I wrote this essay about a month ago, but didn’t pub­lish it at the time in part because I wasn’t sure if I was shoot­ing way off the mark with my gothic con­no­ta­tions (yeah, I’m self con­scious some­times… bah!), but also because I sim­ply for­got. I dis­cov­ered an essay writ­ten in 1986 ear­lier today, how­ever, that reminded me to pub­lish this essay. It was titled “Browning’s Use of Vam­pirism in ‘Porphyria’s Lover’”, and was writ­ten by Michael L. Bur­duck*. Nice to know I’m not the only one who thought that.

By the way, Burduck’s essay does a much bet­ter job explain­ing the Gothic con­ven­tions employed because that was its pur­pose. In mine, they are merely alluded to whilst the key con­cept pre­sented is that of soci­etal crit­i­cism through depict­ing the plight of the indi­vid­ual (in line with the Board of Stud­ies Eng­lish Exten­sion 1 syl­labus). Two dif­fer­ent things entirely — I say all this only to dis­pel any poten­tial accu­sa­tion of plaguar­ism that may arise.

Any­way, enough about all that. 1048 words. Read the rest of this entry »