Essay
A* Crime Comparison Exemplar Essay 3
Explore the significance of places in relation to crime in two texts you have studied. Incorporating the AQA Crime Poetry Anthology and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
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Crime Comparison practice essay 3Explore the significance of places in relation to crime in two texts you have studied
The backdrops to the crimes in My Last Duchess and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd are
interesting in the sense that murder juxtaposes the affluent, almost abstract lives of the criminals,
perhaps serving to comment socially on how crime does not discriminate and is not just limited to
urban areas. Peter Grimes is a poem which, like Christie’s novel, is set in a parochial English village,
although in contrast, Crabbe does not present us with an effective investigation and criticises the
ignorance of the townspeople in apparently permitting the abuse of the youthful victims.
The very fact that the Duke in My Last Duchess feels obliged to murder his wife mounts a
powerful argument against the view that royalty are exempt from the world of crime as Browning
emphasises that criminality is borne out of human nature, which does not change simply for royals.
The significance of such a place is that the speaker’s crime is essentially unpunishable; he
ambiguously reveals that he murdered his wife in the line ‘I gave commands, then all smiles stopped
together’. The use of the first pronoun expresses how the Duke has no need to conceal his crime and
is able to talk about it openly, a view which gains credibility when we remember that he is talking to
a representative from the Kingdom of Tyrol, someone we would expect him to try and impress.
Whilst this may initially seem unusual, as the Duke unwittingly reveals the truths he intends to keep
hidden, it is important to remember that his position as a Renaissance monarch gives him the power
to take whatever action he pleases given that the rule of divine right of kings allowed royalty to reign
beyond the will of the people. Browning subsequently creates powerful social commentary about a
such a form of governance in an era where erratic yet simultaneously all-powerful individuals like
the Duke can be considered fit to rule a nation.
Further criticism perhaps is made of the place due to the fact that the Duchess ‘smiles’
simply ‘stopped’ – the verb ‘stopped’ demonstrates how she is completely powerless and a victim of
her husband’s unwavering power. As a result, the idea of patriarchy is essential to the backdrop of
the crime, acting as another reason for the Duke’s undetectable crime which appears repulsive not
only to a modern reader but also, interestingly, to a Victorian reader, thus diverting sympathy
towards a woman in literature at a time when it was largely unprecedented to do so from a feminist
perspective. As a result, the historical fiction is essential to the shocking nature of the setting
provided by Browning. This view is given further credence by the fact the Duchess is killed simply
because ‘she liked whate’er she looked on’; seen in this light, the victim was the epitome of all that
was grateful and pure in the world, able to see the good in everyone. There is consequently a double
crime in the Duke’s destruction of his wife’s reputation in order to convince others of her infidelity,
something which would not have been difficult due to the patriarchal setting. The key significance of
the place in the poem, therefore, is that it leads to the gross miscarriage of justice that befalls the
Duchess, encouraging us to feel the upmost sympathy for her mistreatment.
Like My Last Duchess, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd contains a crime which juxtaposes an
apparently cosy and safe setting as Christie suggests that rural dwellers are no more exempt from
the world of crime than those who live in cities. We are immediately presented with a place that is
‘very much like any other village’, thus appearing as the quintessential English village of the 20 th
century that was seen by critics of Christie’s works – such as hard-boiled writer, Raymond Chandler,
who called the scene of the crime a ‘cheesecake manor’ – as an unrealistic backdrop to crime. This
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