Exploration Of Love
Exploration Of Love
On the surface Browning’s “Porphyria's Lover” is a sadistic tale of a homicidal man who snuffs out the woman he loves in order to possess her; however, this is a piece ripe for multiple interpretations. Feminist critics may view it as a misogynist piece on the strangling of women from then modern culture, while Psychoanalytic critics would see it as a disturbing echo of Browning’s own morbid desires. However, it can be seen most clearing from those who have significant backgrounds in both Postmodernism and Marxism, for it can be seen as a piece discussing the struggle of power between class (Kavanagh 307).
The poem itself centers around a young woman, Porphyria, and the inert man, the narrator, it appears she adores. She has traveled through a blinding storm to the dull chill of his house, presumably outside of the reach of civilization. When she enters, she sets his furnace and likewise the house alight and then proceeds to peel off her damp clothes. Soon her hair is down and she is murmuring her adoration for the narrator while pressing him against her body. During this moment of devotion, however, the narrator realizes she will not leave her social obligations to be with him. Upon this realization he looks into her eyes, understanding, but if for that one moment, she adored him completely, giving nothing to those obligations which otherwise bind her. With this sudden comprehension he takes her golden locks, and with them, strangles her, so that she will remain his for the all of his existence.
Feminist critics could view this piece as an allegory for the subversion of their gender with a misogynist twist being that God does nothing to imply that women should be treated otherwise as stated in the closing verse: “And thus [they] sit together now, / and all night long [they] have not stirred / And yet God has not said a word!” (58-60) Porphyria is symbolic of womankind on a whole; when she enters into her lover’s damp house she makes “the cheerless grate / Blaze up, and all the cottage warm,” (8-9) representing the servitude of women to men, showing that their sole job is to keep their families warm and content. However, unlike the Stepford wife, she is portrayed as too proud to leave her world of “gay feasts” (27) and festivity by severing “vainer ties”...