Having admitted his secondariness, the duke has to reestablish his indispensability as a critic. Because the duchess's "earnest glance"--though now just image-still bothers him, he cannot meet what has become her enduring (not endearing) gaze. Nevertheless, he can focus the envoy's attention on what Fra Pandolf could not see, i.e., a complexion beneath "that pictured countenance." Besides "That piece [being] a wonder, now," what lay behind the eyes of the duchess should be clear. The duke's "presence" is again paramount, so he stands by (speaking parenthetically) what the envoy could (not) possibly "say" so directly and insultingly to a female superior. The duke's former wife and his current visitor were/are expected as listeners to intuit exactly what "disgusts" someone who is blameless, someone whose "will" and word are acute. Alfonso, briefly granting the envoy the possibility of rhetorical "skill," strips him of it: no one; must rival the duke's command of the last duchess, and anyone "Who'd stoop to blame" her (34) would be undignified. To be really powerful, like his host, the envoy must transcend candor without "stooping." He will prove himself up to the mark, unlike the duchess, if his being "lessoned" means the proud duke will not have to reframe his "commands" to another duchess.

The poem frames "'ra Pandolf' by design" to tighten the bonding of vision, re-creative speech and audition.[9] The absorbing audiovisual text of "My Last Duchess" traces the images that draw the emissary to "read" a message from "that spot of joy" and to hear it respotted, or reviewed, in Alfonso's words. When those images suddenly stop, as "all smiles stopped together," and when the duke casually mentions the count's daughter as another female "object," language seems renewed, more immediate and effective. The defensive duke suddenly looks different after speech has drawn him out. Alfonso, rhetorically trim yet needing to "repeat" what he previously "avowed" (48, 52), is confident that the count's "ample warrant" (50) is audible as well as visible. Coincidentally, he himself has finished with Fri Pandolf, who had exacted more from his demure subject by saying, "'Her mantle laps / Over my lady's wrist too much'" (1617), and by delimiting his medium:

'Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat' . . . (17-19)[10]

Like Browning's art, subjected to reading and listening, Fra Pandolf's artistry needs to be (re-)covered by its spectators. Having resurrected his first--but not "last"--mate by uncurtaining her, Alfonso can be seen and heard stopping her looks and smiles again if we imagine him closing the curtain over her image as he replaces her rhetorically and maritally. Like a snap of his fingers to end the hypnotic spell, the duke's polite inquiry, "Will't please you rise?" (47), lifts the envoy out of a parergonal role as the duchess's subject; having briefly shared her with his host, he returns to being the count's subject and an important accessory to the rule of yet another young, model spouse. In three minutes, while the duke retouches her character, the last duchess becomes a special figure of imagination--ours as well as the envoy's.

When we apprehend the auditor's mediating role, we have to reconnect the speaker's main point (ergon) with what is beside the point (parergon), but the poem itself never confirms that our framing is accurate. As the poem moves from the portrait as object--with a living soul behind it--to the count's daughter as soul-less object, we become almost as involved in the scene as the envoy is. We can only guess what he has learned about the duke's expectations. Our reading of"that pictured countenance, / The depth and passion of its earnest glance" (7-8), will not conform to his subordinate regard for her masculine regard. In fact, his proximity to the duke and the painted image of the duchess draws, as well as repels, our hermeneutics. His being at the center and the critical edge of the action is a complicity that all interpreters want to share with the powerful. Yet our reading, like Fret Pandolf's creativity, "Must never hope to reproduce" (18) the situation exactly. Readers are not posed or sited quite like the canny envoy. He knows his function well before we are discreet enough to get (into) the picture. The duke's intentions are more foreign and perplexing to us up to the point--and perhaps even beyond it--when we realize "the mark" he sets for and upon a last or lasting mate. We might hope that the messenger is sensitive enough to warn his "master" (49) later of the duke's destructive megalomania, and that the count's love for his daughter transcends ambition. Nevertheless, we assume the duke will not be disappointed--as well as deluded. And the sixteenth-century Ferrara outside the nineteenth- century poem confirms our worst expectations. Like the count to whom the envoy will report, we seem superfluous or out of bounds in the interpretive account. Yet we have also been on the duchess's side in "a continuous shifting pattern of oscillation back and forth from looking to being looked at" (Ingersoll, "Lacan" 152). Browning's peerless ekphrasis commands poetry as speaking picture, painting as mute poetry, and reading as psychoglyph. Through her looks, which paint us into a corner, we glance and gaze to achieve a valid, creative perspective on this dramatic scene.

"My Last Duchess" both measures and crosses the boundaries between perceiving subject and perceived object to complement or repeat the way its speaker charms its auditor. Always knowing his place, the envoy must study his host's revelations (or insinuations) tacitly Conversely, readers who are not paragons but nonetheless interpretive contestants must take turns speaking. Our places in the poem are thus more critical and revocable than artfully reinscribing social lines on woman-under-erasure or -rubbed-out. We cannot finish reading, or redesigning, such a dramatic monologue without sanction from "The company below" (48), peers who are always hermeneutically framed, and whom we rejoin. It is as foolish to surmise that the duchess "had a form of 'laughing sickness' [and] died of the bubonic plague" in an asylum as to say, "It is surely much more wholesome to accept the text for what it is. . ." (Fleissner 217, 218). Scholarly authority takes a less "wholesome," a more ducal, approach to textuality by calling, changing, or dropping names. And readers differ and defer because we are as susceptible as the count's envoy to qualifications or "just pretence" (50). Yet our visual and verbal imaginations depend less than his do on artifact and illocutionary pace. We have a license to redraw and revalue textual boundaries which are sharp yet approachable. To readers "on the dangerous edge of things" that Robert Browning treasures (Bishop Blougram's Apology 395), taming "My Last Duchess" only rarely is better than murdering it.

1 Joshua Adler discusses "a double frame: an outer one of aesthetic interest and an inner one of social convention" (219).

2 Louis S. Friedland determines Alfonso II, the fifth Duke of Ferrara, and his young first wife, Lucrezia de Medici, are the historical figures on which Browning bases his poem.

3 L. M. Miller disputes the claim of B. N. Pipes, Jr., that the rush to finish the work indicates it is a fresco. Semiology, not a particular medium, is Browning's concern.

4 A more exact rhetorical term for this narratological parallelism is parecnasis (or parecbasis). Moreover, the text's argumentative edge produces a dismissive summary or rundown. which is another kind of paragon (Turco 137).

5 George Monteiro makes a strong case, based on Richard Henry Wilde's Conjectures and Researches Concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso (1842), with which Browning was quite familiar, for Pandolf being the namesake of painter-priest Alessandro Pandolfo, who was romantically linked with (E) Leonora di Toledo de Medici, who was killed by her spouse ("A Note" 194-95).

6 James Heffernan, crediting yet usurping Gail S. Weinberg, suggests that Browning's allusion "to the passage on Neptune's calming of the winds in the first book of the Aeneid (142-56)" is an ironic way of "signify[ing] the art of ruling wisely" (219n9).

7 In Tristram Shandy Parson Yorick's name is (almost) said to be this old (23; vol. 1, ch. 11).

8 Howard Nemerov remarks, "Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language . . . . IP]oems [about paintings] speak about the silence of the paintings; and where the poet was lucky his poem will speak the silence of the painting. . ." (95-96).

9 "Regarding this emphasis on "design," Browning claimed that it gives the duke "some occasion for telling the story, and illustrating part of it" (my emphasis; A. Allen Brockington, " RobertBrowning's Answers to Questions Concerning Some of His Poems," Cornhill Magazine, ns 36 [1914]: 317; qtd. in Monteiro, "'My Last Duchess'" 234).

10 Michael G. Miller discusses the duke's coverage of Fra Pandolf's two remarks as "verbal legerdemain [whereby] the emissary is doubly misled" about sexual boldness in the painter's language and in his "lady" (33).

Adler, Joshua. "Structure and Meaning in Browning's 'My Last Duchess.'" Victorian Poetry 15 (1977): 219-27.

Baines, Barbara J. "'My Last Duchess' and The Duchess of Malfi. "Studies in Browning and His Circle 11.2 (Fall 1983): 23-30.

Berman, R.J. Browning's Duke. New York: Richards Rosen P, 1972.

Browning, Robert. The Poems. Vol. 1. Ed. John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981.2 vols.

-----. The Ring and the Book. Ed. Richard D. Altick. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981.

Curie, Richard, ed. Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: A Broken Friendship as Revealed by Their Letters. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1937.

Derrida, Jacques. "Le facteur de la verite." The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.411-96.

-----. "Living On: Border Lines." Deconstruction and Criticism. By Harold Bloom, et al. New York: Seabury, 1979.75-176.

Fleissner, Robert F. "Browning's Last Lost Duchess: A Purview." Victorian Poetry 5 (1967): 21749.

Friedland, Louis S. "Ferrara and My Last Duchess. "Studies in Philology, 33 (1936): 656-84.

Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

Hochberg, Shifra. "Male Authority and Female Subversion in Browning's 'My Last Duchess.'" Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 3.1 (1991): 7784.

Ingersoll, Earl G. "Lacan, Browning, and the Murderous Voyeur: 'Porphyria's Lover' and 'My Last Duchess.'" Victorian Poetry 28 (1990): 151-57.

-----. "Perversions of Artistic Sensibility in the Dramatic Monologues of Robert Browning." Studies in Browning and His Circle 16 (1988): 72-84.

Johnson, Barbara. "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida." The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary, Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. 110-46.

Miller, L. M. "'My Last Duchess': A Studiolo Setting?" Victorian Poetry 23 (1985): 188-93.

Miller, Michael G. "Browning's 'My Last Duchess.'" Explicator 47.4 (Summer 1989): 32-34.

Monteiro, George. "Browning's 'My Last Duchess.'" Victorian Poetry 1 (1963): 234-37.

-----. "'I Said "Fra Pandolf" by Design'": A Note on >Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess.'" Victorian Poetry 23 (1985): 194-95.

Nemerov, Howard. "On Poetry. and Painting, with a Thought of Music." Figures of Thought. Boston: David R. Godine, 1978.95-99.

Pinsker, Sanford. "'As If She Were Alive': Rhetorical Anguish in 'My Last Duchess.'" Concerning Poetry 9.2 (1976): 71-73.

Pipes, B. N.,Jr. "The Portrait of 'My Last Duchess.'" Victorian Studies 3 (1960): 381-86.

Shakespeare, William. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Ed. Alfred Harbage. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Penguin, 1969.

Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 1760-67. Ed. James A. Work. New York: Odyssey, 1940.

Turco, Lewis. The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1986.


Copyright of Papers on Language & Literature is the property of Papers on Language & Literature and its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user.

Back to the top
Elizabeth Barrett Browning Magazine/Journal Articles
The Browning Main Page

||| Poetry | Edgar Allan Poe | Home | Young American Poets | Emily Dickinson Page | The Browning Main Page | Poetry Links | Anonymous Poetry | Children's Poetry | How to talk about a Poem | How to talk about a short story | Links | Joke | JavaScripts | Home | Send comments about this page to erin@cswnet.com ||| Sign and View Guestbook |||