Centrality and marginality in Browning, Heaney, and Alexie

¶ … Last Duchess';'Punishment'; 'Capital Punishment'

Three Poems of Decentralization and Marginalization: Browning's "My Last Duchess; Heaney's "Punishment"; and Alexie's "Capital Punishment"

Within the poems "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning; Punishment by Seamus Heaney; and "Capital Punishment" by Sherman Alexie, all three authors deal, although in much different ways, with shifting, and often surprising, relationships between centrality and marginality: of speaker, subject, or both. In Browning's "My Last Duchess, for example the speaker, a duke (the sort of figure one least expects to say or do anything that might cause him to be seen as "marginal," or even unusual, recollects in detail the various jealousy-provoking and ultimately fatal behaviors of his "last duchess." These, at least in the speaker's mind, have given him justifiable cause to kill her. All that remains of her now is her portrait on the wall. In this essay, I will analyze ways that all three poems deal thematically with the tensions and interplay between centralization and marginalization.

Perhaps the dead Duchess's greatest "mistake," according to her now-widowed husband, was, ironically, not "marginalizing" him enough (with praise, obeisance, and other exaltations of his royal rank). Such "positive marginalization" (so to speak) would, it seems, have made him less angry at her and consequently less self-justified in his killing of her. However, as he states instead:

Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody's gift. (lines 32-34)

The speaker's deliberate, sneering repetition of the word "gift" underscores the powerfulness of his feelings about having had that "gift" rejected by the Duchess. The Duchess's lack of discrimination in this respect seems to have been her "crime." As the speaker adds a few lines later:

Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without

undernourished, and your tar-black face was beautiful. (Lines 3-27)

However, unlike Browning's speaker in "The Last Duchess," Heaney's speaker within "Punishment" is brimming with emotions, and these are clearly spawned by the speaker's sense of his own, associated, complicity in the hanged woman's death. The dead woman's "crime," the poem implies, is not hers alone. If her "adulteress" status in fact marginalizes her vis-a-vis others, and society, it marginalizes those others, and society, right along with her, including (and especially) those who would see her murdered without raising their voices in protest. As Webster concurs, the poem:

puts us into the imaginative position of watching someone being executed for having committed adultery, a sin any of us might be tempted into committing . . .the most sobering aspect . . . is the narrator's admission that

he "would have cast, I know, / the stones of silence," . . . he probably would not have voiced his disagreement if he had been there, for he, like all artists, is merely an "artful voyeur," and, as such, would have