Abstract
As the focus on double bodies in The Comedy of Errors illustrates, early modern English culture seems to have had a physiological understanding of the ways in which authority operates. Analogies connecting the human body to monarchy and such curious beliefs as the king’s two bodies suggest that the body was enormously significant in contemporary political discourse. This chapter explores the political resonances of the pregnant female body as depicted in John Webster’s, The Duchess of Malfi, specifically the ways in which the duchess’s great belly challenges the universalized male human body as the dominant figure for authority. As a site of sexuality, regeneration, and doubleness and as a literalization of the two-bodied construction of absolute power, evoking Marian precedents, the duchess’s pregnancies not only challenge Aristotelian beliefs about the limited female role in conception but also recast female authority as natural, thereby subverting the underpinnings of early modern absolutist discourse.
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Notes
Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England. The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 44, puts it, “To be a father, in early modern England, was to be a king, and the reverse was also true.”
Heinrich Bullinger, The Christen State of Matrimonye (1543), sig. B4, asserts, “For the husband is the wyves head, like as Christ also is the head of the congregation, … so let the wives also be in subjection to theyr husbands in all thynges.” In a later marriage manual, Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Forme of Household Governance (1598), I and 9, is famous for writing, “A Householde is as it were a little commonwealth” wherein the husband is “cheefe governeur.” As Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England. The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 44, puts it, “To be a father, in early modern England, was to be a king, and the reverse was also true.”
King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 76. For a comprehensive discussion of the king-head analogy in early modern culture, see Sharpe, Remapping, 111–114.
Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), 146.
Elizabeth was reported to have said at Tillbury in 1588, “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too.” Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 326. Elizabeth may have derived her words from the advice of Bernard of Clairvaux to Queen Melisende in the twelfth century. Bernard advised, “although a woman, you must act as a man by doing everything you have to do ‘in a spirit prudent and strong.’” Quoted in Lois L. Huneycutt, “Female Succession and the Language of Power in the Writings of Twelfth-Century Churchmen,” Medieval Queenship, ed. John Carmi Parsons (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993: repr. 1998), 199.
Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 64.
Mary E. Fissell, “The Politics of Reproduction in the English Reformation,” Representations 87 (2004): 64.
Kate Chedgzoy, “Impudent Women: Carnival and Gender in Early Modern Culture,” The Glasgow Review 1 (1993), 2, notes that “In early modern Europe, the notion that women were an innately disruptive, carnivalesque force in society was grounded in a similar perception of the female body as inherently grotesque.”
All quotations from Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and its source text, William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure, follow John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown, Revels Plays (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1974).
Fear of a monstrous or deformed body informed some of the debate about female rulership in the early modern period. Melanie Hansen, “The World and the Throne: John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,” in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, and Suzanne Trill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 21, notes, “For the woman to assume authority, she was adopting the function of the superior head. Consequently, it is the reversal in the relationship between men and women, when women assume power, that creates a monstrous body.”
Linda Woodbridge, “Queen of Apricots: The Duchess of Malfi, Hero of Desire,” in The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama, ed. Naomi Con Liebler (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2002), 161.
Here Ferdinand supports John Carmi Parsons’s claim that, “[i]f the royal bedchamber was the site of proper reproductive behavior, it could also be the crucible of conflict and upheaval”; John Carmi Parsons, “Family, Sex, and Power: The Rhythms of Medieval Queenship,” in Medieval Queenship, ed. John Carmi Parsons (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993; repr. 1998), 5.
Karin S. Coddon, “The Duchess of Malfi: Tyranny and Spectacle in Jacobean Drama,” Themes in Drama 15 (1993): 34, sees the Duchess’s “invocation of legalese” in the marriage ceremony as “anticipat[ing] the crucial movement in early modern England to a contractual society rather than one centered in the body and blood of the monarch.”
Kimberly A. Turner, “The Complexity of Webster’s Duchess,” Ben jonson journal 7 (2002): 399.
Dympna Callaghan, “Introduction,” in New Casebooks: The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2000), 6, observes that “male rule foundered upon the fact that men often died early, that only 6o per cent of marriages produced a son, and that, demographically, it was unlikely that a son would be of age at the time of his father’s death. A son’s inheritance thus often came into his mother’s hands.” Congenital syphilis and other genetic defects appeared to be rampant among European royal sons, as was the case for the short-lived sons of Catherine de Medici.
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 30.
Inevitably, there was some resistance to this master narrative, and women did occasionally assert and maintain their active role in creating life. Already contradicting women’s passive role in procre-ation was the belief that the womb had its own power. J. Gillemeau, Childbirth: Or the Happy Deliverie of Women (1612), writes, “in some Women the wombe is so greedy, and lickerish that it doth even come down to meet nature, sucking, and (as it were) snatching the same, though it remaine only about the mouth and entrance of the outward orifice thereof”; quoted in Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynecology in Tudor and Stuart England (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), 28–29.
The closest Webster comes to Painter’s plowing metaphors is during the marriage ceremony, when the Duchess herself says to Antonio, “So, now the ground’s broke, / You may discover what awealthy mine / I make you lord of” (1.1.427–429). The lack of such metaphors is compelling, since Webster incorporated more than forty of Painter’s phrases, according to John Russell Brown, “Introduction,” in John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown, Revels Plays (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1974), xxvii.
Jeanne Addison Roberts, “Horses and Hermaphrodites: Metamorphoses in The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34.2 (Summer 1983): 168–169.
This quotation follows William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).
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© 2012 Sid Ray
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Ray, S. (2012). “So Troubled with the Mother”: The Politics of Pregnancy in The Duchess of Malfi . In: Mother Queens and Princely Sons. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137003805_4
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