Interpretation as Authority: Gendered Violence and the Politics of Speech in Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover and My Last Duchess

In Porphyria’s Lover and My Last Duchess Robert Browning turns to the structural absence of rebuttal built into the dramatic monologue to represent violence as an exercise of authority that claims unilateral control over the interpretation of meaning. This contribution maps the rhetorical and formal strategies by which each speaker sustains this asymmetry – from the effacement of agency to the manufacture of female deficiency and the distortion of inferential logic. Browning treats gendered power as a political problem whose enabling assumptions are embedded in the received codes of the Victorian period and well beyond it, grounded in the same languages of measure and moral order that would ordinarily be called upon to recognise and resist it.