Precept and Practice

Abstract

The pernicious clichés about widows (but not widowers) found in polemics, proverbs, household manuals, and plays of the early modern period demonstrate how perplexing widowhood was for patriarchal theory. In The Merchant of Venice, Solanio’s quip about a hypocritical widow who “made her neighbors believe she wept for the death of a third husband” (3.1.9–10) reminds us that widowhood is problematic. First of all, the weaker vessel survives the stronger. Second, she may remarry, thus, some would say, cuckolding her former husband(s), however belatedly (Carlton 125). Third, she may not remarry, thereby revealing that “unheaded” women can get along quite nicely, thank you. Moreover, having been sexually awakened—some believed inflamed— the widow is no less threatening if she remains single, since she can be expected to take multiple lovers. Explicating Plato’s assertion in the “Timaeus” that the womb is a creature ever seeking to bear children and afflicting the entire body if it does not do so, the sixteenth-century misogynist Giovanni Della Casa writes,

Do not imagine that Etna burns with more violence than the soul of woman burns with lust. And her husband is so far from being able to stop it by extinguishing it or appeasing such a fire that his labor ends by exciting it further, just as the intensity of the fire is usually increased by the addition of a small quantity of water.