Sites and parasites of meaning: Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’

Abstract

Robert Browning’s so-called dramatic lyric ‘My Last Duchess’ has been interpreted differently by different critics, some seeing the Duke as shrewd and others seeing him as witless. This article attempts to account for these differing interpretations by analysing indeterminacies in the language of the poem. Starting out with the work of Derrida on speech act theory, and findings on the role of the right hemisphere in language processing, it goes on to propose techniques of linguistic analysis based on systemic-functional linguistics and the concept of particle-waves of language first discussed in Melrose (1996). The article then analyses a number of these so-called particle-waves in ‘My Last Duchess’, and concludes that opposing interpretations of the Duke can be traced to the indeterminacies of language in the particle-waves.