Soo Chung
English 634
Dr. Desmet
Spring 1997
"One met the Duke, 'bout midnight in a lane Behind Saint Mark's church, with the leg of a man Upon his shoulder; and he howled fearfully; Said he was a wolf . . ." (The Duchess of Malfi5.2.13-16)
In The Duchess of Malfi, long before the onset of his lycanthropy and his subsequent mutilation of corpses, Ferdinand exhibits an inclination for other types of dismemberment. As Lynn Enterline observes, "Ferdinand . . . has always pursued his desires and his revenge by proxy" (105). He removes or "dis-members" himself from action and society. Antonio says of him, "He speaks with others' tongues, and hears men's suits / With others' ears" (1.1.164-65).
Similarly, his incestuous feelings toward his twin sister, the Duchess, are also a sign of his movement toward an isolating, dis-memberment from society. According to Frank Whigham, Ferdinand is
a threatened aristocrat, frightened by the contamination of his ascriptive social rank, and obsessively preoccupied with its defense . . . Ferdinand's incestuous inclination toward his sister is a social posture, of hysterical compensat ion--a desperate expression of the desire to evade degrading association with inferiors (Whigham 266).The Duchess's marriage to one outside her socio-economic class threatens Ferdinand with a type of dismemberment. If the Duchess marries outside her class, Ferdinand loses her in a way (he is dismembered) because she risks being dis-membered from her clas s.
As punishment for her marriage to socially inferior Antonio, Ferdinand imprisons her, thus dis-membering her from society, and during her imprisonment, he exposes her to figures of disjunction or disconnection. First, he "[g]ives her a dead man's hand " (4.1.SD at line 43), supposedly that of Antonio. Even if the hand is not actually severed, the darkness of the prison prevents the Duchess from knowing whose hand she holds, and in effect it becomes a figure for dismemberment. So, too, are the eight m admen that Ferdinand later displays to her (4.2); their insanity displaces, or dis-members, them from society. Ferdinand is also the cause for the separation of the Duchess's family, and he later dismembers it by having nearly everyone killed.
After having the Duchess killed, Ferdinand begins suffering from melancholia, usually considered a feminine structure (Desmet). It is as if he assumes his sister's role or identity as female in an attempt to deny her loss (Sokolsky). As Enterline not es, Ferdinand has an intense, conflicted identification with the Duchess: "Ferdinand vacillates between an 'egomorphic' refusal to tolerate his sister's difference from his own image . . . and an equally egomorphic refusal to tolerate her likeness (she c an be acknowledged as 'twin' only at her death)" (108). In killing the Duchess, Ferdinand divides her from himself, thus enacting a self-dismemberment: "But if the Duchess is similar enough to reflect an image of himself, her body also offers him a mirr or of his own dismemberment" (Enterline 112-13). Considering his penchant for division, it is fitting that Ferdinand's melancholia manifests itself as lycanthropy and that he becomes a werewolf who dismembers corpses.