Gender, Genre and the Grotesque: Literary Subversions of
Renaissance Patriarchy
Deanna Wendel
While Mikhail Bakhtin champions the French Renaissance
writer Rabelais in his critical work Rabelais and His World,
this very book positions Bakhtin as a monumentally important
author in his own right, because he illuminates what has long
been a driving tension in literature and in human culture—that
is, the conflict between what has been deemed the “grotesque”
body—open, primal, unfinished, and protrusive—and the
“classical” body, which is smooth, closed, finished. The
classical body, is, as Bakhtin sees it, essentially an
artificial construction, pretending to a form that denies human
nature itself (Bakhtin 29). In Renaissance literature, the
grotesque is most familiarly seen within the genre of city
comedy, which is the realm of the lower class.
This is because
the language of the grotesque body consists primarily of the
language of abuse, profanity, oaths, “indecency,” and most
significantly laughter (16-17).
Yet grotesque body images also
have a more subtle, but equally profound role, in even the
genres seeming outwardly most opposed to it, including
aristocratic revenge tragedies, such John Webster’s The Duchess
of Malfi and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.
Recognizing bodies
as open becomes especially important to the most suppressed
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groups, particularly women, whose suppression is much more
blatant on the level of the palace tragedy than the street
comedy. Reaching out to the fundamentally grotesque nature of
the body provides a vehicle of liberation for female characters,
as the grotesque proves itself able to transcend genres and
becomes a force that even the woman of tragedy can wield in
order to subvert patriarchal attempts to render her voiceless.
Peter Stallybrass is one critic who aims to fill in the
void of feminist perspective in Bakhtin’s theories; in his 1986
essay, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” he points
out the pervasive belief during the Renaissance that the female
body is “naturally grotesque” (Stallybrass 126).
It is this
view, he claims, which prompted the male concept of “constant
surveillance” of women, which was centered on three areas: “the
mouth, chastity, the threshold of the house” (126). In his own
use of metaphor, Bakhtin also creates a subconscious link
between the female body and the grotesque, stating that
“[Grotesque realism] is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is
always conceiving” (Bakhtin 21).
The womb as synecdoche for the
grotesque body is perhaps more fitting than any other body part
for this role, as it takes in all of the principles of rebirth
and renewal that the tradition ideally encompasses. However, the
pregnant body brooked much contradiction during the Renaissance—
on one level, it was recognized as the most naturally grotesque
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of all bodies, but its imagery and language also became imported
into the classical tradition, because if taken from the
temporary perspective of the child, the womb is the most
enclosed and isolated of all spaces—and as Bakhtin elucidates,
“[the classical body] was isolated, alone, fenced off from all
other bodies” (29).
Yet to see the pregnant body as classical
is to ignore the ultimate outcome of pregnancy, which entails a
physical projection beyond the individual self, and a cycle of
creation that is entirely grotesque at its base.
Bakhtin’s use of the word “womb” to describe the philosophy
of the grotesque could not be more appropriate in light of the
character Ursla in Ben Jonson’s Bartholmew Fair. In this play,
we can find the epitome of the grotesque female body, as well as
an overarching picture of the grotesque tradition itself (if we
are going to look outside Rabelais’s works for such an example).
While Ursla, in contrast to Win Littlewit, is not physically
pregnant with child, she represents a different kind of
pregnancy—she is “pregnant” with the entire carnivalesque
culture; as Overdo exclaims of her, “This is the very womb and
bed of enormity gross as herself!” (Jonson II.ii.102-103).
“Enormity” is also synonymous with the body which is
“excessive,” a term Bakhtin constantly uses to depict the
grotesque body. Indeed, Ursla is an excessive woman; not only is
she full of bodily excess, but she also swears excessively,
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drinks excessively, and is easily provoked to anger. She “gives
birth” to the fair culture in that everything that represents
the grotesque body emerges from her booth—fighting, laughing,
drinking, eating, stealing, copulating. She prepares not only
pigs, but prostitutes.
While she is a figure for the audience
to laugh at, this laughter is not that of mere aversion. As
Bakhtin says, “The people’s ambivalent laughter…expresses the
point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also
belongs to it” (12). Ursla is a woman who represents the life of
the fair itself, the belly of it, in all its simultaneous glory
and grotesqueness.
In her arguments with Winwife and Quarlous, Ursla
indoctrinates the upper-class men into the spirit of the fair
and the grotesque body as well. The three of them seem to enjoy
this heated exchange, engaging in a kind of mutually beneficial
ritual—Quarlous clearly enjoys making Ursla incensed, and it
gives Ursla an excuse to be. It provides her with the
opportunity to swear her worst, thereby proving her own
grotesque stature; she calls Quarlous a “dog’s-head,” a
“trendle-tail,” a “pimp,” a “pannier-man’s bastard,” and insults
his mother on several different counts (II.v.112, 110).
Significantly, in calling Quarlous a “trendle-tail,” and a
“dog’s-head,” Ursla associates him with a base animal nature,
similar to her own constant personal comparison to her pigs:
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Quarlous calls her “a walking sow of tallow” (II.v.70) and
Winwife says “her language grows greasier than her pigs”
(II.v.121).
In this way, Ursla forces the richer male visitors
to acknowledge a truth about their own nature, as connected to
its own vital animalistic source.
As Bakhtin comments, “The
combination of human and animal traits, is, as we know, one of
the most ancient grotesque forms” (316).
It is also important to emphasize the role that language
plays in the culture of the grotesque.
Excessiveness of
language, perhaps, is the most notable; repetition of words
abounds in Bartholmew Fair—John Littlewit constantly repeating
Win’s name, for instance, or the token phrases that many of the
characters have (such as Knockem’s “vapours,” or Wasp’s crude
“turd i’your teeth”).
Although women do not have as many of
their own token phrases in the play, we can see that they are
allowed a certain freedom of expression in the openly grotesque
world of the comedy, like that of the fair itself; we do not see
such an obvious level of verbal openness in the atmosphere of
the tragedy. Lower-class women are granted the right to be loud,
in context of the fair’s world, by virtue of their salesmanship.
Bakhtin emphasizes that “The role of the cries in the
marketplace and in the streets was important. The city rang with
these many voices. Each food, wine, or other merchandise had its
own words and melody and its special intonations, its distinct
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verbal and musical imagery” (Bakhtin 182)
For instance, we meet
the saleswoman Joan Trash, who cries her gingerbread wares
loudly, and argues openly with Leatherhead, who has his booth
next door. She spits, “Though I be a little crooked in my body,
I’ll be found as upright in my dealing as any woman in
Smithfield, I. Charm me!” (II.ii.23-25).
This assertive
statement comes in response to Leatherhead’s threat that Overdo
will “charm her,” or subdue her tongue, and this idea of
subduing a woman’s tongue instinctively brings up Stallybrass’s
observation of the male “policing” of the woman’s mouth.
However, Joan Trash simply scoffs at the notion of any
representative of classical order attempting to silence her.
The culture of the grotesque body, as we see, is far more
accepting of women’s voices, even when it jestingly attacks
jabberers, for it is by nature, as Bakhtin notes, “a culture of
the loud word” (182).
We have, however, in seemingly stark opposition to Ursla
and Joan Trash, Grace Wellborn, who is anything but loud.
Indeed, Grace is on stage often and says very little; in
general, she complacently agrees with what the male characters
around her decide to do.
In one sense, she could be seen as
representative of the idealized classical female body, what
Peter Stallybrass calls “the normative Woman” (127). This is the
woman that the Renaissance’s patriarchal society was trying to
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create, using the dominant ideologies it presented to women,
particularly those of the upper-class.
Stallybrass states that
this woman, “…like Bakhtin’s classical body, is rigidly
“finished”: her signs are the enclosed body, the closed mouth,
the locked house” (127). Grace makes differentiating statements
between herself and the non-normative, grotesque woman when she
says, “Truly, I have no such fancy to the Fair, nor ambition to
see it; there’s none goes thither of any quality or fashion”
(I.v.118-119).
However, even in Grace there resides some measure of
defiance of
these classical standards of woman’s silence and
complacency, and she occasionally gives voice to this repressed
nature.
In her handful of asides, muttered when no one but the
audience can hear, she expresses her feelings of rebellion; when
Cokes complements Win and exclaims, “Would I might marry her,”
Grace mutters quietly, “So would I, or anybody else, so I might
scape you” (I.v.75, I.v.77).
Additionally, she is not attracted
to power and status enough to make her entirely normative: she
could, after all, possess such a position by marrying Cokes. As
Grace admits, “I know—he is a fool, and has an estate, and I
might govern him, and enjoy a friend beside” (IV.iii.12-14).
However, she states, “…these are not my aims. I must have a
husband I must love, or I cannot live with him. I shall ill make
one of these politic wives!” (IV.iii.14-16). It is “these
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politic wives” who often become the victims of dramatic tragedy.
Marrying for love is the quintessential mark of a patriarchydefiant woman, and pursuing bodily desire is the mark of the
grotesque. It remains ambiguous whether Grace is attracted as
such to Winwife or Quarlous, but she certainly seems to prefer
them to Cokes, both physically and intellectually, and she acts
on that preference.
Grace also states, “If fate send me an
understanding husband, I have no fear at all but mine own
manners shall make him a good one” (IV.iii.34-36).
This
suggests her own faith in her power as a woman to shape men,
rather than be shaped by them.
Mistress Overdo and Win Littlewit, on the other hand, who
are also of the upper-class, change dramatically throughout the
play, and their exposure to the life of the fair culminates in
their ultimate “breakdown” of classical barriers, and an embrace
of the grotesque nature of the body—in the case of these two
women, however, this means becoming sexually, more than
verbally, open. Mistress Overdo is, from the onset of the play,
much more talkative than Grace, and notably, she is also the one
who approaches Whit about prostitution. She asks Whit, “Shall I
entreat a courtesy of you, Captain?” and whispers it into his
ear: the next thing we know Ursla is helping Overdo to a jordan
to change (IV.iv.170-171). Mistress Overdo comes to openly speak
of her sexual preferences, saying “…though I am a Justice of
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Peace’s wife, I do love men of war, and the sons of the sword,
when they come before my husband” (IV.iv.197-199).
It is also important to note that Bartholmew Fair ends with
a collective coming-together, of both men and women, without
general consequences or punishment to anyone who has
“transgressed” themselves, including the cuckolding wives.
Quarlous reminds the stunned Master Overdo to “…remember you are
but Adam, flesh and blood!...Forget your other name of Overdo,
and invite us all to supper” (V.vi.93-95). The banquet is itself
a powerful grotesque form—one which Bakhtin devotes an entire
chapter to—and a celebratory image.
Quarlous tells Overdo they
will “…drown the memory of all enormity in [Overdo’s] biggest
bowl at home” (V.vi.96-97). The irony is that in drowning
enormity, they are engaging in further enormity, or excess; thus
the result is that the grotesque body continues to perpetuate
itself. The recognition by now, however, is that this nature is
inherent in everyone, and the characters in the play who
considered themselves “above” it all, have seen that they
clearly are not; in this, they are able to feast and admit the
unity in all of them; ultimately, it brings them, and the
audience, closer together, and it does so with a genial outlook
towards gender, because it proves that everyone is equally
laughable—and even cuckolding can be funny.
Because the
language of Bartholmew Fair is ultimately laughter, which is
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unity-inducing, it is in a much less complicated position than
the tragedy, which prompts one to look for answers, for
culpability. Most tragedies also focus on the lives of
aristocratic characters, where the stakes are perceived to be
high—which opens the door to experiencing a different tension,
reflecting the classical body.
As Bakhtin explains, “[Grotesque
language] was unlike the tongue of official literature, or of
the ruling classes—the aristocracy, the nobles, the high-ranking
clergy and the top burghers—though the elemental force of the
folk idiom penetrated even these circles” (154).
This elemental grotesque force, despite attempts at its
suppression, is also illustrative of Webster’s revenge tragedy
The Duchess of Malfi.
Such repression is evident in the
repression of laughter itself; the power of laughter in the
court setting is dangerously constrained, as opposed to the open
joviality of the fair.
An example that illustrates this is the
scene in which Roderigo and Grisolan laugh at a joke Silvio
makes about Duke Ferdinand’s horse, and Ferdinand turns to them
and says, “Why do you laugh? Methinks, you that are courtiers
should be / my touchwood, take fire when I give fire; that is,
laugh but when I laugh…” (I.ii.38-39). This idea of controlling
even the most basic expressions of the body translates even more
intensely to aristocratic men’s control of women.
Ferdinand
hopes, too, that the Duchess will be his “touchwood,” though she
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clearly refuses to be so easily controlled, either in her speech
or her sexuality, two of the areas of policing which Stallybrass
focuses on.
This becomes apparent to us from her first lines in
the play: “Diamonds are of most value, / They say, that have
passed through most jewelers hands” (I.iii.7-8).
As critic Kathleen McLuskie points out, our initial
introduction to the Duchess makes her almost more fitting to a
comedy than a tragedy, and that in these words, the Duchess
“…reveals a figure from comedy, rather than an emblem from a
legend of good women” (McLuskie 79).
Her words provoke
laughter, and align her with the women’s actions in Bartholmew
Fair. She almost sounds like Win or Mistress Overdo and the
perspectives they eventually espouse. Though she addresses a
serious subject, she does so with a comic lightness. The
audience cannot help but laugh, and will surely look more easily
on her subject matter for that. However, her brothers, encased
as they are in the classical body and their own position in the
body politic, do not even chuckle, and so set up their lives to
become a tragedy, rather than the comedy they could be if they
embraced the changeable nature of sexuality and acknowledged
female sexual desire.
It becomes clear that Ferdinand and the Cardinal are trying
to make the Duchess into Stallybrass’s Normative Woman, a rigid,
fixed and finished thing that does not reflect her true, inner
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nature. The Duchess even has to remind Antonio that she is not
such a creature; she tells him, “Make not your heart so dead a
piece of flesh, / To fear more than to love me…This is flesh and
blood sir; / ‘Tis not the figure cut in alabaster / Kneels at my
husband’s tomb” (I.iii.154-158). The Duchess refuses to be seen
as the solid, finished structure that society would have her
seem, but rather points to the open and constantly flowing
nature of her body.
She also provokes the grotesque nature of
Antonio’s own heart; it is not an abstract classical idea, but a
“piece of flesh,” although not a dead one—a palpitating, moving,
and flowing organ.
After Ferdinand’s torture, the Duchess,
feeling utterly defeated, asks Cariola, “Who do I look like
now?” Cariola tellingly replies, “Like to your picture in the
gallery, / A deal of life in show, but none in practice”
(IV.ii.29, 30-31). As a painting, she is what the Renaissance
patriarchy ideally wants a woman to resemble.
In the midst of her imprisonment and anguish, the Duchess
asks Bosola a similar question, and he replies, “Thou art some
great woman, sure, for riot begins to sit on thy forehead, /
clad in gray hairs, twenty years sooner than on a merry
milkmaid’s” (IV.ii.120-121).
Bosola’s words have major class
connotations, and they directly raise the question of the
grotesque versus the classical.
Better for a woman to be a
lower-class “nobody,” Bosola implies, than to be great and
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admired as the Duchess is. In such a position as a milkmaid it
is easier for a woman to embrace her own nature, and her own
body, than it is for an upper-class woman constantly under the
scrutiny of the court, where she falls prey to classical
standards of women’s behavior.
Despite the inherent difficulty women in her position find
in turning away from the classical body paradigm, we
nevertheless find many instances in which the Duchess does
deviate from this norm.
The Duchess jokingly says to Antonio,
when he insists on entering her chamber at night, “You are a
lord of misrule”—directly linking her pleasure at seeing him to
the low-brow carnivalesque culture, as the “lord of misrule”
refers to the elected fool-monarch of the fair (III.ii.7, 1491).
Furthermore, she engages in a somewhat taboo conversation about
sleeping habits with her handmaiden and her lover, very much an
un-aristocratic subject. The Duchess also openly kisses Antonio
in front of Cariola, and the trio strike up a discussion about
what Cariola ought to look for in a man. Cariola asks, “If there
were proposed to me, wisdom, riches, and beauty, / In three
several young men, which should I choose?” (III.ii.32-33).
Antonio points out that Paris chose Aphrodite, goddess of beauty
& love—and it seems that the Duchess has chosen similarly—a
choice that is about following one’s own sexuality, rather than
male relatives’ recommendations.
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We find, too, that the first exchange of proposals between
the Duchess and Antonio is similarly in the nature of grotesque
playfulness.
As McLuskie observes, the scene “…combines a bawdy
joke about rings and fingers with more rarified neoplatonic
images of perfect harmony to create an effect which transcends
both sentimentality about pure love and moralizing condemnation
of a widow’s lust” (80). In this sense, the intrusion of the
grotesque into the classical becomes the ultimate depiction of a
most genuine love, and the two traditions find a kind of mutual
benefaction in each other, when they are simply allowed to
mingle without interference.
The Duchess’s fullest realization of the open body,
however, actually comes after her death—in the phenomenon of her
voice extending from beyond the grave to Antonio, as an echo of
his and Delio’s speech (we can be certain it is her voice, for
under the scene description, Webster explicitly names the voice
“Echo from the Duchess’ grave” (V.iii.)).
As a supernatural
occurrence, this voice is extremely grotesque in nature, as well
as piercing, and is very much a “transgression” of the self.
It
is particularly ironic in light of Bosola’s dying statement
that, “We are only like dead walls, or vaulted graves, / That,
ruined, yield no echo…” (V.v.93-94).
Although the goal of the
dead Duchess’s grotesque voice fails, which is to convince
Antonio not to walk into his own death-trap, there is something
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fundamentally powerful about the way in which she is able to
make herself heard, even more loudly in death than in life.
It is also important not to ignore Julia, who represents a
woman who embraces the grotesque tradition much more openly, and
with less internal (or, for that matter, external) struggle than
the Duchess.
McLuskie notes, “…[Julia’s] sexuality is accepted,
as we see from the way the men joke with her in Act I (I, ii,
23-33) because as the loose wife of an old man, she fits into a
conventional category” (McLuskie 87). The tone of the men’s
conversations with Julia, specifically the Cardinal’s and
Bosola’s, is playful, lighthearted; they could never carry on in
such a manner with the Duchess about sexuality and
changeability. It is Julia’s capacity to fit into a category
that is traditionally comic and grotesque that gives her such a
freedom to speak openly. The Duchess has yet to achieve such an
acceptance, because her “obligation” to the classical body is
perceived by all, whereas Julia’s is not.
Julia’s comfortable
place in a grotesque category makes her sexual deviance
laughable and relatable, rather than purely despicable—and as
Bakhtin explains, laughter is in itself a grotesque emission,
with liberating implications: “Laughter purifies from dogmatism,
from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from
fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from
didacticism, naivete and illusion…” (Bakhtin 123).
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Furthermore, when Bosola expresses concern about whether
the Cardinal will blame him for his dalliance with Julia, she
immediately assures him, “…If I see and steal a diamond, / The
fault is not I’th’stone, but in me the thief / That purloins it”
(V.ii.176-178). This points to the Renaissance’s societal
tendency to have double-standards accusing women, but also
points to Julia’s decision to own her own sexuality, to act as
subject, not object.
In using the word “diamond,” she also
establishes a link to the Duchess, who, as mentioned above,
refers to herself hypothetically as a diamond early on in the
play.
The Duchess may be a diamond, a precious jewel, but
Julia, as more openly a woman of the grotesque body, is a
diamond thief.
This relationship is also interlaced with class;
as a woman slightly lower in class than the Duchess, and
likewise a woman who is of an established comic and grotesque
category, she possesses a kind of agency that the Duchess does
not, despite the Duchess’s more prestigious social status.
The major importance of the female classical body in The
Duchess of Malfi becomes its symbolic effect on the male
relative, and specifically on the male name. Ferdinand states,
“…That body of hers, / While my blood ran pure in’t, was more
worth / than that which thou wouldst comfort, called a soul”
(IV.ii.119-121). This classical emphasis on the importance of
female sexuality to male reputation—which is of weightiest
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importance on an aristocratic level, as only those who have a
reputation can worry about their reputation—is also present in
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, where it represents a hindering
force to the female realization of the grotesque body. The
entire play, as Mary Laughlin Fawcett states, can be examined as
“a meditation of language and the body” (263). What this
meditation suggests is the relationship of the grotesque to the
classical in terms of verbal and bodily expression.
Titus kills
his daughter Lavinia because she has irretrievably lost “…That
more dear / than hands or tongue, her spotless chastity,” but
even more importantly, because she has soiled his own body
metaphorically, by tainting his reputation (V.ii.176-177).
He
exclaims, “Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee, / And
with thy shame thy father’s sorrow die!” (V.iii.46-47). We can
garner that Titus’s reasons for killing Lavinia are ultimately
related to the classical conceptions of male honor, and female
bodily shame, though he does allow Lavinia to have her vengeance
before her death.
Titus’s actions recall Ferdinand’s statement that, “Upon a
time, Reputation, Love, and Death / Would travel o’er the world;
and it was concluded / That they should part, and take three
several ways” (III.ii.120-122). Like Titus, Ferdinand interprets
Reputation as the most important of these three, for indeed it
is venerated in the classical tradition.
Lavinia, like the
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Duchess, dies because she is seen as forsaking the reputation of
her family, though unwillingly. However, it is Love and Death
that are both key to the grotesque body, whereas Reputation is
of little consequence.
Love and Death perpetuate the cycle that
is the world of the grotesque, and when they find their way into
aristocratic tragedy, they actually bring a kind of hope within
them. Even Death is appreciated because as Bakhtin states, “The
essence of the grotesque is precisely to construct a
contradictory and double-faced fullness of life. Negation and
destruction (death of the old) are included as an essential
phase, inseparable from affirmation, from the birth of something
new and better” (63). In Death itself, which usually arrives in
spades at the end of most revenge tragedies, the grotesque is
represented in its most healing activity, so even while the
grotesque body may be denied and debased by patriarchallyoriented characters throughout these plays, ultimately it always
has the last word.
Like Bartholmew Fair, Titus Andronicus also concludes with
a banquet, a traditional way to close out and celebrate the
grotesque body—however, this is more than a banquet for the
grotesque body; this is a banquet of the grotesque body.
Titus
makes good on his threat to Chiron and Demetrius: “[I will]…make
two pasties of your shameful heads, / And bid that strumpet,
your unhallowed dam, / Like to the earth, swallow her own
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increase (V.ii.190-192). Although this may seem to be a strange
derivative—taking the most excessive of a form that is already
excessive—there is a kind of closure in this grotesque, and
female, consumption.
As Tamora consumes her children, the
earth, in parallel form, consumes hers; this means taking most
of the characters in the play into their graves, and leaving
room for fresh blood to continue the cycle. This is fitting with
what Bakhtin refers to as “the ambivalence of the material
bodily lower stratum, which destroys and generates, swallows and
is swallowed” (163). It only makes sense, then, that what
Quintus calls the “swallowing womb” in Act II eventually becomes
so vividly literalized. Despite its ominous tones, it is an idea
that bears the positive connotations of constant renewal,
rebirth, and consumption, which are all linked to an underlying
feminine force (II.iii.239). This sense of the liberating
grotesque is crucial, though we may not initially recognize it
because, as readers, we feel so overwhelmed by the play’s
cascade of dismembered body parts and tears.
Tears themselves, a prolific image in the play, are
grotesque, because they entail protrusion and bodily excess.
The growing proliferation of tears in both Titus Andronicus and
The Duchess of Malfi become almost a replacement for the
laughter that permeates works like Bartholmew Fair, but both
bodily emissions signify a similar kind of power. Tears, like
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laughter, are particularly poignant for women, in terms of
giving them a voice that is both grotesque and undeniably
eloquent. Bosola picks up on this phenomenon, while watching the
Duchess in her imprisonment, for as he states, “You may discern
the shape of loveliness / More perfect in her tears than in her
smiles; / She will muse four hours together; and her silence, /
Methinks; expresseth more than if she spake” (IV.i.7-10).
The Duchess’s silence is loud, but so, too, is Lavinia’s
even more forced, physically tongueless silence. Fawcett
hypothesizes that “[Lavinia’s] silence after her mutilation
appears to be a development…rather than a stopping or reversal”
(266). Not only does Lavinia’s silence make her presence more
commanding, but she actually develops the means to communicate
her thoughts, through gestures with her stumps, and the
manipulation of a staff held in her mouth, to write upon the
dust—this is even a more grotesque and unusual form of
communication than speech itself. Thus we see that ideas of the
loud, grotesque, or open mouth are much more complicated than
first we might assume; the grotesque principle can work through
even the most forcibly closed body without necessarily having to
utilize physical speech. The grotesque nature spills itself out
from the classical body through other manifestations—tears,
laughter, loud silences which project meaning, and creatively
alternative physical means of communication.
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Kathleen McLuskie states that “By and large the women [of
Renaissance literature] can be divided into the witty wives of
city comedy and the doomed victims of tragedy” (78). Although
such a division is indeed accurate on a general level, this
account also judges the wittiness of female tragic victims only
a temporary comic reprieve before dark events ensue; it does not
address the freeing, opening effects of the grotesque upon these
women.
Indeed, the wittiness and grotesqueness of the wives of
city comedy are embedded in aristocratic women such as Lavinia
and the Duchess, although sometimes buried deeply, and it is the
presence of this grotesque nature in women of all classes that
helps them to transcend the especially limiting classical cages
placed upon them by the Renaissance patriarchy. As the grotesque
body leaps genres—transmitting itself from comedy to tragedy—it
brings with it opportunities for women to make themselves heard,
no matter what the message, from Joan’s cries of “Gingerbread!”
to the Duchess of Malfi’s persistent, desperate echo.
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Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1984. 1965.
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Fawcett, Mary Laughlin. “Arms/Words/Tears: Language and the Body
in Titus Andronicus.” ELH 50.2 (1983) 261-277.
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Jonson, Ben. Bartholmew Fair. G.R. Hibbard, ed. New York: W.W.
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McLuskie, Kathleen. “Drama and sexual politics: the case of
Webster’s Duchess.” Drama, Sex and Politics. Cambridge:
Cambridge U P, 1985.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus. Sylvan
Barnet, ed. New York: New American Library/Penguin, 2005.
Stallybrass, Peter. “Patriarchal Territories: The Body
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The Duchess of Malfi.
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22