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To SEEM

As 3 Henry VI begins, Margaret no longer stands in a mediated relationship to sovereign power. The king has become "Base, fearful, and despairing Henry!" (1.1.178), and Margaret claims the space of government. The claim, again, is based on an invasion that has already taken place. When Henry, yielding to York, disinherits his own son, Margaret first desires to disclaim her relationship to national and familial domesticity altogether: "Ah, wretched man! Would I had died a maid / And never seen thee, never borne thee son, / Seeing thou hast proved so unnatural a father!" (11. 216-18). Margaret here wishes herself back in the position of Joan, the maid opposed to rather than implicated in the political and erotic terms of Englishness. But if for Joan that distance is always potentially an illusion, for Margaret it is not even that. Playing the roles of mother and wife, she chastises Henry for his own more tenuous connection to their son and by extension...

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