Elizabeth Proctor
English 634
Dr. Desmet
Spring 1997
Considering dulythat a prince's court
Webster represents melancholia in The Duchess of Malfi as a disease that infects the state's "common fountain." The general contagion spreading throughout the body politic ultimately manifests itself in Ferdinand's lycanthropy. Ferdinand's melancholic body poisons the civic fountain. The androgynous role of the play's titular character destabilizes Ferdinand. The Duchess, viewed through Webster's "glasse" of sexuality and maternity, challenges the masculine identity of the state. Her female body threatens the health of the patriarchal state and disturbs her brother's fragile sexual identity. Ferdinand makes the Duchess's body the object of his plans for a pure, aristocratic bloodline.
Webster internalizes sex roles in The Duchess of Malfi. On stage, a transvestite boy actor played the part of the pregnant woman. Politically, the Duchess assumes a male role. She holds masculine power at court yet she is feminine and nurturing on the inside. The Duchess is a powerful, sexually active woman with masculine authority. Ferdinand plays her father figure, flaunting a phallic poniard even as he suffers from a feminine malady on the inside. The Duchess's reign, characterized in the play by sexual and political confusion, embodies an endangered patrilineal bloodline. The female ruler's sexual dalliances become dangerous within the confines of the political arena because she has transgressed the boundaries inevitably imposed upon her sex by state and familial relations.
Ferdinand's lustful obsession with the Duchess's body renders him effeminate. Her maternity undermines his patriarchal position as the head of an aristocratic family and throws him into a fit of feminine melancholy. Ferdinand's attraction to his sister is narcissistic on both sexual and socio-economic levels. They share the same aristocratic blood. The Duchess's relations with Antonio taint her sexually and socially. When Ferdinand learns that the Duchess is pregnant, he flies into a rage. The idea of his sister's maternal body disgusts Ferdinand. Whereas he once saw the image of himself in the glass of her figure, he now sees a different, terrifying other. Ferdinand grows estranged from the twin self he felt connected to through blood, status, and desire. This fractured sense of self pushes an alienated Ferdinand over the melancholic edge.
Ferdinand's representation of his sister as a hyena prefigures his melancholic metamorphosis into a werewolf. This bestial image also harkens back to the Duchess's behavior at the beginning of the play when she seemed to take pleasure in flouting the submissive role her brothers proscribed for her. The image of the hyena reflects the Duchess's debased sexuality. The female of the species was believed to display the outward form of male genitalia. The Duchess, like a hyena, disturbs Ferdinand's sense of his own masculinity because she assumes both male and female positions at court and in the bedroom. The peculiar hermaphroditic quality of the hyena is intimated by Ferdinand's lycanthropic inner state. His male sexual part turns inward when the Duchess's sin enters his bloodstream in the form of feminine melancholia.
Ferdinand attempted to deflect his madness onto the Duchess through a series of elaborate tortures. His incestuous fascination with the Duchess's political and maternal body leads to Ferdinand's descent into lycanthropy. While the news of the Duchess's pregnancy drove Ferdinand out of his mind, the sight of her death forces him into an isolated state between man and beast. Ferdinand's relationship to his skin grows strained as he fixes his gaze on the Duchess's body. Mortal separation from his twin--his mirror image--alienates Ferdinand from his own shadow. His obsession with the Duchess's sexuality lives on after her death. A lycanthropic Ferdinand must labor in the graveyard under a repetition compulsion, another feminine malady, to seek out her dead body.