In the face of death, Cariola evokes pregnancy to try to protect her. She plies before her execution, “I am quick with child” (4.2.208). However, they strangle her anyway, perhaps because she is trying to deceive since the play does not indicate her being engaged or pregnant before this moment. Nevertheless, considering the claim of pregnancy as a protective measure illustrates the gender politics of the period. For much of the play, pregnancy operated as a secret, a state that evoked danger and fear of female sexuality. If Cariola indeed were pregnant, still the issue of her relationship stands and uncontrolled female sexuality. As mentioned, there was no mention of engagement. Accordingly, her claim to Bosola perhaps did not evoke a sympathetic response because her claim to pregnancy is viewed as negative without the attachment of a man. For the duchess, her motherhood offered her no sense of protection. It did not matter that she had three children and functioned as a mother and wife under the patriarchy.
Moreover, the image of the pregnant women in the play and others of the time evoked feelings of anger and disgust at female sexuality. So why did Cariola try to claim pregnancy as protection? Perhaps she thought that the image of a pregnant woman would evoke sympathy because her image is conflated with a child. With these ideas in mind, I started to research if the pregnant body evoked more sympathy and if the claim to pregnancy was used to dissuade murder. I was surprised to see that murder was the leading cause of death in pregnant women. Isabelle Horo, DrPH, from the Maryland Department of Health, writes on her Web MD report: “We found that homicide was the leading cause of death among women who were pregnant … and accounted for 20% of deaths among that group, compared with 6% of deaths among nonpregnant women of reproductive age.” Many of the murderers were spouses and partners of the pregnant women, the people who, in theory, should be the most sympathetic. All of this leads me to wonder: does pregnancy evoke empathy at all? Contemplating Cariola’s plea of pregnancy illustrates that perhaps a pregnant woman evokes violence, and maybe this violence is a response to a detestation of female sexuality.
really interesting comments! It was actually usually the case that women who were condemned to death for a crime, but were pregnant, had a stay of execution to give birth—so she is perhaps trying to buy some time here?
I found the story of Narcissus and Echo to be very intriguing in the context of Ferdinand. The part in act V, scene ii where Ferdinand attacks his own shadow felt especially reminiscent of Narcissus as both men have a physical and emotional reaction to a version of their own reflection. While there are differences between these two reactions and reflections—a reflection is obviously distinct from a shadow, Narcissus gets a clear vision of his appearance while Ferdinand only has a darkened shape of his body— I think such distinctions only accentuate aspects of the characters’ similarities.
Both men respond as if the image isn’t a natural illusion of their own body. While Narcissus falls in lust with his, Ferdinand fears his own, reflecting each man’s understanding of himself; Narcissus sees detailed beauty in “creamy whiteness” (Ovid 113) while Ferdinand sees total darkness. At the same time, Ovid describes Narcissus’s reflection as a shadow in the line “He fell in love with an empty hope, a shadow mistake for substance” (112). For me, this statement reveals what’s going on for both men; in their madness (or perhaps, misguidedness in Narcissus’s case), they not only fail to recognize themselves, but they also take superficial qualities too seriously, giving them more power than they really have, and consequently exacerbating their madness.
Bodily transformation is involved for both men, as well. Narcissus melts, ironically losing the aspect of his identity that caused his downfall, while Ferdinand is diagnosed with lycanthropia, which includes the symptom of internal body hair. This is crucial to the characters’ similarities, as I think the Duchess serves as a sort of “Narcissus’s reflection” for Ferdinand throughout the play. As his twin, she is already his reflection to an extent. But he doesn’t seem to see her as her own person, and his maniacal attempt to control her is an act of incest (even if not overtly sexual) by means to control his own aristocratic male position. In this way, his relationship to his reflection is the opposite of that of Narcissus, as he not only sees his reflection more and more as part of himself (though it is in fact distinct from himself, unlike Narcissus’s), but also he strives to obliterate the reflection in order to empower his own identity. By destroying his sister’s “masculine” power, he not only retains a social power of the family, but he also feeds his own masculinity, and becomes more physically “manly” (ie body hair, though inside the body) as a result. In becoming non-human through his lycanthropia, his shadow thus becomes what remains of his actual identity, just as Narcissus’s reflection marks a loss of identity, as he loses his own humanity.
this is fascinating, Maya, well done. You’re right that the story fits really well with the aetiology of ‘narcissism’ in Ovid’s story. I was thinking of the more straightforward account of Echo when I assigned it, but you have added a really interesting aspect here!
I found very interesting the unravelling of Ferdinand after his sister’s death. A murder that he orchestrated with a cold-blooded reverence, causes him to contract lycanthropia, a disease brought upon by overbearing melancholy. The disease causes one to “imagine themselves to be transformed into wolves.” This psychotic break causes Ferdinand to lose any sort of previous agency he once had. He is not able to control his bodily functions as he digs up dead bodies, howls at the moon, and later, accidentally kills Bosola. He has also lost control of his voice and convictions. For the remainder of the play, Ferdinand babbles nonsensically as the other characters mostly ignore him. The loss of his mind, voice and reason, turn him into an auxiliary character—a body to be acted upon. This is represented when his attending doctor promises, “I’ll make him as tame as a dormouse.” The word “tame” indicates a clear connection between the feminine and Ferdinand’s lack of mental/physical agency. Ferdinand is now an unruly body (specifically mouth), that needs to be tamed. While reading this, I was reminded of Lady Macbeth’s fall into madness after a murder.
I also noticed a connection between Ferdinand and Narcissus from Metamorphoses. In the story, Narcissus falls in love with his reflection and goes mad when he can not attain his true love. In Duchess of Malfi, Ferdinand falls in love with his twin sister (a reflection of himself) and loses his mind after he kills her, assuring that they will never be together. While there are many parallels you can make between the texts, the emphasis of self-obsession goes back to ideas of femininity. Vanity is often seen as a feminine trait, but it’s very clearly displayed in Ferdinand. It seems to me that Webster is commenting on the connections of mind, body and self, and how these entities play into a feminine/masculine binary.
excellent points, Mel–very good. It is very interesting that Webster portrays this “rupture” in Ferdinand as lycanthropia, a particular kind of melancholy.–I also liked your reading of his obsession with his “sister-image” through the story of Narcissus–that’s a great point, and we discuss more today.
I was struck by some of the connections between The Duchess of Malfi and the story of Echo and Narcissus, especially those outside of the actual echoing scene. As Zoe mentioned, Ferdinand’s desire and frustration with his sister is much like Narcissus’s lust for himself. I also think it is significant that, right before the apparent illusion to Ovid, who is obsessed with transformations, we learn that Ferdinand has lycanthropy and believes he becomes a werewolf. Importantly, he goes to graveyards and digs up bodies, as if in search for the body of his sister, who, if having gone the way of Echo, has no body remaining; even her bones “were transformed to stone” (111).
This mention of stone bones is also interesting to me in the context of the grotesque body; much like Leontes, who desired his wife be less grotesque but found the classical body lacking, Ferdinand is frantically searching for the grotesque body he has already destroyed, going so far as to retrieve parts of corpses. Furthermore, he seems to adopt the grotesque body himself, becoming prone to hysterical outbursts and being killed bloodily, through several wounds. As if mimicking his sister’s echo, Ferdinand too gets a posthumous voice; the stage direction reads, “He [Bosola] kills Ferdinand,” but several lines later, Ferdinand gets some deathbed bemoaning in. This is especially interesting to me in the context of his “reconciliation” to the one body he feels he shares with his sister, as at the duchess’s execution, she comes back alive for a moment as well.
very good–I particularly liked your reading of Ferdinand as both destroyer of the grotesque body (in a way, like Narcissus) and frantically seeking it out–in parts. The reference to stones is also interesting–there are increasing references in the play to people’s hearts being stony or hardened or “empty graves”.
In Act 4, Scene 2, Bosola instructs the executioners to “remove that noise,” and they seize the Duchess (4.2.184). The Duchess, facing them, says: “Dispose my breath how please you” (4.2.213), and then says, “Go tell my brothers when I am laid out, / They then may feed in quiet” (220-223). The stage-action that immediately follows the word “quiet” is the scene of the executioners strangling her. Ferdinand even says, in the final scene, remembering his twin sister’s death, that “strangling is a very quiet death” (5.4.34). To be “a dead thing” and continue to speak is objectively haunting, especially when the method of killing that “dead thing” involved silencing her by cutting off her access to air itself. The Duchess, when she says that her brothers will be able to “feed in quiet” once she has died, she suggests that part of the goal of killing her was to silence her. The Duchess, in being strangled and muted, is thus stripped of her ability to govern. Echo, in Ovid’s story, yearns to hear things she wants to say reflected in Narcissus’s speech so that she can then repeat it and extract some sort of meaning: “She was merely permitted and ready to wait for the sound which her voice could return to the speaker” (Book 3, 377). When the Duchess’ own voice is removed, her voice simply mirrors what Delio and Antonio say; because she is no longer a speaking body, she is no longer a ruling body, a “shrieking” body, a sexual body, or, really, because she only echoes male voices, a feminine body.
Also, Sarah mentioned last class about how intimate the act of strangling seems to be. By holding his hands up to the Duchess’s throat, the executioner is directly and physically interacting with her access to air and voice; he is stopping it up, creating quiet, and we can presume that they are almost face-to-face. The intersections of voice, intimacy, violence, and the body are all at play here.
excellent! this winnowing down of the female voice to mere echo would make a great paper topic, actually..I’ll be interested to hear whether you think there are any traces of the duchess’s actual voice in the echo–or whether it is actually just the men’s voices coming back to them.
I do not know much about classical mythology, so I was really excited to read the stories of Echo and Narcissus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The story of Echo plays in well with the final act of The Duchess of Malfi, especially scene 3 where there is an actual echo in the play—and supposedly sounds like the Duchess’ voice. Echo’s inability to speak stems from her involvement with an illicit sexual act (distracting Juno while her husband had sex with a nymph), and in this sense, she reminds me of Julia in the play. Julia is having an affair with the Cardinal, and he reveals to her that he commissioned the Duchess and her children’s deaths. After disclosing that she would not be able to keep that secret, Julia is poisoned by the Cardinal. Julia is a strong-willed female character, like the Duchess, and they are both silenced by the insecure male characters around them. Although death is an extreme length to silence someone, Ovid details Echo’s body withering away, leaving just her voice behind.
It is interesting to think about the power of voice in this play, especially because of the many asides used, and the confusion that speech causes. It is also interesting to examine the strong female characters, namely the Duchess and Julia, speak their mind and be punished, especially in comparison to Cariola who (unsuccessfully) tries to stop the executioner from killing her. Voice is heavily tied into one’s identity, and a voice that is too powerful for one’s societal position causes chaos for those around. To tie in Echo to this discussion, it is significant that she loses her body and her ability to speak for herself—she can only repeat the last words of what others around her say. Although she is not “dead,” her identity is no longer her own, for she is only the voice of those around her. As we have seen in the other plays that we have read, there is a strong connection between one’s voice and identity, primarily the female voice and the ways in which it was permitted to be used.
excellent observations, Kari! I was particularly struck by your reference to Julia, who is an under-studied character–and notice that she says to the cardinal–“tell your echo this…” etc. I loved your interpretation of the way loss of self is figured in the loss of voice here.
Ferdinand: “She and I were twins;
And should I die this instant, I had lived
Her time to a minute.” (4.2.272-274)
Ferdinand is obsessed with the Duchess in a way that goes beyond brotherly love. Specifically, Ferdinand is fixated on the Duchess as his twin. Ferdinand sees himself in the Duchess, for him, the Duchess is merely a reflection of himself. When the Duchess dies, Ferdinand experiences a disruption in himself because he believes a part of him has died. Ferdinand even appears to contemplate death when the Duchess is killed. Evident in the quote above where he states “should I die this instant, I had lived/ Her time to a minute.” Without the Duchess, Ferdinand becomes unhinged as if his sanity depended on the duchess, or that his sane self was only his reflection in the duchess.
Like Narcissus, Ferdinand fell in love with an “empty hope” which was his own reflection. Ferdinand commanded the death of the Duchess because it was the only way to cure his heartache when the Duchess, through birth and marriage, became her own image apart from Ferdinand’s reflection. Ferdinand kills the Duchess as a final attempt to save his reflection. Narcissus proclaimed to his reflection, “two soulmates in one, we shall face our ending together.” (115) This line of thinking crosses Ferdinand’s mind in the above quote and although his physical body does not die, his mental state that is tied to the Duchess does. At the end of the play while Ferdiannd is dying he exclaims:
“My sister! O my sister! There’s the cause
On’t:
Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.” (5.5.71-74)
Resurfacing from his hysteria, Ferdinand recognizes that like diamonds are cut by other diamonds, in killing his twin he has killed his own flesh. In death Ferdinand believes he and the Duchess will eternally reflect each other so that he can live eternally with his own image.
excellent–very astute observations as always, Haley. The diamond image is particularly good–like wounding like, as though he’s reflecting on the damage he has done to his “own” flesh.
While reading the end of Act V, I was very interested in the succession of the Duchess and Antonio’s son to the dukedom. It represents a transition to matrilineal succession, since as Jankowski pointed out, none of the male figures of the play appear to be fit to rule as they are all “either totally reprehensible morally or come to the title illegally through the female line.” This adds another element to the Duchess’ body politic, making her not only a ruler but a matriarchal figure. However, this identity is notably only conferred onto her in death, because in life she did not have the same agency or power, often being the victim of the patriarchal society that could not handle the queen’s two bodies of ruler and mother.
When the Duchess’ son is named the successor, Delio speaks of it as if it was the natural course of things. He says, “Nature doth nothing so great, for great men, as when she’s pleased to make them lords of truth.” Nature is invoked as a feminine figure who returns life to its correct path, revealing truth in the process. Nature becomes the champion and the cause of the Duchess’s son as the new duke, making matrilineal succession appear to be more natural than a patriarchal lineage. Furthermore, saying that she “makes” lords suggests to me the idea of birthing them into existence, which I think aligns the Duchess to Nature in an interesting way.
very good–we’ll come back to this when we look at the end of the play–it’s an odd moment, yet it seems, as you say, to recast the role of the duchess in a new way. I wonder if somehow the maternal body has to be erased so that men can bring other men into power?
The final act of “The Duchess of Malfi” provides the reader with chaos and confusion. Though there are several instances worth discussing regarding the central characters, I wanted to turn the focus to Julia. We see her act in an extremely flirtatious manner with Bosola in the first scene of the fifth act. After admitting her attraction to the Cardinal’s sidekick, she points a pistol in his face and says “Yes, confess to me, which of my women ’twas you hired to put love-powder into my drink?” After a bit of back and forth, Bosola humors Julia’s episode and says “Surely your pistol holds nothing but perfumes or kissing comfits”, indicating that he does not take her threats seriously; his response could also point to flattery he feels at Julia’s advances.
Jankowski briefly mentions how the final act of the play questions the nature of the social constructs implemented during this specific time period. Julia is a prime example— she is a married woman that sleeps with the Cardinal, hinting that she is more sexual than society wants her to be. She also feels mentally unstable for her physical attraction to Bosola and acts in a hysterical manner towards him, eventually initiating a passionate kiss. Julia’s behavior goes against the conservative and innocent attitude that most women during this time period assume. I find it interesting that Julia is never punished for her hyper-sexuality and infidelity while the Duchess is murdered for getting married to and having children with Antonio; this presents a blatant double standard.
very good–I agree that Julia is an odd and interesting character. She is never punished specifically for her adultery, but the Cardinal kills her for her “curiosity”–which is an interesting twist on this gendered death. more later!
**sorry this is late for Tuesday, but I hope it still applies to our discussion of the play in the future**
The Duchess’ violent death within her own bed chamber, which doubled as her birthing chamber earlier in the play, prompted me to return to Gail Paster and reflect on male intrusion into the female-only birthing chamber. Paster gives us a lot to work with when it comes to analyzing the first two acts of the Duchess of Malfi, during which time the Duchess gives birth offstage to the son of her secret sort-of-husband. Once again, as with The Winter’s Tale, we see a birth occur offstage. In this case, Antonio takes great care to isolate the Duchess from the prying eyes of the court, given that her pregnancy is a secret. He invents an excuse to keep the men out of her chamber and surround her with the women the couple had already planned to participate in the birth. This reflects and extends the secrecy and shame that surrounded childbirth during the period, adding a layer of social stigma regarding delivering a bastard child. I was particularly fascinated with the figure of Bosola as one who attempts to penetrate the Duchess’ chamber soon after the birth. “Surely I did hear a woman shriek,” he says. “To their several wards. I must have part of it, my intelligence will freeze else? (47). Bosola of course is spying on the Duchess on behalf of her brother, and is thwarted in his effort to see her so soon after her birth by Antonio guarding the door. Still, I believe his intentions set up an interesting dynamic with what Pater describes as the female-controlled and thus somewhat socially dangerous space of the birth chamber.
Paster describes the birthing chamber as a unlikely reversal of patriarchal gender norms, writing that “since women in early modern Europe ordinarily gave birth under conditions monitored only by other women, childbirth in the period has been interpreted as an inversion of customary gender hierarchies” (165). She goes on to note that “this period of female hegemony extended throughout the lying-in from the onset of labor to a time about 4 weeks later” (185). This occurs in the marital bed chamber, which is typically a space under male control and used for male pleasure. With this expectation in mind, I believe Bosola’s exclamation “I must have part of it” has significance beyond his desire to collect information. Within the logic of the time, it seems to represent a perverted, unnatural, and possibly creepily effeminate desire to enter and partake in a space intended for women only. I see the Duchess’ murder in this space as a sort of commentary about the male drive to enter and disrupt her space.
very good Sarah–I loved your reading of the line “I must have part of it”–it’s really shrewd. I totally agree about the mirroring of the birth and death scenes–as though Bosola has finally got his wish and violently entered this intimate space –does that make him a kind of midwife in the end?
During my reading of Acts III and IV of The Duchess of Malfi and of Theodora Jankowski’s article, I was interested in the ways in which both texts engaged with the ideas of the grotesque and classical bodies that we’ve previously talked about in class. In the play, I noticed the recurring admonishment of the Duchess’ body. The language used by Bosola and Ferdinand to critique the Duchess’ figure made it clear that they perceive her as grotesque, and view her physicality as something punishable. In Act IV, scene ii, Bosola denounces the Duchess, telling her, “Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best, but a salvatory of green mummy. What’s this flesh? A little cruded milk, fasntastical puff paste: our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in… Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body” (115-120). Here, Bosola condemns the Duchess’ physical, observable body— though he does reserve praise for her invisible soul. Ferdinand echoes this sentiment: when he lures the Duchess out of her house arrest in order to trick her with the dead man’s hand, he tells her that “the darkness suits you well” (4.1.30). Saying so strips the Duchess of her corporeal identity and reduces her to a mere concept of a person.
Jankowski’s distinction between the “body politic” and the “body natural” maps onto an understanding of the grotesque and classical bodies that seems to be suggested in the play. If the body physical is the grotesque body, then the body politic is reflected in the unseeable, hardly attainable ideal of the classical body. The body politic/classical body are aspirational, and symbolic of an impossibly high cultural and civic standard.
Ferdinand seems to have an especially hard time reconciling the Duchess’ body natural and body politic. He values her pure bloodline highly, as this is the way that political status is conveyed. He wishes to keep his own bloodline pure, and this means that the Duchess must remain unmarried or wed a nobleman. He expresses his fears when he says “damn her, that body of hers, while that my blood ran pure in’t, was more worth than that which thou wouldst comfort, called a soul” (4.1.116-119). In these lines, Ferdinand directly condemns his sister’s body, thus acknowledging the capacity of her body change the course of rulership— notably, Ferdinand perceives a confluence between the body politic and the body natural; and this recognition of the power of the female body terrifies him.
excellent comments here (and in class too); you pick some great passages to comment on. I agree that the play focuses on the various attempts to degrade and ultimately destroy the duchess’s grotesque, living body–and with no rehabilitation as in the end of the the Winter’s tale–the line you quote at the end, which places F’s blood in the duchess’s body, somehow sums up the tension in the play–all the while she’s living, she risks turning “his” body into something he regards as tainted.
Last week in class, we discussed the attractiveness and the danger of the Duchess’ speech–how her speech is so full of “rapture” that Antonio would want to listen to her speak as much as he is able. With the Duchess’ power of speech in mind, I thought it illuminated her character as someone more powerful and subversive than I initially thought, especially in contrast to Hermoine from “The Winter’s Tale.” Because, despite being continually talked over by her brothers she remains constant and somewhat indestructible with the constancy of her speech. In III.3 Ferdinand tells her, “Do not speak” before he leaves his dagger with her so that she may kill herself but also so that she may cut off her tongue. Perhaps, Ferdinand realizes how powerful her speech can be that he intends for her to castrate herself by physically cutting off her tongue. As in the castration of the phallus, in which a man becomes emasculated, cutting off the Duchess’ tongue can disempower her.
In her death in IV.2, when she is no longer capable of speaking, both Ferdinand and Bosola try to isolate themselves from the responsibility of being her murderers. They invoke her speech, or lack thereof, when Bosola says: “I am angry with myself, now that I wake” and when Ferdinand says “when I was distracted from my wits” as they look upon her dead body and face. Her speech, then, had a sort of rapturous effect that put these men into a state of emotional frenzy. Once she was gone, and so has her speech gone as well, they “awake” from their rapture and realize that they had committed a grave mistake. This points to the Duchess’ power of speech but also how this becomes idealized, in that Ferdinand and Bosolo also use this rapturous effect for their benefit of excluding themselves from the crime they committed.
this is excellent, Isabella–very well done. Your focus on the duchess’s speech as a kind of potency is very interesting–remember ferdinand’s somewhat obscene reference to the part that “hath no bone”–referring to the phallus and the tongue? So the duchess’s use of her tongue is a kind of masculine activity, which drives these men literally mad (at least in F’s case).
What I have been wrestling with while reading The Duchess of Malfi and supplementary articles is the connection between sexuality and power. In the trailer for “Why Women Kill” (a CBS All Access series that follows a housewife in the 1960s, a socialite in the 1980s, and a lawyer in 2019), one of the only spoken lines is “sex is how women gain power over men.” Although this is contemporary entertainment that is far removed from Webster’s time, there are some noticeable parallels. For example, the Duchess is unsurprisingly accused (by male characters) of being promiscuous and overly sexual, but – unlike what would happen in early modern England – this accusation does not cause her to lose her power and authority. It is important to remember that having the title of Duchess absolutely helps her maintain her authority, so I concede that the title is a large part of her power. Another interesting connection to the Duchess of Malfi’s story is the relationship and power dynamic between Queen Elizabeth I and Walter Raleigh, one of her many suitors who she influenced in large part with her sexuality.
I have also been thinking a lot about death! I noticed many parallels between the death of the Duchess and the death of Hero in the interesting production of Much Ado About Nothing that some of us saw this weekend. One major difference is that the Duchess actually died while Hero only died in spirit. But a major parallel is that both Hero and the Duchess died with integrity, honor, innocence, and purity – all of which were virgin qualities in early modern England, which is an interesting wrinkle. I have also thought about death as a theatrical element in general, and how death affects a story, especially when the title character dies. In Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and Coriolanus, all of the title characters die; it seems fitting that a play written by a contemporary of Shakespeare’s features the death of the title character. My final observation that I have continued to think about is how the Duchess’s death is perhaps most similar to that of Desdemona in the final act of Othello.
good–the theme of death is an interesting one; these “strong” and powerful women disrupt their context to such a degree that the patriarchal drive to erase them can’t rest until they are actually dead; and then the remorse sets in–and in a comedy like Much Ado the dead woman is revived. But who would want to marry Claudio?
The Jankowski article focused on the separation of the Duchess of Malfi’s political body from her natural body, which I found to be an intriguing idea but one that I don’t fully agree with. Jankowski insists that we must read the Duchess as a political figure, but this was something I struggled with because we don’t see her exert any power or be treated by anyone (except Antonio) as if she is someone who rules the region. Although she has the nominal title, she doesn’t have any power except her power of “martyrdom” or dying which then leads her brother’s to realize their guilt. I agree with Jankowski’s idea that the political “or dynastic nature of the early modern aristocratic marriage” must not be ignored, but the political nature of her brother’s desire for control did not further her as a political figure. Instead, the borderline incestuous threats and desire for control from Ferdinand, best demonstrated by the moment when he gives her the phallic symbol of her father’s poignard, seemed like Ferdinand trying to affirm his own self as a political body, relying on the natural body of his sister (who as his twin can nearly be a stand in for his own) to do so. Thus, while I think the role of the Duchess is certainly subversive in some ways, I can’t support the politicized argument of the Duchess’ role because I think it simplifies the motivations of Ferdinand.
Jankowski’s ideas about the obsession with the Duchess’ sexuality by the male characters added nuance to my own understanding of the play. The consummation of her marriage that was not ordained by the church seemed subversive to me, but I hadn’t thought about the broader implications of children. I was wondering why she had children, other than to add some blatant evidence of her sexuality, but she would not need multiple children for that purpose. The fact that she had three children in what I imagined as a very short amount of time seemed to indicate an excess of sexuality. I thought this was interesting that as a woman going against patriarchal norms, her actions must be extreme. She cannot just be a sexual women she must be an extremely sexual woman; it felt to me as if Webster was actually creating a parallel between her and a sexually loose woman on account of her fighting back against expectations. Jankowski’s remark that Duchess removes her children from her political life as well as Antonio, coupled with her characterization that “these children are never thought of as the heirs or commodities in a dynastic marriage” made me think that the death of her children served as an ultimate punishment for her sexuality. The only way that she could be truly punished for it would be for her children to die because they are the direct result of that. Her one child survives, but the other children, perhaps viewed as results of her intense sexuality, had to die and that seemed like a clear punishment.
These are great comments, Colleen, and we’ll certainly touch on these issues in class. I think you make a good argument against Jankowski’s point–it’s true that we don’t really see the duchess embodying power in the public sphere–not to any significant degree. In fact, the redesigning of public and private space in this play is something we should discuss in relation to that issue in other plays. And yes, the children are an interesting problem–I do think it’s important that Webster introduces her son at the end as the hope for the future “in his mother’s right.”
In her essay, “Defining/Confining the Duchess: Negotiating the Female Body in John Webster’s ‘The Duchess of Malfi,'” Theodora Jankowski directs us to Ferdinand’s “obsessive desire” to “confine his sister and preserve her chastity–coupled with his equally obsessive fear that she will dispose of her body as she chooses,” which leads him to view her as “one of those diseased women whose ‘livers are more spotted / Than Laban’s sheep’ (298-299)” (Jankowski 228). I thought this was a particularly interesting passage to highlight, given how prevalent the liver has been in the other texts we have read in reference to the threat of female promiscuity. Just as Leontes quips that, “were my wife’s liver / Infected as her life, she would not live / The running of one glass” (I.ii.304-306), we see in The Duchess of Malfi another male character projecting his masculine anxiety onto the powerful woman in question by targeting her seemingly “excessive” sexuality.
Yet what Webster does in The Duchess of Malfi, as Jankowski points out, is make the Duchess actually quite a subversive character. Despite the attacks on her sexuality (often through the language of sickness and madness) made by her jealous brothers, she is in fact “something that normally does not appear in the early modern drama–a loving wife who is also a sexually mature and active woman” (Jankowski 240). Despite having fewer lines that Hermione in The Winter’s Tale and having a much more tragic (and real) death, the Duchess embodies in many ways a more realistic woman with desires that are in no way excessive to any viewer watching the play. The misogynistic violence against her therefore seems completely hyperbolic (typical of revenge tragedy), and we see much more clearly an evil patriarchal force attempting to confine, control, and defeat the natural and political body of the matriarchal figure.
Although I first read The Duchess of Malfi as a deeply misogynistic play ( I was convinced Webster truly hated women), after reading Jankowski’s article, I’m beginning to push against this slightly. Yes, there is an immense amount of misogyny in the play, but I’m wondering if it might actually be subversive given the Duchess’s power over these men. Some of last words – “I am Duchess of Malfi still” (IV.2.140) –resonate with me in this way. Although she is tragically murdered, she dies with her integrity: something that Ferdinand (or any of his men) does not have. And perhaps integrity is the most powerful weapon.
very good and thoughtful comments, Gemma. I like the way you’re allowing your reading of the play to shift a bit after reading the article–it’s true that the play contains the spirit of its age in terms of the casual misogyny in many of the lines; but at the same time the Duchess is (I would say) a truly attractive and interesting character–she certainly is explicitly presented as more noble than any of the powerful male characters. I’m also struck by that line–I am Duchess of Malfi still–thinking about issues of gender and public sphere, and the political/private body–it’s a complex moment.
October 31, 2019 at 8:53 am
In the face of death, Cariola evokes pregnancy to try to protect her. She plies before her execution, “I am quick with child” (4.2.208). However, they strangle her anyway, perhaps because she is trying to deceive since the play does not indicate her being engaged or pregnant before this moment. Nevertheless, considering the claim of pregnancy as a protective measure illustrates the gender politics of the period. For much of the play, pregnancy operated as a secret, a state that evoked danger and fear of female sexuality. If Cariola indeed were pregnant, still the issue of her relationship stands and uncontrolled female sexuality. As mentioned, there was no mention of engagement. Accordingly, her claim to Bosola perhaps did not evoke a sympathetic response because her claim to pregnancy is viewed as negative without the attachment of a man. For the duchess, her motherhood offered her no sense of protection. It did not matter that she had three children and functioned as a mother and wife under the patriarchy.
Moreover, the image of the pregnant women in the play and others of the time evoked feelings of anger and disgust at female sexuality. So why did Cariola try to claim pregnancy as protection? Perhaps she thought that the image of a pregnant woman would evoke sympathy because her image is conflated with a child. With these ideas in mind, I started to research if the pregnant body evoked more sympathy and if the claim to pregnancy was used to dissuade murder. I was surprised to see that murder was the leading cause of death in pregnant women. Isabelle Horo, DrPH, from the Maryland Department of Health, writes on her Web MD report: “We found that homicide was the leading cause of death among women who were pregnant … and accounted for 20% of deaths among that group, compared with 6% of deaths among nonpregnant women of reproductive age.” Many of the murderers were spouses and partners of the pregnant women, the people who, in theory, should be the most sympathetic. All of this leads me to wonder: does pregnancy evoke empathy at all? Contemplating Cariola’s plea of pregnancy illustrates that perhaps a pregnant woman evokes violence, and maybe this violence is a response to a detestation of female sexuality.
October 31, 2019 at 10:21 am
really interesting comments! It was actually usually the case that women who were condemned to death for a crime, but were pregnant, had a stay of execution to give birth—so she is perhaps trying to buy some time here?
October 31, 2019 at 2:48 am
I found the story of Narcissus and Echo to be very intriguing in the context of Ferdinand. The part in act V, scene ii where Ferdinand attacks his own shadow felt especially reminiscent of Narcissus as both men have a physical and emotional reaction to a version of their own reflection. While there are differences between these two reactions and reflections—a reflection is obviously distinct from a shadow, Narcissus gets a clear vision of his appearance while Ferdinand only has a darkened shape of his body— I think such distinctions only accentuate aspects of the characters’ similarities.
Both men respond as if the image isn’t a natural illusion of their own body. While Narcissus falls in lust with his, Ferdinand fears his own, reflecting each man’s understanding of himself; Narcissus sees detailed beauty in “creamy whiteness” (Ovid 113) while Ferdinand sees total darkness. At the same time, Ovid describes Narcissus’s reflection as a shadow in the line “He fell in love with an empty hope, a shadow mistake for substance” (112). For me, this statement reveals what’s going on for both men; in their madness (or perhaps, misguidedness in Narcissus’s case), they not only fail to recognize themselves, but they also take superficial qualities too seriously, giving them more power than they really have, and consequently exacerbating their madness.
Bodily transformation is involved for both men, as well. Narcissus melts, ironically losing the aspect of his identity that caused his downfall, while Ferdinand is diagnosed with lycanthropia, which includes the symptom of internal body hair. This is crucial to the characters’ similarities, as I think the Duchess serves as a sort of “Narcissus’s reflection” for Ferdinand throughout the play. As his twin, she is already his reflection to an extent. But he doesn’t seem to see her as her own person, and his maniacal attempt to control her is an act of incest (even if not overtly sexual) by means to control his own aristocratic male position. In this way, his relationship to his reflection is the opposite of that of Narcissus, as he not only sees his reflection more and more as part of himself (though it is in fact distinct from himself, unlike Narcissus’s), but also he strives to obliterate the reflection in order to empower his own identity. By destroying his sister’s “masculine” power, he not only retains a social power of the family, but he also feeds his own masculinity, and becomes more physically “manly” (ie body hair, though inside the body) as a result. In becoming non-human through his lycanthropia, his shadow thus becomes what remains of his actual identity, just as Narcissus’s reflection marks a loss of identity, as he loses his own humanity.
October 31, 2019 at 10:22 am
this is fascinating, Maya, well done. You’re right that the story fits really well with the aetiology of ‘narcissism’ in Ovid’s story. I was thinking of the more straightforward account of Echo when I assigned it, but you have added a really interesting aspect here!
October 31, 2019 at 1:53 am
I found very interesting the unravelling of Ferdinand after his sister’s death. A murder that he orchestrated with a cold-blooded reverence, causes him to contract lycanthropia, a disease brought upon by overbearing melancholy. The disease causes one to “imagine themselves to be transformed into wolves.” This psychotic break causes Ferdinand to lose any sort of previous agency he once had. He is not able to control his bodily functions as he digs up dead bodies, howls at the moon, and later, accidentally kills Bosola. He has also lost control of his voice and convictions. For the remainder of the play, Ferdinand babbles nonsensically as the other characters mostly ignore him. The loss of his mind, voice and reason, turn him into an auxiliary character—a body to be acted upon. This is represented when his attending doctor promises, “I’ll make him as tame as a dormouse.” The word “tame” indicates a clear connection between the feminine and Ferdinand’s lack of mental/physical agency. Ferdinand is now an unruly body (specifically mouth), that needs to be tamed. While reading this, I was reminded of Lady Macbeth’s fall into madness after a murder.
I also noticed a connection between Ferdinand and Narcissus from Metamorphoses. In the story, Narcissus falls in love with his reflection and goes mad when he can not attain his true love. In Duchess of Malfi, Ferdinand falls in love with his twin sister (a reflection of himself) and loses his mind after he kills her, assuring that they will never be together. While there are many parallels you can make between the texts, the emphasis of self-obsession goes back to ideas of femininity. Vanity is often seen as a feminine trait, but it’s very clearly displayed in Ferdinand. It seems to me that Webster is commenting on the connections of mind, body and self, and how these entities play into a feminine/masculine binary.
October 31, 2019 at 10:24 am
excellent points, Mel–very good. It is very interesting that Webster portrays this “rupture” in Ferdinand as lycanthropia, a particular kind of melancholy.–I also liked your reading of his obsession with his “sister-image” through the story of Narcissus–that’s a great point, and we discuss more today.
October 31, 2019 at 12:13 am
I was struck by some of the connections between The Duchess of Malfi and the story of Echo and Narcissus, especially those outside of the actual echoing scene. As Zoe mentioned, Ferdinand’s desire and frustration with his sister is much like Narcissus’s lust for himself. I also think it is significant that, right before the apparent illusion to Ovid, who is obsessed with transformations, we learn that Ferdinand has lycanthropy and believes he becomes a werewolf. Importantly, he goes to graveyards and digs up bodies, as if in search for the body of his sister, who, if having gone the way of Echo, has no body remaining; even her bones “were transformed to stone” (111).
This mention of stone bones is also interesting to me in the context of the grotesque body; much like Leontes, who desired his wife be less grotesque but found the classical body lacking, Ferdinand is frantically searching for the grotesque body he has already destroyed, going so far as to retrieve parts of corpses. Furthermore, he seems to adopt the grotesque body himself, becoming prone to hysterical outbursts and being killed bloodily, through several wounds. As if mimicking his sister’s echo, Ferdinand too gets a posthumous voice; the stage direction reads, “He [Bosola] kills Ferdinand,” but several lines later, Ferdinand gets some deathbed bemoaning in. This is especially interesting to me in the context of his “reconciliation” to the one body he feels he shares with his sister, as at the duchess’s execution, she comes back alive for a moment as well.
October 31, 2019 at 10:26 am
very good–I particularly liked your reading of Ferdinand as both destroyer of the grotesque body (in a way, like Narcissus) and frantically seeking it out–in parts. The reference to stones is also interesting–there are increasing references in the play to people’s hearts being stony or hardened or “empty graves”.
October 30, 2019 at 8:19 pm
In Act 4, Scene 2, Bosola instructs the executioners to “remove that noise,” and they seize the Duchess (4.2.184). The Duchess, facing them, says: “Dispose my breath how please you” (4.2.213), and then says, “Go tell my brothers when I am laid out, / They then may feed in quiet” (220-223). The stage-action that immediately follows the word “quiet” is the scene of the executioners strangling her. Ferdinand even says, in the final scene, remembering his twin sister’s death, that “strangling is a very quiet death” (5.4.34). To be “a dead thing” and continue to speak is objectively haunting, especially when the method of killing that “dead thing” involved silencing her by cutting off her access to air itself. The Duchess, when she says that her brothers will be able to “feed in quiet” once she has died, she suggests that part of the goal of killing her was to silence her. The Duchess, in being strangled and muted, is thus stripped of her ability to govern. Echo, in Ovid’s story, yearns to hear things she wants to say reflected in Narcissus’s speech so that she can then repeat it and extract some sort of meaning: “She was merely permitted and ready to wait for the sound which her voice could return to the speaker” (Book 3, 377). When the Duchess’ own voice is removed, her voice simply mirrors what Delio and Antonio say; because she is no longer a speaking body, she is no longer a ruling body, a “shrieking” body, a sexual body, or, really, because she only echoes male voices, a feminine body.
October 30, 2019 at 8:25 pm
Also, Sarah mentioned last class about how intimate the act of strangling seems to be. By holding his hands up to the Duchess’s throat, the executioner is directly and physically interacting with her access to air and voice; he is stopping it up, creating quiet, and we can presume that they are almost face-to-face. The intersections of voice, intimacy, violence, and the body are all at play here.
October 31, 2019 at 10:27 am
good! more on this today!
October 31, 2019 at 10:27 am
excellent! this winnowing down of the female voice to mere echo would make a great paper topic, actually..I’ll be interested to hear whether you think there are any traces of the duchess’s actual voice in the echo–or whether it is actually just the men’s voices coming back to them.
October 30, 2019 at 5:30 pm
I do not know much about classical mythology, so I was really excited to read the stories of Echo and Narcissus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The story of Echo plays in well with the final act of The Duchess of Malfi, especially scene 3 where there is an actual echo in the play—and supposedly sounds like the Duchess’ voice. Echo’s inability to speak stems from her involvement with an illicit sexual act (distracting Juno while her husband had sex with a nymph), and in this sense, she reminds me of Julia in the play. Julia is having an affair with the Cardinal, and he reveals to her that he commissioned the Duchess and her children’s deaths. After disclosing that she would not be able to keep that secret, Julia is poisoned by the Cardinal. Julia is a strong-willed female character, like the Duchess, and they are both silenced by the insecure male characters around them. Although death is an extreme length to silence someone, Ovid details Echo’s body withering away, leaving just her voice behind.
It is interesting to think about the power of voice in this play, especially because of the many asides used, and the confusion that speech causes. It is also interesting to examine the strong female characters, namely the Duchess and Julia, speak their mind and be punished, especially in comparison to Cariola who (unsuccessfully) tries to stop the executioner from killing her. Voice is heavily tied into one’s identity, and a voice that is too powerful for one’s societal position causes chaos for those around. To tie in Echo to this discussion, it is significant that she loses her body and her ability to speak for herself—she can only repeat the last words of what others around her say. Although she is not “dead,” her identity is no longer her own, for she is only the voice of those around her. As we have seen in the other plays that we have read, there is a strong connection between one’s voice and identity, primarily the female voice and the ways in which it was permitted to be used.
October 31, 2019 at 10:29 am
excellent observations, Kari! I was particularly struck by your reference to Julia, who is an under-studied character–and notice that she says to the cardinal–“tell your echo this…” etc. I loved your interpretation of the way loss of self is figured in the loss of voice here.
October 30, 2019 at 3:31 pm
Ferdinand: “She and I were twins;
And should I die this instant, I had lived
Her time to a minute.” (4.2.272-274)
Ferdinand is obsessed with the Duchess in a way that goes beyond brotherly love. Specifically, Ferdinand is fixated on the Duchess as his twin. Ferdinand sees himself in the Duchess, for him, the Duchess is merely a reflection of himself. When the Duchess dies, Ferdinand experiences a disruption in himself because he believes a part of him has died. Ferdinand even appears to contemplate death when the Duchess is killed. Evident in the quote above where he states “should I die this instant, I had lived/ Her time to a minute.” Without the Duchess, Ferdinand becomes unhinged as if his sanity depended on the duchess, or that his sane self was only his reflection in the duchess.
Like Narcissus, Ferdinand fell in love with an “empty hope” which was his own reflection. Ferdinand commanded the death of the Duchess because it was the only way to cure his heartache when the Duchess, through birth and marriage, became her own image apart from Ferdinand’s reflection. Ferdinand kills the Duchess as a final attempt to save his reflection. Narcissus proclaimed to his reflection, “two soulmates in one, we shall face our ending together.” (115) This line of thinking crosses Ferdinand’s mind in the above quote and although his physical body does not die, his mental state that is tied to the Duchess does. At the end of the play while Ferdiannd is dying he exclaims:
“My sister! O my sister! There’s the cause
On’t:
Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.” (5.5.71-74)
Resurfacing from his hysteria, Ferdinand recognizes that like diamonds are cut by other diamonds, in killing his twin he has killed his own flesh. In death Ferdinand believes he and the Duchess will eternally reflect each other so that he can live eternally with his own image.
October 31, 2019 at 10:30 am
excellent–very astute observations as always, Haley. The diamond image is particularly good–like wounding like, as though he’s reflecting on the damage he has done to his “own” flesh.
October 30, 2019 at 2:26 pm
While reading the end of Act V, I was very interested in the succession of the Duchess and Antonio’s son to the dukedom. It represents a transition to matrilineal succession, since as Jankowski pointed out, none of the male figures of the play appear to be fit to rule as they are all “either totally reprehensible morally or come to the title illegally through the female line.” This adds another element to the Duchess’ body politic, making her not only a ruler but a matriarchal figure. However, this identity is notably only conferred onto her in death, because in life she did not have the same agency or power, often being the victim of the patriarchal society that could not handle the queen’s two bodies of ruler and mother.
When the Duchess’ son is named the successor, Delio speaks of it as if it was the natural course of things. He says, “Nature doth nothing so great, for great men, as when she’s pleased to make them lords of truth.” Nature is invoked as a feminine figure who returns life to its correct path, revealing truth in the process. Nature becomes the champion and the cause of the Duchess’s son as the new duke, making matrilineal succession appear to be more natural than a patriarchal lineage. Furthermore, saying that she “makes” lords suggests to me the idea of birthing them into existence, which I think aligns the Duchess to Nature in an interesting way.
October 31, 2019 at 10:32 am
very good–we’ll come back to this when we look at the end of the play–it’s an odd moment, yet it seems, as you say, to recast the role of the duchess in a new way. I wonder if somehow the maternal body has to be erased so that men can bring other men into power?
October 30, 2019 at 12:22 pm
The final act of “The Duchess of Malfi” provides the reader with chaos and confusion. Though there are several instances worth discussing regarding the central characters, I wanted to turn the focus to Julia. We see her act in an extremely flirtatious manner with Bosola in the first scene of the fifth act. After admitting her attraction to the Cardinal’s sidekick, she points a pistol in his face and says “Yes, confess to me, which of my women ’twas you hired to put love-powder into my drink?” After a bit of back and forth, Bosola humors Julia’s episode and says “Surely your pistol holds nothing but perfumes or kissing comfits”, indicating that he does not take her threats seriously; his response could also point to flattery he feels at Julia’s advances.
Jankowski briefly mentions how the final act of the play questions the nature of the social constructs implemented during this specific time period. Julia is a prime example— she is a married woman that sleeps with the Cardinal, hinting that she is more sexual than society wants her to be. She also feels mentally unstable for her physical attraction to Bosola and acts in a hysterical manner towards him, eventually initiating a passionate kiss. Julia’s behavior goes against the conservative and innocent attitude that most women during this time period assume. I find it interesting that Julia is never punished for her hyper-sexuality and infidelity while the Duchess is murdered for getting married to and having children with Antonio; this presents a blatant double standard.
October 31, 2019 at 10:33 am
very good–I agree that Julia is an odd and interesting character. She is never punished specifically for her adultery, but the Cardinal kills her for her “curiosity”–which is an interesting twist on this gendered death. more later!
October 29, 2019 at 8:19 pm
**sorry this is late for Tuesday, but I hope it still applies to our discussion of the play in the future**
The Duchess’ violent death within her own bed chamber, which doubled as her birthing chamber earlier in the play, prompted me to return to Gail Paster and reflect on male intrusion into the female-only birthing chamber. Paster gives us a lot to work with when it comes to analyzing the first two acts of the Duchess of Malfi, during which time the Duchess gives birth offstage to the son of her secret sort-of-husband. Once again, as with The Winter’s Tale, we see a birth occur offstage. In this case, Antonio takes great care to isolate the Duchess from the prying eyes of the court, given that her pregnancy is a secret. He invents an excuse to keep the men out of her chamber and surround her with the women the couple had already planned to participate in the birth. This reflects and extends the secrecy and shame that surrounded childbirth during the period, adding a layer of social stigma regarding delivering a bastard child. I was particularly fascinated with the figure of Bosola as one who attempts to penetrate the Duchess’ chamber soon after the birth. “Surely I did hear a woman shriek,” he says. “To their several wards. I must have part of it, my intelligence will freeze else? (47). Bosola of course is spying on the Duchess on behalf of her brother, and is thwarted in his effort to see her so soon after her birth by Antonio guarding the door. Still, I believe his intentions set up an interesting dynamic with what Pater describes as the female-controlled and thus somewhat socially dangerous space of the birth chamber.
Paster describes the birthing chamber as a unlikely reversal of patriarchal gender norms, writing that “since women in early modern Europe ordinarily gave birth under conditions monitored only by other women, childbirth in the period has been interpreted as an inversion of customary gender hierarchies” (165). She goes on to note that “this period of female hegemony extended throughout the lying-in from the onset of labor to a time about 4 weeks later” (185). This occurs in the marital bed chamber, which is typically a space under male control and used for male pleasure. With this expectation in mind, I believe Bosola’s exclamation “I must have part of it” has significance beyond his desire to collect information. Within the logic of the time, it seems to represent a perverted, unnatural, and possibly creepily effeminate desire to enter and partake in a space intended for women only. I see the Duchess’ murder in this space as a sort of commentary about the male drive to enter and disrupt her space.
October 31, 2019 at 10:34 am
very good Sarah–I loved your reading of the line “I must have part of it”–it’s really shrewd. I totally agree about the mirroring of the birth and death scenes–as though Bosola has finally got his wish and violently entered this intimate space –does that make him a kind of midwife in the end?
October 29, 2019 at 10:18 am
October 29, 2019 at 10:03 am
During my reading of Acts III and IV of The Duchess of Malfi and of Theodora Jankowski’s article, I was interested in the ways in which both texts engaged with the ideas of the grotesque and classical bodies that we’ve previously talked about in class. In the play, I noticed the recurring admonishment of the Duchess’ body. The language used by Bosola and Ferdinand to critique the Duchess’ figure made it clear that they perceive her as grotesque, and view her physicality as something punishable. In Act IV, scene ii, Bosola denounces the Duchess, telling her, “Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best, but a salvatory of green mummy. What’s this flesh? A little cruded milk, fasntastical puff paste: our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in… Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body” (115-120). Here, Bosola condemns the Duchess’ physical, observable body— though he does reserve praise for her invisible soul. Ferdinand echoes this sentiment: when he lures the Duchess out of her house arrest in order to trick her with the dead man’s hand, he tells her that “the darkness suits you well” (4.1.30). Saying so strips the Duchess of her corporeal identity and reduces her to a mere concept of a person.
Jankowski’s distinction between the “body politic” and the “body natural” maps onto an understanding of the grotesque and classical bodies that seems to be suggested in the play. If the body physical is the grotesque body, then the body politic is reflected in the unseeable, hardly attainable ideal of the classical body. The body politic/classical body are aspirational, and symbolic of an impossibly high cultural and civic standard.
Ferdinand seems to have an especially hard time reconciling the Duchess’ body natural and body politic. He values her pure bloodline highly, as this is the way that political status is conveyed. He wishes to keep his own bloodline pure, and this means that the Duchess must remain unmarried or wed a nobleman. He expresses his fears when he says “damn her, that body of hers, while that my blood ran pure in’t, was more worth than that which thou wouldst comfort, called a soul” (4.1.116-119). In these lines, Ferdinand directly condemns his sister’s body, thus acknowledging the capacity of her body change the course of rulership— notably, Ferdinand perceives a confluence between the body politic and the body natural; and this recognition of the power of the female body terrifies him.
October 31, 2019 at 10:36 am
excellent comments here (and in class too); you pick some great passages to comment on. I agree that the play focuses on the various attempts to degrade and ultimately destroy the duchess’s grotesque, living body–and with no rehabilitation as in the end of the the Winter’s tale–the line you quote at the end, which places F’s blood in the duchess’s body, somehow sums up the tension in the play–all the while she’s living, she risks turning “his” body into something he regards as tainted.
October 28, 2019 at 7:39 pm
Last week in class, we discussed the attractiveness and the danger of the Duchess’ speech–how her speech is so full of “rapture” that Antonio would want to listen to her speak as much as he is able. With the Duchess’ power of speech in mind, I thought it illuminated her character as someone more powerful and subversive than I initially thought, especially in contrast to Hermoine from “The Winter’s Tale.” Because, despite being continually talked over by her brothers she remains constant and somewhat indestructible with the constancy of her speech. In III.3 Ferdinand tells her, “Do not speak” before he leaves his dagger with her so that she may kill herself but also so that she may cut off her tongue. Perhaps, Ferdinand realizes how powerful her speech can be that he intends for her to castrate herself by physically cutting off her tongue. As in the castration of the phallus, in which a man becomes emasculated, cutting off the Duchess’ tongue can disempower her.
In her death in IV.2, when she is no longer capable of speaking, both Ferdinand and Bosola try to isolate themselves from the responsibility of being her murderers. They invoke her speech, or lack thereof, when Bosola says: “I am angry with myself, now that I wake” and when Ferdinand says “when I was distracted from my wits” as they look upon her dead body and face. Her speech, then, had a sort of rapturous effect that put these men into a state of emotional frenzy. Once she was gone, and so has her speech gone as well, they “awake” from their rapture and realize that they had committed a grave mistake. This points to the Duchess’ power of speech but also how this becomes idealized, in that Ferdinand and Bosolo also use this rapturous effect for their benefit of excluding themselves from the crime they committed.
October 29, 2019 at 10:07 am
this is excellent, Isabella–very well done. Your focus on the duchess’s speech as a kind of potency is very interesting–remember ferdinand’s somewhat obscene reference to the part that “hath no bone”–referring to the phallus and the tongue? So the duchess’s use of her tongue is a kind of masculine activity, which drives these men literally mad (at least in F’s case).
October 28, 2019 at 1:38 pm
What I have been wrestling with while reading The Duchess of Malfi and supplementary articles is the connection between sexuality and power. In the trailer for “Why Women Kill” (a CBS All Access series that follows a housewife in the 1960s, a socialite in the 1980s, and a lawyer in 2019), one of the only spoken lines is “sex is how women gain power over men.” Although this is contemporary entertainment that is far removed from Webster’s time, there are some noticeable parallels. For example, the Duchess is unsurprisingly accused (by male characters) of being promiscuous and overly sexual, but – unlike what would happen in early modern England – this accusation does not cause her to lose her power and authority. It is important to remember that having the title of Duchess absolutely helps her maintain her authority, so I concede that the title is a large part of her power. Another interesting connection to the Duchess of Malfi’s story is the relationship and power dynamic between Queen Elizabeth I and Walter Raleigh, one of her many suitors who she influenced in large part with her sexuality.
I have also been thinking a lot about death! I noticed many parallels between the death of the Duchess and the death of Hero in the interesting production of Much Ado About Nothing that some of us saw this weekend. One major difference is that the Duchess actually died while Hero only died in spirit. But a major parallel is that both Hero and the Duchess died with integrity, honor, innocence, and purity – all of which were virgin qualities in early modern England, which is an interesting wrinkle. I have also thought about death as a theatrical element in general, and how death affects a story, especially when the title character dies. In Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and Coriolanus, all of the title characters die; it seems fitting that a play written by a contemporary of Shakespeare’s features the death of the title character. My final observation that I have continued to think about is how the Duchess’s death is perhaps most similar to that of Desdemona in the final act of Othello.
October 29, 2019 at 10:10 am
good–the theme of death is an interesting one; these “strong” and powerful women disrupt their context to such a degree that the patriarchal drive to erase them can’t rest until they are actually dead; and then the remorse sets in–and in a comedy like Much Ado the dead woman is revived. But who would want to marry Claudio?
October 28, 2019 at 12:31 pm
The Jankowski article focused on the separation of the Duchess of Malfi’s political body from her natural body, which I found to be an intriguing idea but one that I don’t fully agree with. Jankowski insists that we must read the Duchess as a political figure, but this was something I struggled with because we don’t see her exert any power or be treated by anyone (except Antonio) as if she is someone who rules the region. Although she has the nominal title, she doesn’t have any power except her power of “martyrdom” or dying which then leads her brother’s to realize their guilt. I agree with Jankowski’s idea that the political “or dynastic nature of the early modern aristocratic marriage” must not be ignored, but the political nature of her brother’s desire for control did not further her as a political figure. Instead, the borderline incestuous threats and desire for control from Ferdinand, best demonstrated by the moment when he gives her the phallic symbol of her father’s poignard, seemed like Ferdinand trying to affirm his own self as a political body, relying on the natural body of his sister (who as his twin can nearly be a stand in for his own) to do so. Thus, while I think the role of the Duchess is certainly subversive in some ways, I can’t support the politicized argument of the Duchess’ role because I think it simplifies the motivations of Ferdinand.
Jankowski’s ideas about the obsession with the Duchess’ sexuality by the male characters added nuance to my own understanding of the play. The consummation of her marriage that was not ordained by the church seemed subversive to me, but I hadn’t thought about the broader implications of children. I was wondering why she had children, other than to add some blatant evidence of her sexuality, but she would not need multiple children for that purpose. The fact that she had three children in what I imagined as a very short amount of time seemed to indicate an excess of sexuality. I thought this was interesting that as a woman going against patriarchal norms, her actions must be extreme. She cannot just be a sexual women she must be an extremely sexual woman; it felt to me as if Webster was actually creating a parallel between her and a sexually loose woman on account of her fighting back against expectations. Jankowski’s remark that Duchess removes her children from her political life as well as Antonio, coupled with her characterization that “these children are never thought of as the heirs or commodities in a dynastic marriage” made me think that the death of her children served as an ultimate punishment for her sexuality. The only way that she could be truly punished for it would be for her children to die because they are the direct result of that. Her one child survives, but the other children, perhaps viewed as results of her intense sexuality, had to die and that seemed like a clear punishment.
October 29, 2019 at 10:14 am
These are great comments, Colleen, and we’ll certainly touch on these issues in class. I think you make a good argument against Jankowski’s point–it’s true that we don’t really see the duchess embodying power in the public sphere–not to any significant degree. In fact, the redesigning of public and private space in this play is something we should discuss in relation to that issue in other plays. And yes, the children are an interesting problem–I do think it’s important that Webster introduces her son at the end as the hope for the future “in his mother’s right.”
October 27, 2019 at 11:12 pm
In her essay, “Defining/Confining the Duchess: Negotiating the Female Body in John Webster’s ‘The Duchess of Malfi,'” Theodora Jankowski directs us to Ferdinand’s “obsessive desire” to “confine his sister and preserve her chastity–coupled with his equally obsessive fear that she will dispose of her body as she chooses,” which leads him to view her as “one of those diseased women whose ‘livers are more spotted / Than Laban’s sheep’ (298-299)” (Jankowski 228). I thought this was a particularly interesting passage to highlight, given how prevalent the liver has been in the other texts we have read in reference to the threat of female promiscuity. Just as Leontes quips that, “were my wife’s liver / Infected as her life, she would not live / The running of one glass” (I.ii.304-306), we see in The Duchess of Malfi another male character projecting his masculine anxiety onto the powerful woman in question by targeting her seemingly “excessive” sexuality.
Yet what Webster does in The Duchess of Malfi, as Jankowski points out, is make the Duchess actually quite a subversive character. Despite the attacks on her sexuality (often through the language of sickness and madness) made by her jealous brothers, she is in fact “something that normally does not appear in the early modern drama–a loving wife who is also a sexually mature and active woman” (Jankowski 240). Despite having fewer lines that Hermione in The Winter’s Tale and having a much more tragic (and real) death, the Duchess embodies in many ways a more realistic woman with desires that are in no way excessive to any viewer watching the play. The misogynistic violence against her therefore seems completely hyperbolic (typical of revenge tragedy), and we see much more clearly an evil patriarchal force attempting to confine, control, and defeat the natural and political body of the matriarchal figure.
Although I first read The Duchess of Malfi as a deeply misogynistic play ( I was convinced Webster truly hated women), after reading Jankowski’s article, I’m beginning to push against this slightly. Yes, there is an immense amount of misogyny in the play, but I’m wondering if it might actually be subversive given the Duchess’s power over these men. Some of last words – “I am Duchess of Malfi still” (IV.2.140) –resonate with me in this way. Although she is tragically murdered, she dies with her integrity: something that Ferdinand (or any of his men) does not have. And perhaps integrity is the most powerful weapon.
October 30, 2019 at 4:06 pm
very good and thoughtful comments, Gemma. I like the way you’re allowing your reading of the play to shift a bit after reading the article–it’s true that the play contains the spirit of its age in terms of the casual misogyny in many of the lines; but at the same time the Duchess is (I would say) a truly attractive and interesting character–she certainly is explicitly presented as more noble than any of the powerful male characters. I’m also struck by that line–I am Duchess of Malfi still–thinking about issues of gender and public sphere, and the political/private body–it’s a complex moment.