The Appropriation of Pleasure in The Magnetic Lady

Abstract

What is true pleasure, and who is allowed to have it? Or rather, who is allowed to have her? In The Magnetic Lady, Ben Jonson reduces these questions to matters of gender and class, allegorizing pleasure as two nubile fourteen-year-old girls, one the heiress Placentia, the other her foster-sister and waiting-woman Pleasance. Both names suggest delights ranging from sweet amiability to sexual gratification, although neither girl offers much beyond her own ignorance in the way of personality. But then Jonson does not offer them as anything other than figures of male fantasy, to be contemplated and competed for in the presence of other men, ratifying and ranking male victories or losses. The girls are conventional objects of desire, tokens of economic and social exchange, female bodies whose reproductive power men appropriate as vehicles for transmitting and securing property. These blanket binaries inhibit more complicated characterizations that might otherwise mitigate the satirical context. But they do allow Jonson to establish the rightness of this system of feminine nature in the service of masculine culture by showing what happens when a household of women reappropriates maternity and motherhood in the course of their own pursuit of independent pleasure or profit. The very idea of women taking control of their own sexuality and procreativity threatens the dominant male order with illegitimate heirs that might topple the established rule. Though The Magnetic Lady develops the most explicit matriarchal takeover