Abstract
This paper investigates Robert Browning’s engagement with history in “My Last Duchess.” Where modern scholarship on this poem has largely focused on the figure of the individual and the moral and psychological conditions of the characters in the poem, my essay shifts focus away from the trans-historical exploration of individual selves and human relations. I conceptualize history, not as an irrelevant and exotic background to the essence of human relations in the poem, but as integral to the meaningful expression of “My Last Duchess.” Rather than treating the individual as a category beyond or across time, my essay situates Browning and his poem in history. It interprets the poem in the contexts of the Italian Renaissance and Browning’s theorization of this historical past as a Victorian. While recent scholarship on “My Last Duchess” foregrounds gender relations in examining force and repression within a marriage, my essay calls attention to rigid hierarchical social division as the basis for Browning’s understanding of the past. In “My Last Duchess,” Browning expresses class distinction and power relations as an aestheticized spectacle of aristocratic tyranny. In doing so, I argue, Browning at once envisions class domination as informing the past and suggests that his own liberalism is beyond history.