“I pray sir, hear me: I am married”: Language and Sexual Politics in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi

Abstract

Abstract This article follows the critical lines of new historicism, feminism, psychoanalysis and performance studies so as to reveal Webster’s challenge of the conventional gender roles via the binary opposites of speech and silence. Within the context of new historicism, I contend that Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1613–1614) comments on the corruption and abuse of absolute political power within the reign of King James I and the Catholic Church through the figures of Ferdinand (the head of the state) and the Cardinal (the head of the Church). Contrary to the new historicism’s conception of all-encompassing ideology, Webster attributes male figures’ loss of control over their voices and the movement of the plot to their aural closure to the Duchess’s moral speech. Following the methodology of feminism, I argue that this tragedy enacts an inversion of gender roles with respect to discourse. Webster associates the Duchess of Malfi’s voice and silence with honesty and dramatic authority and her tyrannical brothers’ voices with incestuous and murderous desires. Drawing on Freudian and Jungian concepts of psychoanalysis, I propose that Ferdinand and the Cardinal whose voices are associated with murderous and incestuous desires are linked with the psychic zone of the id while the Duchess, who expresses and acts on her sexual desire within the sphere of marriage, is linked to the ego, the reality principle. Her appearance as an echo in the tragic closure reveals her progression towards perfection, the superego. While Ferdinand’s misogyny is a projection of his unconscious sexual desire towards his sister, his madness is a sign of incestuous frustration. At a meta-theatrical level, I argue that this subversion of gender roles via the binary opposites of embodiment and disembodiment and silence and speech is linked to theatrical performance. Webster shows that the boy actor impersonating the Duchess’s voice and silence appropriates masculine agency while male figures’ voices are linked to madness and lack of subjectivity.