My Last Duchess

The speaker in the poem “My Last Duchess” written by Robert Browning appears to be a selfish man. The speaker is talking in the poem to a person about marrying a counts daughter. The speaker tells the person about his last wife as a way to inform the person he is talking to about how he expects his new wife to act. The Dutch makes his last duchess seem like she was with many men and cheating on him. It’s hard to tell if she was actually cheating on him physically or if he just assumed that she was with the looks that she gave to other people. A really good example in the poem of this is when the speaker stated “She looked on, and her looks went everywhere. Sir, t’was all for one!” (Browning, lines 25 and 25). The Dutch saw himself as important and it really bothered him that she wasn’t grateful to be his wife. An example of this in the poem was when the speaker said “My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame This sort of trifling?” (Browning, lines 33, 34, and 35). These lines really show how arrogant this speaker is. He thinks that she should have felt honored to be with him. As arrogant as he was he was still easily a jealous person. If the duchess even gave someone the same smile that she had given to him he would assume there was more going on. This is shown in the poem when it says “Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! But thanked Somehow—I know not how” (Browning, lines 31 and 32). It seems that the speaker let who he was affect how he saw other people. Since he was a Dutch, he saw people has his own personal objects. This is shown when the speaker states “though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed At starting, is my object.” (Browning, lines 51 and 52). He strongly thought he was above everyone else.