Abstract
‘The greatest fault that remains in us women is that we are too credulous’, wrote Jane Anger in her passionate protest against women’s inferior status written in 1589.1 The point remains central to feminism today: as Catherine Belsey asks, ‘why, since all women experience the effects of patriarchal practices, are not all women feminist?’2 The functioning of dominant ideologies hinges on their internalisation by the oppressed subject. Patriarchal discourses, which I have identified as heterogeneous, are not necessarily experienced as such by women, although they confer a dichotomy upon the latter which is not always stable; on the contrary, as we saw in the case of the Elizabethan world picture, they seek to efface contradictions and appear as ‘natural’ and ‘obvious’, as ‘plain common-sense’. In the texts we have been looking at, women internalise the values conferred upon them, as did that early feminist Christine de Pisan. She was at first overwhelmed by the force of male disdain of women:
And I finally decided that God had made a vile creature when He made woman … a great unhappiness and sadness welled up in my heart, for I detested myself and the entire feminine sex, as though we were monstrosities in nature … Alas, God, why did You not let me be born in the world as a man … and in my folly I considered myself most unfortunate because God had made me inhabit a female body in this world.3
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Notes
Jane Anger, Jane Anger her Protection for Women (1589), in The Women’s Sharp Revenge: Five Pamphlets from the Renaissance, ed. Simon Shepherd (London, 1985), p. 35.
Catherine Belsey, ‘Constructing the subject: deconstructing the text’, in Judith Newton and Debroah Rosenfelt (eds), Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture (New York and London, 1985), p. 45.
Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (London, 1983), p. 5.
Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London and New York, 1985), p. 183.
See, for example
Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and their Contemporaries (Baltimore and London, 1983)
Paul Brown, ‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester, 1985), pp. 48–71.
See Irving Ribner, Jacobean Tragedy: The Quest for Moral Order (London, 1962)
Robert Ornstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy (Madison and Milwaukee, 1965).
T. S. Eliot, ‘Thomas Middleton’, in Selected Essays (London, 1932), p. 169.
See Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London, 1975), p. 92;
Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women in Seventeenth Century Drama (Brighton, 1983), p. 69.
Frank Whigham, ‘Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malft’, PMLA, 100 (March 1985), 172.
See Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: a Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (New Delhi, 1978)
Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male–Female Dynamics in Muslim Society (London, 1985, revd edn).
Una Ellis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation (1936), p. 142.
See Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women, in Roma Gill (ed.), Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedies (Kent, 1984), p. 379; emphasis added.
Dale B. J. Randall, ‘Some observations on the theme of chastity in The Changeling’, English Literary Renaissance, 14:3 (Autumn 1984), 348–9.
See Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Brighton, 1984) and Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy.
Sigrid Weigel, ‘Double focus: on the history of women’s writing’, in Gisela Ecker (ed.), Feminist Aesthetics (London, 1985), p. 80.
Martha Andreson-Thom, ‘Thinking about Women and their prosperous art: a reply to Juliet Dusinberre’s Shakespeare and the Nature of Women’, in Shakespeare Studies, 11 (Columbia, 1978), p. 276.
Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind 1540–1620 (Brighton, 1984), p. 260.
Lisa Jardine, ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, in Still Harping on Daughters: Women in Seventeenth Century Drama (Brighton, 1983).
Simon Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in Seventeenth Century Drama (Brighton, 1983), p. 117.
William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure (1567), in J. R. Brown (ed.), The Duchess of Malfi (London, 1964), p. 184.
The term is J. R. Brown’s: see J. R. Brown (ed.), The Duchess of Malfi (London, 1964), p. xxxi.
See Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita (eds), In Search of Answers: Indian Women’s Voices from Manushi (London, 1984), p. 254.
Alison Heisch, ‘Queen Elizabeth I: parliamentary rhetoric and the exercise of power’, Signs, 1: 1 (1975), 34.
John Berger et al., Ways of Seeing (London, 1972), p. 47.
Joan Kelly, Women, History, Theory (Chicago, 1984), p. xxv.
Ursula Sharma, ‘Purdah and public space’, in Alfred de Souza (ed.), Women in Contemporary India and South Asia (Delhi, 1975), p. 227.
Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on top: symbolic sexual inversion and political disorder in early modern Europe’ in Barbara Babcock (ed.), The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Ithaca, NY, 1978), pp. 154–5.
See Lawrence A. Babb, ‘Marriage and malevolence: the uses of sexual opposition in a Hindu pantheon’, Ethnology, 9 (1970);
Deviprasad Chattopadhyay, Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism (New Delhi, 1973);
Gowrie Ponniah, ‘Ideology and the status of women in Hindu Society’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Sussex, 1976).
Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi, Daughters of Independence: Gender, Caste and Class in India (New Delhi/London, 1976), p. 55.
Bruce Elliott Tapper, ‘Widows and goddesses: female roles in deity symbolism in a South Indian village’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (new series), 13:1 (1979), 24.
Ruth Vanita, ‘“Ravana shall be slain and Sita freed…”: The feminine principle in Kanthapura’, in Lola Chatterji (ed.), Woman Image Text: Feminist Readings of Literary Texts (New Delhi, 1986), p. 189.
Catherine Belsey, ‘Disrupting sexual difference: meaning and gender in the comedies’, in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (London and New York, 1985), pp. 166–90.
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Loomba, A. (2001). Women’s Division of Experience. In: Simkin, S. (eds) Revenge Tragedy. New Casebooks. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21397-5_3
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