"My Last Duchess" and "Blank Space"

This week in class we read Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.”  This poem is a dramatic monologue in which a Duke tells the story of his last wife and how he had her killed because she did not value him and his title more than everyone and everything else in her life.  You may not think that this poem would have any connection to pop music at all.  However, when I first read this poem I was immediately reminded of the music video for Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space.”

"Blank Space" music video

 In this video, a very wealthy woman invites a man to a large home that is very similar to the Duke’s home in Browning’s poem.  The woman even has her own art gallery to which she adds a painting of this man.  This is reminiscent of the gallery that the Duchess’s painting hangs in.  For a while, everything seems to be going wonderfully for the couple in the video.  They have a picnic, ride horses, and appear to enjoy each other’s company.  This continues for a while until the woman notices the man smiling at something else on his phone instead of her.  The woman then becomes extremely jealous and irrationally angry.  She destroys all of the man’s possessions in a fit of rage because he has been paying more attention to something else than he is paying to her.  She then defaces the paintings she has in her gallery of the man and appears to poison him until “all smiles stopped together” (Browning 1283).  At the end of the video, we see a very familiar shot of the woman inviting a new man to her home in order to do the whole thing all over again.  Similarly, the Duke in “My Last Duchess” is speaking with a representative of the woman that he hopes will be his new wife.  

Source: Browning, Robert. "My Last Duchess." The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2012. 1282-1283. Print.