The Heroines

Abstract

The worlds of Webster’s two tragedies are dominated by men and by patriarchal values: within his own dukedom the word of a Brachiano, Francisco or Ferdinand is law; the only superior authority is the Church and its sphere is seen to be more political than spiritual. The abiding concern is less with responsible rule than with power, aggrandisement, enhancing one’s personal will. Both plays, as we have seen, carefully define this patrician consciousness as self-regarding, vicious because utterly shameless. Women have few opportunities in this world except as reflections of male rule: the virtuous because submissive wife, widow, mother or sister content to follow her lord’s guidance and as such a valuable pawn in statecraft. To assert her independence is to be branded loose or shrewish. She must flatter her lord’s will at the expense of her own. There is therefore great pathos in the Duchess’s choice of a man of a different class and markedly different values for her second husband; but the freedom to be fully herself which she seeks in that marriage never extends beyond the privacy of their bedroom: her public self is still under her brothers’ control. Vittoria is tempted away from an appalling arranged marriage by a man who seems sensitive to her feelings and womanhood and is quickly labelled ‘whore’ by the world at large and becomes an object of suspicion even to her lover.