Reading the Double Bind: The Death of the Good Woman in Early Modern Literature
2019-10
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Reading the Double Bind: The Death of the Good Woman in Early Modern Literature
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2019-10
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Many early modern literary texts end with dead women. These texts stage a paradox endemic to a system which denies the possibility of the chaste, silent, and obedient paradigm it claims to venerate. Women are not simply punished for their transgressions but compelled to transgress by the unattainability of goodness. Women must prove their virtue in a system predicated on denying it. I begin with an analysis of late medieval virgin martyr legends. In privileging holiness over obedience to men, these women are simultaneously welcomed into heaven by God and executed as bad women who have divested from the social system that deems them so. This divestment is the very thing that makes their legacy so difficult to replicate by women who must prove their goodness to the same authority that accuses them of wickedness. Second, I turn to Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, Titus Andronicus, and Othello. I argue that Lucrece, Lavinia, and Desdemona are not simply literary victims of circumstance, but reflections of a material phenomenon that eroticizes women’s virtue, demands women’s violation, and compels their death despite their testimony. Their testimony can never be heard by the same authority that endangers them. Third, I turn to Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam in order to deconstruct the Mariam/Salome foil—to trouble the dichotomies that inhere in such a formulation: chaste/unchaste, moral/wicked, sacred/profane. I argue that Mariam is underwritten less by a foil and more by a double bind—Mariam is trapped within a system that demands the virtue that endangers her, despises the disobedience that protects her, and compels her death as proof of innocence. Finally, I turn to the social pamphlets of the Jacobean querelle de femmes, or the public debate about the nature of woman. I argue that the writers who successfully defend women’s virtue do so by relying on rhetorical strategy rather than personal testimony. Without testifying, these writers weaponize the double bind against itself and turn to the Bible as evidence, casting aside what does not serve them and writing their own redemptive biblical exegesis.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. October 2019. Major: English. Advisor: John Watkins. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 192 pages.
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McCarthy, Katelyn. (2019). Reading the Double Bind: The Death of the Good Woman in Early Modern Literature. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/209196.
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