Porphyria\'s Lover -- a Man in Love

Porphyria's Lover" -- a Man in Love with a Dead Ideal

"I knew Porphyria worshiped me," exclaims the narrator, and when Porphyria confirms that she does, she seals her doom as her lover vows to kill her, as she falls asleep by his side, near a comfortably roaring fire. This suggest that only when a woman is dead, according to Victorian ideology, can a man be sure that he possesses her utterly. This is why the speaker of Robert Browning's Victorian dramatic monologue poem "Porphyria's Lover" strangles his lover, despite the fact that the woman begins the poem "murmuring how she loved me," and is "too weak, for all her heart's endeavor," to resist him and to resist the temptation to give herself to him, completely and utterly. The idea that the woman has another past, with other men (whether in the speaker's envious fantasy or reality) or even the prospect that his lover might change her mind is too frightening for the speaker, so he takes the coil of her yellow hair and strangles her, silencing her for all eternity and thus, in his imagination, rendering the woman his and his alone, outside of the province of other men.

This scenario suggests, almost without question that Browning's speaker is a jealous man. "Nor could tonight's gay feast restrain," the speaker notes, nor entirely dissuades him from the idea that the "vainer ties" of the woman she swears she has endeavored to "dissever," -- that is the other men she has been tied to -- prevent her from giving herself to the speaker "to me forever," alone. At first he is happy and proud, in his words, that he has conquered the woman's affections. "At last l knew/Porphyria worshiped me: surprise/Made my heart swell, and still it grew." But almost immediately afterwards in the next line, he withdraws his own, mutual affection from the woman and decides plot is necessary. "While I debated what to do," the speaker of the poem enthuses; he immediately begins to concoct a plan to ensure that the woman cannot stray from his side again.

This is why, as she dozes by the fire, the speaker realizes that any living human being's affection is not a fixed and unchanging object. It is not mere love that the speaker demands, but outright worship and utter sureness and exclusivity in his lover's affection. Love for him is not in action, or even so much in a vow, but in inaction and passive beauty as, Porphyria's head, begins to nod. After he kills her, he marvels at the similarity between the head in sleep and in death, as the head, "which droops upon it still:/The smiling rosy little head, / So glad it has its utmost will, / That all it scorned at once is fled, / And I, its love, am gained instead!" So long as Porphyria is still beautiful and sill loves him, death and sleep are the same, as he wishes to keep her in "that moment she was mine, mine, fair, / perfectly pure and good." He comforts himself with the fact that, now dead, Porphyria will never violate the law and code of female chastity, nor play him false.

In other words, the "found" thing to do, that has been perplexing the speaker ever since Porphyria vowed her love and caused him such anxiety, after his initial pleasure is to kill the woman to keep her in such a passive state, where she cannot change her mind again. The woman is most perfect, not in the act of love, but in the act of being an object. The nature of men, Browning argues, is not merely that men are jealous of rivals, but jealous of even the possibility of rivals, of the idea that she might again entertain the idea of another man. A woman's desire as expressed for a man may shift, and she may break her vow. But when death deprives of her individual will as a sleeping or a dead object Porphyria is the speaker's utterly. Women are at their most sexually desirable when they are at their most passive, and able to be manipulated.

Interestingly enough, although the speaker says that Porphyria may have had another lover or may entertain other objects of affection, there is no proof in the poem that she was deceitful or unfaithful to the speaker. Rather, she makes a fire for him and swears her love towards him. The creation of Porphyria in the poem takes place in the speaker's mind, rather than in the actions of the women in the poem, as over the course of the poem the reader is not privy to the thoughts of the woman, but only sees the woman's beauty, spiritedness and then docility in the eyes of the speaker. This suggests that how men perceive women and female fidelity and sexuality is often more important than how women actually behave in life, in terms of the fate of woman in a misogynist society. The beauty of Porphyria's long hair and her choice of a lover are far more influential in determining her destiny than her individual will and choice.

The poem thus contains another suggestion through its plot -- that the construction of the ideal, unspeaking woman with beautiful yellow hair is one that cannot be achieved at all by a living woman. The ideals of society, the trappings of feminine beauty strangle Porphyria, and the qualities such as her hair that make her beautiful prove her undoing. Because Browning's male protagonist cannot see the woman as she truly is, too, this suggests the unspeaking and often uncommunicative nature of female sexuality, except in a physical sense. Porphyria is at her most, utterly physical as a corpse.

In Victorian society, Browning's cautionary dramatic monologue and fable suggests, men are most comfortable when a lover cannot articulate desire, and women are most perfect when they are unspeaking subjects, without their independent sexual wills, purely at the mercy of male desire.

Thus, the idea that Porphyria has had another life and other lovers before encountering the speaker makes the speaker unsure he can possess her. The Victorian ideal, of course, was that of an untouched virgin. Whether true or not, the speaker believes that his lover has a past that exists beyond his knowledge of her, and the only way to reduce her to a knowable, virgin state is to have her body, not her mind, and render her passive.