PHONOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF BROWNING’S MY LAST DUCHESS

Abstract

The chief objective of the study is to analyze the stylistic features of the poem My Last Duchess by Robert Browning. The poem has multilayered meaning which is investigated through different stylistic tools of analysis. The poem is interpreted through parallelism to find out the themes. Moreover, the study focuses on the male supremacy in the Victorian age in Robert Browning My Last Duchess by using the theory of foregrounding to highlight the prominent and foregrounded element in the text. Phonological and is being applied to the poem to find out the effect of foregrounding in the poem. Besides, the thesis attempts to explore the ways the poet uses repetition of sounds and punctuations and how these repetitions of sounds and punctuations portray the male supremacy as well as informal behavior of Victorian women towards every common man apart from their spouses. The study investigated the effect of parallelism through repetition of sounds.. Furthermore, this research explored the suggestivity through alliterations, assonance, consonance. The thesis portrayed the main controversy of the Victorian age that is male supremacy and found that sound patterns of the poem corresponded to the social problems of the Victorian era. The current study is reasonable and helpful because it attempts a novel field. The model of the stylistic element of the same sounds and form of the words, as well as other markings of the selected poetry, are described in detail in this study.