ENGLISH 102

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The Duchess of Ferrara and the Countess Gismond: Two Sides of the Andromeda Myth Author: Sidney Coulling Date: 1986 From: Studies in Browning and His Circle(Vol. 14) Reprint In: Poetry Criticism(Vol. 97) Document Type: Critical essay Length: 9,006 words

Full Text: [(essay date 1986) In the following essay, Coulling examines two Browning poems--"My Last Duchess" and "Count Gismond"-- concluding that both may be seen "as deriving from the same initial impulse."]

In a well-known essay, "The Virgin and the Dragon," William C. DeVane observed that the Andromeda pattern could be traced, in "one form or another," throughout Browning's life and works. As illustrations he cited a number of poems, among them "Count Gismond" and "The Flight of the Duchess," in both of which the lady is saved, and "My Last Duchess," in which there is no "rescue of outraged innocence."1 On other occasions DeVane seemed less sure of the relationship these poems bore to each other, at one time remarking that the Duchess of Ferrara "appears with altered features" in "The Flight of the Duchess,"2 and at another time referring to the connection between "My Last Duchess" and "Count Gismond" as "somewhat meretricious."3 But today, after forty years of commentary that has obscured almost as much as it has illuminated "My Last Duchess" and "Count Gismond," DeVane's perception that they reflect opposing sides of the Andromeda myth seems more valid than he apparently realized. In this article, accordingly, I shall argue that one way of explaining some still unresolved difficulties in "My Last Duchess" and of correcting some recent misreadings of "Count Gismond" is to see the two poems as deriving from the same initial impulse.

I

The two poems (or, more precisely, "My Last Duchess" and the first eight stanzas of "Count Gismond") originally appeared side by side, on a page of double columns, placed under the general heading "Italy and France" and entitled "I. Italy" and "II. France."4

Visually, therefore, they invited comparison, more noticeable in 1842 than now because of the parallel between the Duke's pointed emphasis on the Duchess's "earnest glance" (8)5 and (in a line later revised) the Countess's assertion that Gauthier struck her "honor's face" (6). But even when separated seven years later and given new titles ("My Last Duchess. Ferrara" and "Count Gismond. Aix in Provence") the two poems remained linked by visual, dramatic, verbal, and thematic details. In both poems, for instance, the scene is three-dimensional: the Duke discusses his former Duchess with the Count's emissary as they look at her picture on the wall, and while Gismond talks with his boys at the gate the Countess tells Adela of his rescuing her from Gauthier. The Duke mentions Frà Pandolf's name "by design" (6), and Gauthier, according to the Countess, "must have schemed" (8). Whereas the Duke chooses "Never to stoop" (43), the Countess's friends made her "stoop / Under the canopy" (33-34). The Duke and the emissary "go / Together down" (53-54), and the Countess and her cousins "descend the castle-stairs" (30) arm in arm. The Duke's dissatisfaction with the Duchess and Gauthier's accusation of the Countess are related through a series of correspondences: the "spot of joy" (14-15, 21) on the Duchess's cheeks and her looks that "went everywhere" (24) to the Countess's enjoying "the heart of the joy" (80) and her looking "North, South, / East, West" (76-77), and the Duke's disclaiming "skill / In speech" (35-36) and commanding "all smiles" (46) to stop to the Countess's disbelief that "such a thing / As answer" (62-63)6 was possible and Gauthier's order to "Bring no crowns" (60). In each poem the tête-à -tête ends as speaker and guest join or are joined by others, and closure in each is effected by the monologuist's diverting attention to, in the one instance, the statue of Neptune and, in the other, the Countess's tercel. Both poems, finally, blur the distinction between appearance and reality--visitors seem as if they would question the Duke about the Duchess's glance, and the Countess seemed happy and thought her cousins loved her--and both leave unanswered some fundamental questions about the character, motivation, and guilt of the principals.

But a more central link may be embedded in the initial words of the Duke, who begins with a remark of chilling nonchalance: "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive" (1-2). The terse independent clause, opening with a trochee that emphasizes the picture rather than its subject, declares what for the Duke is the reality of the Duchess--not the person herself, but her image;7 and the past participle that follows, defining her as fixed in lifeless immobility, is immediately offset by a present participle asserting her lifelike appearance. It is this phenomenon--a representation that appears, as the waxworks of Madame Tussaud or the animations of Walt Disney seem to their admirers, more real than life itself--that the Duke pronounces to be a wonder.8

Then, after informing the envoy that the painting is the product of a day's work by Frà Pandolf and inviting him to "sit and look at her" (5)--not the picture but the Duchess herself--the Duke continues:

I said "Frà Pandolf" by design, for never read Strangers like you that pictured countenance, The depth and passion of its earnest glance, But to myself they turned (since none puts by The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, How such a glance came there; so, not the first Are you to turn and ask thus. (5-13) The passage, the most enigmatic in the poem, teases us out of thought. Are those who view the painting of the Duchess for the first time so struck by her glance that they indeed wish to ask, if they dared (because of the intimidating presence of the Duke, or because of the impertinence of the question?), how it "came there," or is the idea of asking simply the Duke's invention?9 (The conditional "seemed as they would ask me" becomes almost immediately the declarative "not the first / Are you to turn and ask thus.") Is the source of the glance a question of how the artist was able to depict it or of what caused it to appear in the Duchess's countenance?10

And why does the Duke mention Frà Pandolf by name and declare that he does so "by design"?11

Browning once responded to this last question with the characteristically offhand explanation, "To have some occasion for telling the story, and illustrating part of it."12 The answer is patently evasive, the Duke having an opportunity to tell his story regardless of the artist's identity, and at odds with every other use in Browning's poetry of the word design,13 invariably denoting a careful, preconceived plan. Unless the Duke is employing the word in a different sense, therefore, he has a purpose in dropping Frà Pandolf's name, though he never divulges what that purpose is.

Three explanations have been offered, none of them altogether satisfactory. The most common is that the Duke is proudly showing off to the Count's emissary one of his most prized possessions, a work by a famous artist.14 The name being fictitious, however, we have no means by which to judge either the artist or his work and hence no way of determining whether the Duke is a connoisseur or a tasteless collector, or whether the painting is a masterpiece or trash or even whether it is a portrait or a fresco.15 A more ingenious explanation is that the Duke deliberately identifies Pandolf as a monk in order to avoid so much as a hint of an affair between the artist and his subject.16 Yet the Duke would hardly show the picture at all if it aroused suspicion that he had been cuckolded, and besides, as Fra Lippo Lippi testifies, monastic vows are no guarantee that one will "never kiss the girls" (225). In any case this second explanation is cancelled by a third, which suggests that Browning intentionally gave the artist the name Pandolf in order to link him to a lover named Pandolfo in a popular Renaissance tale and thus lend support to the implied charge of adultery.17 Whatever the literary interest of this parallel, from the point of view of understanding the poem one might argue with equal logic that just as Gandolf was the Bishop's rival, so Pandolf (whose name differs by the first rather than the final letter) is the Duke's.

To approach the question more satisfactorily it is helpful to recall the implied connection between the name of the artist and the reason (as given by the Duke) a viewer is first interested in the painting--curiosity about the source of "The depth and passion of her earnest glance." The connection may be explained in a number of ways, the most plausible of which is that Frà Pandolf himself caused the glance, which "came there" (in the eyes of the living Duchess) because his presence or words or actions elicited it, or that he was not himself the cause of the glance, which had its source elsewhere, but that it "came there" (in the picture) because he rendered it with a fidelity that arrests the attention of the viewer. The first of these explanations is weakened by its making the Duke touch on a matter--cuckoldry--that would be the last thing he would mention and by its confusing the glance with the "spot of joy"18

which the Duke does indeed say Pandolf may have caused but which had other causes as well. The second explanation, on the other hand, presents no such difficulty and is worth pursuing.

Countenances with some or all of the qualities of the Duchess's glance--depth, passion, and earnestness--are found in a number of poems by Browning, notably Pauline, where Andromeda makes her first appearance:

Andromeda! And she is with me: years roll, I shall change, And change can touch her not--so beautiful With her fixed eyes, earnest and still. ... (656-59) Later the image is associated with Pauline herself, whom the speaker implores:

Leave me not, Still sit by me with beating breast and hair Loosened, be watching earnest by my side. (925-27) Both passages are Shelleyan in their mingling of the sensuous and the spiritual, as in Laon and Cythna:

then, Cythna by my side, Until the bright and beaming day were spent, Would rest, with looks entreating to abide, Too earnest and too sweet ever to be denied or

her still and earnest face,

Pallid with feelings which intensely glowed Within, was turned on mine with speechless grace.19

But though derived from Shelley, the image of passionate and earnest eyes takes on a new significance in Browning. As Constance W. Hassett has in effect noted, it becomes a principal characteristic of his "tales of deliverance."20

It appears, for example, in our first glimpse of Palma, "passion's votaress" (5:998), as she stands with her "earnest eyes" (1:331) beside the reclining Sordello. Although betrothed to Count Richard she has longed for "some out-soul" to direct the "force" she feels within her, and she finds it, in what proves to be the pivotal moment of Sordello's life, when "outburst / One face from all the faces" and Sordello is "recognized, accepted" (3:319-21, 353-54, 359).

Later it reappears at a crucial point in "The Flight of the Duchess," a poem that bears an obvious resemblance to "My Last Duchess." Just as the first Duchess had a heart "too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed; she liked what'er / She looked on, and her looks went everywhere" (22-24), so the other Duchess was almost too small "for the life and gladness / That over-filled her" (137-38):

In truth, she was not hard to please! Up she looked, down she looked, round at the mead, Straight at the castle. ... (141-43) Just as the one Duchess seemed to thank indiscriminately, so the other

as much thanked me as if she had said it, (With her eyes, do you understand?) Because I patted her horse while I led it. (146-48) Just as the Duke of Ferrara regarded the Duchess as his possession, so "the Duke's plan admitted a wife, at most, / To meet his eye, with the other trophies" (186-87). Just as the one Duke would not "stoop to blame" (34) or correct the Duchess, so his counterpart thought giving his wife a "rebuff" not "contemptuous enough" (204-05). And just as "all smiles stopped together" after the Duke's commands (46), so "The lady's face stopped its play" at the Duke's appearance.

The poems diverge, however, in the contrasting uses they make of the image which provides the most significant parallel. Although the depth and passion of her earnest glance are the most arresting qualities of the painted Duchess, they were manifestly insufficient to save the living Duchess. But depth and passion were precisely the means by which the other Duchess was reached and saved. When the narrator who helped her "cast off [the Duke's] yoke" (3) thought of rescuing her from the crone, he "was stopped by the lady's expression":

For it was life her eyes were drinking From the crone's wide pair above unwinking, --Life's pure fire received without shrinking. (539-42) Her cheeks burning and eyes glistening, she hears the crone tell her:

I bid my people prove and probe Each eye's profound and glorious globe Till they detect the kindred spark In those depths so dear and dark. (577-80) And placing before the Duchess the choice between life with the gypsies and continuing enslavement to the Duke she declares:

those passionate eyes speak true, speak true, Let them say what thou shalt do! (648-49) Liberation comes to this Duchess with her profound, passionate, truth-proclaiming expression, but not to the timid, procrastinating lady in the "The Statue and the Bust," where the image appears, as in "My Last Duchess," embalmed in a work of art that grimly records a life lost. Imprisoned by her jealous husband, her youth and beauty having long since vanished and her love for the Duke Ferdinand still unfulfilled, the wife of Riccardi commissions a bust depicting "The passionate pale lady's face--/ Eyeing ever, with earnest eye / ... / Some one who ever is passing by" (192-95).

Not surprisingly the image reappears in the poem that most insistently invites comparison with the Andromeda myth, The Ring and the Book. When Caponsacchi recalls the sight of Pompilia at her window, he describes her expression as

the same great, grave, griefful air As stands i' the dusk, on altar that I know, Left alone with one moonbeam in her cell, Our Lady of all the Sorrows. (6:704-07) And later, citing the imperfections of her face as evidence that he was not infatuated, he mentions

how the dark orbs dwelt deep underneath, Looked out of such a sad sweet haven on me--. (1993-94)

Even Guido, in his second monologue, is haunted by the memory of Pompilia's "look / Of steady wrong, endured as steadily" (11:1371-72). Her patient, accusatory eyes seem still to be maddeningly riveted on him. "Again," he exclaims,

how she is at me with those eyes! In Caponsacchi Pompilia finds an expression corresponding to her own. Recounting the episode at the theatre when some comfits were thrown into her lap, she says that she

looked to see who flung them, and I faced This Caponsacchi, looking up in turn. Ere I could reason out why, I felt sure, Whoever flung them, his was not the hand,-- Up rose the round face and good-natured grin Of him who, in effect, had played the prank, From covert close beside the earnest face,-- Fat waggish Conti, friend of all the world. (7:980-87) Later she twice describes his face as "silent" and "solemn" (989-90, 1410), and she speaks of the first word she heard him utter as "an eternity / Of speech, to match the immeasurable depths / O' the soul that then broke silence" (1445-47). Their relationship, as Sister Mary Richard Boo has shown, has become "much more than an emotional infatuation; rather, it is in many ways closely allied to the agonizing Passion of Christ."21 That is clearly Caponsacchi's meaning when, in caustically justifying his attempt to save Pompilia, he says that

priests Should study passion; how else cure mankind, Who come for help in passionate extremes? (6:2078-80) Philip Drew has written that although "what Browning says in one poem is never decisive proof of what he means in another," we may nevertheless assume, if we make generalizations, "that the poems are not single self-subsistent works of art, each with its own values, but are part of an oeuvre, of which we can expect each part to be more or less consistent with the rest."22 If Drew is right, as I believe he is, then we may say that earnest, passionate eyes characteristically signify in Browning's poetry the intense desire for union with a loved one, or for deliverance from a dragon/despot, or for both. Linking Andromeda, Palma, two duchesses, the wife of Ricardi, and Pompilia, the image is not to be confused with the joyful blush that expresses an ingenuous, uninhibited response to life. It is rather Browning's metaphor for a cri de coeur, in its most explicitly erotic form a passionate appeal for sexual fulfillment, and in its most anguished an urgent, desperate cry to be saved.

The ambiguity that thus inheres in the image, implying emotions either adulterous or guiltless, may explain the difficulties traditionally caused by the opening lines of "My Last Duchess." To conclude that the Duke is accusing his wife of infidelity is implausible, as I have earlier argued, and most of what he says about her refutes such a charge. But the testimony of countless readers of the poem, from the most casual to the most attentive, is that he appears to be making precisely that charge or at least intimating that there are grounds for making it. If these readers are not mistaken, then a reasonable explanation for the Duke's giving the painter's name "by design" is his awareness that the Count's emissary knows of Frà Pandolf's reputation as a philanderer.

Yet, as we have seen, the image may imply something altogether different--the lady not as whore, as Gauthier accuses the future Countess Gismond of being, but as innocent victim. If this is what his former duchess was, then the Duke gives the painter's name and title "by design" because it was to Pandolf that she seemed to look for help, as Pompilia seemed to look to Caponsacchi, or because, though unable or unwilling to help, Pandolf was the one who permanently captured on canvas or a wall her look of despair. The Duke, fully aware of the significance of her glance, deliberately calls attention to it and, for the benefit of the Count's emissary and his daughter, describes in what follows the utter futility of such a glance.

Here, I suggest, lay the initial impulse for "My Last Duchess," the account of an Andromeda crying out in vain for a Perseus to appear. But the impulse was not sustained beyond the thirteenth line, in which the Duke takes a different tack:

Sir, 'twas not Her husband's presence only, called that spot Of joy into the Duchess' cheek. ... (13-15) From the earnest glance our attention is diverted to the blushful cheek and then to the lady's wrist and throat; and just as we are allowed to forget our questions about the origin of the glance, so too are we encouraged to forget about Frà Pandolf. After a final reference to him, prefaced with a hypothetical perhaps, the Duke leaves the painter to be remembered only by his work: "There she stands / As if alive" (46-47).

What has happened is what happens in other poems by Browning in which, as J. Hillis Miller has said, there are "juxtapositions of contradictory impulses," "sudden illogical transitions," and "shifts from one attitude to another."23 We begin the poem with our minds fixed on the name of the painter and the Duchess's glance, and then, our suspicion having been aroused by the Duke's declaration that he has spoken with deliberate design, our attention must undergo a series of adjustments, moving rapidly from eyes to cheek, painter to husband, past to present, Duchess to Count, picture to sculpture. In short, the Andromeda theme, implicit in the opening lines, has been aborted. But in the poem intended as companion to "My Last Duchess" it comes to full term.

II

For almost a century and a quarter following its first publication "Count Gismond" was read as the counterpart to "My Last

Duchess," a straightforward narrative in which an innocent lady is not destroyed by a tyrannical husband but rescued by a chivalric hero. Then in 1961 John V. Hagopian scornfully dismissed this conventional view as a "'sweetness and light' reading, typical of the Browning Society," and argued that the Countess "is lying and that Gauthier is indeed the rejected lover, perhaps even the father of the elder son."24 The next year John W. Tilton and R. Dale Tuttle, having independently reached much the same conclusion but carrying it further, radically reinterpreted the poem and in the process vilified the Countess's character beyond recognition, representing her as "an ambitious, grasping opportunist" with a "lust for bloody sport" and a "perverted sense of values."25 The following year Sister Marcella M. Holloway, proclaiming that "the Lady's guilt is established" and applying to Gismond the same treatment that had already demolished his wife, portrayed him as a despot of "refined cruelty" and "a true brother to the Duke of Ferrara."26 A decade later Frank Allen added his endorsement to this new interpretation of the poem,27 and despite an occasional protest, notably in a lively and witty response by Michael Timko,28 the rereading has not only escaped a sustained rebuttal but has become so firmly entrenched that a critic like Clyde de L. Ryals can conclude, "In the last analysis we cannot accept the lady's story as true."29

Why can't we? Dissatisfaction with the traditional reading of the poem seems to have derived first of all from the belief that it made "Count Gismond" too "simple" and hence inferior to the complex monologue with which it was originally paired. Hagopian, for example, maintains that because the speakers in Browning's characteristic dramatic monologues ironically reveal hidden or unrecognized traits, so must the Countess. Tilton and Tuttle, far from conceding that Browning "was so insensitive as to publish a mediocre dramatic narrative as a companion poem to a magnificent dramatic monologue," declare that their reinterpretation not only "gives much satisfaction to the admirer of Browning" but also transforms "Count Gismond" into "as penetrating a psychological study and as intellectually stimulating a dramatic poem as 'My Last Duchess.'"30 And an unidentified correspondent writes to Ian Jack, who records it as a remark that only "a literary critic" could make "without embarrassment," that the poem is "much more interesting if the speaker's guilt is assumed."31

Quite apart from its fallacious assumptions (that a simple poem is artistically inferior to a complex one and that a technique used in one poem must be used in another), the rereading of "Count Gismond" illogically requires us, first, to reject a straightforward reading on the grounds that a direct narrative is uncharacteristic and unworthy of Browning and, second, in order to make the poem characteristic and worthy, to believe that in it he employs a device he uses in no other poem. Although the speakers in his dramatic monologues are extraordinarily diverse, representing almost the entire range of human passion and weakness, nowhere among them can be found an unreliable narrator who tells a lie so basic that everything else said is thrown in doubt.32

It can be objected, of course, that the Countess does indeed lie about the subject of her conversation with Adela. And if she can lie about this, the argument goes, she can lie about her relationship with Gauthier. And if she can lie about that, she can lie about the paternity of her elder son. As Ian Jack notes, the critic who hypothesizes "that the speaker is not telling the truth ... can claim a liberty of interpretation which is entirely without limitation."33 But a more compelling objection to the use of such an hypothesis is that it leads the critic to conclusions that violate logic and ignore human behavior. A lady who would lie about a tercel is not necessarily one who would lie with Gauthier, nor is telling a small lie the same as telling a big one. A major objection to the revisionist view of "Count Gismond," in fact, is that it asks us to believe that the Countess would tell her husband a bigger lie than a fib but would not tell Adela a still bigger lie, a fabricated story that would raise no question at all concerning her chastity. And a fatal objection is that it cannot explain the recantation of Gauthier, who faces death from Gismond regardless of what he says but seeks to avert "God's second death" by confessing that his charge was a lie.34

Still, for the revisionists there remains the suspicious distinction between the two boys, the elder with "the clear / Great brow [allegedly of his father, Gauthier]" (121-22) and the younger with a "black / Full eye [which] shows scorn [allegedly like Gismond's]" (122-23). Further suspicion is aroused, so it is argued, by the inconsistency in the Countess's use of possessive pronouns, referring in one instance to the boys as "his" (Gismond's; 50) but designating in another "Our elder boy" (121). At the very least, a respected critic has concluded, the poem suggests "that one of the boys may not be Gismond's."35

There are several objections to such a conclusion. First of all it asks us to believe that the Countess not only lay with Gauthier but also bore his son, and then to believe that Gismond's behavior requires no explanation in light of this discovery. If he mistakenly thinks the elder boy to be his, he either cannot count to nine or knows little about human gestation. If, on the other hand, he is aware that the boy is not his, then his slaying Gauthier, marrying the Countess, and adopting their son as his own are quite inexplicable.

Furthermore, the Countess's pronominal references support rather than weaken the traditional reading of the poem. Although Sister Marcella Holloway, who tries to have it both ways, may believe that no "happy mother" would refer to her husband's sons as "his two boys,"36 the expression is altogether natural, and like the reference to "Our elder boy" it affirms, not denies, Gismond's paternity.

The "Great brow" of the elder brother also argues more convincingly for Gismond's paternity than for Gauthier's. Of the more than two hundred uses of the word brow listed in the Browning concordance, those in which great or broad appears as a modifier invariably suggest nobility of character or heroism such as Gismond's. Like Elizabeth Barrett, the wife in "By the Fire-Side" has a "great brow" (113, 258). Herakles, the "fully Christianized Greek hero of Balaustion's Adventure,"37 has a "great brow acquainted with command" (2186), and both the Other Half-Rome and Pompilia refer to the "broad brow" of Caponsacchi (3:1256, 7:1796).

Nevertheless, for the revisionists Gauthier is the hero, albeit a flawed one, and therefore appropriately the father of the great-browed son. Tilton and Tuttle, for example, argue that whereas Gismond is "superficially honorable," responding "mechanically to the chivalric code," Gauthier is outraged by the Countess's "hypocrisy" and is thus "motivated by a real sense of honor."38 It seems not to have occurred to them that a man of honor doesn't kiss and tell or cast the first stone, but in any case, on this crucial issue of motivation their rereading of the poem is no more helpful than it is elsewhere.

The most plausible reason for Gauthier's accusation, according to them, is that he was "moved ... to righteous anger" and must be telling the truth, for he "would have been a fool indeed to chance death" for a falsehood.39 Such an argument assumes that he knew he might be challenged, although the poem itself provides no evidence that Gismond's appearance was any less a surprise to

Gauthier than to the Countess. Other motives suggested by revisionists are equally unsatisfactory, being at odds with their basic premise. If Gauthier is "an opportunist who boldly accuses the Countess because her goodness mocks his moral depravity," he must be lying. If he is "a worldly courtier who desires to expose what he feels is the Countess' real character," apparently (as implied by the verb feels) he is not certain she is unchaste. And if he is "a jealous lover publicly denouncing her for a lack of constancy,"40 he could be the rejected suitor of the traditional reading.

None of these explanations focuses on the simplest and most obvious of motives. Unless Gauthier, like Iago or the Ancient Mariner, was acting out of motiveless malignity,41 the most plausible reason for his accusation was the desire for revenge. He had asked the Countess to lie with him and she refused; having been privately humbled, he determined to humiliate her publicly.42 He struck "at length" (5), she says, indicating the passage of a substantial period of time, and "Chose time and place and company" (4), implying careful, deliberate planning. But the plan was such that he could not execute it openly and alone. "And doubtlessly ere he could draw / All points to one," the Countess surmises, "he must have schemed!" (7-8). That is, arranging a suitable occasion at an appropriate time and place and with the desired audience (drawing "All points to one") required deception and accomplices ("he must have schemed!"). In the Countess's cousins he found exactly what he needed.

There is no reason to believe, as has been suggested, that they have bribed Gauthier,43 for that would give to them the initiative which the opening lines clearly indicate to be his. Nor is there reason to believe, as one revisionist reading has it, that "the cousins have discovered the speaker's affair with Gauthier" and "cast down their eyes in shame when all the crowd looked to the supposed representative of virtue to present the victor's crown."44 Far from being innocents with blushes on their maiden cheeks, the cousins are jealous, vindictive young women who bitterly resent the Countess. Having lived "untroubled" lives before she "vexed them" (118-19), presumably by coming to live in the castle (30) with them after being orphaned, they appear to love her ("I thought they loved me"; 13) but in reality regard her as an intruder and threatening rival.45 Although they are "beauteous" (19) themselves, the Countess's face causes their hearts "to bleed" (16-17), and although "Each a queen / By virtue of her brow and breast; Not needing to be crowned" (19-21), they glance "sideways" (24) or "down" (45), refusing to acknowledge her queenship and (to the Countess in retrospect) betraying their complicity with Gauthier: they allow her to laugh and sing and meet the "merry friends who kissed my cheek" (32), all the time playing their deceitful roles in the plot to humiliate her.

Had they "dropped / A word" (17-18) or "Had either of them spoke" (23), the Countess says, "the play had stopped" (18). Although it was her birthday (26) and she, an orphan, needed "to be crowned" (21), she would have withdrawn instantly if her cousins had confessed the jealousy she caused them. It was, after all, only a "foolish throne" (38) and, whatever they may have thought, no substitute "for parents in their shroud!" (42). The revisionist charge that the Countess is guilty here of "self-pity," trying "to gain Adela's sympathy and to portray herself as the helpless orphaned innocent,"46 might be brought against almost the entire orphanage that dominates Victorian literature, not least of all Pompilia in her emotion-charged monologue. And the revisionist notion that the Countess's pauses show her guilt may be still more readily answered. She is no actress who can produce tears on cue but a falsely accused young woman whose eyes understandably cloud over ("the old mist again"; 47) when she recalls the critical moment of her life; and, completely innocent, she is no more able to answer a wholly unexpected and unfounded charge ("I never fancied such a thing / As answer possible to give"; 62-63) than is Billy Budd.

But if the Countess is innocent of Gauthier's charge against her, why does she lie to Gismond about the topic of her conversation with Adela? To the revisionists she is so false that, paradoxically, her lie becomes the truth. For one of them "the falconry image is apt," referring to the carefully trained fighter who strikes down innocent birds for her, as Gismond had been her fighter in striking down Gauthier.47 According to others she "has been telling Adela about her tercel," for "she has conceived of both Gauthier and Gismond as falcons engaged in a bloody sport immensely joyous to her."48 For still another, "Gismond is literally and symbolically her tercel."49

Yet whatever the metaphorical connection between the tercel's striking birds and Gismond's slaying Gauthier, the fact remains that the Countess was not discussing falconry with Adela. That she tells Gismond otherwise may be a flaw in the poem, as W. David Shaw argues in the most subtle treatment "Count Gismond" has yet received. "By trying to shock the reader with a final intimation of the woman's guilt," he argues, "Browning only confuses him." Yet even here the revisionist reading suffers from excessive ingenuity. We cannot determine from the text, as Shaw does, that Gismond "senses not only that she is lying, but also that she knows this," and thus we cannot conclude with him that the interaction with Adela and then with her husband "introduces a psychological complexity that undermines her charge against Count Gauthier."50 But to admit that the conclusion is not as natural and inevitable as that in "Fra Lippo Lippi" or as carefully prepared as that in "Andrea del Sarto" is not to say that it shakes our confidence in the Countess's veracity. She is entitled to a few moments of privacy with an old friend (apparently one she has not seen since before moving to the castle), telling her of what has happened in her life since they were last together, and she knows her husband well enough to realize that he does not wish his gallantry to receive the attention exacted by Ferrara's "gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name" (33).

If such a reading of the poem invites the charge that it returns us to the sweetness and light of the Browning Society, then it must be said in reply that the revisionist view requires slighting some of the essential features of "Count Gismond" that set it apart from "My Last Duchess" and make it a very different poem. One is its almost allegorical quality at times, its suggestion of a medieval morality play dramatizing a struggle between opposing forces--God and Satan, truth and falsehood, belief and doubt--that will determine the salvation or damnation of the contestants. Another is a romantic denouement that seems intended to echo the dreamlike close of "The Eve of St. Agnes."51 Just as Porphyro, who is "saved by miracle" (339) as the Countess is saved by Gismond, says to Madeline, "Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be, / For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee" (350-51), so Gismond "began to say the while / How South our home lay many a mile" (113-14). And just as Keats's young lovers passed "sleeping dragons all around" (353) and "fled away" (371), so Gismond and his bride "mid the shouting multitude / ... walked forth to never more / Return" (115-17). Finally, there is the implicit but pervasive presence in the poem of the Andromeda myth. As the Countess "knew / That [she] was saved" the moment "out strode Gismond" (67-68), so Pompilia, before she "could reason out why, ... felt sure" (7:982) that Caponsacchi had not thrown the comfits into her lap. As the Countess, "at first view, / ... felt quite sure that God had set / Himself to Satan" (69-71), so the Pope applauded Caponsacchi's "championship, / Of God at first blush, such prompt cherry thud / Of glove on ground that answers ringingly / The challenge of the false knight" (10:1155-58). And as the Countess recalls Gismond's sword (111), which for the revisionists is predictably phallic and suggestive of her salacious appetite, so Pompilia remembers the tapestry

depicting Perseus, "the slim young man / With wings at head, and wings at feet, and sword / Threatening a monster" (7:390-92).

Here, in the Andromeda myth, I suggest, was the initial connection between "My Last Duchess" and "Count Gismond." Revisionists, of course, have disputed that connection, but offering another explanation for the link between the two poems has challenged their ingenuity to its limit. According to one reading, they were paired as "ironical commentaries on the marital customs of Renaissance Italy and Medieval France," depicting in the one case a lady "really innocent" and in the other a lady "hypocritically so," and were separated when it became clear to Browning that readers misunderstood "Count Gismond."52 For another revisionist the poems were originally linked by the bond between Ferrara and Gismond, both tyrannical husbands,53 and for still another by the bond between the Duke and the Countess, "a match" for him in her shrewdness.54

"It is no novelty for innocence / To be suspected," remarks Braccio in Luria,55 and so it should come as no surprise that the chastity of both the Duchess and the Countess has been questioned. Both ladies are completely innocent, however, although one is saved and one is not. The impulse that led Browning to pair the two poems, I believe, was the desire to dramatize this difference, portraying two sides of the Andromeda myth, but because the theme was left undeveloped in "My Last Duchess" the connection between the poems was too tenuous to be clear. Browning therefore separated them, making certain changes in the titles and the text of "Count Gismond" that reenforced the separation. Yet even when separated, as the history of revisionist criticism makes plain, they stay joined as reminders that "many chaste and noble sister-fames / ... lie / Strangled, for one Pompilia proud above / The welter, plucked from the world's calumny" (12:487-90).

Notes

1. Yale Review 37 (1947): 36. The essay is reprinted in Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Philip Drew (London: Methuen, 1966), pp. 96-109.

2. The Shorter Poems of Robert Browning (New York: Crofts, 1934), p. 331.

3. A Browning Handbook, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), p. 107.

4. Dramatic Lyrics (London: Edward Moxon, 1842), pp. 4-5.

5. All references to Browning's poetry, unless otherwise specified, are to the Yale edition: Robert Browning: The Poems, 2 vols., ed. John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins, and The Ring and the Book, ed. Richard D. Altick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). Line numbers are indicated by Arabic numerals in the text.

6. Her prefatory "As I live" (61) provides an obviously ironic counterpart to the Duke's comment, twice made, that in the picture the Duchess "stands / As if alive" (46-47, echoing 2, 4).

7. The point is well made by Kathy Overhulse, "The Duke of Ferrara: Shrewd Diplomat or Frustrated Dictator?" The Rectangle 49 (Spring 1974): 11: "The picture is never regarded as a picture, but is treated as if it were the Duchess herself."

8. The Duke's pronouncement is interestingly anticipated by Schramm's speech in Pippa Passes (343 ff.) on the inexhaustible capacity to wonder. Although the Duke could not wonder at the living Duchess, he can now wonder at the picture of her. Stanton Millet's explanation of his pronouncement--that the Duchess herself was "excessively shallow and undiscriminating" and Pandolf "solely responsible for whatever is of interest" in her expression ("Art and Reality in 'My Last Duchess,'" VN [Victorian Newsletter] 17 [1960]: 26)--seems to me mistaken though skillfully argued.

9. E. Warwick Slinn argues that the Duke "assigns his own thoughts to other people ... the envoy has not asked 'thus' ... nor has anyone else, since that is only what they 'would' have asked if they dared. Their enquiring gesture, turning to him, could mean several things. The specific question about the glance is therefore the Duke's own supposition and part of his presumption that people think what he imposes on them" (Browning and the Fictions of Identity [London: Macmillan, 1982], pp. 40-41). Essentially the same point was made earlier by Ralph W. Rader, who says "that the Duke is replying not to a question which the listener has actually asked but to one which the Duke has gratuitously imputed to him" ("The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms," Critical Inquiry 3 [1976]: 137).

10. The ambiguity is succinctly explained by Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1980), pp. 178-79.

11. Ralph W. Rader, rebutting Robert Langbaum's assertion that the Duke's purpose in speaking is "self-expressive" rather than dramatic (The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition [New York: Random House, 1957], p. 182), declares that "interpreting the poem as if the Duke speaks by design gives it much more power" ("The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms," p. 138). The textual question to be answered, however, is not why the Duke speaks, but why he mentions Frà Pandolf's name "by design." R. B. Jenkins recognizes this point when he writes, "The Duke tells the envoy: 'I said / "Fra Pandolf" by design,' as if to imply that strangers who view the Duchess' portrait with a questioning wonder would understand more clearly 'How such a glance came there' if they knew Frà Pandolf to be the artist" ("The Devil's Advocate: A Different Approach to 'My Last Duchess,'" The Journal of English Teaching Techniques 10 [Winter 1980]: 20).

12. A. Allen Brockington, "Robert Browning's Answers to Questions Concerning Some of His Poems," Cornhill Magazine 36 NS (1914): 317.

13. See, for example, Paracelsus (1:159, 196) and Sordello (1:286, 2:554).

14. In what at times is a fictionalized account of the poem, depicting the Duke as walking "slowly, graciously bored amid the opulence and perfect taste of his splendid family," R. J. Berman describes Pandolf as "renowned and justly celebrated" (Browning's Duke [New York: Richards Rosen Press, 1972], pp. 22-23, 87), but in another passage (p. 40) he says that Pandolf "either did have considerable celebrity or the Duke is trying to establish it by mentioning his name ... perhaps to justify his own patronage of that portraitist."

15. For the debate over this last point see B. R. Jerman, "Browning's Witless Duke," PMLA 72 (1957): 491-92; Laurence Perrine, "Browning's Shrewd Duke," PMLA 74 (1959): 74; B. N. Pipes, Jr., "The Portrait of 'My Last Duchess,'" VS [Victorian Studies] 3 (1960): 381-86; R. J. Berman, pp. 23, 105-06; and L. M. Miller, "'My Last Duchess': A Studiolo Setting?" VP [Victorian Poetry] (1985): 189-92.

16. The argument seems to have been advanced first by Louis S. Friedland ("Ferrara and My Last Duchess," SP [Studies in Philology] 33 [1936]: 678) and has been repeated since by Thomas J. Assad ("Browning's 'My Last Duchess,'" Tulane Studies in English 10 [1960]: 119), Patrick E. Kilburn ("Browning's MY LAST DUCHESS," Explicator 19 [1961]: Item 31), and Leonard Burrows (Browning the Poet: An Introductory Study [Nedlands: Univ. of Western Australia Press, 1969], p. 117).

17. George Monteiro, "Browning's Fra Pandolf," SBHC [Studies in Browning and His Circle] 1 (Fall 1973): 55-57. In a more recent note Professor Monteiro links Pandolf with a real rather than an imaginary person, one Allesandro Pandolfo, who turned capuchin to escape punishment for his love of Leonora di Toledo de' Medici ("'I Said "Frà Pandolf" by Design': A Note on Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess,'" VP 23 [1985]: 194-95).

18. The two are repeatedly confused in commentaries on the poem, as in Mrs. Orr's remark, "That earnest, impassioned, and yet smiling glance went alike to everyone" (A Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning, 6th ed. [New York: Kraus, 1969], p. 251). For the same confusion see Edward Berdoe, The Browning Cyclopedia (London: George Allen, 1949), p. 281; Thomas J. Assad, pp. 121-24; Sanford Pinsker, "'As If She Were Alive': Rhetorical Anguish in 'My Last Duchess,'" Concerning Poetry 9 (Fall 1976): 72-73; and Deirdre Burton, "What Is Browning Implying? A Close Reading of 'My Last Duchess,'" in Discourse and Style, II, ed. J. P. Petit (Lyon: L'Hermès, 1980), p. 99. The laxness characterizing much commentary on the poem is reflected not only in this confusion but also in the frequency with which the Duchess is described as "beautiful." Whether she is in fact beautiful or homely the poem never reveals. All it tells us about her appearance in the painting is that she is standing (4), that her eyes show depth, passion, and earnestness (8), that her cheek has a "spot of joy" (14-15, 21), and possibly that one of her wrists and the "faint / Half-flush that dies along her throat" (18-19) have been at least partly rendered by Pandolf. That the living Duchess often smiled is, of course, not in dispute.

19. Canto II, ll. 897-900, 942-44, the text from The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 4 vols., ed. Neville Rogers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972-).

20. The Elusive Self in the Poetry of Robert Browning (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982), pp. 37 ff., where it is the Shelley of "Ode to the West Wind" who is seen behind the Andromeda passage in Pauline.

21. "The Ordeal of Giuseppe Caponsacchi," VP 3 (1965): 184.

22. The Poetry of Browning: A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen, 1970), pp. 35-36.

23. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 86-87.

24. "The Mask of Browning's Countess Gismond," PQ [Philological Quarterly] 40 (1961): 153-55.

25. "A New Reading of 'Count Gismond,'" SP 59 (1962): 83-95.

26. "A Further Reading of 'Count Gismond,'" SP 60 (1963): 549-53.

27. "Ariosto and Browning: A Reexamination of 'Count Gismond,'" VP 11 (1973): 15-25.

28. "Ah, Did You Once See Browning Plain?" SEL [Studies in English Literature 1500-1900] 6 (1966): 731-42. See also Daniel Karlin ("Browning's Paired Poems," EC [Essays in Criticism] 31 [1981]: 226, n. 2), who cites as one of the "horrendous misreadings" of William E. Harrold (The Variance and the Unity: A Study of the Complementary Poems of Robert Browning [Athens: Ohio University Press, 1973]) his belief in the Countess's guilt.

29. Becoming Browning: The Poems and Plays of Robert Browning, 1833-1846 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. 158. See also the conclusion of Dorothy M. Mermin ("Speaker and Auditor in Browning's Dramatic Monologues," UTQ [University of Toronto Quarterly] 45 [1976]: 142, and The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983], p. 51): "It appears ... that the Countess's story is true except for one crucial detail: that Gauthier's accusation was true also." E. Warwick Slinn (p. 103) follows an admirably succinct statement of the essence of the poem--"The point of the speaker's account of her rescue from moral ruin is not to perpetuate a deception, but to celebrate an experience where the pattern of chivalric romance gave her life both vitality and value"--with the dismaying reversal that "Gauthier may have been right."

30. "A New Reading," pp. 84, 93.

31. Browning's Major Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 88.

32. Although he doesn't specifically mention "Count Gismond," John P. McGowan writes, "The monologues, while allowing their speakers a certain amount of control over language and its shaping of a world that suits the speakers' purposes, almost always

contain some principle by which the speaker's control can be undermined, his altering of facts for his own ends detected" ("Of Truth and Lies in Browning's Dramatic Monologues," The South Carolina Review 16 [Fall 1983]: 99-100). I would quarrel only with the "almost."

33. "Of Truth and Lies ... ," p. 94.

34. In his incisive treatment of the poem William Cadbury writes, "We believe the woman's story because, as she reports it, Gauthier at his death admits his lie" ("Lyric and Anti-Lyric Forms: A Method for Judging Browning," UTQ 34 [1964]: 53). Tilton and Tuttle (p. 91) try to circumvent the difficulty by arguing that if the accusation had been false, Gauthier would have confessed, "I have lied about her"; but he "would have lied to God and to her if earlier he had promised marriage as a means to seduction." Why such a promise would be a lie to God is not clear.

35. Becoming Browning, p. 158.

36. "A Further Reading," p. 550.

37. Clyde de L. Ryals, "Balaustion's Adventure: Browning's Greek Parable," PMLA 88 (1973): 1044.

38. "A New Reading," p. 90.

39. "A New Reading," p. 90.

40. "Ariosto and Browning," pp. 19-20.

41. W. David Shaw explains Gauthier's "otherwise motiveless accusation" against the Countess as "a compulsive act, a form of obsessional neurosis, in which he parades her forth as the spectacular beauty he would like to possess. He represents as actuality what is merely a sexual fantasy. The only way he can gratify this fantasy is by making his outrageous charge against her" (The Dialectical Temper: The Rhetorical Art of Robert Browning [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968], p. 73).

42. See Isobel Armstrong's comment about "A Pretty Woman": "Male fantasies trap women in conventional roles, and men take revenge upon women when they do not react to conventional expectations: 'Shall we burn up, tread that face at once / Into tinder?' when a girl refuses to respond to the sexual demands made of her?" ("Browning and Victorian Poetry of Sexual Love," in Robert Browning, ed. Isobel Armstrong [Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975], p. 285).

43. "The boldness of the accuser is not accounted for, but in such cases there is usually a bribe" (Margret Holmes Bates, Browning Critiques [Chicago: Morris Book Shop, 1921], p. 84).

44. "A New Reading," p. 89.

45. Recall, for example, Hindley Earnshaw's resentment of Heathcliff. According to Mrs. Dean, "the young master had learnt to regard ... Heathcliff as a usurper of his parent's [father's] affections, and his privileges, and he grew bitter with brooding over these injuries" (Wuthering Heights, chap. 4).

46. "A New Reading," p. 90, n. 20, and p. 88, n. 17.

47. "The Mask of Countess Gismond," p. 155.

48. "A New Reading," p. 85.

49. "A Further Reading," p. 553.

50. The Dialectical Temper, p. 74.

51. The text is from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978).

52. "A New Reading," p. 94.

53. "A Further Reading," p. 549.

54. "Ariosto and Browning," p. 25.

55. III, 133-34, the text from The Complete Works of Robert Browning, ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke (New York: Fred DeFau, 1898).

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2009 Gale, Cengage Learning Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Coulling, Sidney. "The Duchess of Ferrara and the Countess Gismond: Two Sides of the Andromeda Myth." Poetry Criticism, edited

by Michelle Lee, vol. 97, Gale, 2009. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420091368/LitRC?u=bccc_main&sid=LitRC&xid=f68b2d0f. Accessed 23 June 2020. Originally published in Studies in Browning and His Circle, vol. 14, 1986, pp. 66-84.

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420091368