This essay attempts to highlight the symbolic theme of anti-tyranny in Robert Browning’s selective poems by using symbols. This study sheds light on studying symbols as Browning’s indirect way of criticizing the Victorian Age by linking the meaning of the symbol to linguistics. This study clarifies that Browning, as being religious, patriot and human, is discontented with the material Victorian community that seems, externally, prosperous, but conceals, internally, the brutal visage of despotism, materialism, and tyranny. Browning selects his personas in “My Last Duchess” and “Fra Lippo Lippi” as Italian Renaissance characters, with a bit alters, to strengthen the likeness between the Victorian age and Renaissance Italy in respect to money love, exploitation, and tyranny. Browning is fed up with the stifling inhumane tyrannical Victorian atmosphere, trying to revive the Victorian people via the forum of poetry.
Robert Browning (1812-1889) is a famous English Victorian poet who was born in the London Suburb of Camber well. He grew up in a household of a bank-official modest father who had a six thousand-book library. Thus, Browning was self-educated at home, was married to Elizabeth Barrette who was more famous than her husband. The couple had a settled life in Florence, Italy where Browning wrote most of his works; “Sordello”, “Men and Women” (1855). Browning went back to London, after Elizabeth’s death, where he wrote his masterpiece “The Ring and The Book”).
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Taking the Victorian social and historical milieu( 1832-1901), Browning was encircled by Victorian (1832-1901) problems such as the rise of Darwin's 'Theory of Evolution' which refutes the old Christian faith, stating that man had not been created by God but by a process of development of certain substance. As well, the Victorian Age was the hey-day of Marxism which believes that there is no God and life is matters (Burgess 1987: 180). Besides, the bread price increased due to corn taxes; the immigration of two Irish millions to English cities, because of famine, who lived in bad conditions as poverty and sickness; women and children labor in factories for insufficient salaries along with the unhealthy atmosphere of those factories; and the workingmen were deprived of the vote and representation in the parliament.
Browning refuses the negative results of the spread of material values and consequently, Browning indirectly criticizes the materialism, tyranny, and loss of faith in the Victorian Age, in his specific selective poems, which lead to the loss of human value of the suppressed Victorian lays.
A Symbol is “an object that refers to something beyond itself and in this sense, all words can be symbols”. In other words, the symbol is the connotative or non-literal meaning that a word bears, for example, the word ‘chair' has a fixed denotative or literal meaning, to be found in any English dictionary, that is an object made of wood, of four, or less, legs on which people can sit. However, the same word ‘ chair' could refer to ‘authority' or ‘power' in a specific context, especially a literary one in which the writer uses the symbol to make his literary work different from everyday life language.
And the writer uses the symbol to write freely about certain issues that can’t be discussed directly due to social, religious or political restraints that may constitute a barrier to him/her. Thus, Browning's following pieces of poetry are examples of Browning’s implicit criticism of the Victorian cruel Society via studying and analyzing the deep meaning of symbols in the previous poems.
Some literary theorists categorize the symbol into two groups, the “conventional” or “public” symbols as opposed to the “private” or “personal ones”. The word ‘raven’ is an example of the conventional conception of ‘bad omen’, while Blake’s, a romantic poet, ‘conception of child’s innocence’ is an instance of the personal symbols that alters due to context. Blake regards child’s innocence, in his poem “The Chimney Sweeper” taken from The Songs of Experience, as a negative way of the submission to the superstitions and constraints of the society that suppresses the free mentality. Unlikely, Blake, himself in 'The Lamb' taken from The Songs of Innocence considers the child's innocence positively and he envies child because of the child's possession of the divine vision. Hence, there are two different personal symbols of the same word ‘innocence' of the same poet; the first meaning is simplicity or naïveté of thinking which Blake refuses, and the second meaning is simplicity as being uncorrupted by the social complicated rules which Blake approves.
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