The Role of Art and Objectification in Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess"

Robert Browning's dramatic monologue "My Last Duchess" (1842) presents a chilling portrait of patriarchal domination through the aestheticisation of female subjugation. This study employs feminist art criticism and historical contextual analysis to interrogate how Browning's Duke of Ferrara transforms his late wife into an object of artistic possession, thereby enacting posthumous control over her identity and narrative. The research investigates three key dimensions of objectification in the poem: (1) the material objectification of the Duchess through her reduction to a portrait, (2) the discursive objectification through the duke’s manipulative narration, and (3) the institutional objectification within Renaissance aristocratic marriage customs. Drawing on John Berger's theories of the male gaze and Griselda Pollock's feminist art historiography, the analysis demonstrates how Browning critiques the intersection of aesthetic appreciation and gendered violence in nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. The paper further reveals how the poem's dramatic monologue form itself becomes complicit in the Duchess's silencing, as Browning crafts an ironic tension between the duke’s self-revelation and his intended self-presentation. By situating the work within the tradition of ekphrastic poetry and Renaissance portraiture conventions, this study illuminates Browning's sophisticated commentary on how art functions simultaneously as a vehicle for memorialization and as an instrument of patriarchal control. The findings suggest that "My Last Duchess offers a prescient critique of the gendered power dynamics inherent in both artistic representation and marital institutions that remains disturbingly relevant in contemporary discussions of gender and representation.