How Does Browning Tell the Story in “My Last Duchess”

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The dramatic irony of the story is held in tension by the fact that the Duke reveals more to us as readers than he knows to be telling his listener. Though he is able to suspend the disbelief of his listener, as he directs the emissary’s eyes to the painting of the Duchess and asks him “please” to “sit and look at her”, he is ultimately unable to suspend our own; the self-reflexive nature of the poem, which is sustained in Browning’s heroic couplets, forces us to interpret the Duke’s story as a self-conscious performance rather than a truthful account of his late wife. The Duke’s preface to the story behind the portrait of the Duchess is an attempt to hide the fact that he has murdered his late wife, and to seduce the emissary into his authoritative interpretation of her character as revealed in the painting. Though he flatters his inferior by speaking to him as a familiar “you” and “Sir”, his polite condescension does not “stoop” to the emissary’s level, but rather establishes who is in charge. While he paints over his command to sit – “Will’t please you sit and look at her” – with flattery, he does not hesitate to remind his listener of the privilege he has to be shown the painting in the first place: “since none puts by/The curtain I have drawn for you, but I”. Furthermore, he indicates that without “turn[ing]” to his presence, “Strangers like [the emissary]” will never understand the “depth and passion of its earnest glance”. We never hear the listener ask to be told the story; while it can be implied that he has asked (“not the first/Are you to turn and ask thus”), his voice is excluded from the narrative, and the reader believes that the story will be told regardless of the emissary’s

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