Browning’s porphyria’s lover Essay Example

as he stabbed her repeatedly, Blackwood's murderer chillingly declared that once she was dead, his "joy, his happiness, was perfect" (qtd.In Mason 255-56).

Mason also notes that Browning's friend Bryan Procter published a poem in 1820, "Marcian Colonna," which acknowledges the Blackwood's source. In his poem Procter embellishes the original story by having his murderer sit up all night next to his dead love's recumbent body. These details--white skin, golden hair, blue eyes, sitting motionless through the night--appear in "Porphyria's Lover.While Browning's narrator does not stab his beloved, he says that he "strangled her" with her own hair, mentions her drooping head, and marvels that he seems to have gotten away with his crime, for "God has not said a word! " 41,51,60).

But there are several details in Browning's poem that are not necessarily explained by the insane-murderer reading: The narrator tell us twice he is certain Porphyria felt no pain; in addition to this, he describes opening her eyes after he strangles her and seeing that "again / Laughed the blue eyes without a stain" (44-45).Equally perplexing are his reports that after he "untightened" Porphyria's tresses from around her neck, "her cheek once more / Blushed bright beneath my burning lips" (46-48) and that, while her head drooped upon his shoulder, it was also "smiling," "rosy," and "glad" (52-53). Finally, in Browning's account, instead of describing the lover as watching over a reclining dead woman, he says that he and Porphyria sat "together" all through the night.Browning's poems, as Isobel Armstrong has aptly remarked, "often have a double movement of seriousness and mockery or puzzlement" (283). In addition to this, Armstrong has commented that poems

such as "Pophryia's Lover" seem to have been "written deliberately to challenge, shock and test the responses of the unthinking reader" (288).

So it is reasonable to double back in reading "Porphyria's Lover" to consider the ossibility that Browning has folded into this poem the suggestion of an alternative but no less disturbing plot that might explain the anomalous details cited above.What if Browning wanted to titillate his readers with the possibility that instead of murdering Porphyria, the narrator has made love to her using erotic asphyxiation, a well-documented but dangerous sex game in which participants use some type of mechanism to impede the flow of oxygen to the brain in order to heighten sexual pleasure? Hazelwood et al. note that this behavior is much more common than might be expected ( 4), that it is practiced throughout the world 81) and surfaces repeatedly in art and literature ( 7-9), some of the earliest examples being Mayan relics dating from 1000 A.D. (14). Witnesses to public hangings in England were familiar with the fact that hanged men often experienced erection and even ejaculation.

More to the point, the private practice of brief asphyxiation for the purpose of sexual arousal is cited in various English and European texts, including Robert Herrick's poem "Upon Love" (1648); de Sade's Justine (1791); Gamiani, ou, Deux nuits d'exces (1833), attributed to Alfred de Musset; an anonymous English pamphlet entitled Modern Propensities: Or an Essay n the Art of Strangling (c. 792), as well as nineteenth-century editions of the London Times and English and Continental medical books. ( n3)If such a game were part of Porphyria's sexual initiation into the so-called "little death"

of orgasm, and if her lover untightened her tresses at the right moment, then Porphyria's eyes would still have been bright, and her cheek would in fact have blushed again, because she wasn't dead. n4).

The fact that Porphyria experienced no pain may be explained by a detail in the Modern Propensities pamphlet's account of how a dubious character named Parson Manacle ministered to a condemned oman who was terrified that hanging would be painful. In this story, which may well be a spoof, the parson first demonstrated erotic asphyxiation himself and then included the prisoner in his sex play in order to show her that hanging would not hurt.The pamphlet concludes that the poor woman's "ideas of hanging were greatly dissipated, and that she believed a few repetitions  would entirely remove her terrors" (qtd. in Hazelwood 21). Further support for the erotic asphyxiation reading can be found in the differences between the narrator's vivid description of Porphyria's appearance and those of the overs in the Blackwood's and Procter accounts.

The eyes of the dead woman in Blackwood's are blue, but also "dim," and her face is "fixed as ice" (qtd. in Mason 256). Procter's dead woman's blue eyes are covered by "a dull film," and her "pulse [is] silent" (qtd. in Mason 256).

Certainly such a reading is distasteful and rather creepy, but distasteful creepiness is common in Browning's dramatic monologues. For example, the Duke of Ferrara in "My Last Duchess" is unable to hide his ruthless and morbidly obsessive character; in "The Laboratory," a jilted woman from the French court excitedly buys poison for her lover and his ew paramour; and in "Soliloquy of the Spanish

Cloister," a Spanish monk reveals not only his lust for "brown Dolores" but also his extensive knowledge of scrofulous French novels.There are other reasons to consider this reading, including the likelihood that Browning exposes rather than colludes with the characters in his poems who objectify and oppress women sexually and socially (Maxwell 989). As Maxwell points out, at the beginning of the poem, Porphyria is clearly in charge, but the tables turn on her by the end of the poem.

This volte-face invites the audience to read ackwards and to move their focus from the behavior of the lover/narrator to Porphyria's plight.Apparently Porphyria is driven by a powerful sexual passion and the desire for agency, but she lives in a society that discourages both and that seems to allow only two alternatives for her sexually. This young woman is not yet the angel of some man's house, nor was she born to be a prostitute. We are told that she has left a "gay feast" and ridden out all alone on a stormy night to be with her lover, whose arm she boldly puts around her waist and to whom she enticingly bares her "smooth white shoulder" (16-17). These are learly the actions of a woman who feels and wishes to act upon sexual desire.

But Porphyria is also described as "Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor, / To set its struggling passion free / From pride (22-24). " These lines are usually read as a reference to the difference in social status between the lovers, one of the impediments to their being together that drove him to murder her. Alternatively, these lines might refer to

the pride and fear of a young gentlewoman who knows the likely consequences and social price to be paid if she sets her passion free outside of marriage in an age with no reliable birth control.Finally, we might take the poem's last line about God's silence to reflect Porphyria's concerns, not her lover's, for she is part of a society which taught young women that God himself would frown on them for freely expressing sexual desire. The evidence of a subplot of erotic asphyxiation under "Porphyria's Lover"'s primary narrative suggests that the sexual pathologies explored in the poem are more complicated and radical than we may have formerly thought.

It also supports the work of other scholars who have suggested that readers should look as seriously at Porphyria's story as they do at her lover's.