In a paper consisting of five pages a pragmatic feminist criticism of this poem is offered. Seven sources are cited in the bibliography.
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and hypocrisies that consume most. Browning portrayed his characters in terms of his society - what was accepted and what was evident and yet denied. In Brownings poetry,
devaluing love affairs are attributed to the patriarchal nature of the male characters. This is clearly seen in the poem, The Last Duchess. The student will want to
know that a pragmatic opinion is one based on personal and philosophical beliefs. The poem, The Last Duchess, may be addressed in terms of a feminist view where the
audience is responding to the difference between the social norms of the Victorian era as compared with modern thought. It is true that beauty is in the eye
of the beholder. What is thought of as art is a compilation of what one believes is truth, what one fears, how the world is viewed and the value
that is placed in the realm of the spiritual. In other words, the cultural beliefs held by the individual. The culture itself has a strong influence on how
a certain message is perceived and interpreted. Reading the poems of Robert Browning is, as Joseph Dupras so aptly puts it, "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" (3). The use of audience for the poem adds to the inclination toward comparing the Victorian view with the modern, feminist, view. Differences within
cultures such as gender, class, race, ethnicity, religion and sexual preferences have been used by those in power to construct hierarchical, exploitative systems of ruling. The institutions structuring power