"My Last Duchess": Paragon and Paregon.

Browning's "My Last Duchess": Paragon and Paregon

Browning's "My Last Duchess": Paragon and Paregon

There is here a problem of framing, of bordering and delimitation, whose analysis must be very. finely detailed if it wishes to ascertain the effects of fiction.

---Jacques Derrida, "Le facteur de la verite"

If we are to approach a text, it must have an edge.

---Jacques Derrida, "Living On: Border Lines"

The interaction of creativity with interpretation concerned Robert Browning throughout a career in which he made the dramatic monologue converge sound, silence and audition, as well as image and vision. Reading such a poem is like being drawn into it, having to side with its personae, while feeling extraneous or beside the point; more than sympathy or.judgment, these alternatives lead readers to self-reflection, to seeing themselves shifting between the center and the border of some artistic design. Nevertheless, as many readings of "My Last Duchess" show, "this most dramatically paragonal of all ekphrastic poems" (Heffernan 144) undermines such a simple scheme of moving or fixing readers. This dramatic monologue, arguably Browning's premier work, adds a pictorial, fourth dimension to the usual pattern of speaker and silent auditor in a momentous, reader-monitored situation. Eyeing the poem's nested utterances, we do not actually see fictitious Fra Pandolf's imaginary portrait of the "last Duchess" (line 1), whose peerless "looks" (24) from inside an iconic "wonder" (3) will supposedly imprint the envoy. Yet the painted work, surrounded by discourse and history, is invaluable as a touchstone--a paragon-- for appraising readers, who "turn" (9, 13), or change, to Browning or his personae. Our cognition of "My Last Duchess" is parergonal (i.e., framed and framing), like the Duke of Ferrara's intention to finish his wife as a person and as an objet d'art. But also like him, we find art...