The critical preoccupations surrounding Webster's plays have been those of structural coherence, and moral vision (or lack of it). John Russell Brown writes in a critical commentary on The White Devil [in his 1979 edition of Webster's work]: 'By borrowing some structural devices from chronicle plays, Webster was bound to lose something of the concentration which is often considered a hallmark of tragedy; but apparently this was not considered a fault in his eyes, for these devices are repeated in The Duchess of Malfi.' Webster, Brown goes on to argue, 'presents a series of related and contrasted figures, not a single hero'; hence John Russell Brown's argument for 'loss of concentration'. Criticism, however, has also shown a marked tendency to regard the centrality of the female protagonist in itself as a structural flaw. So, for Gunnar Boklund [as expressed in his The Sources of The White Devil, 1966] The White Devil has a number of 'structural confusions'. He perceives the play as 'a world without a centre': 'The play depicts an existence disordered and without a core, and in order to do this convincingly the dramatist created a tragedy without a hero.' Indeed, Vittoria or the Duchess make relatively limited appearances on stage. For example, deaths in the final Act are probably the most ubiquitous characteristic of tragedy, and yet in The Duchess of Malfi, the death of the Duchess does not even coincide with the end of the play. Traditional criticism, then, is quite correct in pointing out the problems of tragic centrality in these instances, and further, this criticism exemplifies some of the problems of the universalist, essentialist models it deploys. Yet instead of regarding Webster's play as a demonstration of certain flaws in the critical construction of tragedy, traditional criticism has instead used this as evidence of the playwright's defective dramaturgy. Thus the structural confusion so abhorred by critics is aligned with that equally loathed 'moral and emotional anarchy', serving again to dismiss the problematised centrality of the tragic protagonist rather than to address it.

The title page of The White Devil shows all the fascinating tensions involved in defining what the play is about. Is the 'white devil' a person, and is not the term something of a contradiction in terms? Could it be the court, or what? The tragedy, the title page declares, is Bracciano's—together with the life and death of Vittoria, the 'Venetian courtesan' (my italics). To complicate things even further, Flamineo says almost twice as much as any other major character in The White Devil. Thus the text articulates the contradictions that criticism has traditionally sought to resolve. Feminist criticism must interrogate notions of tragedy so that it does not remain ensnared in the limitations of masculinist criticism. It seems necessary to shift the terms of analysis entirely in order to deprive the tragic hero of his status as the positive term and fixed centre of tragic action. The typical tragic pattern of exposition, conflict, crisis and catastrophe outlined most notably by Bradley becomes disturbed.

The literary theory of Pierre Macherey provides a useful insight into this situation. Just as the human subject is divided in and through language in the continual production of the unconscious, Macherey posits a parallel unconscious in the literary text. The task of criticism is then to decentre the text and to establish its 'unconscious'—that is, the gap between the ideological project of the text and its formulation. However, to examine 'the reverse side of what is written' becomes particularly interesting in works that are already radically decentred by the presence of a female tragic protagonist. For instance, in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, decentring the tragic hero does not involve constructing an alternative centre that focuses on the 'other' of the symbolic order (this would merely establish a female hero). Further, female tragic protagonists and heroines display radical discontinuity, at some points displaying a degree of sexual autonomy and at others being utterly idealised. Female characters oscillate uneasily between their functions as objects of uncertainty and embodiments of perfect truth ('Woman to man / Is either a god or a wolf,' The White Devil, IV.ii.91-2).

The entire realm of sexuality is displaced onto woman who becomes at once the site of instability and at the same time the fulfilling other. The result is a polarisation in the concept of woman in tragedy and culture. A few textural examples will clarify this point. In one scene of Othello, Desdemona is constructed as a series of entirely different things. For example, by her father she is presented as the perfect daughter:

A maiden never bold;
Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion
Blush'd at herself…
(I. iii. 94-6)

as the fickle daughter:

Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters' minds
By what you see them act.
(I. i. 170-1)

and as the deceptive daughter:

Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see;
She has deceiv'd her father, and may thee.
(I. iii. 292-3)

This last gives the clue to how the instability created through polarisation in the category of woman will be played out in ensuing acts. In Act II scene i, Desdemona is the witty woman indulging in dockside banter and sexual innuendo with Iago. Yet by Act IV, she is the incredulous innocent who cannot grasp the concept of betrayal:

Beshrew me if I would do such a wrong
For the whole world
(IV. iii. 78-9)

The Duchess of Malfi is similarly constructed as the concupiscent widow by her brothers, and yet as the idealised love object by Antonio: 'the right noble duchess'. The Duchess is forced to undermine Antonio's idealisation of her in order to woo him:

This is flesh, and blood, sir;
'Tis not the figure cut in alabaster
Kneels at my husband's tomb.
(I. i. 453-5)

None the less, the Duchess, despite her own earlier protestations to the contrary, is idealised again as the faithful wife and loving mother by the time of her death three Acts later. Cordelia too progresses from being the autonomous woman to the obedient daughter:

O, look upon me, sir,
And hold your hand in benediction o'er me.
[No, Sir,] you must not kneel.
(IV. vii. 57-9)

Even the almost irredeemable Vittoria shifts from being the wanton adulteress to the stoic victim. There is, then, a progression towards idealisation in the construction of the central female tragic character, which is in part a function of the dramatic structure of tragedy.

A polarised conception of woman operates not only within the characterisation of central individual female character but also by alternative stereotypes of the feminine represented by all the other female characters in the tragedy. This does not serve to individualise the central female character, but rather to diminish her centrality. To present a good man next to a bad one (as with, for example, Othello and Iago) is radically different from presenting a good woman next to a bad one in a culture where the basic tenet of the prevailing misogyny is that all women are the same. So, for example, Desdemona is constructed in terms of Bianca and Emilia; Cordelia is constructed in terms of Goneril and Regan; the Duchess is constructed in terms of Cariola; and Vittoria in terms of Isabella and her shadow side, the Moorish Zanche. Furthermore, because of the female initial transgression the terms of this relation can never be purely antithetical; thus, Desdemona is not simply the opposite of Bianca, while Zanche is not simply the obverse representation of her mistress—the white devil. The shift in the characterisation of the central female character takes place in terms of gradations of the cultural stereotype of the feminine. An individual character may be seen to make an unwarranted leap from wilful transgressor to monument of female virtue, but the dynamic of the polarised feminine has already been established in terms of other female characters. In this way, woman can be said to be constructed as a 'shifting' subject in several senses. She is sometimes idealised and sometimes denigrated, sometimes present on stage as the focus of the plot, and sometimes not. The progression from transgressive sinner to beatified saint is the result of the constant tension in the dramatic representation of women between the polarities through which they are constructed.

This path of woman in tragedy extends through a range of discontinuities from the instigation of the tragic situation by means of an initial transgression, to her sanctification as the chief corpse of the denouement. That neither Vittoria nor the Duchess can be 'female heroes', should not be attributed to faulty plot construction on the part of Webster (an issue of aesthetics, which is largely irrelevant), but to the fact that the presence of the female protagonist radically destabilises the tragic paradigm as it has been constructed in criticism from fatal flaw to catastrophe, and, finally, to apotheosis. As unrepresentative of humanity and the universal human situation, Vittoria and the Duchess can only play out a specific dramatic catastrophe instead of the mythic archetype posited by the tragic paradigm. Female characters like the Duchess, Desdemona, Cordelia and Vittoria follow the transgressive route they alighted upon as a result of their initial transgression to its logical conclusion. As Lisa Jardine [in her essay found in John Webster's 'The Duchess of Malfi', edited by Harold Bloom, 1987] observes of the Duchess: 'From the moment of her assertion of sexual independence, the Duchess moves with dignity and inexorably towards a ritual chastisement worthy of a flagrant breach of public order.'

There is no need for a female hero nor should feminists try to create a new critical paradigm in order to accommodate one. Heroes are merely the chief characters of plays, not the timeless representatives of the bravest and the best; and tragic action is not the zenith of aesthetic experience, but, in Madelon Gohlke's phrase [from her essay ' "I wooed thee with my sword": Shakespeare's tragic paradigms,' 1990], 'a particular kind of heterosexual dilemma', leading to mortal ends unmitigated by transcendence or apotheosis.