Browning's "My Last
Duchess": Paragon and Parergon
Joseph A. Dupras
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)
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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 trompe l'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 "misses" or "exceeds 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.
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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.(2) 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 mimesis--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 day" (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 bywork. Such artistic composition illustrates that " the
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 bypassage 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 and no
distractions.
NOTES
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).
WORKS CITED
Adler, Joshua. "Structure and Meaning in Browning's 'My
Last Duchess.'" Victorian Poet 15 (197):
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.
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. tick. New
Haven: Yale CTP, 1981.
Curle, 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.
Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of
Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1993.
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.
