Women (Malfi) Flashcards
How do the brother’s attitudes towards the Duchess reflect traditional attitudes at the time?
The brothers’ attitudes tell us a great deal about early modern ideas about women and family honour. Their fears are in large part fuelled by anxieties about female sexuality in general and of widows in particular. Women in early modern England were widely thought to have a much stronger sexual appetite than men, which is one of the main reasons they were often feared as untrustworthy and why chastity was so insistently invoked as the cardinal feminine virtue.
How does Ferdinand attempt to manipulate the Duchess through misogynistic language?
Ferdinand expresses such misogyny when he says to the Duchess in Act 1: ‘And women like that part which, like the lamprey, / Hath ne’er a bone in’t, his reference to the lamprey, a type of eel, containing a bawdy suggestion of ‘penis’. Widows, as sexually experienced women, were thought to be especially susceptible to this feminine vice.
Why are the brother’s especially concerned about the Duchess remarrying?
The fact that widows were not firmly under the control of their male relations intensified their ability to arouse masculine anxieties.
What was the traditional life for a woman in the Jacobean era?
In this period, when a woman married she moved from a position of legal subservience to her father to being legally subject to her husband. A widow, then, especially if she inherited wealth from her dead husband, could claim an alarming degree of independence. She might, as a result, presume to choose her second husband herself, rather than marrying in accordance with her family’s wishes.
How does the Cardinal react to the idea of the Duchess being a ruler and a widow?
This is a prospect that clearly worries the Cardinal, who warns his sister not to ‘take your own choice’. The Duchess’s position as a female ruler only exacerbates her brothers’ concerns about her capacity to act independently of their wishes. Their repeated references to the dangerous temptations of the courtly life – ‘You live in a rank pasture here, i’th’court’ and ‘I would have you to give o’er these chargeable revels’ – disclose their unease with the power she wields as a duchess who presides over her own court.
