A Beloved or A Devil?: Toxic Masculinity in Robert Browning's “My Last Duchess’’ and “Porphyria's Lover’’

Abstract

Research Article Coinciding with the years between 1837 and 1901, The Victorian period witnessed the dramatic growth of the reading public and the increasing significance of the novel genre in accordance with the circulating libraries and weekly magazines through which a great number of Victorian novels were published. Although these realist novels, characterized by an impetus for social realism in order to portray the negative impacts of industrialism and capitalism upon the Victorian life, prevailed over any other genre through their critical imagery of contemporary issues, there was a group of poets such as Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Robert Browning who contributed to the blossoming of poetry and its distinctive characteristics. Considered as a threshold between Romanticism and Modernism, Victorian poetry has a tendency to depict religious uncertainty, science, morality, and social reform, thereby leading it to incorporate both social and political issues into the realist lens of poetry. In view of its moralist outlook of Victorian poetry, Robert Browning (18121889) produced, essentially, a great number of dramatic monologues, based on a fictitious speaker and a listener, so as to epitomize women’s repression and patriarchal domination, consolidated by the growing male authority in the Victorian era in opposition to the country's female ruler named ''Victoria''. Thus, this article aims to analyze the objectification and victimization of women by the patriarchal society and toxic masculinity in the Victorian period through the male gaze of such poems as “My Last Duchess’’ and “Porphyria's Lover’’. Received: 22.03.2021 Revision received: