Discuss The Duchess of Malfi as a feminist text within 600 words for 15marks
Answers
QuestioN :
Discuss The Duchess of Malfi as a feminist text within 600 words
ANswer :
The Duchess of Malfi is an unusual central figure for a 17th-century tragedy not only because she is a woman, but also because, as a woman, she combines virtue with powerful sexual desire.
Dympna Callaghan places Webster's character in the context of contemporary drama, politics and discourses about widows and female sexuality.
John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi is in many ways a remarkable forerunner to the adulterous and tragic heroines found in landmark 19th century novels (think Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878)).
However, unlike these later heroines, Webster’s Duchess exercises transgressive, independent sexual agency in defiance of social conventions not through infidelity but through marriage, or more accurately, remarriage.
While, given the prevailing ideas about female behaviour in the 19th century, the sexual choices of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina necessarily bring them to tragic ends, remarriage in the 17th century was not inevitably a recipe for tragedy. In fact, it was a popular topic for city comedy.
Webster’s Duchess defies social and sexual orthodoxies in ways that are not dissimilar to those of comic widows.
What lends itself to tragedy in the Duchess’s situation is that, unlike her comic counterparts who are the widows of merchants and citizens, she is the head of state.
Answer:
The tragedy of the Dutchess of Malfy, also known as The Duchess of Malfi, was a play written by John Webster about 1612 and produced in 1614 by Shakespeare's company, the King's Men.
Explanation:
The representation of women as manipulative and powerful is a prevalent characteristic in Jacobean theatre. Almost all of the female characters in Jacobean theatre are strong-willed and passionate. This kind of strength is not male, but it is also not feminine. This is one of the reasons critics have often termed the female characters in Jacobean play as "shemale" who mirror "masculine power". Helen Mirren played the Duchess of Malfi in the 1981 film The Duchess of Malfi. When asked about her experiences as a Duchess, she stated :
“It is essentially a feminist play about a woman who is fighting for her autonomy.”
She kept her mental identity as described in "I am Duchess of Malfi, still" after executing all the parts with maximum composure and keeping all the bodies in synchronous harmony. (Scene 2 of Act 4) Despite managing all of these bodies and trials to keep them divided, especially the intertwined political and personal, the lack of insanity is astonishing.
Thus, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi can be classified as a feminist literature because it not only satirises the status of women in seventeenth-century society but also depicts the breadth and plurality of a female body/bodies.
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