Channels, Spring 2017

Channels • 2017 • Volume 1 • Number 2 Page 1 Encountering the Phantasmagoria: Pre- Raphaelite Aesthetics as the Antidote for Victorian Decadence in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” Matthew Werneburg English — Cedarville University Introduction n his dramatic monologue, “My Last Duchess,” published in 1842, Robert Browning chooses for his speaker a sixteenth century Duke of Ferrara. The duke directs his audience’s attention to a portrait of his last duchess, whom he has killed, as is made clear by the poem’s end. A footnote in the Longman Anthology of British Literature notes that the duke in Browning’s poem is based on the historical Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso II, “who married the 14-year-old Lucrezia de Medici in 1558” (1328). When Lucrezia died in 1561, many people suspected that she had been poisoned, and in 1565, Alfonso II took another duchess. The duke’s monologue centers on a painted portrait of his duchess, and the portrait seems to have caused him to break from his self-restrained aloofness and murder his duchess. But what exactly is it about the portrait that so disturbs the duke? As I will show, the answer to this question lies in Browning’s engagement with the problem of Raphael, a Victorian aesthetic debate that Browning uses to underscore Victorian society’s spiritual impotence—the necessary result of its emphasis on external appearances. Charles Baudelaire’s Aesthetics Charles Baudelaire’s concepts of the “perfect flaneur” and the “dandy,” described in his The Painter of Modern Life, provide a useful theoretical lens for evaluating “My Last Duchess.” For Baudelaire, the artistic vision of the perfect flaneur, also called the “man of the world,” presents an antithesis to nineteenth century academies’ and connoisseurs’ fetishization of Raphael (683). Baudelaire laments the fact that many spectators at the Louvre rush “past rows of very interesting, though secondary, pictures, to come to a rapturous halt in front of a Titian or a Raphael—one of those that have been most popularized by the engraver’s art; then they will go home happy, not a few saying to themselves, ‘I know my Museum’” (681). For Baudelaire, Raphael “does not contain the whole secret.” Baudelaire’s goal is to “establish a rational and historical theory of beauty, in contrast to the academic theory of a unique and absolute beauty” (681). Baudelaire conceives of a two-fold beauty, “made up of an eternal, invariable element, . . . and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be . . . the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions. Without this second element . . . the first I