AbstractsWomens Studies

"Evil Women: Patrilineal Fantasies in Early Modern Tragedy," examines the portrayal of "evil" women in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale, Beaumont's and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, Webster's The White Devil, and Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam. Good and evil in these plays are often determined by women's responses to their status as commodities in a patrilineal system. Because commodities, as Marx suggests, have a ghostly or fantastic existence, female characters are imbued with a phantasmagoric value as property: they become "spectres" haunting a system of order and morality that – in theory – depends on absolute values of honor, obedience, and virtue. I highlight the spectrality of commodification, then, to challenge conventional readings of putatively evil women such as Goneril, Regan, and Lady Macbeth. Drawing on pamphlets debating women's nature by such writers as Juan Luis Vives, I examine Queen Elizabeth's speeches and letters to analyze her deployment of negotiation, manipulation, and torture. Read in dialogue with conduct manuals for women, plays such as The Maid's Tragedy suggest that pamphlet writers' circumscription of women's desire through rigid curricula of silence and obedience is redeployed on the stage where women who assert their desire in disobedience to fathers, brothers, and husbands are punished by ostracism and death. Shakespeare's tragedies stand in opposition, though, to those of Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, and Ford because they interrogate the cultural and political stakes constructing women's desires; thus Goneril, Regan, and Lady Macbeth participate in a Hobbesian political structure which demands brutality rather than compassion.