Robert+Browning+and+Porphyria's+Lover

Robert Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" is a sordid tale of madness and love. Being the first of Browning's style of the "dramatic monologue," the poem was published in the January 1836 issue of // The Monthly Repository, // under the title of "Porphyria" (Hacht). It was later published under the name in "Madhouse Cells" in //Dramatic Lyrics// (1842)//,// and again in 1863 with its current title (Hacht). The poem went unnoticed upon its first publication, but it later garnered attention in the literary and psychological fields as being one of the first poems to delve into the issue of mental illness in the 19th century. "Porphyria's Lover" involves the narrator and his lover, Porphyria, who, after leaving a "gay feast" (Browning 27), retires to a remote cottage to meet him, only to be strangled to death by her own hair (27). The speaker then revels in the feeling of perfect happiness this has brought to him and spends the rest of the night sitting next to his murdered lover.

The poem demands multiple readings due to the multitude of interpretations and ambiguity Browning has left open to the readers. "Porphyria's Lover" is used as one of the archetypes of Isobel Armstrong's method of reading Victorian poetry known as the "double poem" (Armstrong 14). This consists of "two concurrent poems in the same words" (14). Although reading poetry in terms of different allegorical interpretations has been around as long as the craft itself, Armstrong believes that the Victorian poets used a unique, "more sophisticated . . . philosophical and linguistic complexity" than poets of the Neoclassic or Romantic era (Armstrong). This need to incorporate this dualism of the expressive and the analytical was due to two prodigious changes that faced the reception of Victorian poetry. Poetry and "art was viewed as extraneous to life. . . Poetry redefined the ambiguities between self and other (lover, society, nature, labour)", and the "ambiguities of meaning produced by the universality of print" (Hughes). These two evolutions in the literary world created a need for poetry to both "explore and expose," to be an "expression of self as it contemplates its relations to others and/or the world yet also offer up the cultural and linguistic grounds of representation on which that expression rests" (Hughes). Armstrong reads Porphyria as both a "privacy [in] banishing the world or taking a life" and a "madness in representative terms" (Armstrong). However, because of the ambiguity of the poem, using the "double" method of reading as a template becomes almost restrictive as the myriad of allegorical interpretations has become numerous.

Many critics agree that the unbalanced mental state of the speaker is one of the main critical questions and features of the poem. Porphyria itself is a medical disorder of certain enzymes that manifest that can lead to paranoia and insanity. Porphyria arrives at the speaker's cottage out of a fierce storm raging outside. Porphyria calls to him, yet "no voice replies" and she has to physically put his "arm about her waist" leading to the belief that the narrator is indolent and suffering from a disease or mental disturbance causing his lack of response (Browning 16). The narrator then takes her hair and winds it "three times her little throat around,/ And strangled her" (40-1). Then after propping her lifeless body "up as before", he spends the rest of the night with her all the while "God has not yet said a word" (49, 60). The murder and lack of empathy on the part of the speaker has lead to a conclusion by many critics that the narrator is suffering from some type of mental disturbance and is in a state of psychosis (Landow). Some critics believe the act to be spontaneous, as a "a thing to do" for the evening (Best). This reading is attributed to the possibility of Porphyria being sickly, cold and "pale," and the narrator kills her on a whim as an act of euthanasia to put her out of her misery and preserve the moment before it is too late and all his love being in vain (Browning 28). When God has not punished him, the narrator believes that it is because it was the right thing to do. Yet, most interpretations have the narrator in a state of madness that leads to the murder of Porphyria as an act of unprovoked psychosis (Hughes). The rhyme pattern of the poem retains an ABABB repetition, mimicking that of a heartbeat that does not change even as the murder takes place. Since it is a dramatic monologue, the heartbeat belongs to the speaker. This unchanging pattern throughout the poem is an indication of the lack of empathy the speaker possesses, which tends of be one of the traits of a psychopath. As he props her up, he is preserving the perfect moment that he believes brings him a "love . . . gained instead" (Browning 55). The speculation on the relationship between the two is as ambiguous as the poem itself with theories ranging from an incestual one to an extramarital affair. Nevertheless, because of the enigmatic layering of the poem, it leaves the reader with a sense of incompleteness and a madness of his own, much akin to the narrator. -- UVic Engl 386/2012W Works Cited

Armstrong, Isobel. "Introduction: Rereading Victorian Poetry." // Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and // // Politics. //London: Routledge, 1993. 13-25. Web. 8 Mar., 2012

Best, J.T. "'Porphyria's Lover' — Vastly Misunderstood Poetry." //The Victorian Web.// victorianweb.org, 8 June 2007. Web. 8 Mar., 2012.

Browning, Robert. "Porphyria's Lover." // Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, // ed. Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne Rundle. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999. 312-313. Print.

Hacht, Anne Marie. //Poetry for Students//. Detroit: Gale Group, 2002. Print.

Hughes, Linda K.. "Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics by Isobel Armstrong." // Victorian Periodicals Review // 28.3 (1995): 270-272. Web. 15 Jan. 2015.

Landow, George P. "'Porphyria's Lover':A Case Study in What Counts as Evidence and Where the Ambiguities Arise in Dramatic Monologues." //The Victorian Web.// victorianweb.org, 8 April 2008. Web. 8 Mar. 2012.