The duke is shown to be a control-freak, an over imaginative psychopath who finds fault in the innocence of his wife’s youth, and condemns her to death. He is full of self-importance, a trait that is tarnished and brought into question when his wife does not share his arrogance and haughty attitude. He shows an unnatural possessiveness towards her, presenting an unattractive, all-encompassing jealousy that wanted to eclipse all other interests that his duchess may have had. The death of the Duchess was a cold, calculated move by the Duke to remove the source of his jealousy. She did not value his nobility and all that it stood for; she did not deserve her position as Duchess, or live up to the responsibilities that her noble stance required. “She thanked men, - good! But thanked Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked my gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody’s gift.” The Duke describes how people are surprised by her seductive, passionate glance, and he gets very jealous when people admire the painting, thus he decides to hide the portrait behind some curtains and he acts like he still owns her in the way that he would own an object. He has, in his imagination, reduced his wives unimaginable beauty and grace, to a mere possession. ‘The depth of passion in that earnest glance, But to myself they turned, since none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you, but I’
In porphyria’s lover Browning weaves a compelling tale of mystery, murder and intrigue, which in equal parts disgusts and delights the reader. Through naturally flowing language, this poetic account of burning emotion within a setting of tranquil domesticity presents the all-consuming power of human sensuality in its bleakest attempt to override social structures. “That moment she was mine, mine, fair perfectly pure and good:” At that point of pure passion, the narrator’s lover belonged to him totally. To stop the struggles and conflicts of class discrimination that would prevent them from seeing each other, he decided to kill her. His act of strangulation was a crime of passion - it was not pre-meditated. The speaker's lust for precedence over other forces in Porphyria's life evidently leads to her fatal end. His ecstasy at her new, momentary devotion leaves him at the gate of attaining his dream. On the instantaneous realization of Porphyria's love, the speaker's passion and rational mind still stand separate to some extent. Browning's presenting the reader with an unreliable narrator serves only to intensify the psychological effects of his unrequited love, and says nothing for the supposed convictions and yearnings of Porphyria. While Porphyria finds her way to the speaker through the symbolically oppressive weather of the outside world, the speaker kills her upon realizing not only society's restrictions on their relationship, and maybe also his belief of Porphyria's own unwillingness to love him fully. Thus in freezing the moment and liberating the two of them from social structures, Browning distorts the deed to a point where it appears to be a divine event foreseen even by God. In toying with Porphyria's dead body, the narrator relates not the coldness of sudden death, nor the warmth of sitting with his love, but the blazing, untouchable serenity of enacted passion. While the suggested insanity of the speaker would traditionally indicate the narrator's unreliability in a moral sense, Browning constructs the isolated scene such that the lover's emotional internalization is understandable.
