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My Last Duchess: 19th Century Logic About Women 11972 Views
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Description:
Hanging your wife's portrait above your fireplace? Romantic. Hanging it up after you've killed her? Not so much.
Transcript
- 00:07
My Last Duchess: Nineteenth Century Logic about Women, a la Shmoop
- 00:11
Ahh, romance.
- 00:13
Girl meets boy…
- 00:15
Boy marries girl…
- 00:16
Girl smiles too much…
Full Transcript
- 00:18
Boy kills girl.
- 00:19
16th century love was so touching. Robert Browning didn’t write My Last Duchess
- 00:24
during the Renaissance…
- 00:25
…instead, he took a creepy old story and gave it new life.
- 00:29
But maybe he didn’t just do it to make us all super uncomfortable.
- 00:33
Maybe he wrote the poem because psychopathic woman-hating still wasn’t out of style by
- 00:37
the 19th century, when he was writing.
- 00:39
The Duke in “My Last Duchess” is really just taking nineteenth century logic about
- 00:44
women… to an extreme. In the poem, he’s introducing his friend,
- 00:48
the Count, to his wife.
- 00:50
Sorry… a painting of his wife.
- 00:52
A painting of his dead wife…
- 00:55
…whom he may or may not have killed for smiling at other men.
- 00:59
But hey, close enough to the real thing, right? He even says: “there she stands as if alive.”
- 01:07
Because now she quote unquote “lives” the way he wants her to… no moving, no talking,
- 01:12
definitely no being nice to other people…
- 01:15
Now that she’s a painting, he can treat her the way he always wanted to: like a thing
- 01:18
he owns.
- 01:20
That’s my last Duchess, he says. You can tell he really sees women as objects…
- 01:25
…because he’s showing off this painting of his dead wife…
- 01:29
… to the Count whose daughter could be the newest Duchess.
- 01:31
So he’s bargaining for a dowry to “buy” his next wife…
- 01:35
…while casually dropping hints that he may have offed the other one for smiling.
- 01:40
Not that what he did was cool or anything…
- 01:44
…but maybe it wasn’t all the Duke’s fault.
- 01:46
Okay, he’s pretty creepy, but it’s not like he’s the only one here who’s bonkers.
- 01:50
We don’t hear the count raising any objections.
- 01:52
He’s there to sell his daughter, period.
- 01:54
He doesn’t much seem to mind that the buyer is …probably a psycho killer.
- 01:59
So if women are objects in the Duke’s culture…
- 02:02
…and in Browning’s culture, too…
- 02:04
…then is the Duke really that crazy to treat them that way?
- 02:09
Shmoop amongst yourselves.
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