On the Entrapment and Incarceration of the Victorian Woman Essay

Thomas Blackburn describes the two prissy poets, Robert toasting and Alfred, passe-partout Tennyson as being great contemporaries (47). As such it is intelligent that their works should muse upon and explore similar topics and themes. Their connection is especially observable in Brownings My Last Duchess and Tennysons The chick of Shalott. The themes of entrapment and imprisonment feature heavily in both of these works. Specifically, it is the entrapment and incarceration of women which pervade their single compositions. When taking into consideration the way in which women were viewed at this juncture in history- being nothing more than beautiful objects (Gilbert and Gubar 54), it is quite easy to fix how the literary representations of the nineteenth century woman would be responses to such confines. enchantment My Last Duchess can be looked upon as an investigation of the captor, represented by the Duke The Lady of Shalott can be considered an exploration into the captive , represented by the Lady that gives the meter its title. Both poems are an analysis into the Victorian woman as an incarcerated and entrapped sub-culture of a predominately patriarchal society. It is no surprise then that the methods of which these fictional women channelise to escape comes at the cost of their lives.The doomed Duchess of Robert Brownings hammy monologue, My Last Duchess is the embodiment 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 marriage as bondage is consistently explored throughout Brownings early wor... ...y 16.1 (1978) 70-87.Jospeh, Gerhard. Tennysons Optics The Eagles Gaze. PMLA 92.3 (1977) 420-428.Langbaum, Robert. The verse line of Experience The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition. New York W.W. No rton & Company, Inc., 1957.McGhee, Richard. Marriage, Duty, & Desire in Victorian numbers and Drama. Lawrence The Regents Press of Kansas, 1980.Orr, Mrs. Sutherland. Handbook to Robert Brownings Works. 6th Edition. London George Bell and Sons, 1899.Plasa, Carl. Cracked from aspect to Side Sexual 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.