On the Entrapment and Incarceration of the Victorian Woman Essay

Thomas Blackburn describes the two Victorian poets, Robert brown and Alfred, Lord Tennyson as be great contemporaries (47). As such it is apt that their works should mull over upon and explore similar topics and themes. Their connection is especially evident in Brownings My Last Duchess and Tennysons The Lady of Shalott. The themes of entrapment and incarceration feature heavily in both of these works. Specifically, it is the entrapment and incarceration of women which pervade their respective compositions. When taking into favor the way in which women were viewed at this juncture in history- being postal code more than beautiful objects (Gilbert and Gubar 54), it is quite easy to see how the literary representations of the ordinal century woman would be responses to such confines. While My Last Duchess potty be looked upon as an investigation of the captor, represented by the Duke The Lady of Shalott heap be considered an exploration into the captive, represented by the Lady that gives the poem its title. both poems are an analysis into the Victorian woman as an incarcerated and entrapped sub-culture of a predominately decrepit society. It is no surprise then that the methods of which these fictional women take to escape comes at the cost of their lives.The doomed Duchess of Robert Brownings dramatic monologue, My Last Duchess is the soma of the incarcerated woman taken to the eternal extreme. The setting for this poem is the Italy of the Middle Ages, a time when women had still less freedom than in the Victorian era. Women were regarded as possessions, a form of imprisonment within itself. As Johnson states the theme of wedding ceremony as bondage is consistently explored throughout Brownings beforehand(predicate) wor... ...y 16.1 (1978) 70-87.Jospeh, Gerhard. Tennysons Optics The Eagles Gaze. PMLA 92.3 (1977) 420-428.Langbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Experience The Dramatic Monologue in Modern literary Tradition. New York W.W. Norton & Company, In c., 1957.McGhee, Richard. Marriage, Duty, & Desire in Victorian Poetry and Drama. Lawrence The Regents urge of Kansas, 1980.Orr, Mrs. Sutherland. handbook to Robert Brownings Works. 6th Edition. London George Bell and Sons, 1899.Plasa, Carl. Cracked from Side to Side versed Politics in The Lady of Shalott. Victorian Poetry 30.3 (1992) 247-263.Ricks, Christopher. Tennyson. London The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1972.Showalter, Elaine and English Showalter. Victorian Women and Menstruation. Victorian Studies 14.1 (1970) 83-89.Showalter, Elaine. Victorian Women and Insanity. Victorian Studies 23.2 (1980) 157-181.