Channels, Spring 2017

Page 8 Werneburg • Encountering the Phantasmagoria duchess in order to force his stable meaning onto the portrait speaks to the unnaturalness of the expectations he places on the duchess as well as to the ultimate unreality of Raphaelite beauty. Browning suggests that the Raphaelite conception of beauty inadvertently purges all true spiritual life from the work of art as a result of its idealism. The duke can only “call / That piece a wonder, now ,” after he has done away with the portrait’s real referent (2-3, my emphasis). When the duke kills the duchess, he makes the painted duchess only “As if alive,” whereas before he killed her, the painting itself was alive by virtue of its pointing to the sacred reality of the real duchess (47). Ironically, the duke’s desire to kill the real referent of the portrait proves his own spiritual deadness, for he always chooses the image over the living thing itself. In contrast to the duke, the duchess is aligned with Baudelaire’s perfect flaneur , with Pre- Raphaelite aesthetics, and with sacramental realism. She exemplifies the curiosity that Baudelaire designates the mark of genius. She is keenly interested in everything that catches her eyes: “she liked whate’er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere” (24). The duchess, like the flaneur , does not find any pleasure in distinction, which is precisely what astonishes and frustrates the duke: Sir, ‘twas all one! My favour at her breast, The dropping of the daylight in the West, The bough of cherries some officious fool Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule She rode with round the terrace—all and each Would draw form her alike the approving speech, Or blush, at least. (25-31) The duchess derives spiritual joy through her natural “appetite for the non-I” (Baudelaire 684). She rebels against her husband’s tyrannical possessiveness because of her instinct to become “one flesh with the crowd” (683). The duchess is continually absorbed with the project of accessing sacred reality through ordinary human experiences. That’s what the duke can’t stand. The duke’s identity depends on his construction of himself as the subject and everything and everyone else as an object. Whereas the duchess, like the flaneur , recognizes that she is most spiritually alive in the space between subject and object. The duchess’ and Fra Pandolf’s ability to mutually recognize each other as subjects (and Fra Pandolf’s ability to faithfully record this process) gives rise to the phantasmagoric portrait. Both of them are willing to become the object of the other. When the duke first saw the portrait, he recoiled in terror because he experienced the phantasmagoria—he recognized a spiritual vivacity in the duchess that made him aware of the emptiness of his own identity, which was built up of external signs. The duchess in the portrait was far too lifelike for the duke’s Raphaelite tastes—he had to ensure that the duchess of the portrait was only “As if alive” and only a disembodied ideal for which he could set the terms (47). Browning’s poem suggests, then, that in the same way that the duke’s murder of the duchess reveals his own insufficiency, so the Victorian art establishment discrediting the nineteenth century Pre-Raphaelites speaks to the incompetence of the art establishment