Discussion Questions:
What did class think of the way that this play speaks about virginity? “beloved twin virginity” (p. 42)
What did you make of it in terms of the play as a whole or the acts that we looked at?
What about De Flores’s skin condition? How are we supposed to read ugliness in this play?
In what ways are Isabella and Beatrice-Joanna different? How does Isabella relate to Antonio (the changeling) and Franciscus? Is she the only person with any compassion in the subplot?
Beatrice-Joanna’s main transgression seems to be caprice. Does she really understand the implications of what she asks De Flores to do in murdering Alonzo?
Threads of Conversation:
The violence (and also speed) that characterizes how the play discusses the taking of virginity
- * This is pointed out to be a strange idea because of how women’s sexual appetite was conceived of in the period
Ugliness in this play
- *Not fixed in bodily characteristics (as in Richard III)
- *Entirely possible (and occasionally practiced) that De Flores may have no visible deformities, so that the discussions of his physical ugliness make little sense in performance
- *De Flores’s ugliness seems rather to be located in some kind of creepiness under the skin
- *More like he is a kind of bad omen
- *Dialogues in the period about ugliness as a sign of interior blockage, moral decreptitude, imbalance of humors
- *Yet there were still public figures who were deformed and adored, seems to be an ambivalence about this issue in public discourse
- *Problem of the ability to counterfeit madness or deformity in the subplot
Female Chastity
- *Problem of servants in the home, access to the women of the household
- *Isabella’s chastity is essentially lost as she is accosted by the different men of the household
- *No possible defense from them
- *Lack of female bodily autonomy in the period
De Flores’s Actions
- *No possibility of getting out of the voyeuristic position as audience members
- *Burk sees the play as upholding the patriarchal psychology underlying the contemporary rape laws
- *But the play also choreographs our separation from the charismatic villain to a horrified moment where he hauls her off to rape her
- *Audience has to feel sympathetic and implicated in her position
- *Beatrice-Joanna has no way out from her position
The Murder of Alonzo
- *Beatrice-Joanna not implicated in the murder until presented with Alonzo’s finger
- *She can actually be connected with the ring he gives her back
- *Finger links back with the seizure of virginity, maidenhead figured as an actual body part in its tremendous effects on body, family, marital prospects, economic, social, political implications
- *Conflation of violence and desire
- *Murder is an act of sexual aggression and pleasure
- *Promise of the reward that he imagines crowds out the vision of what he’s actually doing during A’s murder
- *Parody of the hand fasting in the marriage ceremony
- *Signifier brought back with the body still attached to it as a brutal severing with that tradition
- *This is a new world in which marriage traditions will be inverted
- *De Flores’s violent language of thrusting fingers into sockets
- *His imagined desire is a kind of manhandling of Beatrice-Joanna’s body that is violent/possessive/wearing her, way beyond the one-flesh model of marital unity
Beatrice-Joanna’s Psychology
- *fact that her desires contradict father’s will is the real problem; that is why we see her as capricious
- *love is impossible for a woman if it contradicts the patriarchy in which she lives; those family members control her ability to desire and love
- *Perhaps she understand what murder means, but she wishes to exercise control over it, where others wrest that control from her; her uncontrol of her own body gets unleashed on the bodies of others
- *Burks focuses on the idea that her deceit is two-fold because she doesn’t tell her father what she wants to do; would it matter? Wouldn’t really change anything about the course of her fate; extremes because she doesn’t have control over her own life
- *Beatrice can only discover that she has interiority by doing terrible things. Terrible that they can only discover that they can keep a secret is by going outside of the patriarchy.
- *Places that are female-female environments present opportunities for arithmetical thinking about women’s faithfulness can be projected
- *Beatrice-Joanna’s problem, that she is engaged to the wrong man, is a common problem in plays from this period – but her choices for how to improve her situation are remarkably circumscribed
- *Her choices are also potentially linked up with the romantic notions of either loving the man of choice or dying
- *Place of desire in the relationship between De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna’s - easy for us to find B and DF’s “romance” (not attractive) but captivating or charismatic
- *B and DF almost become a charismatic, romantic super-figure – become as “other” others; understand their romance as functional, as opposed to other idiot male figures who survive
- *problem arises from within, double othering which puts us back at the site of our own interiority; gaze of the protective male figures is always outward when it needs to be within and below
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