Presentation Teaser (for 9/22)

In the section dealing with Heywood in "The Age of Shakespeare," Swinburne writes of this play that "Anne is never really alive till on her death-bed." I think many would agree that Anne's character becomes vivid and exciting to us in the text primarily, or even exclusively, through her chosen death. I will be focusing our discussion tomorrow on the question we began to pursue during our last class meeting and through our previous critical readings: Does Anne's decision and eventual death truly reflect a pious act of contrition, or can it also be read as an empowered act that resists the patriarchal strictures of her contemporary society? One thing that intrigues me in particular about this question is that these options are not mutually exclusive. An entire range of readings is possible. Consequently, perhaps even more than in other texts, the performance decisions in stagings of this play can radically alter our understanding of the characters, and I'm interested in discussing how that fact is reflected in the ambivalence of the words themselves. I plan to do this through an examination of how Heywood mediates the subject through language of food, reflection/mirroring, and embodiment.

One external theoretical idea I'd like to make available for discussion is somewhat anachronistic in its approach, but hopefully useful regardless. In her article “Anorexia, Humanism, and Feminism,” Gillian Brown shows different ways in which we can conceptualize anorexia and how the practice of anorexia can contribute to identity formation in a paradoxically positive way. She claims that liberal humanism, born in the work of Locke and Rousseau and afterwards increasingly integral to our cultural attitudes, “has aligned individual worth with the capacity of the individual to augment himself through his labors.” A person is only worth as much as he or she can accumulate -- or have the potential to accumulate -- through action. In this light, Brown claims that, regardless of eventual physical impact, “the anorectic can be seen as exercising her right to free speech and privacy and to the management of herself.” As the anorectic subject loses weight physically, she gains something psychologically. Brown thus claims that anorexia provides a way of studying “how individuals come to matter through their acts, attributes, and accumulations,” and ultimately shows the ways in which anorectics determine not only a sense of self-worth but also a sense of self-ownership and even identity through the process of loss. Although Brown's article focuses very specifically on a post-Enlightenment culture of humanism, I wonder if Brown articulates here some of the ideas we might use to theorize Anne's death as an exercise of power rather than a surrender of it.