Browning's Rogues

Well besides my reference to the films Rear Window (if you haven't yet seen this one, you must!) and Boxing Helena (if you haven't yet seen this one, you probably shouldn't!), I'm reminded, too, of Tom Petty's song and video for "Mary Jane's Last Dance," about a morgue assistant who brings a female corpse (played by Kim Basinger in the video!) home for a dinner date. Nearly too perfect (even if a bit on the macabre side) for "Porphyria's Lover," eh?! There seem to be all kinds of possibilities for accompanying music for this poem; besides the songs we heard today (the Burt Bacharach/Dionne Warwick chestnut "Anyone Who Had a Heart," "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," and, as you left, Michael Jackson's "The Girl is Mine"), there's also the more recent "Can't Do Without You," by Caribou, that megahit by The Police, "Every Breath You Take" (that I never realized was about obsession), and even Josh Ritter's "Kathleen" ("I'll be the one to drive you back home, Kathleen ... I'll have you back by break of day / I know you are waiting and I know it is not for me").

Well, I enjoyed the discussion this morning -- there were so many insightful comments and observations that helped us deal with our challenge with Browning's poems: i.e., how to make them more than merely chilling Gothic studies. How do we get nearer to a poems like these? What pathways allow us to historicize them as definitively Victorian poems? As the various comments established, it would seem, certainly, that we could approach them in the contexts of (1) class issues, (2) of the relationship between material beauty (each of the two poems we read, to varying degrees, features fancy clothing or luxurious furnishings, decorations, ornaments, etc.) and morality (in the form of concern for the poor or lower classes, perhaps), (3) of "the gaze" and male desire to inscribe and fix female identity or sexuality, (4) of the Victorian desire (represented via both Porphyria's Lover and the Duke) to mold behavior (sexual or otherwise) and thus stabilize the moral/social order, (5) of the nature of love and the balance between the sexes (remember Blake's indictment of a "dark secret love," love that goes underground and that is governed by secrecy and control and illicit behaviors, etc.), and (6) of that issue of trying to preserve the hallelujah moment & freeze time (and the danger, as Katie noted, of trying too hard to do so, of presuming to try to "smother" the moment), among many others, I'm sure. One could imagine these dramatic monologues -- as unique and as strange as they are -- being put into serious conversation with such poems as "The Sick Rose," "Ode to a Nightingale," "The Lady of Shalott," "Mariana," "Goblin Market," "In an Artist's Studio," and Aurora Leigh.