Post Feminism' in Robert Browning's My Last Duchess

Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess focuses on the power dynamics of male gaze, objectification of female identity, aristocratic pride and authoritarian control. It interrogates the gender politics at work, silencing the female sexuality, commodification of women’s body and erasure of the Duchess’ voice. Duke symbolises the patriarchal possession and how the absence of Duchess’ signifies the intergeneration feminism as the voice of women in history, art and cultural memory had always been silenced. “To be silenced is not simply to be deprived of speech but to be deprived of subjectivity.” (Gilbert & Gubar 45). By silencing his wife (literally through death, symbolically through narration), the duke deprives her of subjectivity. The contemporary feminist concerns lie in the voice, agency and representation of a woman in this work. The contemporary debates of agency, visual pleasure and ideological containment from Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze and Rosalind Gill’s concept of postfeminist sensibility are dealt in the research paper.