Duchess of Malfi, Outline for Passport Essay

Introduction:

In recent years, much has been made of the Duchess of Malfi’s body. Webster’s text invites the reader to endlessly analogize the Duchess’s body: it may refer to the lands she rules, her intangible body politic, the wealth and noble status, her capacity to provoke desire and also her ability to experience desire, her domestic and maternal roles, and, indeed, to her untimely death. And yet, that same body, in its constant state of flux, becomes unstable ground for the ideas it seems to represent. It resists being pinned down. Critics have attempted to explain the Duchess’s enigmatic body by associating it with the historicized political theory of an Elizabethan monarch’s two bodies; the Duchess’s shape-shifting body enacts her attempts to promote a functional ideology of female rule. Feminist critics describe the static female body as an empty cipher, to be read and interpreted by her husband, father, brother, or lover. The Duchess’s dynamic body refuses to be interpreted by her brothers; it therefore becomes a locus for female empowerment and a site that the Duchess can claim for her own sexual and maternal agendas.

Each of these theories falls short in its interpretation of the Duchess’s body. While the pregnant Duchess may offer a new way to imagine female rulers, she undermines her own political goal, and ends prisoner in her own castle. Similarly, the Duchess’s changing body seems to resist easy management by her brothers, but she looses this ability when she is captured, tortured, and killed at their command. In order for the Duchess’s body to be appropriately understood, it must be examined after her capture, and in the moments leading up to her death. Each of the above theories depends on the Duchess’s body itself being the grounds for transformative fulfillment; instead, I would argue that a Pauline dualism is much more involved in Webster’s depiction of the Duchess’s body than is typically accepted. I argue that the Duchess’s rhetorical move into the domestic sphere just before her death signals not an overwhelming identification with the body, but rather a leave-taking of one world before the entrance of another. It is the Duchess’s ability to dissociate from her body that ultimately proves to be her strength.

I The Duchess’s pregnant body is taken as a physical manifestation of the “two-body” theory, and is thought to promote a new kind of female rule. This attempt is unsuccessful, as the Duchess is unable to reconcile her private decisions with her public face as a “prince.”

II The Duchess’s shape-shifting body is described as refusing to be “read” or “interpreted” by the Duchess’s brothers; it “speaks for itself.” The Duchess does not, however, gain autonomy, and her body is described in monstrous terms that reduce her rather than affirm her.

III These critics have eschewed an interpretation involving a Pauline divide between earthly body and heavenly body. I believe that just such a divide is at the heart of the play, and is particularly important as the Duchess prepares for death.

Bibliography

Jankowski, Theodora A. “Defining/Confining the Duchess: Negotiating the Female Body in John Webster’s “The Duchess of Malfi.” Studies in Philology, 87 (Spring 1990): 221-245.

Moncrief, Kathryn M and Kathryn R. Mcpherson, Ed. Performing Maternity in Early Modern England. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007.

Wall, Wendy. “Just a Spoonful of Sugar: Syrup and Domesticity in Early Modern England.” Modern Philology, 104 (2006): 149-172.