Power Is For Men: A Relatively Traditional Reading to “My Last Duchess,†a Poem by Robert Browning, Regarding the Victorian Age

Abstract

During the Victorian age the feminist movement got power, but women still robbed of their vital place both within their family life and social environment. Men exercised their power over them and made them stay home and do house work. In other words, women had no right to struggle for social participation and they were passive in their life as if they were the slaves of men. So according to masculine functionality, they oppressed, marginalized and debarred from love. In his poem Browning tries to show the negative side of the power or the “Big Error†that has been committed by Victorian men, and at the same time to condemn them of their wrong actions that they had toward their wives. Browning is not the supporter of the feminist but like Percy Shelly he wants to generalize equity between both “genders.†However, his poem clarifies the exercising mode of power, namely, the negative, undesirable and traumatic effect of masculinity within family and community relations during the stifling Victorian atmosphere.