Giovanni, unlike Annabella, refuses to repent for his violations against Christianity. I am particularly interested in how he morphs Annabella into a godlike figure in this last image. He refers to her as being able to give “grace”–a particularly Christian idea referring to God’s forgiveness of people (5.6.104).  Here Annabella is able to give grace, rather than God, demonstrating Giovanni’s further lack of Christianity.

In discussing ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, we’ve talked a bit about whether or not we’re meant to identify with Annabella and Giovanni’s plight and root for their success, whatever that success means. If we are meant to be on their side, this would imply condoning incest at large. However, in Act V Scene 5, Giovanni frames their relationship in this way: “[W]hen they but know / Our loves, that love will wipe away that rigour / Which would in other incests be abhorred” (Ford 234). Giovanni says this in telling Annabella the ways in which he hopes society will see their relationship after they have died. In framing their relations this way, does he see his and Annabella’s transgression as an exception to the rule that incest is universally deplorable? If so, why are he and Annabella special? What are the conditions for an acceptable/unacceptable incestuous relationship?

I was interested in the way that Giovanni does not fully trust Annabella until he hears her talking to Soranzo. In this scene, Giovanni says from above, “Why now I see that she loves me” (3.2.54). Of course, Annabella has already told Giovanni of her love for him, but he did not fully trust her until he heard her speak to Soranzo. It is interesting that he did not trust her at first, as he does not give much of an indication of that before this point. It is also interesting that if there were a lack of trust, it is this conversation that convinces him that her love is true. What makes her initial words untrustworthy to Giovanni? Why is this conversation so convincing for him?

Similarly to Raisa, I also looked at ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore in terms of doubling and mirroring. In Act 1, Scene 2 when Annabella and Giovanni confess their love to each other, they recite the same lines to each other in what resembles a mock marriage ceremony. She kneels first and says “On my knees, / Brother, even by our mother’s dust, I charge you, / Do not betray me to your mirth or hate; / Love me, or kill me, brother” (1.2.243–246). Giovanni then repeats the same lines, calling her “Sister,” except he changes “our mother’s dust” to “my mother’s dust” (1.2.247). Based on this simple word change in otherwise identical speeches, it seems that Annabella is more closely holding on to their endogamous status, whereas Giovanni claims the family ancestry for himself. In terms of Quilligan’s argument, it seems to me that this small difference shows the extent to which Annabella is conscious of keeping herself within the family and claiming her sociopolitical connections.

Hi Carly,

I think another way that Giovanni attempts to justify his love/desire for his sister is through appropriating  the lexias of different forms of discourse. For example, in the opening lines, he uses both medical and religious language to justify his relationship. More broadly, I think that Ford could be making a broader point about the limits of logic and reason and is asking us to look closer when a form of reason seems complete and unwavering–such as the Friar’s interpretation of religion.

Giovanni is a student. The Friar, a prevalent character in the play, is his tutor. Florio, Giovanni and Annabella’s father, without knowing of their incestual relationship, urges his son to “forsake/ This over-bookish humour” (2.6.114-15). Giovanni makes something that on the surface is irrational–his desire for his sister–appear rational by viewing it through different theoretical lenses in act 1, scene 2. Once logically justifying his love to himself, and to his sister, Annabella discloses that she, indeed, harbors desire for her brother. Only after Giovanni’s multifaceted argument supporting his union with Annabella do the two commence their incestuous relationship.

Similar to our class discussion of doubling in “The Duchess of Malfi,” the first two acts of Ford’s play seem to reveal how Giovanni and Annabella (siblings) are in love because of their ‘sameness,’ a factor that normally obstructs erotic desire (we’ve previously explored this mirroring in Donne’s “The Cannonization”: “By us; we two being one, are it.”)

Annabella’s beauty is “the frame and composition” which Giovanni follows. He is not in love with her character, or her intelligence, or her “soul,” even though Neoplatonic tradition argues that the body is just a vessel for the soul (and that the soul will be released when the body dies).

Hi Sarah,

I agree that it’s worth taking a look at the Duchess through the lens of Qulligan’s argument about agency, since she doesn’t explicitly reference Webster’s play in her article. I personally found fault with Qulligan’s logic that incest can act as a catalyst for agency in women; if anything, it would seem to reinforce a woman’s – particularly a noblewoman’s – inability to escape the obligations of class, i.e. maintaining her family’s bloodlines. Many women were expected or even forced to marry first and second cousins to keep blood blue, so it would seem that incest in this context only bolsters elitist patriarchal authority structures.

In the Duchess’ case, I saw her declaration of “I am the Duchess of Malfi still” as a last-gasp attempt to convince herself that her rank would save her from such tyranny and suffering, rather than a reassertion of agency. Her mind has been irrevocably fractured by her brothers’ psychological torture at this point, so she lacks the strength to take control of her own life again. Her initial attempt to resist patriarchal authority through her marriage to Antonio was what sparked her brothers’ wrath, and their actions stripped her of whatever other agency she might have had.

To add to the pile, felt that Quilligan’s argument puts major emphasis on female writers (women who produce their own signs) and didn’t fully acknowledge how this emphasis has its limits. On page 19, Quilligan writes on Sedgwick:

Because she uses only the male-oriented understanding of the “traffic in women:’ Eve Sedgwick’s understanding of the homosocial space in which Shakespeare’s sonnets circulated among men in the early modern period makes female agency in that genre impossible to articulate. Lorna Hutson, for example, examines the difficulties facing the Renaissance poet Aemila Lanyer, who attempted to use sonnet discourse to female patrons.

The problem I see here is that Aemilia Lanyer does not have a body of work anywhere as close to as large as Shakespeare’s; that no female Renaissance writer has a body of work that compares to that of the male Renaissance writers; that eventually, a scholar is going to run out of works written by women fast. Quilligan paints it as a 1:1 ” Segdwick uses Shakespeare and Hutson uses Lanyer.” But there just are not that many Aemelia Lanyers. This isn’t to say that I think this is an unfair critique of Segdwick — we should make as much use of the works written by women as we can, especially when formulating theories that are about the subjugation of women. But perhaps Quilligan needed to acknowledge that, at some point, there is a scholarly necessity to read women through men, as unfortunate as it may be.

Hi Rachel,

I agree with your point about the weakness of Quilligan’s argument; I especially liked the way you described incest as a temporary halt to the problem vs. actually giving women true agency. I wonder in what ways this plays out through the other 2 ways out of the system that Quilligan outlines on p. 13: celibacy and lesbian desire. While lesbianism might give women more sexual agency, Quilligan seems to agree with Butler that same-sex desire is interconnected to and springs from incest (p. 16). Also, as we’ve read before, explicit lesbian desire was not really recorded; it does not really give women an active voice in the kinship model or agency in the long run, regardless of what brief sexual liberation it might provide in the moment. The only way that seems to really work, then, is celibacy, which ironically (or fittingly) is the ultimate act of passivity.