“Gained Instead”: A Study of Power in Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”

On the surface, Robert Browning‟s poem, “Porphyria‟s Lover” is a straightforward piece. 1 The plot begins with the speaker, a man, being visited at night by his lover, Porphyria, and ends ultimately with him strangling her. It is a simple story, albeit a distressing one. As literary critic Catherine Ross notes in her article, “Browning‟s Porphyria’s Lover,” the “standard reading” of the poem is that Browning‟s narrator is mentally unstable or “insane,” which allows him to commit the crazed, criminal act of murdering his beloved (Ross 1). In her book Robert Browning, Isobel Armstrong adds that the poem itself is an “attempt to examine... neurotic or insane behavior, and in particular the pathology of sexual feeling” (Armstrong 288). Certainly, the act of strangling Porphyria does initially seem insane – an act without a clear or actual rationale – yet this widely held critical view of Browning‟s piece is perhaps too myopic. Madness, after all, says little about anything else other than itself. It is the intention of this paper to prove that “Porphyria‟s Lover” is a far more complicated piece than a basic tale of a deranged man who commits a deranged act. Textual evidence supports a different, more complex, and perhaps more troubling reading – that Porphyria‟s death is the deed of a sane man, motivated by the lust for power. Browning‟s poem was first published in 1836 in the Monthly Repository, a British literary journal (Broadview Anthology 226). The only details the poem reveals about the poem‟s speaker is that he is a man and that Porphyria is his lover. If it is to be assumed that the speaker is also British and is also living in the Victorian Era, then these characters and the murder itself can be greater understood by contextualizing them in terms of the Victorian time period and culture. Porphyria‟s murder can then be interpreted as being motivated by the Victorian understanding of gender roles, the state‟s stance on the morality of its citizens, and concepts of artistic creation. “Porphyria‟s Lover” then becomes a poem that is fundamentally about neither love nor death, but one concerned primarily with power.