After reading the first two acts of The Duchess of Malfi, I was struck by the themes of gender and class immediately apparent in the text. These themes play well into the ideas that Gail Kern Paster discusses in chapter four of her book, The Body Embarrassed, especially the historical context surrounding birth and conception. As Paster writes, the reason for diving into this history is “to note how thoroughly early modern reproductive theory was permeated by the ideologies of class and gender and thus how we can expect to find marked out in the ideological fault lines of early modern culture” (Paster, 173). The play has begun to call attention not only to clear gender norms and expectations, while Webster also subtly weaves in issues of class, money and lawfulness.
Paster discusses early modern reproductive theory as a very precise and logical process, where one could control the sex of their child if they abided by specific rules and norms. These norms, too, were influenced by gender and class—similarly to the marriage of the Duchess and Antonio. The pair are of two very different social spheres—Antonio is of a lower class and worked for the Duchess’ family—but she takes the union into her own hands and they are wed. This jointure mixes in themes of class, gender and legality. A woman, firstly, was not one to decide upon her own marriage, especially against the behest of her brothers. It was an even bigger societal faux pas to marry someone of a different economic status.
It is interesting to think about the Duchess’ agency in terms of her family and in terms of her own will, especially with the historical context surrounding conception. There were very strict rules about maternity and giving birth that were applied to the upper classes that were ignored by the lower ones; these class-based themes tie into the union between the Duchess and Antonio. The control that was exerted over women in maternal states is also interesting to analyze in terms of the pregnant Duchess, who married of her own accord.
excellent–you’ve pulled out some of the very passages that I was hoping to talk about, and clarified well the nexus of gender and class operating in the play!
Paster discusses the notion in early modern literature “that the womb seems to function as a kind of quasi-independent force in the female body, like an agent within” (175). For Bosola to feed the Duchess something that elicits the immediate expulsion of a child from her body is indicative of the male desperation to control what goes in and out of the female body. Bosola’s disgust at the Duchess’ pregnancy is almost immediately clear from the moment we discover she is pregnant—his observations of her pregnancy (and even of the way in which she eats the apricots— “greedily,” “vulturous”) reveals that he pays a lot of attention to her body’s state and shape: “She pukes, her stomach seethes,” “she wanes i’th’cheek, and waxes fat i’th’flank” (2.1.62-64). Paster writes: “Birth was called a ‘great evacuation,’ a great emptying-out, which not only configured the baby as excretory product but… construed birth as a violent purgation not unlike the purges central to humoral therapy” (184). Bosola seems to be conducting a sort of “great evacuation” of the thing inside her that might, without his intervention, behave under the agency of the Duchess and her puking, growing, excreting body. When something goes into the body, something must inevitably come out. This is true of food and excretion, but this is also true of childbirth: Bosola has ensured that he will put something in to the Duchess to elicit the birth, which, in some ways, is a sexual, territorial, misogynistic act. Paster writes that there was a conflation between the baby and excretory product, but if this is true, then there must also be a conflation between food and sperm.
excellent–this passage has attracted a lot of attention, and your reading is extremely interesting– a voyeuristic, controlling act that conflates childbirth and defecation…
Jawonski argues that “women’s bodies are threatening because they are ever-changing and cannot be confined in a single shape” (238) both through the female body’s physical capacity to “outgrow itself,” and “transgresses its own limits” (Stallybrass 124) in “drift[ing] into and out of pregnancy with alarming regularity” (238) and culturally through the socially sanctioned use of cosmetics for women, which allows them to change their appearance and “present to the world a facial image that differs from reality” (237). The duchess’ patriarchal threat comes not just through the mutability of her body, but also of her behavior which disallows her from being easily contained through “stereotypic ‘naming’” (236). As Jawonski notes, “Webster has represented the Duchess as being very different in regard to her sexuality from accepted images of early modern women. She is neither chaste virgin nor unregenerate whore” but instead the un-diagnosable and thus uncontainable “loving wife who is also a sexually mature and active woman” (240). In other plays we have read, female protagonists have been presented as in flux in either corporeally or behaviorally but never both. Hermione’s pregnancy exposes the monstrous volatility of the female form which is eventually made unequivocally static through her rebirth as a post-menopausal statue. Petruccio laments of Maria that “were she a whore directly, or a scold,/ An unthrift, or a woman made to hate me/, I had my wish, and knew which way to rayne her” although this too is solved by the end of the play at which point Maria accepts her stereotypical role as a dutiful wife. The Duchess is uncontainable physically through her pregnancy and societally through her incompatibility with any stereotypes for female behavior. This combination makes her not just threatening to the patriarchy, but utterly intolerable, which could help explain the much more extreme punishments she is subjected to.
very good–you do a great job linking together the themes that have run through the last several plays, and help to illuminate the character of the Duchess–whose pregnancy, as you note, is especially challenging. Its secrecy is one of the things I hope we’ll talk about today.
I found many of what Paster’s arguments in Complying with the Dug really interesting and some even directly illuminated specific instances in the Duchess of Malfi.
During the Act 2.1 in which Bosola gives the Duchess an apricot to find out whether or not she is pregnant, once the Duchess consumes the apricot she immediately goes into labor. Represented here is Paster’s statement that the womb seems to be a “quasi-independent force in the female body, like an agent within” (Paster 175) to whom the mother is also subject to. Bosola’s intent is to appeal to the womb’s tastes and the Duchess’ consumption of the apricot triggers the womb to expel the baby. The mother, then, is rendered powerless in controlling her own body, which is part of why women were seen as inferior to men. This separation of the womb from the feminine figure pardons the womb of an essentially female sin. Indeed, the womb was seen as “suspect and unstable” and dirty (Paster 174) but it is also depicted as the “protagonist… burdened with responsibility and disease” (Paster 178). This ambivalence reveals that women themselves are the source of blame for their bodies’ ‘unnatural’ functions. When Leontes from Winter’s Tale says “no barricado for the belly” he refers to Hermoine’s voluntariness in committing her supposed adultery that leads to her pregnancy. But what is the point of isolating the womb from the woman’s body when it is so a part of their own?
It was also interesting to see how humoural therapy, as Paster mentions, plays a significant role in the Duchess of Malfi. As a response towards the news of his sister’s labor, Ferdinand says:
Apply desperate physic:
We must not now use balsamum, but fire,
The smarting cupping-glass, for that’s the mean
To purge infected blood, such blood as hers.
There is a kind of pity in mine eye,
I’ll give it to my handkerchief; and now ’tis here
I’ll bequeath this to her bastard. (2.5 Duchess of Malfi from Lary Avis Brown website)
Ferdinand seeks “to purge [the Duchess’] infected blood” (2.5) due to differing yet connected possibilities. It may be because she has consummated with someone of lower status outside of marriage. In other words, the seed (in using Paster’s terms) that impregnates her is of different blood, which suggests Ferdinand’s incestuous desires for his sister. Another possibility lies within humoural medicine, in which the Duchess having “blood such as hers” (2.5) alludes to her overflowing of passions that leads her to commit this ‘sin’ of birthing (The World of Shakespeare’s Humors from the National Library of Medicine). Interestingly, Ferdinand is not only angered to be linked by blood with a “notorious strumpet” (2.5) but also because it is not him who impregnates her. He calls her “mistress,” (2.5) as if she committed adultery against him specifically. All this shows, essentially, is the constant policing and staking claim of women’s bodies by men. In Ferdinand’s situation, however, it seems almost fetishistic with the ways in which he sees the Duchess’ grotesque maternal body to the point that the more he thinks about it, the crazier and violent his thoughts and he seems to become.
excellent! You bring Paster’s work into very productive conversation with the play here, and with that notorious apricots scene in particular; and you also illuminate very aptly the oddly disturbing relationship between the duchess and ferdinand–who as we’ll learn later, are actually twins.
October 23, 2019 at 10:56 pm
After reading the first two acts of The Duchess of Malfi, I was struck by the themes of gender and class immediately apparent in the text. These themes play well into the ideas that Gail Kern Paster discusses in chapter four of her book, The Body Embarrassed, especially the historical context surrounding birth and conception. As Paster writes, the reason for diving into this history is “to note how thoroughly early modern reproductive theory was permeated by the ideologies of class and gender and thus how we can expect to find marked out in the ideological fault lines of early modern culture” (Paster, 173). The play has begun to call attention not only to clear gender norms and expectations, while Webster also subtly weaves in issues of class, money and lawfulness.
Paster discusses early modern reproductive theory as a very precise and logical process, where one could control the sex of their child if they abided by specific rules and norms. These norms, too, were influenced by gender and class—similarly to the marriage of the Duchess and Antonio. The pair are of two very different social spheres—Antonio is of a lower class and worked for the Duchess’ family—but she takes the union into her own hands and they are wed. This jointure mixes in themes of class, gender and legality. A woman, firstly, was not one to decide upon her own marriage, especially against the behest of her brothers. It was an even bigger societal faux pas to marry someone of a different economic status.
It is interesting to think about the Duchess’ agency in terms of her family and in terms of her own will, especially with the historical context surrounding conception. There were very strict rules about maternity and giving birth that were applied to the upper classes that were ignored by the lower ones; these class-based themes tie into the union between the Duchess and Antonio. The control that was exerted over women in maternal states is also interesting to analyze in terms of the pregnant Duchess, who married of her own accord.
October 24, 2019 at 10:39 am
excellent–you’ve pulled out some of the very passages that I was hoping to talk about, and clarified well the nexus of gender and class operating in the play!
October 23, 2019 at 10:50 pm
Paster discusses the notion in early modern literature “that the womb seems to function as a kind of quasi-independent force in the female body, like an agent within” (175). For Bosola to feed the Duchess something that elicits the immediate expulsion of a child from her body is indicative of the male desperation to control what goes in and out of the female body. Bosola’s disgust at the Duchess’ pregnancy is almost immediately clear from the moment we discover she is pregnant—his observations of her pregnancy (and even of the way in which she eats the apricots— “greedily,” “vulturous”) reveals that he pays a lot of attention to her body’s state and shape: “She pukes, her stomach seethes,” “she wanes i’th’cheek, and waxes fat i’th’flank” (2.1.62-64). Paster writes: “Birth was called a ‘great evacuation,’ a great emptying-out, which not only configured the baby as excretory product but… construed birth as a violent purgation not unlike the purges central to humoral therapy” (184). Bosola seems to be conducting a sort of “great evacuation” of the thing inside her that might, without his intervention, behave under the agency of the Duchess and her puking, growing, excreting body. When something goes into the body, something must inevitably come out. This is true of food and excretion, but this is also true of childbirth: Bosola has ensured that he will put something in to the Duchess to elicit the birth, which, in some ways, is a sexual, territorial, misogynistic act. Paster writes that there was a conflation between the baby and excretory product, but if this is true, then there must also be a conflation between food and sperm.
October 24, 2019 at 10:40 am
excellent–this passage has attracted a lot of attention, and your reading is extremely interesting– a voyeuristic, controlling act that conflates childbirth and defecation…
October 23, 2019 at 8:42 pm
Jawonski argues that “women’s bodies are threatening because they are ever-changing and cannot be confined in a single shape” (238) both through the female body’s physical capacity to “outgrow itself,” and “transgresses its own limits” (Stallybrass 124) in “drift[ing] into and out of pregnancy with alarming regularity” (238) and culturally through the socially sanctioned use of cosmetics for women, which allows them to change their appearance and “present to the world a facial image that differs from reality” (237). The duchess’ patriarchal threat comes not just through the mutability of her body, but also of her behavior which disallows her from being easily contained through “stereotypic ‘naming’” (236). As Jawonski notes, “Webster has represented the Duchess as being very different in regard to her sexuality from accepted images of early modern women. She is neither chaste virgin nor unregenerate whore” but instead the un-diagnosable and thus uncontainable “loving wife who is also a sexually mature and active woman” (240). In other plays we have read, female protagonists have been presented as in flux in either corporeally or behaviorally but never both. Hermione’s pregnancy exposes the monstrous volatility of the female form which is eventually made unequivocally static through her rebirth as a post-menopausal statue. Petruccio laments of Maria that “were she a whore directly, or a scold,/ An unthrift, or a woman made to hate me/, I had my wish, and knew which way to rayne her” although this too is solved by the end of the play at which point Maria accepts her stereotypical role as a dutiful wife. The Duchess is uncontainable physically through her pregnancy and societally through her incompatibility with any stereotypes for female behavior. This combination makes her not just threatening to the patriarchy, but utterly intolerable, which could help explain the much more extreme punishments she is subjected to.
October 24, 2019 at 10:42 am
very good–you do a great job linking together the themes that have run through the last several plays, and help to illuminate the character of the Duchess–whose pregnancy, as you note, is especially challenging. Its secrecy is one of the things I hope we’ll talk about today.
October 23, 2019 at 4:46 pm
I found many of what Paster’s arguments in Complying with the Dug really interesting and some even directly illuminated specific instances in the Duchess of Malfi.
During the Act 2.1 in which Bosola gives the Duchess an apricot to find out whether or not she is pregnant, once the Duchess consumes the apricot she immediately goes into labor. Represented here is Paster’s statement that the womb seems to be a “quasi-independent force in the female body, like an agent within” (Paster 175) to whom the mother is also subject to. Bosola’s intent is to appeal to the womb’s tastes and the Duchess’ consumption of the apricot triggers the womb to expel the baby. The mother, then, is rendered powerless in controlling her own body, which is part of why women were seen as inferior to men. This separation of the womb from the feminine figure pardons the womb of an essentially female sin. Indeed, the womb was seen as “suspect and unstable” and dirty (Paster 174) but it is also depicted as the “protagonist… burdened with responsibility and disease” (Paster 178). This ambivalence reveals that women themselves are the source of blame for their bodies’ ‘unnatural’ functions. When Leontes from Winter’s Tale says “no barricado for the belly” he refers to Hermoine’s voluntariness in committing her supposed adultery that leads to her pregnancy. But what is the point of isolating the womb from the woman’s body when it is so a part of their own?
It was also interesting to see how humoural therapy, as Paster mentions, plays a significant role in the Duchess of Malfi. As a response towards the news of his sister’s labor, Ferdinand says:
Apply desperate physic:
We must not now use balsamum, but fire,
The smarting cupping-glass, for that’s the mean
To purge infected blood, such blood as hers.
There is a kind of pity in mine eye,
I’ll give it to my handkerchief; and now ’tis here
I’ll bequeath this to her bastard. (2.5 Duchess of Malfi from Lary Avis Brown website)
Ferdinand seeks “to purge [the Duchess’] infected blood” (2.5) due to differing yet connected possibilities. It may be because she has consummated with someone of lower status outside of marriage. In other words, the seed (in using Paster’s terms) that impregnates her is of different blood, which suggests Ferdinand’s incestuous desires for his sister. Another possibility lies within humoural medicine, in which the Duchess having “blood such as hers” (2.5) alludes to her overflowing of passions that leads her to commit this ‘sin’ of birthing (The World of Shakespeare’s Humors from the National Library of Medicine). Interestingly, Ferdinand is not only angered to be linked by blood with a “notorious strumpet” (2.5) but also because it is not him who impregnates her. He calls her “mistress,” (2.5) as if she committed adultery against him specifically. All this shows, essentially, is the constant policing and staking claim of women’s bodies by men. In Ferdinand’s situation, however, it seems almost fetishistic with the ways in which he sees the Duchess’ grotesque maternal body to the point that the more he thinks about it, the crazier and violent his thoughts and he seems to become.
October 24, 2019 at 10:43 am
excellent! You bring Paster’s work into very productive conversation with the play here, and with that notorious apricots scene in particular; and you also illuminate very aptly the oddly disturbing relationship between the duchess and ferdinand–who as we’ll learn later, are actually twins.