Channels, Spring 2017

Channels • 2017 • Volume 1 • Number 2 Page 9 itself. In “My Last Duchess,” the underlying threat of the duchess communing with Fra Pandolf rather than with her husband activates the English fear that the reintroduction of certain sacraments and rituals would become a means for priests and prelates to invade the sanctity of the hearth. Yet Browning’s poem subtly points to the real reasons anti- Catholic Victorians denied the efficacy of the sacraments and labeled Catholics as licentious: protestant attacks on Catholics and Ritualists served to deflect Protestant anxieties over the inefficacy of their own forms of worship. Raphael and the Pre-Raphaelites Through reading “My Last Duchess” in light of Baudelaire’s treatment of the problem of Raphael, we see how Browning’s poem dramatizes the conflict between the perfect flaneur and the dandy, between the established Raphaelite ideal and the Pre-Raphaelite movement, between conservative Protestant forms of worship and Anglo-Catholics’ return to devotional images and sacramental realism. Browning demonstrates how, in the realm of aesthetics and forms of worship, the dominant power exercises tyranny by controlling and qualifying the image and annihilating its true referent. In order to escape this tyranny and to accomplish true spiritual growth, we must abandon the idolatry of the sign and instead seek access to the sacred reality behind the signs. For Browning, the true work of art connects the audience to a spiritual reality by forcing viewers to look for the sacred in the natural, ordinary human reality, not in some idealized version of reality.