Ida remains silent, but as the Prince continues to describe the wonders that will result from unity between the sexes, she merely sighs ““I fear / They will not’” (7.280-81) and “‘A dream / That once was mine! what woman taught you this?’” (7.290-91). The possible implications of these lines are typically double-edged, but the fact the Princess ““fear[s]"” that the Prince’s proposi- tions will not be realized suggests her continued suspicion of his insistence on union. Her final words are “‘Never, Prince; / You cannot love me”” (7.317-18). The fact that the Princess then makes no stated response to the Prince’s entreaty (“‘trust to me’”) means that any strict sense of closure is destroyed; the (unstated) resolution of the story transgresses the boundary of the text. The narrative poem does not (and for Tennyson cannot) contain either the full reconciliation of extremes or, conversely, the full re-establishment of conventional gender positions that critics have read into it. In either case, attention to the text warns that Walter, and decades of criticism, have worked with an idea that Tennyson never quite states. —JANE WRIGHT, University of Leeds, England WORK CITED Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “The Princess.” Alfred Lord Tennyson: The Complete Poems. Ed. Christopher Ricks. 2nd ed. 3 vols. Harlow: Longman, 1989. Browning’s PORPHYRIA’S LOVER Many of Robert Browning’s early poems were part of what Isobel Arm- strong has called a “systematic attempt to examine many kinds of neurotic or insane behavior, and in particular the pathology of sexual feeling” (Armstrong 288). Paired with a companion poem, “Johannes Agricola,” under the title Madhouse Cells, “Porphyria’s Lover”(1836) is one of the earliest products of this project. The standard reading of this monologue is that the poem’s insane narrator, Porphyria’s unnamed lover, has murdered her in order to possess her completely or, perhaps, to freeze in time a moment of perfect devotion: at last I knew orphyria worshiped me; surprise Made my heart swell, and still it grew While I debated what to do. That moment she was mine, mine, fair, Perfectly pure and good: (32-37) I would like to suggest that beneath the narrative of the insane, murdering lover, Browning layered a tale of erotic asphyxiation, one in which Porphyria survives.!There is ample evidence in the text and its contexts to credit the murder reading alone, without such a shadow text. Violence and death are well-known outcomes of frustrated or perverse sexual feelings like those Browning writes about here and elsewhere in poems such as “My Last Duchess” and “The Lab- oratory.” Similar sexual behaviors surface in the works of other poets of the period, including Patmore, Tennyson, and Meredith. Furthermore, as Michael Mason has suggested, aspects of the poem’s narrative resemble an 1818 account in Blackwood’s of a real life murder. In Blackwood’s account, the murderer spoke about the “snow white breasts,” “golden” hair, and dead “blue eyes” of his beloved. Remarking that his victim never cried out, even as he stabbed her repeatedly, Blackwood’s murderer chillingly declared that once she was dead, his “joy, his happiness, was perfect” (qtd. In Mason 255-56). Mason also notes that Browning’s friend Bryan Procter published a poem in 1820, “Marcian Colonna,” which acknowledges the Blackwood’s source. In his poem Procter embellishes the original story by having his murderer sit up all night next to his dead love’s recumbent body. These details—white skin, golden hair, blue eyes, sitting motionless through the night—appear in “Porphyria’s Lover.” While Browning’s narrator does not stab his beloved, he says that he “strangled her” with her own hair, mentions her drooping head, and marvels that he seems to have gotten away with his crime, Tor “God has not said a word!” (41, 51, 60). But there are sev- eral details in Browning’s poem that are not necessarily explained by the insane-murderer reading: The narrator tell us twice he is certain Porphyria felt no pain; in addition to this, he describes opening her eyes after he strangles her and seeing that “again / Laughed the blue eyes without a stain” (44-45). Equally perplexing are his reports that after he “untightened” Porphyria’s tresses from around her neck, “her cheek once more / Blushed bright beneath my burning lips” (46-48) and that, while her head drooped upon his shoulder, it was also “smiling,” “rosy,” and “glad” (52-53). Finally, in Browning’s account, instead of describing the lover as watching over a reclining dead woman, he says that he and Porphyria sat “together” all through the night. Browning’s poems, as Isobel Armstrong has aptly remarked, “often have a double movement of seriousness and mockery or puzzlement” (283). In addi- tion to this, Armstrong has commented that poems such as “Pophryia’s Lover” seem to have been “written deliberately to challenge, shock and test the responses of the unthinking reader” (288). So it is reasonable to double back in reading “Porphyria’s Lover” to consider the possibility that Browning has folded into this poem the suggestion of an alternative but no less disturbing plot that might explain the anomalous details cited above. What if Browning wanted to titillate his readers with the possibility that instead of murdering Porphyria, the narrator has made love to her using erotic asphyxiation, a well- documented but dangerous sex game in which participants use some type of 69mechanism to impede the flow of oxygen to the brain in order to heighten sex- ual pleasure? Hazelwood et al. note that this behavior is much more common than might be expected (4), that it is practiced throughout the world (81) and surfaces repeatedly in art and literature (7-9), some of the earliest examples being Mayan relics dating from 1000 A.D. (14). Witnesses to public hangings in England were familiar with the fact that hanged men often experienced erection and even ejaculation (8). More to the point, the private practice of brief asphyxiation for the purpose of sexual arousal is cited in various English and European texts, including Robert Herrick’s poem “Upon Love” (1648); de Sade’s Justine (1791); Gamiani, ou, Deux nuits d’exces (1833), attributed to Alfred de Musset; an anonymous English pamphlet entitled Modern Propen- sities: Or an Essay on the Art of Strangling (c. 1792), as well as nineteenth- century editions of the London Times and English and Continental medical books.’ If such a game were part of Porphyria’s sexual initiation into the so- called “little death” of orgasm, and if her lover untightened her tresses at the right moment, then Porphyria’s eyes would still have been bright, and her cheek would in fact have blushed again, because she wasn’t dead.’ The fact that Porphyria experienced no pain may be explained by a detail in the Mod- em Propensities pamphlet’s account of how a dubious character named Par- son Manacle ministered to a condemned woman who was terrified that hang- ing would be painful. In this story, which may well be a spoof, the parson first demonstrated erotic asphyxiation himself and then included the prisoner in his sex play in order to show her that hanging would not hurt. The pamphlet con- cludes that the poor woman’s “ideas of hanging were greatly dissipated, and that she believed a few repetitions [. . .] would entirely remove her terrors” (qtd. in Hazelwood 21). Further support for the erotic asphyxiation reading can be found in the differences between the narrator's vivid description of Porphyria’s appearance and those of the lovers in the Blackwood's and Proc- ter accounts. The eyes of the dead woman in Blackwood’s are blue, but also “dim,” and her face is “fixed as ice” (qtd. in Mason 256). Procter’s dead woman’s blue eyes are covered by “a dull film,” and her “pulse [is] silent” (qtd. in Mason 256). Certainly such a reading is distasteful and rather creepy, but distasteful creepiness is common in Browning’s dramatic monologues. For example, the Duke of Ferrara in “My Last Duchess” is unable to hide his ruthless and mor- bidly obsessive character; in “The Laboratory,” a jilted woman from the French court excitedly buys poison for her lover and his new paramour; and in “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” a Spanish monk reveals not only his lust for “brown Dolores” but also his extensiye knowledge of scrofulous French novels. ‘There are other reasons to consider this reading, including the likelihood that Browning exposes rather than colludes with the characters in his poems 70who objectify and oppress women sexually and socially (Maxwell 989).5 As Maxwell points out, at the beginning of the poem, Porphyria is clearly in charge, but the tables turn on her by the end of the poem. This volte-face invites the audience to read backwards and to move their focus from the behavior of the lover/narrator to Porphyria’s plight. Apparently Porphyria is driven by a powerful sexual passion and the desire for agency, but she lives in a society that discourages both and that seems to allow only two alternatives for her sexually. This young woman is not yet the angel of some man’s house, nor was she born to be a prostitute. We are told that she has left a “gay feast” and ridden out all alone on a stormy night to be with her lover, whose arm she boldly puts around her waist and to whom she enticingly bares her “smooth white shoulder” (16-17). These are clearly the actions of a woman who feels and wishes to act upon sexual desire. But Porphyria is also described as “Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavor, / To set its struggling passion free / From pride (22-24).” These lines are usually read as a reference to the difference in social status between the lovers, one of the impediments to their being together that drove him to murder her. Alternatively, these lines might refer to the pride and fear of a young gentlewoman who knows the likely consequences and social price to be paid if she sets her passion free outside of marriage in an age with no reliable birth control. Finally, we might take the poem’s last line about God’s silence to reflect Porphyria’s concerns, not her lover's, for she is part of a soci- ety which taught young women that God himself would frown on them for freely expressing sexual desire. The evidence of a subplot of erotic asphyxiation under “Porphyria’s Lover's primary narrative suggests that the sexual pathologies explored in the poem are more complicated and radical than we may have formerly thought. It also supports the work of other scholars who have suggested that readers should look as seriously at Porphyria’s story as they do at her lover's. —CATHERINE ROSS, University of Texas at Tyler NOTES 1. wish to acknowledge and thank my student Angela Brown, for it was in conversation with her that this argument emerged. 2. See Armstrong, entire; also Marcus. 3. Modern Propensities (1792) refers to the case of Francis Kotawara (who died practicing erotic asphyxiation) and the prostitute Susannah Hill (who was acquitted of his murder). The Lon- don Times for 17 September, 1791, also refers to the Kotzwara case. Modern Propensities details another story of erotic asphyxiation—the case of a curious fellow named Reverend Parson Man- acle (see Hazelwood et al. 15-22). Wolfe speculates that the pamphlet is the product of a patent inventor of spring bands, which may have been used in erotic asphyxiation> Citing a note in Guthkeich and Smith, Hazelwood speculates that Jonathan Swift may have referred to some kind of physical pleasure resulting from swinging or possibly hanging (seé Guthkelch 272, n. 2). 1Hazelwood also cites a number of English texts written after the Victorian period that refer to erotic asphyxiation, suggesting that the practice has been continuous in Britain, Among these are Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1954), P.D. James’ An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), and the English film The Ruling Class (1972), directed by Peter Medek and starring Peter O'Toole. Hirschfeld describes the medical texts. 4. See Hazelwood for descriptions of how erotic asphyxiation often only “interferes with the supply of fresh blood through the major arteries to the head” and does not actually compress the trachea or stop a person's breathing (60). 5. Though she does not go so far as to posit erotic asphyxiation, Maxwell has also touched upon the confusing erotic behaviors in “Porphytia’s Lover’ WORKS CITED Anonymous, “Old Bailey. Third Day. Murders.” London Times 17 September, 1791: 3. Anonymous. Modern Propensities: Or, an Essay on the Art of Strangling Etc., Illustrated with Several Anecdotes. London: J. Dawson, n.d. [c. 1792]. Armstrong, Isobel. “Browning and Victorian Poetry of Sexual Love.” Robert Browning. Ed. Isobel Armstrong. Athens: Ohio UP, 1975. 267-98. Browning, Robert. “Porphyria’s Lover.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams. 7th ed. Vol. 2. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. 1349-50, Guthkelch. A. C., and D. N. Smith, eds. A Tale of the Tub. To which is added the battle of the books and the mechanical operation of the spirit, By Jonathan Swift, 2nd ed. New York: OUP, 1958. Hazelwood, Robert R. Autoerotic Fatalaties. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1983. Hirschfeld, Magnus. Sexual anomalies; the origins, nature, and treatment of sexual disorders. A sunmary of the works of Magnus Hirschfeld. New York: Emerson Books, 1948, Holmes, Ronald M. Sex Crimes. London: Sage Publications, 1991. Marcus, Stephen. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nine- teenth-Century England, New York: Basic Books, 1966. Mason, Michael. “Browning and the Dramatic Monologue.” Robert Browning. Ed. Isobel Armn- strong. Athens: Ohio UP, 1975. 231-66. Maxwell, Catherine. “Browning's Pygmalion and the Revenge of Galatea.” ELH 60.4 (Winter 1993): 989-1013, Wolfe, R. H. “The hang-up of Franz Kotzwara and its relationship to sexual quackery in late 18th- century London.” Paper presented as the 11th Annual Janus Foundation Lecture on the Histo- ty of Medicine, San Francisco, CA, 15 January, 1980. Dickinson’s BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH. Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me— The Carriage held but just Ourselves— ‘And Immortality. We slowly drove—He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility— 7