Jackie Peterson's father was killed just before Christmas. Thus, for her, the holidays became a conflicted and an emotional time.
2) Jackie and her siblings were pushed by their mother into an orphanage, and Jackie was separated from her brothers for ten years.
3) While it is not known whether or not Jackie suffered emotional, sexual or physical abuse, documentation now proves that the place where she lived all those lonely years was a "cesspool of pedophilia."
4) We do know that soon after arriving at this place Jackie developed debilitating asthma and was at the mercy of her keepers --- not only for her day-to-day existence, but also for her very breath since they had control of her medications.
5) Jackie left the orphanage to care for her ailing mother who soon died, and again she was left alone. Did she have expectations of a "family reunion" that turned into another loss?
6) In the next few years Jackie gave birth to two children with two different men and gave up both for adoption.
7) Jackie kept her third child conceived with a third partner because her doctor shamed her into it.
8) A few years later Jackie married Lee Peterson, a man who left his wife and three children because he was not comfortable in the company of his offspring.
The technique of Robert Browning in "my last duchess" is known as a dramatic monologue. This is so because all the poem is expressed in one voice only, as oppossed to a dialogue, where more voices would appear. And it is dramatic because it contains all the elements of drama.
