Author: Carmine "Red" Zingiber

My Last Duchess by Robert Browning tells the story of a duke who has taken an advisor from another nobleman whose daughter the duke is trying to marry. On his tour, the duke runs across a portrait of his ex-wife. This is not his last wife because it is his final love; she was his most recent. This seems to imply that this is a constant string of marriages and murders for him, and the woman that we see in this portrait is his latest victim. The meeting with the advisor suggests he is not slowing down. This oppressive violence towards women becomes even more insidious when one takes into account that the possessive nature does not end at the death of the duchess. The painting itself is an act of violence against the woman, for it takes away her autonomy as it both stills and silences her. She is objectified in a literal sense. Trapped within the oil paints bought by the duke’s wealth, she is his forever. His wealth and standing allowed him to marry her in the first place, allowed him to capture her image, and allowed him to kill her without consequence. He even covers her with a curtain so that he alone may be allowed to dictate who is allowed to see her “(since none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)” (Browning). However, I think that the last three lines of the poem give the clearest demonstration of Browning’s intentions with this poem. Neptune taming a seahorse, a wild beast, made into a trophy, a possession. Similar to how the duke sought to tame his last duchess. Obvious symbology aside, how the duke talks about the trophy of Neptune is at the same level of grandeur as how he talks about his dead wife, and he moves on from her with startling ease. She is no more than a horse cast in bronze to him.

Help Me I’m Trapped Inside of This Computer,

Carmine “Red” Zingiber

“For example, he is immensely fat. Before this time I have always especially disliked corpulent humanity. I have always maintained that the popular notion of connecting excessive grossness of size and excessive good-humour as inseparable allies was equivalent to declaring, either that no people but amiable people ever get fat, or that the accidental addition of so many pounds of flesh has a directly favourable influence over the disposition of the person on whose body they accumulate. I have invariably combated both these absurd assertions by quoting examples of fat people who were as mean, vicious, and cruel as the leanest and the worst of their neighbours. I have asked whether Henry the Eighth was an amiable character? Whether Pope Alexander the Sixth was a good man? Whether Mr. Murderer and Mrs. Murderess Manning were not both unusually stout people? Whether hired nurses, proverbially as cruel a set of women as are to be found in all England, were not, for the most part, also as fat a set of women as are to be found in all England?—and so on, through dozens of other examples, modern and ancient, native and foreign, high and low. Holding these strong opinions on the subject with might and main as I do at this moment, here, nevertheless, is Count Fosco, as fat as Henry the Eighth himself, established in my favour, at one day’s notice, without let or hindrance from his own odious corpulence. Marvellous indeed!” (Collins PG)

The question of fatness as it relates to consumption is one that we see as the women in the story with bigger frames are framed as having bigger appetites. The framing of fatness as a moral failing is something that has persisted for only heaven knows how long and yet here we see another stereotype of fat people, that they are good-natured. Here we see Marian offer what seems to be a diatribe against the very idea of stereotypes in saying that they’re simply inane, “either that no people but amiable people ever get fat, or that the accidental addition of so many pounds of flesh has a directly favourable influence over the disposition of the person on whose body they accumulate. I have invariably combated both these absurd assertions by quoting examples of fat people who were as mean, vicious, and cruel as the leanest and the worst of their neighbours.” (Collins PG) This condemnation of bigotry, or at the very least the enumeration of the flaws of stereotyping is symbolic of the trope many Victorian novels have. They make a good point but they miss it entirely. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded is another such novel that seems to miss its own point. It shows a young woman getting groomed, it is written almost as a horror novel, and then she ends the novel marrying her groomer and it’s framed as a good thing. Victorian novels love to play at being subversive but at the end of the day they are invested in the creation and the upkeep of British “normalcy”. At the end of this novel our main character is raising white British children.

Writing from the side of the sea,

Red.

“The lady’s complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead. Her expression—bright, frank, and intelligent—appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete.” (Wilkie Collins Project Gutenberg)

The Victorians love phrenology almost as much as they love tea and biscuits. The idea that the way a person looks determines who they are is an insidious idea that is inherently racist because it holds traditionally white features in higher esteem and demeans and dehumanizes everyone else. This pseudoscience can be seen here as Walter Hartright demeans the woman’s features for not being European and Aryan enough. Large features as well as coarse black hair are seen as signs of ugliness. Additionally, this passage shows just how invested Walter is in the traditional ideas of masculinity. The intelligent features, which again is simply phrenology and there is no such thing as looking intelligent that isn’t built off of societal stereotypes that are built around the idea that rich white men are smart and capable which leads us to the ideas of social Darwinism which while I don’t believe has been put into explicit terms yet the idea of “the rich are just better” has been around since forever, are unbecoming to a woman because a woman’s role, in the mind of this fucking jackass, is to be silent and submissive which we see as he says, “while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability,” a woman’s role is to be silent, pretty, and most importantly, to fit into the cishet white patriarchy.

So long and thanks for all of the fish,

Carmine