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.

Quilligan’s overarching thesis–that incest gives women agency to halt the traffic in women–seems to be only applicable to very particular forms of incest. Quilligan herself notes that greater agency is exercised by women already in positions of social power (for example, in her discussion on the frequency of women writers to be Tories) (20). I would question whether it is the incest that gives women social power, or rather the fact that they already hold social power that allows for the endogamous transgression. She gives the example of the queen Semiramis who had sex with her son. But Semiramis was already powerful before committing incest with her son–incest here may be a way for her to consolidate her power but it is not the cause of it. Additionally, Quilligan’s discussion seems to ignore the way patriarchal conventions can instead lead to incest and instead take away women’s agency. The control of a father, brother (as in the Duchess of Malfi) or other figure may be able to use his position of authority to subjugate a female member of the family, particularly if the woman does not have her own source of power in society. Incest then may halt the homosocial bonding of the traffic in women, but it will not necessarily grant women agency.

Hi Nick!

I think that your point that Bosola is ultimately just a tool for Ferdinand’s reach was really key for me in understanding Bosola’s tragedy and his shift in character in the last act of the play. It seems to me that Bosola speaks much less in the final act than in the other three. In Act 5 scene two, he’s on stage for nearly a page of dialogue before speaking, and even then he only gets to speak in snippets. While he is still the featured character in this section he, ironically, takes on more of a spy position, hiding in the shadows while Julia tricks the Cardinal and genuinely rebelling against the authority of Ferdinand and the Cardinal. While Bosola seems to mourn the Duchess’s death and genuinely wishes for the safety of Antonio, he also seems to turn inward in this section, and I wonder how much of his change of heart is due to his dejection and/or vengeance (motivations that are, at the core, self-centered) rather than morality or sympathy.

Bosola and Ferdinand, undoubtedly the two most detestable characters in the play, play off each other, constantly shifting roles and changing the seeming balance of power. As the play goes on into the Acts 4 and 5, Ferdinand’s evil works further into the plot, while Bosola is portrayed less and less as the force of evil and more as the body through which Ferdinand is able to carry out his own evil wishes. Of course, Bosola is still a horrible person imo, but we really see Ferdinand come to the fore as he shows, even under pressure from Bosola, no remorse whatsoever for killing the Duchess. It is interesting to think broadly about how Bosola and Ferdinand’s respective roles change throughout the play, with Bosola’s agency appearing less in his own hands and more in the hands of Ferdinand as the acts play on. He is ultimately just the agent through which Ferdinand can carry out his psychopathic wishes, and while this does not excuse Bosola, it does present him less as an evil soul and more as a pathetic servant to Ferdinand, the true source of evil in the play.

I found your post about the multiple scenes/voyeurism really interesting. I think the effect makes particular sense for a play that is so centered on surveillance and control. I wonder how Bosola, the spy, is incorporated into this idea–he is the one observing others, but is also so much something to be observed himself, because of the way he dominates the scenes he is a part of in the play.