Women Beware Women Critics on the Rape of Bianca Biggs attempts to refute claims that Bianca is raped Hutchings refutes Biggs but also fudges the issue in some ways What happens next We do not know Professor Anthony B Dawson assumes that the action of ID: 932932
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Slide1
Playing the
Wise Wench:
Women Beware Women
Slide2Critics on the Rape of Bianca
Biggs attempts to refute claims that Bianca is raped; Hutchings refutes Biggs (but also fudges the issue in some ways):
What
happens next? We do not know. Professor [Anthony B.] Dawson assumes that the action of
II.ii
itself constitutes rape, and [William C.] Carroll seems to go along with him, until - in a mysteriously privileged view - he asserts that the Duke ‘actually’ rapes Bianca ‘offstage’. But the couple's final passage onstage suggests that the Duke no longer needs to use or even threaten force. Carroll argues that Women Beware Women ‘is one of the few Jacobean plays which actually feature rape or incest instead of merely threatening them’. But the evidence of
II.ii
is surely that rape is threatened rather than enacted;
or rather
, to put it more completely, that the
scene begins
as if leading
to coercion
to
intercourse, continues
intermittently to threaten such
coercion, and
ends as a seduction.
(Murray Biggs, ‘Does the Duke Rape Bianca in
Women Beware Women
?’,
Notes and Queries
44 (1997), 97-100; p. 99)
Biggs argues that ‘the scene begins as if leading to coercion to intercourse [the evasion of ‘rape’ is striking], continues intermittently to threaten such coercion, and ends as a seduction’… Biggs' thesis is that Bianca does not
protest sufficiently
to justify
critics’
claims that
the Duke
rapes her. Indeed,
‘Bianca
is both
vain and ambitious…and
therefore bears
some responsibility
for the outcome of
Il.ii
’
(99).
Yet it
is surely the case that in both
‘textual’
terms
- which
Biggs considers - and in
‘theatrical’ terms
- which he does not - Bianca
is threatened
by a social superior who will
not take ‘no’
for an answer.
Il.ii
suggests all
too readily
the
Duke’s
abuse of power: if
Bianca submits
, she does so, surely, because the
only alternative
is a brutal
rape. (Mark Hutchings
, ‘Middleton´s
Women Beware Women
: Rape, Seduction – Or Power, Simply
?´,
Notes and Queries
,
45 (1998), 366-367; p. 367)
Slide31. Dissuasion.
(See Shakespeare,
Pericles
, Scene 19)
The function of rape as chastity test puts great emphasis on the female art of dissuasion. In spite of the numerous examples in which women are clearly powerless to prevent their rape, it is generally defined implicitly as a woman’s failure of eloquence. While giving women a voice, this emphasis also implies that if a woman cannot dissuade a man from rape, her chastity is questionable. If she fails and is raped, suicide may redeem her, or alternatively, an impulse towards suicide followed by marriage to the rapist; in these cases her eloquence is often reserved for after the event. Preferably, however, she should succeed in protecting herself, usually to the wonder of her assailant
. (Jocelyn Catty,
Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 100)
Slide42. Divine Providence and/or luck.
She that has
that [chastity],
is clad in complete steel,
And like a quivered nymph with arrows keen
May trace huge forests, and
unharboured
heaths,
Infamous hills, and sandy perilous wilds,
Where through the sacred rays of chastity,
No savage fierce, bandit, or mountaineer
Will dare to soil her virgin purity.
(John Milton,
Comus
, ll
. 420-426)
(See also Shakespeare,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
; Jonson,
Volpone
.)
Slide53. Marriage.
[M]
arriage
often functions as
recompense for
an actual rape, reflecting real-life
contingencies. In Painter’s
story ‘Alexander de
Medices
’ the rapist is compelled
to marry
his victim and ‘the marriage [was] made in presence of
the Duke
, with so great
ioy
and
contentation
of all
partes
, as there
was rage
and trouble for ye rape of the Bride
’.
This neat equation
seeks
to
cancel out the rape
, writing the issue of female consent and
desire out
of the story, and conflating all male sexual behaviour as ‘love
’, whether
aggressive or not. Alexander commands the rapist to ‘
loue
hir
so
dearely
, as fondly
heeretofore
she was
beloued
of thee’ (f. 168v).(Catty,
Writing Rape
, p. 29)
Slide64. Suicide.
Even here she
sheathèd
in her harmless breast
A harmful knife, that thence her
soul
unsheathèd
.
That blow did bail it from the deep unrest
Of that
polluted prison
where it
breathèd
.
Her
contrite sighs
unto the clouds
bequeathèd
Her
wingèd
sprite, and through her wounds doth fly
Life’s lasting date, from cancelled destiny.
(Shakespeare,
The Rape of
Lucrece
, 1723-29
)
Slide75. Murder.
SATURNINUS
Because the girl should not survive her shame,
And by her presence still renew his sorrows.
[…]
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee,
And with thy shame thy father’s sorrow die. (5.3.45-46)
(See Livy, ‘The History of Appius and Virginia’ in
The History of Rome
)
Slide86. Survival and whoredom.
The virgin martyr sets the implicit standard for the heroine threatened with sexual violence. If, like Jonson’s Celia and Marston’s
Sophonisba
, she adheres to the example of the saints, she shares in their glory. If, like Middleton’s Bianca and Beatrice-Joanna, she deviates from their model,
valuing her life more and her chastity less, her deviation is a sign of moral and spiritual corruption
; she is, in
Vives’s
words, ‘an evil keeper’ of her chastity and she is punished for it by vituperation as a whore. In the Jacobean drama, as in the lives of the saints, the
truly
chaste woman is inviolable; her body may be ‘
defouled
’ by symbolic rape or erotic torture but not sexually violated. (Karen
Bamford
,
Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 32)
Bianca is not devoid of virtue. While the Duke pleads his passionate love and the futility of religious scruples, she has the moral strength to withstand him. But when he shrewdly pities her condition and offers comfort and security, Bianca has no answer because he has touched upon a newly felt need that is deeper than her desire to maintain her honor and remain true to
Leantio
… It is psychologically right that Bianca says no more:
morally she cannot acquiesce, emotionally she cannot resist
.
(
Verna Ann
Foster, ‘The Deed’s
Creature: The Tragedy of Bianca in
Women
Beware
Women
’,
The
Journal of English and Germanic Philology
,
78
,
(1979
),
508-521; 512)
Slide9Dissuasion
Divine Providence / luck
Marriage
Suicide
Murder
Survival and whoredom
Slide10HIPPOLITO
...vengeance met vengeance
Like a set match, as if the
plagues of sin
Had been agreed to meet here altogether. (5.2.159-61)
Many of the ‘plagues of sin’ (V.ii.158) that characterise the masque are
apocalyptic
in origin, and interestingly they offer a kind of inverted parody of the Catholic mass… Seen in this light, the vicious swiftness of the retribution that characterises the masque, and that so many critics have found problematic, makes sense. Isabella is killed when Livia throws ‘flaming gold’ (V.ii.117sd) upon her, an appropriately apocalyptic ending. She becomes figuratively ‘painted’ like the whore [of Babylon] as punishment for her sin… For the more
Calvinistically
minded members of the audience, these deaths would be
as appropriate as they were inevitable
. (Adrian
Streete
, ‘An old quarrel between us that will never be at an end’: Middleton's
Women Beware Women
and Late Jacobean Religious Politics’,
The Review of English
Studies,
60 (2009), 230-254; p. 253)
Slide11CARDINAL
Vowed you then never to keep
strumpet
more,
And are you now so swift in your desires
To
knit
your honours and your life fast
to her
?
Is not
sin
sure enough to wretched man,
But he must
bind himself in chains
to’t
? Worse!
Must marriage, that immaculate robe of honour,
That renders virtue glorious, fair, and fruitful
To her great master, be now made the garment
Of
leprosy
and foulness? (4.3.8-17)
Slide12BIANCA
…mine honour’s
leprous
… (2.2.422)
BIANCA
A blemished face best fits a
leprous
soul. (5.2.207)
Slide13BIANCA
Now bless me from a blasting; I saw that now
Fearful for any woman’s eye to look on.
Infectious mists and mildews hang
at’s
eyes,
The weather of a doomsday dwells upon him.
Yet since mine honour’s leprous,
why should I
Preserve that fair that caused the leprosy
?
Come, poison all at once. (2.2.418-24)
BIANCA
A blemished face best fits a leprous soul. (5.2.207)
Slide14First
of all, from what I understand from doctors,
that’s
really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape,
the female body has ways
to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or
something… (Todd Akin, former Republican Congressman, discussing abortion for rape victims 2012)
What is his picture of the sort of rape scenario that would cause the female body to “shut that whole thing down,” absent
divine intervention
?...
[D]
oes
Akin think that doing what one could to survive would delegitimize the rape—or that a legitimate victim is one who sees rape as a fate worse than death? Is it fear that shuts that whole thing down, or disgust? Fear and sex and pregnancy are not strangers… [T]here is a notion, common in conservative rhetoric lately, that desperation is always elsewhere, and that the crises in ordinary lives do not need to be contemplated or worried about—not by nice people. They are rare; something has gone wrong; maybe the complaint isn’t legitimate; maybe it’s their own fault. That indifference goes beyond the question of rape and abortion. (Amy Davidson, ‘What Does Todd Akin Think “Legitimate Rape” Is?’, The New Yorker, 19th August 2012)
Slide15‘…the female body has ways…’
The
opposition of body and
soul… –
an important strategy for containing the crime of rape which, as we know, goes back to Augustine – implicitly mystifies women, and in a context crucially concerned with establishing chastity. It thus
seems
likely to fuel
a prevalent anxiety concerning the
knowability
of female
sexuality
… The
problem goes beyond the mere practicality of catching a woman in the act of adultery, to the greater
anxiety generated by the relative invisibility of the female genitals and female sexual pleasure. The unknowability of female sexuality or sexual status, which we have already seen to be of particular pertinence for the issue of rape, is strongly problematized by the dramatic mode. (Catty, Writing Rape, pp. 107-08)LEANTIOThey are all of ’em a kind of spirits – soon raisedBut not so soon laid, Mother. As for example,A woman’s belly is got up in a trice –A simple charge ere it be laid down again:
So ever in all their quarrels, and their courses
. (1.1.80-84)
Slide16BIANCA
Oh the deadly snares
That women set for women, without pity
Either to soul or honour! Learn by me
To know your foes; in this belief I die:
Like
our own sex
, we have no enemy, no enemy! (5.2.213-17)
Slide17LEANTIO
Yet let’s be wise, and keep all
smothered
closely;
I have bethought a means; is the door fast?...
You know, Mother,
At the end of the dark parlour there’s a place
So artificially contrived for a conveyance,
No search could ever find it. When my father
Kept in for
manslaughter
, it was his sanctuary.
There will I lock my life’s best
treasure up,Bianca. BIANCA Would you keep me closer yet?Have you the conscience? Y’are best e’en choke me up, sir! (3.1.240-49)
Slide18LEANTIO
Here stands the poor
thief
, now, that
stole
the
treasure
,
And he’s not thought on. Ours is near kin now
To a twin-misery born into the world:
First the hard-
conscienced
worldling, he hoards wealth up;Then comes the next, and he feasts all upon’t –One’s damned for getting, th’other for spending on’t. (3.2.88-93)
Slide19BIANCA
Make me not bold with death and deeds of ruin
Because they fear not you; me they must fright.
Then am I best in health
. Should thunder speak
And none regard it, it had lost the name
And were as good be still. I’m not like those
That take their soundest sleeps in greatest tempests;
Then wake I most
, the weather
fearfullest
,
And
call for strength to virtue. (2.2.349-56)
Slide20ISABELLA
What’s that?
Methought
I heard ill news come toward me
,
Which commonly we understand too soon,
Then over-quick at hearing.
I’ll prevent it
,
Though my joys fare the harder. Welcome it?
It shall ne’er come so near mine ear again
. (1.2.216-20
)Note: the punctuation here is from the edition in Taylor and Lavagnino’s Collected Works of Middleton, not from Dutton’s Oxford World’s Classics edition.
Slide21FABRITIO
She’s a
dear
child to me.
DUKE
She must needs be; you say she is your daughter.
FABRITIO
Nay, my good lord,
dear to my purse
I mean –
Beside my person;
I ne’er reckoned that
.
She has the full qualities of a gentlewoman:I have brought her up to music, dancing, what notThat may commend her sex, and stir her husband. (3.2.104-10)Isabella’s lot, to be paraded like a prize mare for the lascivious scrutiny of the cretinous and phallically obsessed Ward, is a graphic reminder of the condition to which [the women in the play] all either are, or have been, or could be subject. Her protests about the social realities that place women in such situations are unanswerable. (Richard Dutton, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Middleton,
Women Beware Women and Other Plays
(Oxford: OUP, 1999), p. xxii)
Slide22LYSANDER
You have her father’s love, Demetrius;
Let me have
Hermia’s
:
do you marry him
. (
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
1.1)
In
keeping with
Leantio’s
commercialized, debased
Petrarchanism, I don’t think it coincidental that Bianca first appears at a distance, that she says nothing, and that we, like the Mother, are called upon to gaze at her She is indeed his master-piece, a token that reveals his mastery, his theft… Probably no scene in Jacobean drama represents so graphically the commodification of women as that in which the Ward and Sordido peer down Isabella's throat and peep under her skirts in their efforts to scan ‘all her parts over’ (III.iv.43) before buying. As in the main plot, economics and erotics come together here in the act of speculation. Isabella is not only a valuable commodity to be ventured for, she is also a visual, erotic object to be looked at. (Anthony B. Dawson, ‘Women Beware Women and the Economy of Rape’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 27 (1987), 303-320; p. 306)
Slide23ISABELLA
Marry a fool!
Can there be a greater misery to a woman
That means to keep her days true to her husband,
And know no other man? So virtue wills it.
Slide24Why
, how can I obey and honour him
But I must needs commit
idolatry
?
A fool is but the image of a man,
And that but ill made neither.
Slide25Oh
the heart-breakings
Of miserable maids,
where love’s enforced
!
The best condition is but bad enough:
When women have their choices, commonly
They do but buy their thraldoms, and bring great portions
To men to
keep’em
in subjection –
As if a fearful prisoner should bribe
The keeper to be good to him, yet lies in still,
And glad of a good usage, a good look sometimes.By’r Lady, no misery surmounts a woman’s:Men buy their slaves, but women buy their masters.
Slide26Yet
honesty and love
makes all this happy,
And, next to angels’, the most
blest estate
.
That Providence that has made
ev’ry
poison
Good for some use, and sets four warring elements
At peace in man, can make a harmony
In things that are most strange to human reason.
Oh but this marriage
! (1.2.157-81)DESDEMONAO, these men, these men! (Othello 4.3.59)PORTIAO me, the word ‘choose’! I may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father. Is it not hard, Nerissa, that I cannot choose one nor refuse none?... In truth, I know it is a sin to be a mocker, but he – why,
he… (
The Merchant of Venice
1.2)
Slide27FABRITIO
Why, is not man
Tied to the same observance, lady sister,
And in one woman?
LIVIA
’Tis
enough for him;
Besides, he tastes of many sundry
dishes
That we poor wretches never lay our lips to:
As obedience forsooth, subjection, duty, and such kickshaws,
All of our making, but served in to them.
And if we lick a finger then sometimesWe are not to blame; your best cooks use it. EMILIA’Tis not a year or two shows us a man: They are all but stomachs, and we all but food;
They eat us
hungerly
, and when they are full,
They belch us. (
Othello
3.4)
[Christopher
Newstead
, in his
Apology for Women
(1620), contends] that all misogynists in history have been gluttons. (Later, he argues that women are more intelligent than men because they eat less, adducing the proverb ‘Fat
panches
make
leane
pates’.) (Linda Woodbridge,
Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620
(Brighton: Harvester, 1984), p.80)
Slide28FABRITIO
Th’art
a sweet lady, sister, and a witty-
LIVIA
A
witty
! Oh the
bud
of commendation
Fit for a
girl of sixteen
; I am
blown
, man,I should be wise by this time; and for instanceI have buried my two husbands in good fashion,And never mean more to marry.GUARDIANO No? Why so, lady?LIVIABecause the third shall never bury me.I think I am
more than witty
; how think you, sir? (1.2.37-53)
Slide29DUKE
She that is fortunate in a duke’s favour
Lights on a tree that bears all women’s wishes;
If your own mother saw you pluck fruit there,
She would commend your
wit
...
Come, play the
wise
wench and provide for ever. (2.2.368-80
)
Note: ‘wise’ reads ‘wife’ in the first printed edition.
Slide30DUKE
I can command,
Think
upon that. (2.2.360-61)
Although Renaissance law defined and enforced women’s subordinate position, one must remember that this was a period in which the notion of legal personhood itself was undergoing a radical transformation. It would not be many years after the law books began formulating their new definition of rape that political theorists started to articulate a modern notion of the law as mandated to protect the rights of individuals who expressed their freedom in their ability to consent to political, social, and economic contracts. The definition of rape as ‘carnal knowledge of a woman’s body against her will’ that took hold in English law at the beginning of the sixteenth century was arguably a precursor to the vision John Locke articulated at the close of the period when he asserted that government should be founded on the idea that ‘men are not bound to submit to the unjust will of another’.
And while proscriptions on female self-expression contributed to women’s subjugation, the tendency of feminist scholars to view the equation of female chastity with silence only in negative terms limits our ability to read the
positive
ideas and uses of silence in this period, and particularly its role in the development of a modern notion of subjectivity… While the word
privacy
derives, in its Latin root, from the concept of privation or exclusion from forms of public action and authority, it was this state of exile that made privacy the core of a new power attributed to the individual psyche as the seat of a will that operated independently of an external arena of social action
. (Amy
Greenstadt
,
Rape and the Rise of the Author: Gendering Intention in Early Modern England
(Farnham:
Ashgate
, 2009), p. 23)
Slide31ISABELLA
Oh
the heart-breakings
Of miserable maids, where love’s enforced
! (2.2.164-65)
Slide32The radical implications of Middleton’s
The Spanish Gypsy
(1623)
are…subdued
by its conclusion. The raped woman, Clara, is, as Gossett points out, ‘the first woman to be genuinely uncertain that she is stained’; her description of herself as ‘infected now / By your soul-staining lust’ condemns Roderigo’s soul as readily as
hers.
She is then quick to believe that she has purged herself with her
tears.
For Clara, knowledge of her lack of complicity is sufficient to ensure her right to live; she even refuses to rule out the possibility that she will marry a man other than the rapist.
Unfortunately, these implications are finally lost when she marries Roderigo. Conventionally, she claims that she is now ‘righted in noble satisfaction’, and Roderigo’s claim that he will ‘redeem my fault
’ enables
the audience to assume a happy marriage for them and to see him as the hero of the play
. (Catty,
Writing Rape, p. 107)