Lusty Widows/Remarried Widows

Abstract

Women’s lust is “insatiable; put it out, it bursts into flame; give it plenty, it is again in need.…” So wrote St. Jerome (“Jovinianus,” Bk. I, 367). This ancient myth of women’s sexual ravenousness was not displaced until the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when females were reconstructed as sexless.¹ Conservative ideologues and world-without-end saws insisted that passion is at its most violent in widows. For women with pretensions to respectability, lust waits upon marriage—hence Chaucer’s contribution to the tradition. His Wife of Bath having been married five times and hoping for six is outhusbanded by Shakespeare’s nine-times married Mistress Overdone, “Overdone by the last” (Meas. 2.1.222).² Following Freud, Charles Carlton suggests that the lusty widow became a figure of fun because men used humor as a way of dealing with realizations that frightened and angered them (124). Nevertheless, “so soon forgot” remained a characteristic theme in many plays featuring remarried widows,³ and, even for those who observed the mourning custom of “the widow’s year” designed to assure paternity, any time was liable to be “so soon.”