Channels, Spring 2017

Channels • 2017 • Volume 1 • Number 2 Page 7 or body; however, we must bear in mind the circumstances of the poem: the duke is presenting his case to an ambassador of some aristocrat in the hopes that this aristocrat will give his daughter in marriage to the duke (49-53). Accordingly, the duke is trying to present himself as favorably as possible, and in order to do so, he must explain the death of his previous duchess in a manner that does not reflect poorly on himself. If the duchess did stray, it would bespeak some lack on the part of the duke—it would suggest that the duke had not been masculine enough to rule over and control his wife (Mazurek 435). Consequently, the ambassador would likely perceive the duke as unfit to rule in other matters like business and politics. If the duke could not control his wife, then he is not someone whom the ambassador’s master could prudently enter into a business arrangement with. So the duke invents another explanation for his motivation to murder the duchess. He claims that his last duchess was low-minded—“She had a heart, how shall I say?—too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed” (21-23). Here, the duke seems to suggest that the duchess’ blushes arose involuntarily as a result of her deviant mind, which refused to recognize the self-evident primacy of the duke over the other people and things in the duchess’ world. Her smile, her blush, her thanks distributed evenly to those around her made it seem, to the duke, “as if she ranked / My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name / with anybody’s gift” (34). The duke’s testimony of his duchess’ deviant mind is a performance that allows him to deny, both to himself and to the ambassador, something lacking in himself. It seems as though the duke is suffering from both a sexual and a spiritual insecurity or impotence. Browning forces his Victorian readers to recognize the marks of their own culture in the duke in order to make a case for Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics and sacramental forms of religious worship that depend on a belief in sacramental realism. As I have pointed out several times already, Browning’s audience would have recognized the duke as a Victorian dandy. The duke’s identity is based on his material property and his dignified manners. He takes pleasure in astonishing his guests with the wonders and rarities of his gallery while never allowing himself to be astonished. His identity is determined by things external to himself: things that he nonetheless expects the duchess and the ambassador to interpret as referring directly to him and conferring nobility on him. Thus he expects the duchess to recognize the distinction of his “nine-hundred-years-old name.” His reliance on external signs as the mark of his dignity causes the duke to place the portrait of the duchess in his gallery and cover it with a curtain that only he “puts by” to reveal the painting (9). By killing the duchess and preserving the portrait—which is only revealed to the duke’s guests when he is standing by, waiting for his guest’s to ask “How such a glance came there”— the duke has ensured that the duchess’ smiles refer only to himself, bear only his impress (12). The duke’s insistence upon his own distinction above everyone else’s, as well has his absolutist notions of how the duchess ought to control her appearance (he wants to be able to tell her “Just this / Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss, / Or there exceed the mark”) serve to associate the duke with the Raphaelite conception of beauty, which is governed by strict rules (37-39). The duke’s expectations for how the duchess ought to comport herself are unrealistic and unnatural, like Raphael’s idealized beauty. The duke’s apparent affinity for classical art—“Notice Neptune, though, / Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity”—also marks him for a Raphaelite (54-55). The fact that the duke must kill the