Approximate Bodies

Gender and Power in Early Modern Drama and Anatomy

Maurizio Calbi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134282340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The early modern period was an age of anatomical exploration and revelation, with new discoveries capturing the imagination not only of scientists but also of playwrights and poets. Approximate Bodies examines, in fascinating detail, the changing representation of the body in early modern drama and in the period's anatomical and gynaecological treatises.

Maurizio Calbi focuses on the unstable representation of both masculinity and femininity in Renaissance texts such as The Duchess of Malfi, The Changeling and a variety of Shakespeare plays. Drawing on theorists including Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, these close textual readings examine the effects of social, psychic and cultural influences on early modern images of the body. Calbi identifies the ways in which political, social, racial and sexual power structures effect the construction of the body in dramatic and anatomical texts. Calbi's analysis displays how images such as the deformed body of the outsider, the effeminate body of the desiring male and the disfigured body parts of the desiring female indicate an unstable, incomplete conception of the body in the Renaissance.

Compelling and impeccably researched, this is a sophisticated account of the fantasies and anxieties that play a role in constructing the early modern body. Approximate Bodies makes a major contribution to the field of early modern studies and to debates around the body.

1 ‘That body of hers’

The secret, the specular, the spectacular in The Duchess of Malfi and anatomical discourses

There is nothing so highe in the heavens above, nothing so low in the earth beneath, nothing so profound in the bowels of Arte, nor any thing so hid in the secretes of nature, as that good will dare not enterprise, search, unclose or discover.

(John Banister, Historie of Man)

‘Looking’ where there is ‘nothing to see’; as if the site of origin, as if one’s ‘history’ was written up in capital letters in the site one has elected as the fantasmatic theatre of one’s own ‘origin’: the inside of the uterus; as if on the scene of desire there was something to see.

(Rosi Braidotti, ‘Organs Without Bodies’)

‘Cover her face’

In John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, as he gazes on the strangled body of his sister, Ferdinand addresses his accomplice Bosola as follows: ‘Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle’ (IV.ii.264). The ‘general eclipse’ of the Duchess’s body, threatened earlier in the play (II.v.79) and understood by Ferdinand as the necessary outcome of her being ‘too much i’ th’ light’ (IV.i.42), seems not to occur without the uncanny emergence of the intolerable gaze of the abject corpse.¹ Nonetheless, the apotropaic gesture of covering the Duchess’s face is followed by Ferdinand’s request to uncover it once more: ‘Let me see her face again’ (IV.ii.272). This request is also intimately, if obliquely, connected with Ferdinand’s envisioning of another – more gruesome – scene of uncovering: ‘The wolf shall find her grave, and scrape it up: / Not to devour the corpse, but to discover / The horrid murder’ (IV.ii.309–11). In these lines the Calabrian Duke presents himself as other than himself, as a less-than-human hybrid entity moving uneasily in the liminal zone where the Duchess’s corpse has already been situated. He will continue to exercise his keen sight, but the fantasmatic reiteration of his visual mastery over the ‘object’ disquietingly comes to coincide with the undoing of the ‘human’.

The double injunction to veil and unveil the female body is not confined to this scene in which the Duchess of Malfi is strangled. It is part of the contradictory and unstable desire to see and not to see that pervades Webster’s play. In the course of this chapter, I want to explore the gender and class dynamics of this desire, and show some of the ways in which it intersects with the equally ambiguous ‘ocular drive’ governing coeval anatomical and gynaecological discourses. By following the textual movement of a play I regard as emblematic of a multi-layered crisis in the constraining production of bodies, pleasures and identities, I also want to develop further some of the theoretical questions I started addressing in the ‘Introduction’.

The female body and the body politic

Within the ‘ocular economy’ of Webster’s tragedy the female body is construed as an entity that is at once entirely visible and threateningly opaque. It simultaneously upholds and undermines the ‘body proper’ of the social.² One of the initial constructions of the female body is Antonio’s ‘picture’ (I.i.207) of the Duchess as the ‘normative’ and inaccessible Lady of courtly love, a high-born virginal being whose ‘countenance’ is liable to be misinterpreted as erotic provocation and yet remains, fundamentally, nothing but the embodiment of ‘continence’ and denial:

Ant. For her discourse, it is so full of rapture

You only will begin then to be sorry

When she doth end her speech …: whilst she speaks,

She throws upon a man so sweet a look,

That it were able raise one to a galliard

That lay in a dead palsy, and dote

On that sweet countenance: but in that look,

There speaketh so divine a continence

As cuts off all lascivious, and vain hope.

(I.i.190–2; 194–200)

It is worth adding that the Duchess is presented not only as a woman – or, rather, to use Lacanian language, as ‘Woman’ or ‘The woman’, the fantasmatic support of masculine identity³ – but also as a way of making statements about the body politic. More specifically, she is the yardstick against which the ‘political’ activities of her two brothers can be gauged.⁴ In this sense, Antonio’s praise of the Duchess relates back to the panegyric of the ‘judicious’ French king he offers only a few lines into the start of the play:

Delio. How do you like the French court?

Ant. I admire it –

In seeking to reduce both state and people

To a fix’d order, their judicious king

Begins at home: quits first his royal palace

Of flatt’ring sycophants, of dissolute

And infamous persons …

Consid’ring duly, that a prince’s court

Is like a common fountain, whence should flow

Pure silver drops in general: but if ’t chance

Some curs’d example poison ’t near the head,

Death and diseases through the whole land spread.

(I.i.4–9; 11–15)

Antonio’s commendation of the Duchess also links with, and is in fact the last of, a series of arresting tableaux through which various members of the Malfi court are introduced, from Bosola⁵ to the Cardinal and Ferdinand. Unlike the Duchess, they are characterized in such a way that they come to stand for the lethal ‘curs’d example’ of Antonio’s initial speech. They contaminate the court qua fountain ‘near the head’.⁶

Therefore, as Franco Moretti points out in his study of Jacobean tragedy, the court is signified as ‘the exemplary site of an unrestrained conflict of private interests’, as the new ‘collective protagonist’ replacing the centre previously provided by the tragic hero and king.⁷ Sovereignty is a receding formation in Webster’s play, not only because it is located elsewhere, but also because this ‘elsewhere’ is already internally split when it begins to function as a term of comparison for the Malfi court. Strictly speaking, it is the French king’s reiterated endeavour to re-establish a ‘fix’d order’ that prevails over the undivided presence of the king qua foundation of a hierarchically organized body politic.⁸ Yet, in spite of, or because of, this twofold ‘deconsecration’ of sovereignty, the Duchess’s body is somewhat reinvested – and not only by Antonio – with the principle of ‘fix’d order’, so as to sustain the ‘proper’ boundaries of class, gender and eroticism.

This is not to suggest that the attempt to supplement the – double – absence of the sovereign through the regulatory production of the body of the Duchess is successful. Antonio is the most outright champion of this substitutive process. Yet the play’s ‘wooing scene’ implicates him in the Duchess’s re-marking of her body away from ‘the figure cut in alabaster kneel[ing] at [her] husband’s tomb’ (I.i.454–5), thus revealing his unreliability as a spokesperson for rigid demarcations. Moreover, one could argue, with Lacan, that Antonio’s ‘picture’ of the Duchess is not in itself entirely unambiguous. Behind the Lady as a narcissistic projection filling in the potentially castrating lack in the Other, there seems to show through the spectre of a distanced and inhuman ‘partner’, indicative of the traumatic Thing that cannot be specularized or symbolized.⁹ It is perhaps as a form of anticipatory defence against this trauma that Antonio brings forward a sense of quietude so uncannily similar to death as the ultimate sign of the propriété and lack of desire of the Duchess’s body:

Ant. Her days are practis’d in such noble virtue

That sure her nights – nay more, her very sleeps –

Are more in heaven than other ladies’ shrifts.

(I.i.201–03)¹⁰

Bodily discoveries, eroticism and mimicry

The finale to Antonio’s eulogy of the Duchess shows that we are not too far away from the ‘eclipse’ of the female body with which I began. Still, Antonio’s depiction of the Duchess’s modest self-display and proper withdrawal, for all its ambiguity, does not quite match Ferdinand’s construction of his sister’s body and identity as potentially opaque and ominously predicated upon the discrepancy between a public façade and a secret inner part:

Ferd. [B]e not cunning:

For they whose faces do belie their hearts

Are witches, ere they arrive at twenty years –

Ay: and give the devil suck.

(I.i.308–11)

The overlapping of ‘countenance’ and ‘continence’ in Antonio’s ‘picture’ is thus replaced by a split identity. The emergence of this identity is, in turn, the conditio sine qua non for the implementation of an almost endless process of disclosure, whose ostensible aim is that of bringing – or bringing back – to light what is hidden and private, so as to reinforce visibility as a modality of power over the body of the Duchess:

Ferd. Hypocrisy is woven of a fine small thread,

Subtler than Vulcan’s engine: yet, believe’t,

Your darkest actions – nay, your privat’st thoughts –

Will come to light.

(I.i.313–16)

Earlier in the play Ferdinand disdainfully rejects the suggestion that a prince might act through a third person, ‘by a deputy’ (I.i.100). Yet it is Bosola who is charged with the task of inspecting and controlling the ‘young widow’ (I.i.255). He is to ‘observe the duchess, / To note all the particulars of her ’haviour’ (I.i.252–3). To the Calabrian Duke, Bosola’s ‘old garb of melancholy’ (I.i.278) should be able to give him ‘access to private lodgings’ (I.i.281), one of which is of course the Duchess’s. ¹¹

In an article that attempts to contextualize some of Othello and Hamlet’s key words, Patricia Parker refers to the proliferation of spies and secret informers in the early modern period as compensating for the lack of a fully developed policing apparatus.¹² ‘Their number’, as Monticelso observes in The White Devil, ‘rises strangely and some of them you’d take for honest men’ (IV.i.45–7).¹³ Parker also points out the close relation between the delator’s activity of bringing something hidden before the eye and the ‘voyeuristic’ drive of early modern anatomical and gynaecological discourses that seeks to expose, in all senses of the word, the ‘secret place’ of women. This ‘secret place’, she adds, is most often interpreted as something folded, closed or concealed.¹⁴ Some of Bosola’s speeches in The Duchess of Malfi situate themselves at the point of conjunction between these two discourses. One of the many masks he puts on in his role of ‘intelligencer’ is that of the physician detecting the signs of the transformation of the Duchess’s body:

Bos. 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.

(II.i.63–6)

After tempting her with some ‘dainties’ (II.i.143), he concludes as follows: ‘her tetchiness and most vulturous eating of the apricocks are apparent signs of breeding’ (II.ii.1–3). But it is in the following speech that Bosola’s scrutiny of the body reveals even more its embeddedness in the anatomical and gynaecological discourse’s ocular impulse to see and know, to lay bare and exhibit the secrets of the female body:

Bos. A whirlwind strike off these bawd farthingales,

For, but for that, and the loose-body’d gown,

I should have discover’d apparently

The young springal cutting a caper in her belly.

(II.i.148–51)

The Duchess’s pregnant body does not fully pre-exist the act of examination and discovery. Bringing before the eye the ‘secrets’ of the female body is a bringing into being of that which one claims merely to uncover. It is a production as well as a regulation of the body. Bosola’s reading of the body and subsequent diagnosis, as well as his fascination with the hidden scene taking place in the Duchess’s ‘belly’, inscribe a knowledge of the reproductive body that has less to do with a gradual understanding of its status than with the implementation of relations of domination. The perusal of the signs of pregnancy is only the incipit of Bosola’s ‘work’ (II.i.63) as a would-be man-midwife. Still, it plays an important role in what a 1612 midwifery treatise not uncommonly calls ‘the government and ordering’ of the pregnant woman.¹⁵

As Michel Foucault has persuasively argued, in the context of a discussion of the body’s involvement in the exercise of power, ‘there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations’.¹⁶ In this sense, the ‘objective’ status of the pregnant body of the Duchess emerging from Bosola’s inspection is symptomatic of a far more ‘realistic’ knowledge of the body, especially when compared to the misogynistic loathing of the flesh articulated in Bosola’s virulent tirades against his ‘rival’, the Old Lady-midwife whose appearance immediately precedes and follows his ‘observation’ of the Duchess. Yet this ‘realism’ needs to be understood as one of the effects of the anatomical and gynaecological discourses in which the play participates. These are discourses that invest and take hold of the body to ‘en-gender’ it as a quasi-empirical object subjected to the male gaze.

However, the relations of power thus activated do not go uncontested. As Foucault also points out, th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Texts
• Introduction: Thinking About the Body
• 1 ‘That Body of Hers’: The Secret, the Specular, the Spectacular in The Duchess of Malfi and Anatomical Discourses
• 2 ‘Behind the Back of Life’: Uncanny Bodies and Identities in The Changeling
• 3 ‘A Meer Chaos’: Moles, Abject Bodies and the Economy of Reproductive Discourses
• 4 ‘Strange Flesh’ and ‘Unshap’t Bodies’: Monstrosity, Hyperbolic Masculinity and ‘Racial’ Difference
• 5 ‘Un-pleasurable’ Detours: Figurations of Desire and the Body Erotic
• Notes
• Bibliography