"My Last Duchess"

During this week, we read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Raven,” Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”  These stories and poems are all excellent examples of relationships that are plagued by insanity.  My favorite of these works, however, was probably Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess.”  I really enjoyed how Browning gave the reader little clues throughout the poem that eventually led to a shocking realization at the poem’s end.  This is seen as the narrator says that his last Duchess was “… painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive” and that he “… gave commands; then all smiles stopped together.”  Browning also uses these details to help the reader to understand the narrator’s character.  The narrator is a very controlling man.  He says that his wife “smiled, no doubt, whene’er I passed her; but who passed without much the same smile?” and that as his wife rode “round the terrace-all and each would draw from her alike the approving speech, or blush, at least.”  In the end, he killed his wife because she did not follow his commands.  He saw her as a possession and referred to her in the poem as a piece of art or some inconsequential object.