My Last Duchess Practice Commentary

The given text is an extract from the short story “My Last Duchess” by Margaret Atwood from the anthology Moral Disorder. The story has the same title as the poem by Robert Browning. Gives tells the reader right away that the poem is central to the story they are about to read. It also tells that the writer expects the reader to know the poem before hand, implying that the target audience is sophisticated and educated. The story is told from the first person perspective of a charater named Nell. We know that it is from a first person perspective as personal pronouns are used and we know that the narrator is Nell because she comes in other stories from the same anthology such as “The Art of Cooking and Serving”.
The first paragraph starts with the first line from the poem and introduces the charater of Miss Bessie. The line from the poem creates a literary allusion and shows how the poem by Browning is connected to this story. It is clear that Miss Bessie is a teacher in this story adressing a class of high school students. The nouns “Gorilla, Crip, Hippo” are used for other teachers. This name calling is comical but also shows how Miss Bessie is different from the other teachers as she has a comparitively more respectful name among her students. There is a use of colon before listing the names and Miss Bessie’s dialogues are given in quotations. The paragraph ends with Miss Bessie asking a question to her class. The purpose of this paragraph is to introduce the character of Miss Bessie, briefly give the setting of the classroom and show how that poem by Browning is connected to the story.
The second paragraph is a lot more descriptive about the classroom and the setting outside the room. We get a lot of visual imagery of the sky outside which is described as a “hazy blue, a warm, drowsy color”. These words give the reader a sense of laziness and the relaxed atmosphere outside the classroom. Also the fact that the students “couldn’t see anything out of them[the