Anxious Masculinities in Robert Browning and T.S. Eliot

This thesis examines how T.S. Eliot uses the dramatic monologue to expose the pathology and violence embedded in Victorian and early-modernist ideals of masculinity. The poets depict how repressed instinctual desires, pushed down by the restrictive expectations for men, can manifest as psychological neurosis and violence. Drawing on Freudian theory, I show how the male speakers in Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” “My Last Duchess,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” embrace the death drive in response to internal conflicts between instinctual desire and societal repression, revealing a critique of the destructive demands of masculine identity.