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To HAVE

Possession may, as Lacan asserts, always be an illusion; it is also, however, a way of articulating the relationship between agency and desire that structures the representation of women in Henry VI, Part 2. As York speaks his last line to Joan—"Curse, miscreant, when thou com'st to the stake" (1HVI,5.3.44)—the statement of finality, punctuated by the stage direction "Exeunt," is immediately undermined by another stage direction: "Enter Suffolk, with Margaret in his hand. " For Joan, being a Frenchwoman in the hands of the English is an experience of violence that demonizes sex; for Margaret, literally in the hand of Suffolk and metonymically in the hands of the king, the position is more conventionally eroticized, her body defined as a commodity well worth the effort expended to acquire it. "She's beautiful, and therefore to be wooed; / She is a woman, therefore to be won," says Suffolk (11. 78-79); and where Joan's beuaty...

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1. Introduction
2. To BE
3. To HAVE
4. To SEEM
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