The Denial of Female Autonomy: Possession and Power in Robert Browning’s Dramatic Monologues

This study examines the denial of female autonomy in Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, focusing on “My Last Duchess,” “The Laboratory,” “Andrea del Sarto,” and “Porphyria’s Lover.” It argues that possession in these poems emerges from a desire to restrict, appropriate, or eliminate women’s capacity to exercise independent desires, choices, and identities. While existing readings of Browning’s dramatic monologues have explored gender, jealousy, violence, sexuality, marriage, and psychological conflict, the relationship between the denial of female autonomy and the possessive exercise of power requires further comparative attention. Drawing on Feminist Literary Theory, the study employs qualitative textual analysis to examine how the speakers respond to women whose autonomy challenges their desires, expectations, or authority. The analysis reveals that possession takes different forms across the poems, including marital control, artistic appropriation, emotional domination, sexual possessiveness, and retaliatory violence. It further demonstrates that Browning presents possessive desire as deeply connected to the refusal to recognise women as autonomous subjects. The study concludes that the poems expose the psychological and violent consequences of transforming female autonomy into an obstacle to be controlled rather than a condition to be respected.