Criminal or Victim: an Analysis of Victimhood in ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘The Laboratory’ Amy Jenkinson 12th Grade

In the case of Robert Browning’s two poems ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘The Laboratory’, victimhood is complex – in ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, the victim is very clearly Porphyria, but in the case of ‘The Laboratory’, whether there actually is a victim or not is much more debatable.

In ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, the lover “strangled her”, and in his way of killing her, she is undeniably the victim. However, in ‘The Laboratory’, no murder actually ever takes place. The entire poem is plotting, structured in quatrains with a regular rhyme scheme, and although this arguably emphasizes the narrator’s intent on the murder as well as her calculation, there ends up being no actual victim of her crime – only intended ones. However, the narrator attempts to justify her actions and makes it appear as if she is a victim. “They believe my tears flow / while they laugh, laugh at me.” The epizeuxis of “laugh” emphasizes not her malice, but that of her intended victims – and through this presentation it can be argued that the narrator of ‘The Laboratory’ is actually the true victim.

However, in the two texts, perhaps the suggested victims are not the only victims represented in the two poems. For example, in ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, she “kneeled” to warm the...