The Theme of Incest in The Duchess of Malfi Essay

Every marriage has there ups and downs. In fact, there are no such things as a perfect marriage. The subject of marriage and gender roles are usually mentioned in literary pieces that put the emphasis on mostly on the way the family is set up. The following comparative essay will put the emphasis to center on the two fictional stories; 'I'm going' by Bernard Tristan and 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' by James Thurber. The researcher is able to relate to both of the stories on account of the certain dealings that he has had in marriage unions. These two literary pieces are the researcher's preferred choice to talk about the subject of gender roles and marriages. This following two sources of literature puts the emphasis on the marriage that is among Henri and Jeanne also as Mr. and Mrs. Mitty.

According to Peter Grevious, the American Revolution was caused by the requirement to obey a supreme authority that sent the colonists into total neglect. As the wife of the Old Nobleman who the settlers were under the arm of, “she was an omnipotent Goddess and ought to be worshipped as such, that it was the height of impudence and disobedience in the new settlers to dispute her authority,” (7). The settlers pledged agreements with the Old Nobleman through The Great Paper, obeying the regulations set. The wife then has an unlimited amount of authority over the settlers, making her utterly supreme. With her power, the wife observed “that the new settlers were very fond of a particular kind of cider… she published another edict obliging them

Poverty and hardship are shown to create vulnerability in female characters, particularly the female servants, allowing powerful men to manipulate and sexually abuse them. Kent illustrates how poverty perpetuates maltreatment and abuse in a society like Burial Rites using the characters of Agnes’ mother Ingveldur and Agnes. Agnes’ mother is forced to make invidious choices as her children are “lugged along” from farm to farm, where she is sexually exploited by her employers. In spite of these circumstances, Agnes’ mother is commonly referred to as a whore in their society which abhors female promiscuity yet disregards male promiscuity as a harmless character trait; as in the case of Natan, who is merely “indiscreet” despite all his philandering. Born into poverty, Agnes experiences similar sexual coercion and manipulation from her “masters” and yet is labelled “a woman who is loose with her emotions and looser with her morals”. The severe poverty of Agnes is explicitly demonstrated to the reader by Kent through the intertextual reference of her entire belongings - a very dismal, piteous list to be “sold if a decent offer is presented”. Furthermore, Kent contrasts the situation of Agnes, a “landless workmaid raised on a porridge of moss and poverty”, to the comparative security Steina has experienced using a rhetorical question from

Each young girl finds reasons to act on her incestuous passions. Byblis finds Caunus is pleasing and "fair indeed" thus worthy of her love (308). Likewise, Myrrha finds her father deserving of love (339). Byblis looks to the gods and realizes they accept relations like these; momentarily, she uses this as an excuse to carry out her passion (309). Myrrha discusses the "privilege" that animals have in mating with their kin and describes a tribe that allows intermarriage; she reasons that these "loving bonds, so reinforced, make families more fond" (339). Byblis' most self-convincing rationalization is that if Caunus had approached her, she would have accepted; therefore she should approach him, and he will accept (309). Similarly, Myrrha ends her self-spoken struggle wondering if her father would give in if he shared this "frenzy" (340). Both girls state concrete reasons to act, in many ways swaying readers to agree that these passions are

The theme of matrimony in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue as well as in the Miller’s Tale does not fit in with traditional fourteenth-century culture. The characters in these two texts turn what is suppose to be a sacred unity into a promiscuous and taboo fantasy for pilgrims. The characters narrating these two tales promote the idea of what fourteenth-century canon law would define as adultery—to have had a third lover while married is the new societal trend for the characters in these tales. And so, marriage becomes a component to the larger fantasy of having a relationship with a character who is already in a marital bond, i.e., cuckolding is a fetish for Alisoun in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue as well as for Nicholas and Absolom in the Miller’s Tale. That is, Alisoun’s pursuit of her lover Jankin while being married, promotes the idea that having a third partner amplifies one’s sexual life, meanwhile, Nicholas’s and Absalom’s quarrel over (a different) Alison encourages the idea that engaging with a married someone enhances the gratification of adultery. In other words, marriage is not portrayed as a scared bond, but as a device to fulfill a pilgrim’s sexual fantasy; and, this new fantasy is what the pilgrims try to make a trend throughout England. Note that I will be using the name, “Alisoun,” to represent the wife from Bath, and I will be using the name, “Alison,” to portray the wife in the Miller’s Tale.

John Richetti argues that: “the early eighteenth-century amatory novella…outs one part of the antithesis I am working with: …the heroines are visited by overwhelming and ineffable…passion, obsessions that preclude self-examination and make a mockery of agency and self-consciousness” (336-337) in his essay “Ideas and Voices: The New Novel in Eighteenth-Century England.” Her mother, upon finding her daughter ill, feels “Pity and Tenderness” (Haywood 69), which is then “succeeded by an adequate Shame and Indignation” (69). Her mother is a representation of the exact ideas that the protagonist feared hearing of her now damaged reputation. Her mother hears Beauplaisir’s story after finding out the truth of her daughter’s schemes. She plans to have her daughter and Beauplaisir marry, to save her daughter from dishonour, but he knows nothing of his actions with the protagonist. Rather, the mother sends her daughter to a monastery in France because she finds him not at fault. Haywood demonstrates how women are at fault for the ruin of their virtue and honour, even though the sexual acts were mutual and consensual (except the first one, for the

The economics of marriage was not the only pressure on children to marry where their parents directed. Sixteenth-century children, and girls in particular, were very much brought up to obey, and to believe that it was their duty to their parents… to marry the person chosen for them. It would have taken a very strong-minded girl indeed to have refused to follow her parents’ wishes. Girls who did refuse the partner offered could find themselves bullied by their parents. (3)

The discourse of “incest” is considered almost universally as taboo and so is the study of the phenomena of sexual relations between closely related individuals in its diverse manifestations. Literary texts at length have tried to explore incest as social and psychological deviance but the discussion moves to the margins of the narrative into unspoken or rather “unspeakable” territory. The mainstream discourse prevents the writers from representing and speaking about the theme of incest explicitly. It remains restricted to a marginal space and can be understood only through a deep exploration of the individual characters and the narrative style of the text.

Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi is a tragedy about a forbidden love but more specifically a forbidden marriage, which leads to the deaths of the both the lovers and many other characters of the play. The theme of the forbidden is also portrayed through the Machiavellian qualities of certain characters as they lie and are deceitful. There is also the use of the motif of fruit which represents the forbidden. Lastly, the forbidden is shown using women. These are also shown in other pieces of literature, such as Paradise Lost, written by John Milton, however both writers portray the theme of forbidden in different ways.

Although the King’s son, Ferdinand loses his luxury life and has to face the test of survival, his determination and valor enables him to live a time of jubilation. Living in Naples, Ferdinand struggled to find his true love, but shortly after he arrives on the island, a spirit named Ariel uses his mellifluous voice to guide Ferdinand towards Prospero’s daughter, Miranda. With one glance, Ferdinand falls for Miranda, who he claims as, the “perfect and… peerless” (III, i, 47) lady he’s been waiting for. In addition to love, Ferdinand is also living every adolescent’s dream; being away from their parents. Without his father next to him on the island, Ferdinand gets to make his own decisions and lives his life without his father’s ruling; obtaining the feeling of independence and discovering what he is capable of doing on his own. Ferdinand finds pleasure with the feeling of freedom, wanting to “live here [forever]”

Portia is a bachelorette in Belmont, the heiress to her dead father’s fortune, which attracts men from all over the world. ‘In Belmont is a lady richly left; And she is fair, and fairer than that word...For the four winds blow in from every coast renowned suitors’ ( I, i, 161 – 169). Portia loves her recently deceased father and this is shown when she decides to carry on with the casket challenge for her suitors that her father started. The men that arrive, wanting Portia’s hand in marriage are all drunk and boisterous and she isn’t particularly attracted to them but she is obliged to, because of her father’s wishes. The way Portia acts towards her father shows how much she loved him, unlike Jessica’s attitude towards her father.

none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)' He acts like

It is often said that marriage is the extension of a family. Through marriage, one family is linked to another. In this regard, we have a third kind of women who are victims of the institution of marriage. In The Boarding House, Mrs. Mooney’s daughter Polly is the victim of the ingrained institution of marriage. After she learns of the affair between her daughter Polly and Mr. Doran, Mrs. Mooney forces him to marry her daughter in a rather tactful and cunning way:

the personality of his duchess, he is shown to be a heartless, arrogant man. His complete

With each letter in Les Liaisons dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos advances a great many games of chess being played simultaneously. In each, the pieces—women of the eighteenth-century Parisian aristocracy—are tossed about mercilessly but with great precision on the part of the author. One is a pawn: a convent girl pulled out of a world of simplicity and offered as an entree to a public impossible to sate; another is a queen: a calculating monument to debauchery with fissures from a struggle with true love. By examining their similarities and differences, Laclos explores women’s constitutions in a world that promises ruin for even the most formidable among them. Presenting the reader glimpses of femininity from a young innocent’s daunting debut to a faithful woman’s conflicted quest for heavenly virtue to another’s ruthless pursuit of vengeance and earthly pleasures, he insinuates the harrowing journey undertaken by every girl as she is forced to make a name for herself as a woman amongst the tumult of a community that machinates at every turn her downfall at the hands of the opposite sex. In his careful presentation of the novel’s female characters, Laclos condemns this unrelenting subjugation of women by making clear that every woman’s fate in such a society is a definitive and resounding checkmate.