[In the following essay, Callaghan argues that female sexual desire, and perhaps even femininity, is always depicted as monstrous in Renaissance tragedy. In addition to the Duchess, Callaghan discusses Desdemona from Othello, Cordelia from King Lear, and Vittoria from Webster's The White Devil.]

Desire is inscribed at every level (social, economic, political, sexual) as the motivation for change, upheaval, disruption, and crucially, for female tragic transgression. It is a force of disorder in terms of both conceptual and social systems. Importantly, defining the category of woman in terms of desire is a Renaissance preoccupation, and yet, paradoxically it is one which ultimately threatens to unfix the categories of gender difference because, as we shall see, this is precisely the point where differential markers themselves become problematic.

Voracious female sexual desire was posited as the most conspicuous sign of gender difference, and was treated both as a disease and as a monstrous abnormality. A contemporary medical text proposes a remarkable cure for this peculiarly female malady:

We must conclude that if they be young … they have a spirit of falacity, and feel within themselves of frequent titilation, their seed being hot and purient, doth irritate and inflame them to venery; neither is this concupiscence allaid and quallified, but by provoking the ejaculation of the seed, as Galen propounds the advice in the example of the widow who was affected with intolerable symptoms, till the abundance of the spermatik humour was diminished by the hand of the skillful midwife. …¹

The hand of a skilful midwife becomes the tool to divert desire from what would be its otherwise destructive course. Such advice is part of that body of medical discourse which defines female sexuality, much of which is predicated on an admixture of the ‘botched male’ theory, derived from Aristotle (and echoed in the main source for The Duchess of Malfi, William Painter's Palace of Pleasure, 1567),² which held that women were intended by nature, but that in each individual procreative instance, nature strove for perfection and therefore strove to produce males and Galenist beliefs in female semen.³ Women were defined as both physically inferior and medically unique.⁴ Such ‘mapping down’. That is, the charting of ideological boundaries constitutes a form of containment, delineating the category of woman in terms of wombs, fecundity, frailty, etc., in a remarkable fusion of the ideological and the physiological.

Like the medical discourse of the time, Othello's diagnosis of Desdemona is conditioned by pre-given expectations of female lust and can be seen to have a similar ideological function:

Hot, hot, and moist. This hand of yours requires
A sequester from liberty: fasting, and prayer,
Much castigation, exercise devout,
For here's a young and sweating devil here
That commonly rebels. 'Tis a good hand,
A frank one.

(Othello, III. iv. 39-44)

In the simple act of taking Desdemona's hand, a whole body of knowledge is utilised about the physical symptoms of physiological and moral predisposition. Cold and moist humours were thought to dominate in the female sex, but heat and moisture were strongly associated with lecherousness. The cure Othello recommends for this supposed physical ailment is a moral one. Desdemona's hand is ‘frank’ and thus open, to Othello, but also open to anyone. Moreover, Othello seems to think that he can simply read off symptoms, already knowing their cause. An anatomy of woman thus creates a semiology (in both the linguistic and pathological sense) of the feminine.

Importantly, this passage cannot be dismissed as mere evidence of how jealousy has impaired the balance of Othello's mind. This scene echoes an earlier one where Desdemona reduced an eloquent Othello to broken phrases about the death of ‘young affects’ by expressing her explicitly sexual desire, a wish to accompany him to Cyprus for the consummation of their marriage, ‘The rites for why I love him’ (I. iii. 257). This wish might well be read as demonstrating all the ‘venery’ to be expected in a young woman. Such a display of apparently insatiable female sexual appetite severely problematises Desdemona's characterisation as a virtuous woman. Equally, the Duchess's hasty departure with Antonio to their bed might be thought typical of a wanton widow displaying the symptom of ‘high blood’. Female characters in Renaissance tragedy are rarely identified with sexual passivity.

Notably, in The White Devil, unlike the other tragedies under consideration here, there is no discourse which counters the construction of female desire as a monstrosity. In this, however, it does not legitimate female desire, but rather presents it in terms which betray a certain sexual curiosity. Desire, particularly female sexual initiative, is shown to be a comic aspect of deviance in the play's racist discourse:

ZAN.
Methought sir, you came stealing to my bed.
FRAN.
Wilt thou believe me sweeting? by this light
I was a-dreamt on thee too: for methought
I saw thee naked.
ZAN.
                                                                                          Fie sir! as I told you,
Methought you lay down by me.
FRAN.
                                                                                                    So dreamt I;
And lest thou shouldst take cold, I cover'd thee
With this Irish mantle.
ZAN.
                                                                                          Verily, I did dream
You were somewhat bold with me; …

(V. iii. 227-34)

The sexual desire of the black serving-woman shows as clearly as the colour of her skin. Karen Newman has brilliantly demonstrated that in Othello femininity is not constructed as the antithesis of blackness, but rather aligned with it because both categories are culturally aligned with sexual monstrosity.⁵ But in The White Devil blackness and femininity are conjoined not just in Zanche, but in the way she mirrors Vittoria. Zanche's function is to embody a lust that is unmediated by race or class privilege. The iconic import of the juxtaposition of black maid and white mistress is to posit blackness as a monstrous characteristic of femininity. As the title of the play implies, femininity can function as an antonym for blackness, as an alternate figure for the monstrosity it invokes. Similarly, racially marked as the devil of the play (devils were traditionally represented as black) Zanche functions as an embodiment of the female desire unleashed upon the world of the play for the purposes of tragic containment.

In fact, allusions to desire and restraint are central to The White Devil since it is untamed sexual desire that leads to Vittoria's imprisonment and finally causes her to flee with Bracciano. The desire/restraint motif appears early in the play when Flamineo delivers Vittoria to Bracciano:

Come sister, darkness hides your blush,—women are like curst dogs, civility, keeps them tied all daytime, but they are let loose at midnight, then they do most good or most mischief …

(I. ii. 198-201)

Similarly, in The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola posits that female desire must always be countered by restraint:

                                        this restraint
(Like English mastiffs, that grow fierce with tying)
Makes her too passionately apprehend
Those pleasures she's kept from.

(IV. i. 12-15)

Indeed, rather than defiantly affirming her sexuality, Vittoria confesses that this has been her ruin, ‘O my greatest sin lay in my blood’ (V. vi. 240).

Female sexual initiative is regarded as a kind of ‘natural’ deviance, simultaneously feared and expected, both aberrant and typical, and regarded as synonymous with the desire to control men. Thus female sexual and political power are completely interchangeable, so that female sexual initiative is read as a political threat, and female sovereignty is treated as sexual domination. Female sexual initiative, like female government is regarded as grotesque: ‘It is monstrous if the head stand where the feet should be. …’⁶ Social and anatomical confusions are imaged here as monstrous inversion because sexual or social power in the hands of women immediately threatens the phallic order and thus threatens the process of producing and reproducing the boundaries which are the content of gender differentiation. These confusions arise from a logical contradiction in patriarchal thinking which constructs sexual difference only to use that difference as evidence of the aberrant nature of femininity. Thus femininity, goes the conundrum, is monstrous because it refracts from the male norm.

It is precisely the most indisputable markers of gender difference that are read as most abnormal, particularly female generativity, the logical consequence of female desire as well as the most gender specific of biological functions. Pregnancy in particular becomes evidence of monstrous desire, and was, as Peter Stallybrass points out, punished as criminal deviance:

‘inappropriate elements’ were concepts applied to the actual women, constituting them as sinners and criminals to be purified or exterminated. The godly mother is opposed to the witch who gives suck to a satanic familiar. The pelican who pecks her breast to feed her young on her own blood has as her demonized opposite the woman who kills her child.

Stallybrass goes on to note the vast number of executions for what was previously the rare crime of infanticide.⁷ Also, a large body of medical discourse devoted itself to the womb, an object of mystery and fear, a wandering organ which is the cause of hysteria, another uniquely female ailment. The author of A Woman's Doctor says: ‘… the matrix [i.e., the womb] is the cause of all those diseases which happen to women.’ The moon and the imagination cause the womb to move about the body, giving rise to hysteria and irrationality.⁸ In this there is an interesting alignment of the notion of physical inferiority with the idea of monstrosity whereby deficiency and excess become aspects of one another.

Bosola alludes to the way in which a woman's belly is blown up like glass:

BOS.
There was a young waiting-woman had a monstrous desire to see the glass-house. …
And it was only to know what strange instrument it was should swell up a glass to the fashion of a woman's belly.

(II. ii. 6-10 ff.)

It is not pregnancy itself which is thought of as monstrous here, but rather, female curiosity about the male sexual organ. This allusion is later repeated in the scene with the madmen:

Hell is a mere glass-house, where the devils are continually blowing up women's souls, on hollow irons, and the fire never goes out.

(IV. ii. 77-9)

Devils are the ones here who are responsible for the male part of procreation in a displacement that is a common feature of misogynistic vilification. For example, the Malleus Maleficarum claims: ‘All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.’⁹ In defining women as monsters whose great bellies mark them as social and conceptual (in both senses of the word) excess, the concept of succubus comes to the rescue. The burden of desire is usually placed on women since they are regarded as lustful and sexually incontinent.

Bosola's description of the pregnant Duchess voices disgust at the very idea of being with child:

          I observe our duchess
Is sick o'days, she pukes, her stomach seethes,
The fins of her eyelids look most teeming blue,
She wanes i'th' cheek, and waxes fat i'th' flank;
And, (contrary to our Italian fashion)
Wears a loose-body'd gown—there's somewhat in't!

(II. i. 64-8)

White, blue, vomiting, and in an unfashionable dress to boot, the pregnant Duchess has become a monstrosity. Not only is the Duchess regarded by Bosola as grotesque in pregnancy, but the foetus she carries is apparently equally subhuman: ‘The young springal cutting a caper in her belly’ (II. i. 151) is, at the very least, a precocious sprite. Monstrosity becomes the category against which to define the very nature of being human itself. The pregnant woman is implicitly set against the norm, man, and only later redeemed as the good mother in order to sentimentalise the Duchess's death.

Evil can be reified as the peculiarly feminine monstrosity of pregnancy. For example, Iago's: ‘It is engend'red: Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light’ (I. iii. 403-4).¹⁰ Interestingly, Luther, in arguing that women were no less perfect creations than men, decried those who thought otherwise by calling them, ‘monsters and the sons of monsters’.¹¹ He defends women by none the less alluding to the idea of the monstrous mother.

Similarly Othello cries, ‘O monstrous, monstrous’ (III. iii. 427) when Desdemona becomes, ‘a cestern for foul toads / To knot and gender in’ (IV. ii. 61-2). If there is any sort of natural process going on in such an apparently unnatural woman as Othello regards his whore/wife to be, then it is of the foulest kind that nature can devise. Twisting, procreating toads are to be the only progeny of Othello's union with Desdemona. She has become the befouled object of his desire, instead of the fantasised location of complete fulfilment:

                              where I have garner'd up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from which my current runs
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence!

(IV. ii. 57-60)

As the repository of Othello's desire and his seed, Desdemona becomes responsible for inflicting spiritual aridity and physical impotence upon him. Therefore he can ‘bear no life’ from what he takes to be Desdemona's rancid womb. She has killed every aspect of his potential for procreation.

Lear's curse upon Goneril is that she will be infertile, but if she is ever to bear a child, it is to be a monster:

Hear, Nature, hear, dear Goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful.
Into her womb convey sterility,
Dry up in her the organs of increase,
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honour her! If she must teem,
Create her child of spleen, that it may live
And be a thwart disnatur'd torment to her.

(I. iv. 275-83)

This speech is interesting because it produces the idea of the good mother against which to compare Goneril's derogate femininity. But even this positive notion of motherhood against which sterility is to be compared is qualified by the word ‘teem’. It is in contrast to the use of ‘fruitful’ only four lines previously. Once Goneril becomes a monster (at least in the course of this passage), she can no longer conceive or be fruitful, she can only ‘teem’. This word is interesting because it means not only to bear offspring and to be prolific, but also to empty, discharge or pour out. Any reproduction in Goneril would be excretion, emission of waste matter: a monstrous birth.

Pregnant or potentially pregnant women are often defined as monstrous mothers, as possessors of the foul and fetid womb/tomb, breeding death rather than giving life. Defined primarily by their insatiable desire, intimately connected with their capacity to reproduce, women, like idiots and lunatics are regarded as incapable of reason and deprived of legal and economic autonomy and responsibility. Moreover, those without reason stray out of the human sphere altogether. Such people according to Thomas Wright: ‘… are guided by an internal imagination, following nothing else but that [which] pleaseth their sense, even after the same manner as brute beasts do’.¹² However, even if woman is placed as the most ‘serviceable’ of animals, the analogy, taken to its logical conclusion, makes human copulation bestiality.

Construction of sexual difference, then, is also the production of feminine monstrosity. Thus the category of woman in tragedy continually threatens to explode.

Notes

1. Quoted by Hilda Smith, ‘Gynecology and ideology in seventeenth century England’, in Bernice Carroll (ed.) Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Perspectives (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 104.

2. William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, quoted in John Russell Brown (ed.) The Duchess of Malfi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), p. 65.

3. See Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Women: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life, pp. 31-8; and Smith, p. 103.

4. Smith, 104.

5. Karen Newman, ‘“And wash the Ethiop white”: femininity and the monstrous in Othello’, in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (eds) Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 142-62.

6. John Robinson, Wks IV, quoted in George, p. 279.

7. Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal territories: the body enclosed’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy Vickers (eds) Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, p. 131.

8. Smith, p. 100.

9. Kramer and Spengler, repr., J. O'Faolain and L. Martines (eds), Not in God's Image (London: Temple Smith, 1973), pp. 208-9.

10. See Elizabeth Sacks, Shakespeare's Image of Pregnancy (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980) on Iago's impregnation of Othello, pp. 68-73.

11. Quoted by Maclean, p. 9.

12. Quoted by Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 81.