Last class, our group focused on many things and shared ideas
on the story of My last duchess. In those discussions what interested me the
most was “the point of view”.
This story of “My last duchess” is told in first person point
of view. In other words a girl who is the main character is talking. So the
point of view would be limited as all the thought are based on her personal ideas
and might include some of the prejudice. For example she says only good things
about Miss Bessie as you can see in page 56. It says, “Miss Bessie was the best
English teacher in the school. Possibly she was one of the best in the city.”
We came to an idea that she thinks Miss Bessie is great teacher because she is
smart enough to understand the English lessons that are done by Miss Bessie and
clever enough to keep up with her lessons. So if Bill or any other boys those
were picked by Miss Bessie were telling this story, they won’t say such a good
things about this teacher like the girl did. Also as you can see on page 63,
Bill calls the poetry “That goddamn Duchess poem” which we can understand that
he is feeling nauseous for not understanding the poem. I investigated that he
might be having some anger toward Miss Bessie for choosing the poetry, My last
duchess, for their class work. However from the main character’s point of view,
she might think it is good training to do such a hard poetry as she has some
kind of idea about the questions the teacher asks whereas Bill has no idea for
it. So you can see that Bill has not much favourable impression toward Miss
Bessie.
If the story was told in Bill’s point of view, the impression
of the last feeling after they broke up might have changed in the reader’s
mind. In this original story, which is written in the girl’s point of view, it
gave us the impression of serious as it uses the metaphor of “dark tunnel” and
also in the very last line she says “I’d be all on my own”. However the feeling
of Bill and the girl isn’t always the same, so if Bill was thinking very
lightly, for example he believes it’s only a quarrel they always have and they
would be together by next day, the impression would change in the readers mind.
Our group thought that this story is compared to the poem of
My last duchess. The Duke and the Duchess is compared to Bill and the main character
in this story. The similarity of these story and poem are that they both are
having easy mistakes and end with the couples being separated. And we thought
the message of this story is that humans don’t learn and they make same
mistakes over and over again as the mistakes doesn’t really change if we
compare early days and modern days. Any ways, we thought that the basic of the
story was quite similar so they were compared. However we came to a question
that why didn’t the author made Bill the storyteller. The storyteller in the poetry
is Duke who is male but storyteller in this story is a girl who is female and
there is a quite big different point of view between male and female. What I
can think of is that the status of male and female has become other way round
as times passes. In the early days male was absolute and female had to obey or
follow the male. So the status of male was very high than female. However in
modern days there is not much difference in the status between the two.
Actually female might be a little higher. So the author might have chosen a
girl to be a storyteller who has better status than Bill.
