Sign, Thing, and Gender: Materiality in The Duchess of Malfi

In Webster's The Duchess of Malfi the interplay of material objects and physical bodies creates a linguistic and performative machinery that seeks to suppress and undermine the Duchess's authority and agency. Within this oppressive structure, the play also contains a powerfully subversive hermeneutic: one that re-negotiates the discursive possibilities of the play's bodies by re-thinking the relations of those bodies to their material counterparts. Using medieval and post-modern conceptions of the body and materiality, this paper seeks a feminist re-reading that contextualizes the Duchess's death as a failure of the body but as a triumph of the imagery and objects she inhabits. In this way, the Duchess never truly dies, as her essence lies in her powerful re-signification of patriarchal signs, images, and objects.

By combining early-modern thoughts about the material and physical world with Baudrillard's concepts of simulation and simulacrum and Bill Brown's theory of "things," a new material economy emerges that succeeds in outlasting the Duchess's physical presence. Focusing the subversive potential of these theories as they relate to the play, Judith Butler's analysis of drag performance frames the Duchess's material interactions. Butler's concept of drag, in this case, applies not only to clothing and acts but to the network of material signs and images the Duchess inhabits. This 'drag' of images uses and subverts the patriarchy even to the extent of its literal destruction by the play's end. In this manner, the play shows how a female economy of signs can outlast the body and give voice to feminine authority and legitimacy. The Duchess of Malfi thus maintains its relevance and value in the face of temporal distance and social progressivism through a re-reading that supports both threads, respectively.

Through necessity, the Duchess both displaces and takes on the mantle of early-modern patriarchal social inscriptions. Ferdinand's power, as produced by the objects/individuals under his command, becomes an exemplum of oppressive materiality, and its reproduction at the hands of social institutions illustrates how conflicting desires and objects overwhelm, destroy, and resist agency. However, while the Duchess may be consumed by 'things,' she also successfully undermines their ability to oppress her by appropriating them to her own uses. In Malfi, the Duchess's demise also activates a new machinery of relations that eventually annihilates her enemies, even if it does not re-produce a lasting effect on patriarchal desires or relations.

By analyzing bodies not as static subjects but as "sites of possibility"¹ that reside within networks of desiring and desired "things" the play moves closer to early-modern conceptions of the body as an entity inhabited by subjects who claim only partial ownership over them.² This de-centered ownership opens those bodies to the effects and desires of the material world. By searching out how these bodies desire and discursively constitute that materiality, the symbolic and ritual aspects of patriarchy the Duchess appropriates appear to float free of her biological existence: this is a life of "things" that floats from their materiality and succeed where the Duchess's body cannot.

Cohen's discussion of early-modern bodies also constructs a historical link with post-modern discourse. Without incurring the charge of presentism, theories of the dislocated or networked bodies in the early modern world can be analogued (not paralleled) with the post-modern in order to revitalize their texts in the present. In addition to seeing the body as being materially connected with its outside environment, the medieval body could often be negotiated as a biological machine.³ Cohen's examples include the hemorrhoids of King Alfred as they can be connected to an increasing divinity, various states of being (love, contemplation), as well as illustrations of the Zodiac.⁴ In each example, the body radiates and internalizes machinic functions that remove the binarism of human / machine because in the medieval world "their machines were fully human."⁵ Instead of presenting unified discourses of the body, their removal ⁶entails their biological "unrave[ling]" and becomes what Artaud calls a "body without organs"⁷

While Cohen's modeling of the biologically freed, mechanized body and universe of the medieval mind receives inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari's work on the rhizomatic body, material life in The Duchess of Malfi can best be considered in light of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, where the real becomes profoundly abstracted through overdetermination. If the rhizomatic body abstracts and fragments human consciousness, then Baudrillard's assertion that the "characteristic hysteria of our times [is] that of the production and reproduction of the real; what every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to over-produce, is to restore the real that escapes it" fragments the post-modern material world. For Baudrillard, material production has abstracted into simulation, and that abstraction takes the form of images. These images result in the "loss of meaning [which] is directly linked to the dissolving, dissuasive action of information, the media, and the mass media."⁸

Images seek to reproduce lost originals in much the same way that, for Judith Butler, heteronormativity attempts to continually reproduce itself as an originary sexuality. In Butler's words:

Always already a cultural sign, the body sets limits to the imaginary meaning that it occasions, but is never free of an imaginary construction. The fantasized body can never be understood in relation to the body as real; it can only be understood in relation to another culturally instituted fantasy, one which claims the place of the "literal" and the "real."⁹

While Baudrillard and Butler participate in different discourses, their arguments appear to be both fundamentally related and oddly recursive. The relationship of these theories to medieval tropes of perceiving the body and spirit involves a difference in perception bridged by meaningful commonalities. If the medieval mind perceived the body as a machine within a larger and more powerful machina of God's creation, this materializes the body and de-centers it in ways not totally unfamiliar to post-modern texts. In a universe of bodies possessed of and possessed by the divine or demonic, the sacred and the profane, the discourse of human identity cannot be unified and controlled. Instead, the medieval discourse places bodies and materials in networks abstracted by the loss of subjectivity, and enacting what supposedly has become an exclusively post-modern problem. This is not to say that the medieval mind that presents these problems self-consciously produced post-modern thought, but that post-modernism in some ways re-produces practices of looking originated in the early-modern world.

As evidenced by these qualifications, making such an argument has its dangers. Cohen himself introduces the problem that reading the medieval body through Deleuze and Guattari often subverts the "best intentions of the medieval envisioner,"¹⁰ and so mapping the materiality of the medieval body in the context of the post-modern world must necessarily come with a warning label. The alterity of the medieval world can never be posited too clearly, and the reading of Malfi I intend to present in no way claims to manifest direct parallels between medieval theoretical models and post-modern ones. Instead, this reading seeks leverage in the medieval world in order to create post-modern sites whereby texts can be re-positioned for new political functions.

However, as noted above, the ability for such readings to reintegrate texts into modern social discourse cannot be discounted. Without the material anchors of the body, the play itself can be negotiated as a "site of possibility" where images, desires, functions, subjects, and objects possess unfixed locations and so allows for re-readings of the Duchess's literal demise as a victory over both death and patriarchy. Effectively, setting up the body as a "thing among things"¹¹ disrupts the discourses that legitimate Ferdinand's framework of patriarchal machinery. The play, re-situated in time and space, adapts to progressive moves that vitalize this and other early-modern texts for socially engaged performance, giving some hope that 'things' can be manipulated to the advantage of moves towards feminism and agency in material culture.

If feminism and agency constitute discourses, then "things" populate those discourses phenomenally and as signs. In Thing Theory, Bill Brown makes an argument for the flexible relationship of 'things,' and 'subjects' that focuses interpretations of materials and images in useful ways, especially allowing for their concreteness in a manner denied by Butler and Baudrillard. Most importantly, Brown successfully grasps at a means for dealing with the alterity of consumable goods because of, not despite, their temporal distance. Inhabiting a liminal space between subjects and objects, 'things' denotes a term of particularity and generality that combines the final reducibility of 'things' to material objects and all those objects to the discourses which create them. For Brown, "thingness amounts to a latency (the not yet formed or the not yet formable) and to an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects)."¹² This liminality or 'thingness' implies that phenomenological happenings remind us that we're "caught up in things" and that the body is always simply "a thing among things."¹³

These statements establish the primacy of desire between subjects and objects or between objects and other objects while also describing a means for analyzing or tracing the paths of those desires. If subjects, objects, practical functions, and desires intersect in nearly seamless ways in the present, then the very 'outmoded' status of objects opens them to examination in the future, when the desire and practical use for those objects ceases to be relevant. This natural relevance of objects from the past manifests the necessary tools for investigating Malfi within the frames of the medieval, Butler, and Baudrillard. Instead of simply accepting the "hyperreality" of the post-modern world, Brown allows something about materiality to be "real" but necessarily slippery.

This would suggest that early-modern texts can have a new life in the present- a life clearly disjunct from previous uses but still relevant to present contexts. The Duchess of Malfi becomes a particularly open text whose performances in the present can begin to deconstruct the oppression of material culture, especially in its suppression of female agency, authority, and social legitimacy. Since meaning and desire for early-modern objects has dissipated and their signs have fewer referents, Malfi's re-contextualization allows the play, along with its objects and systems of meaning, to be radically re-imagined as a critical examination of current norms and processes.

This presents an opportunity for mapping the thematics and material culture of the early-modern world onto the present in order to understand the postmodern situation in a new light. With some work, plays like Malfi help to wedge apart the virtually unintelligible networks of things that we have no temporal perspective to interpret, or rather, subjects can be crowbarred away from objects temporarily to show the machinery beneath. Images, icons, rituals, and etc. become tools to interpret current ways of deconstructing normative desires and impulses. Seeing 'things' in this way emphasizes shifts in the mutually involved connections between things and subjects without privileging either. Instead, by using material desires as the primary focus, things turn out to be discursively constructed. No 'things' exist in a vacuum. We recognize the places of things literally and metaphorically, taking mental note when 'things' move or get out of hand.

If the "things" in Malfi feel peculiarly material, the desires of these objects mimetically reflect the discourses that surround them. Materials become signifiers of gendered discourses of penetration, agency, subversion, entrapment, and ritual. Performatively constituted, these

Acts, gestures, and desires produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifyingabsences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.¹⁴

Butler constitutes desire through things and acts that themselves form discourses inscribed on the body. However, Butler does not take stock of the implied agency of her own argument. If the Duchess's things may seem to entrap and disown her, even to murder her, she can still subvert or slow their processes for years. She marries against the will of Ferdinand, successfully maintains a healthy sexuality, and confidently defies death. Materialized patriarchal desires eventually and finally eradicate her biological agency, but not before exposing chinks in the armor of normative culture that reverberate uncomfortably for its subjects.

These gendered signs, in a necessarily ahistorical move, can be reassigned to support a subversive agenda that reifies the Duchess's position and follows Butler's notion of 'drag' to expose how Ferdinand fetishizes the Duchess's position and wealth, while the Duchess 'dresses-up' in the signs of patriarchy to justify her actions. Butler notes in Imitation and Gender Insubordination that:

Drag constitutes the mundane way in which gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation. If this is true, it seems, there is no original or primary gender that drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself."¹⁵

This imitation of a supposed original begins with the "prince's court" which is "like a common fountain," and opens the play with an image of unified power under stable patriarchal rule. However, this pure imagery gives way in 1.1 to the Duchess's wooing of Antonio, and a predicament that forces her to take up princely power.

In this drag of signs, Antonio's covert marriage to the Duchess manifests the reality of her material agency. The "goodly roof" that is "too low built,"and the "fair lightsome lodgings"¹⁶ of Antonio's ambition become a symbolic frame of stately power and princely language. The language transfers the power of the Duchess's estate into new "ground's broke[n]" with clear sexual innuendo but also with a newly minted agency that directly refuses Ferdinand's threats. This negotiation of agency becomes clear when the Duchess herself notes that "the misery of us that are born great, / we are forced to woo because none dares woo us: / and as a tyrant doubles with his words...so we / are forced to express our violent passions"¹⁷ The Duchess becomes the male "tyrant," forced to enact a series of images and signs typically reproduced and propagated by patriarchal forces. Even Antonio, acknowledging the Duchess's subversion, says (perhaps surprised) that "These words should be mine / and all the parts you have spoke..."¹⁸

While Butler might see the Duchess performing here within the limits of patriarchy, enacting a gendered discourse "always already" signified, Baudrillard and Butler may also both see the Duchess's self-conscious donning of the "tyrannical" to be double-edged. After all, the meta-theatricality of the Duchess's marriage vows, which by Antonio and the Duchess's own declaration should have been made by a male of the Duchess's own social stature, brings to bear the very constructedness of the signs as they come to the audience's attention. By taking this desire for the words and signs to be male into account, the scene exposes the fetishized nature of matrimonial signs and rituals. This holds true for the early-modern world as well, where "the Duchess is so easily within the bounds of her society in remarrying that her widowhood is not the cause but the context for her martyrdom,"¹⁹ and the major subversions involve the re-gendered relations of those signs. The scene highlights the mutability of signs while at the same time bounding them within concrete desires and gender functions.

While the Duchess directly takes up "princely powers" to marry Antonio, Webster frames Ferdinand's own power as a corrupted copy of a pure ideal, an ideal the Duchess attains in the drag of patriarchy. Images in 1.1 begin with "pure silver drops" from the prince's fountain, but give way to "standing pools"²⁰ in Bosola's description of Ferdinand. In fact, this description seems not unlike other early-modern plays about the rise and fall of other Shakespearean rulers like Richard II, or even Marlowe's Edward II, who surround themselves with "flatt'ring panders."²¹ Richly couched in terms of rotting fruit, stagnant water, leeches, and crooked trees, Webster has already set out a framework of images describing Ferdinand and the Cardinal manipulated in favor of the Duchess, with the implication from the first lines that the Duchess represents a "blessed government" fated to be "poison't near the head."²² Beyond the panders surrounding Ferdinand and the Cardinal, their imagery of rot also mimics that of Hamlet, who notes famously that "something is rotten in the state of Denmark." The play, even without the imagery and sign of drag in the marriage scene, supports the Duchess's character from the outset.

However, while the Duchess may command images and signs, the threats to her power and life are real and biological. Ferdinand "would not have her [the Duchess] marry again," and in conversation with Bosola takes on further images of depredation and evil. In procuring his services to spy on the Duchess, Bosola uses language that describes himself as a "quaint invisible devil," Ferdinand a "corrupter" and accepts his task with the foreshadowed knowledge that "should [he] take these [gifts] they'd take me to hell."²³ With rot and hell on Ferdinand's side, Oakes' position that "instead of indicting the Duchess, the play anatomizes Ferdinand and in so doing places his brutal ideology in question"²⁴ strengthens and frames the Duchess's struggle for independence.

With the strength and conflict of the play's imagery firmly set, talk of hell gives way to physical threats when Ferdinand shows off his "father's poniard"²⁵ to the Duchess. Nakedly portrayed, the threat of the dagger which Ferdinand is "loath to [see] look rusty"²⁶ would seem to concretize Ferdinand's power. Instead, the act signs Ferdinand's desperation in attempting to contain the Duchess's seemingly boundless ability to reframe and "drag-out" gendered discourses. If heteronormativity and patriarchy seek to frame themselves as original manifestations of sexuality always already copied and reified by their own discourses, then "his father's poniard" sets up the inevitable failure of that ancestry of symbols to command power over the feminine.

If the imagery of the play already sets the Duchess on stable, ideal grounding, then the physicality of Ferdinand's threat weakens and destabilizes Ferdinand's position. As Butler or Baudrillard might view it, Ferdinand's dagger represents a patriarchal sign of the father for which no original exists, and therefore the symbol gains no purchase on the Duchess's symbolic world. At the same time, the dagger as materialized "thing" asserts a desire based solely on absence, on the assumption of a real or originary desire of patriarchal power to assert limitations on the Duchess's independence. Fraught with an attempt at the construction of a copy of his father's power, the dagger expresses desires with no base, and represent the only material threat to the Duchess's power. This symbolic failure seals the Duchess's biological death, since she gives the law of the father no other means to stem her subversion of masculine symbology and power. Even as this display of power actually weakens Ferdinand's position, the Duchess ends by discarding it in favor of her agency to "wink and ch[oose] a husband.²⁷ The dagger becomes a simulation, nothing more nor less, a figment of material power with no gendered original, and that contains no power except that granted it by discourse.

This threat, as has been seen, does not stop the Duchess from seeking Antonio's hand. After all, the Duchess lives in the drag of the signs and images she maintains, and she plays with them accordingly. As 2.1 comes upon the Duchess and she grows pregnant, she continues to turn the signs and rituals of power against normative traditions. Discussing the French court, the Duchess notes that:

Duchess:[to Antonio]

I have heard you say that the French courtiers wear their hats 'fore the king

Antonio:

I have seen it.

Duchess:

In the presence?

Antonio:

Yes.

Duchess:

Why should we not bring up that fashion?

'Tis ceremony more than duty that consists

In the removing of a piece of felt.

Be you the example to the rest o'th'court,

Put on your hat first.²⁸

In this instance, the Duchess performs another re-appropriation of ritual in the doffing of one's hat before the prince, and seeks to assert her own authority by altering the rule. Antonio responds demurely and irrelevantly that courtiers bear their heads before the prince in colder countries than France, and so he will keep his hat off before his wife. For the Duchess, this "ceremonial" of deference to power has no meaning because for her it simply copies the attempts of men to reinforce their own power before their subjects. For her feminine power, the sign reads simply as "fashion," a notion as easily discarded as Ferdinand's dagger and less important.

For Antonio, whose public reticence attempts to keep the intimacy of his relationship to the Duchess secret, who indeed seems to be the only person in the play actually afraid of Ferdinand and his cronies, the tradition of doffing the hat continues to retain influence and significance. In part, this can be ascribed to Antonio's knowledge of his public persona- he is the Duchess's steward still. However, his oddly contrived reasoning for continuing the tradition also exposes its constructed and depth-less nature. Other colder countries "stand bare to th'prince; and the distinction / Methought showed reverently."²⁹ The colder the country then, the more reverent those who remove their hats? Probably not. Rather, Antonio wants the Duchess without having to re-inscribe the signs of early-modern princely power. While the Duchess has no choice but to appropriate those signs, Antonio hangs onto them as long as possible because he views power in the play traditionally, whereby the Duchess's position in Ferdinand's physically realized world seems far more tenuous.

Linguistically beautiful, the continuing scene mimics the Duchess's actions and appropriation in imagery and innuendo. The apricots³⁰ prove to be a fruitful image (pun intended) and start a conversation that takes place on multiple levels of significance and meaning. On one hand the apricot's sexual significance reinstates the Duchess's healthy accession to her desires, and on the other they manifest the physical reality of the Duchess's transgression against the boundaries imposed by Ferdinand. No marriage, in this case, also means no sex³¹ as evidenced by Ferdinand's longing reference to the Duchess as a "lusty widow,"³² and the fact of her pregnancy thus gives way to further fantasies of the Duchess with "some strong-thighed bargeman" in the "shameful act of sin."³³ This fetishization of the Duchess's sexuality reinforces the desperation of 1.1's poniard with its attendant imagery of penetration and sexual misconduct. Yet, despite the direct and dichotomous discourse of sex/transgression, Bosola also says that "Tis a pretty art, this grafting,"³⁴ which literally refers to the "springal cutting a caper in her belly,"³⁵ but also refers back to the dialectic taking place around the Duchess's appropriation of hat-doffing before the prince.

The latter quotation also paints a less-than violent image of the Duchess's indiscrete coupling than any conjured up by Ferdinand. Bosola's status as a hired "intelligencer" betrays itself here to a degree, especially since his word and deed always seem disjunct, and his part in the drama fated by his ability to foreshadow its conclusion.³⁶ The implication here being that Bosola follows orders because he has to, and his fence-sitting language set in contrast to the violent threats and sexualized images from Ferdinand prove how far Webster sides with the Duchess's simulations, that not even all of the prince's men can be without some trepidation in word and image at the Duchess's death. Of course, Bosola does help kill the Duchess (a fact that mediates his words somewhat), but this paper does not concern itself with the Duchess's biologic death so much as the continuation of her symbolic life.

The apricot, like the dagger, represent materials of great consequence controlled and controlling of the play's action/characters. In discussion of the medieval body as environmental and conjoined with Brown's "things," the apricot seems causally related to the Duchess's pregnancy. It is not 'the Duchess is pregnant and therefore eats apricots' but vice-versa. 'The Duchess eats apricots and therefore must be pregnant' seems more accurate. Her "colour rises" only after she eats the apricots, she becomes fertile as she "greedily eats them."³⁷ Just as Ferdinand's dagger creates a physical threat only through its exposure, only through its description as a "father's dagger" and so inscribes boundaries non-existent before its symbolism comes into play.

Perceived in this sense, the play, like any simulation or copying of desire, gendered or otherwise, is always in the process of becoming. This process distinguishes itself in this play particularly because it serves as the Duchess's ultimate meta-theatrical metaphor. Like most symbolic and ritual happenstances in Malfi, the Duchess appropriates and renegotiates her own identity at first tentatively, but later with remarkable agency and self-assurance. The Duchess, like the femininity she constructs, is always in process, always re-thinking her bodily desires and appropriations from the patriarchal culture. The Duchess's business for the post-modern world becomes play, an articulated vision of Butler's drag, and finally becomes a text fascinated with its own propensity to manifest a feminine discourse in the early-modern world.

The process described above for the Duchess and the play mirrors Butler's finding of "identity categories" suspect, and also finds the joy of unsiginified signs within feminine discourse. As Butler posits:

Identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression...I would like to have it permanently unclear what precisely that sign [of lesbian] signifies³⁸

As part and parcel of an identity in process then, when Ferdinand goes about calling her a "lusty widow" he seeks through a patriarchal regime to categorize the Duchess and she resists. Finding herself surrounded by an invasive patriarchy, she produces personal pleasure for herself as an effect of, and not despite, "the instabilities of those categories that sustain various erotic practices."³⁹ Foundationally, The Duchess of Malfi plants a resistant praxis into a seemingly straightforward play about the oppression and death of a matriarch.

Nowhere can this construction of feminine power and resistance be better described than in the play's own attempt to destroy it. Confronting her over the marriage, Ferdinand skulks in the shadows of the bedchamber until the Duchess notices. Without equivocation she tells him that "whether I am doomed to live, or die, / I can do both like a prince."⁴⁰ Ferdinand, without the ability to do the deed himself, hands her the poniard, thus manifesting a second instance of his impotence to act and his desperation in the face of the Duchess's flagrant pride and confidence. As the Duchess says to Ferdinand "Alas, your shears do come untimely now / To clip the bird's wings that's already flown."⁴¹ Or rather, the Duchess uses imagery to describe the imagistic triumph of simulation and resistance over physical threat and destruction.

Much discussed in discourse about the play, the dead man's hand of 4.1 offers up rich imagery for interpretation, and has become a seminal symbol:

Ferdinand:

...Here's a hand

To which you have vowed much love: the ring upon't

You gave.

[gives her a dead man's hand]

Duchess:

I affectionately kiss it.

Ferdinand:

Pray do, and bury the print of it in your heart.

I will leave this ring with you for a love token,

And the hand, as sure as the ring; and do not doubt

But you shall have the heart too. When you need a friend

Send it to him that owned it; you shall see

Whether he can aid you.⁴²

Giving her 'Antonio's' dead hand in marriage supposedly undoes the Duchess's transgression and reverses the marriage itself. The trinity of ring, hand, and heart mentioned by Ferdinand must trump the Duchess's secret marriage vows, and consign to death her world of resistance and play. However, Ferdinand misses his own defeat within the symbols he chooses to enact his vengeance. By appropriating these very images to begin with, the Duchess robs them of their ability to destroy. Forcing Ferdinand to play at her own game, the trio of symbols have no more or less impotence than the poniard. Disturbed, but by no means broken, the Duchess asks "What witchcraft doth he practise, that he hath left / a dead man's hand here?"⁴³ Noticeably, she does not ask why Antonio's hand has been left here. Chalked up to black magic and/or Ferdinand's insanity, the symbol loses some of its oppressive function.

The imagery of the Duchess's descent during the course of 4.1 begins to slow her ability to remake herself, instead favoring images of stillness and memorialization. She sees "my picture, fashioned out of wax"⁴⁴ turns to the sacrifice of Portia,⁴⁵ and speaks of life itself as "so small a business."⁴⁶ This language couples imagery of death with memory. Pictures, historical sacrifices, and death all hold the promise of a renewed life in 'things.' Bosola responds in language reminiscent of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar with "Let them like tyrants / Never be remembered but for the ill they have done: / Churchmen forget them." Foreshadowing Ferdinand's own descent into insanity but contrasting the reasons for the Duchess's remembrance, the networks of things begin to take the place of pleasure, and the Duchess's material triumph begins to take the place of her body.

Webster goes so far as to give Ferdinand the line "Damn her, that body of hers / While that my blood ran pure in't, was more worth / Than that which thou would'st comfort, called a soul." ⁴⁷ The impurity of Ferdinand's blood, its stagnation, distresses him. His body, that copy of patriarchy without an all-important original- a soul - weakens and degenerates him. The Duchess's soul, here perceived as the opposite of her body, which at one point even contained that purity (so long as it obeyed Ferdinand's rules) manifests the overarching soul as "thing." Not just on Earth, but in the heavens shall the Duchess be remembered and invoked. Ferdinand's confusion of body and soul, the symbol and the physical, the biological with 'things' of more mettle, eventually manifests his own moral, ethical, and physical destruction. The Duchess may die one death, but Ferdinand's body leaves nothing but a physical husk. This husk can only have been biological, a form once animated only by the simulation of object and desire. The difference between him and the Duchess seems much like the recursive dialectic of the apricots. Objects and desires simulate the biological form, not the other way around. Identity at this level abstracts and materializes "things," images, and ideas at the same time. For, while the material world seems terribly concrete, especially to Ferdinand, the qualities of perceiving, desiring, and inscribing identity refracts the material into the simulation, the discourse, and the sexuality that make up our identities and which have no stable or essential structures.

Finding the weakness of the body and the stolid significance of the ruin or gallery, the Duchess prepares for the death of her body. Cariola notices that the Duchess looks "Like to [her] picture in the gallery, / A deal of life in show but none in practice; / Or rather like some reverend monument / Whose ruins are even pitied."⁴⁸ Bosola notes later that "Our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in."⁴⁹ Already thinking her husband and children dead, the waxen figures Ferdinand has shown her mirror her death and life after: a life consigned to haunting symbols destined to carry out the Duchess's curse. As she says, "Remember, my curse hath a great way to go. / Plagues, that make lanes through largest families, / Consume them."⁵⁰ Her curse, as with the signs that have haunted the play, bring about the total destruction of Ferdinand and all who participated in her demise. Such is the connection of the Duchess to the divine, that through her sacrifice she can still exact her revenge.

Before the Duchess's death, Bosola attempts to drive her to madness with thoughts of her own death, and in so doing receives the Duchess's lest declaration of symbolic resistance. Kept from sleeping by the madmen outside the house who cry out and sing, deeply impacted by the supposed death of her family, the Duchess hangs tenuously to her sanity. She asks of Bosola:

Duchess

Am not I thy Duchess?

Bosola

Thou art some great woman sure, for riot begins to sit on

thy forehead, clad in grey hairs, twenty years sooner than on a merry milkmaid's...

Duchess

I am the Duchess of Malfi still.⁵¹

Oakes suggests here that "although her most famous line 'I am the Duchess of Malfi still' has been traditionally interpreted as an affirmation of dignity in the face of degradation, it is instead deeply, ironically tragic"⁵² While the tragedy of the Duchess's death seems clear, the maintenance of her dignity "in the face of degradation" need not be a mutually exclusive phenomenon. To the contrary, the Duchess's final heartfelt declaration of power and sanity manifests her ultimate triumph over her antagonists. Her portrayal here represents a courageous and powerful woman who has, in a few years, struck down the bounds of patriarchal rule and appropriated its signs to achieve her own personal versions of power, desire and health.

The Duchess's identification as "The Duchess of Malfi" maintains the symbolic threads discussed above, and engages a final separation between the symbolic orders of her power and her biological form. Alternatively, Webster might have identified her as "Antonio's wife still," but purposely does not.⁵³ Instead, the Duchess can be identified with her title, a title that does come from her first husband (a character never seen and barely spoken of), but one that she took into her own hands by choosing her own husband, by defying her brother, and by re-interpreting the significance of masculine traditions. Again, the play purposely un-seams the Duchess from the centrality of her body, marking the unbounded power brought to her because of, and not despite, her death. At the end of her conversation with Bosola, she says, and perhaps with deep scorn, that "thou art very plain." He responds glibly that "My trade is to flatter the dead, not the living. / I am a tomb-maker."⁵⁴ The Duchess's body will last only to the end of this scene, but her tomb will last far longer.

The Duchess simulates like a prince, and dies like a saint. Contrasted finely with the histrionics of her waiting woman, the Duchess asks the executioners to "pull and pull strongly, for your able strength / Must pull down heaven upon me - / Yet stay, heaven gates are not so highly arched / as prince's palaces: they that enter there / Must go upon their knees..."⁵⁵ She dies then in the act of prayer. Her words cry out for the justice of heaven to be pulled down upon her, and perhaps to carry out the curses laid out at her brother's door. Indeed, her death sends the the play down into chaos with the " mistake as I have often seen / in a play" that kills Antonio and frees Bosola from the spell of his own aberrant actions. Antonio's death has already been fated by his death in wax. His inclusion within the frame of tradition and physical commitment to patriarchy inscribes his eventual murder.

Interestingly, the play's last lines come from Delio, Antonio's friend and a relatively minor character. The contents of these lines powerfully enjamb the plays imagery as well as this paper's discussion:

Delio

I heard so, and

Was armed for't ere I came. Let us make noble use

Of this great ruin; and join all our force

To establish this young hopeful gentleman

In's mother's right. These wretched eminent things

Leave no more fame behind 'em than should one

Fall in a frost and leave his print in snow:

As the soon as the sun shines, it ever melts,

Both form, and matter. I have ever thought

Nature doth nothing so great, for great men,

As when she's pleased to make them lords of truth:

'Integrity of life is fame's best friend,

Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.'

The great ruin, as we may remember from Coriola's description, includes the Duchess. The bodies of the men will leave nothing behind them, but the Duchess who has "Integrity of life" that "crowns the end" instates her presence in a superordinate hierarchy of symbols that refuses death and establishes her as divine and triumphant. The sun, also a participant in this hierarchy, melts "both form and matter," dissolving the earthly fame and power of men into a watery nothing, a function of the flowing imagery that began the play.

Images and signs rule this play, turning the Duchess from a tragic figure into a triumphal one, a figure easily recognizable within a culture built on simulation and simulacra, on the "things" we desire, and the play of gendered significance. Oppressed by the "copy without an original," the Duchess appropriates symbols and refuses physical threats to create a symbolic likeness concretely defined by play's end. At the same time that post-modern thoughts free the Duchess from traditional interpretations, the early-modern world constructs an environment rhizomatically connected to the material world, and bodies affected by and effecting the mechanisms of the divine. Within such a give-and-take between early and post-modernisms resides the praxis of new and relevant interpretations whose political and social relevance can be limited only by our ability to animate them on stage.

1Cohen, Jeffrey. Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003), xiii.

2Cohen, xx.

3Cohen, xiv.

4Cohen, xiv.

5Cohen, xiv.

6Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) 23.

7Cohen, xvii.

8Baudrillard, 79.

9Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. (New York: Routledge Publishing, 2007) 96.

10Cohen, xiv.

11 Brown, Bill Thing Theory (Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 1, Things, Autumn 2001), 4.

12Brown, 4.

13Brown, 4.

14 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 2007), 185.

15 Butler, Judith. Imitation and Gender Insubordination in The Lesbian And Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993), 309.

16Webster, John, Brian Gibbons ed. The Duchess of Malfi. (New York: WW Norton, 2001). 28-29.

17Webster, 29. Line 433-436.

18Webster, 30. Line 464.

19Oakes, Elizabeth. "The Duchess of Malfi" as A Tragedy of Identity. (Studies in Philology, Vol. 96, No. 1). 51.

20Webster, 9-11.

21Webster, 11.

22Webster, 9.

23Webster, 21.

24Oakes, 59.

25Webster, 24.

26Webster, 24. If exposed to the Duchess's blood, the blade might become rusty.

27Webster, 25.

28Webster, 37. Lines 119-128.

29Webster, 37. Lines 128-131

30In the early-modern world, apricots signified fertility. The Duchess eats them here (to Bosola's delight) and so proves that she is pregnant. The ensuing conversation is replete with innuendo based on the language of gardening.

31A point that Ferdinand obsesses about to the point of fantasy, see later discussion.

32Webster, 25. Line 332. Oakes, 58.

33Webster, 53. Lines 40-43.

34Webster, 38. Line 148.

35Webster, 39. Line 155.

36See prior discussion of devil imagery.

37Webster, 38-39.

38Butler, Imitation, 308.

39Butler, 308.

40Webster, 62. Lines 68-9.

41Webster , 63. Lines 84-5

42Webster 86-7. Lines 41-49.

43Webster, 87. Lines 53-4.

44Webster, 88. Line 62.

45Portia's legacy lives, mirroring the Duchess's fate.

46Webster, 89.

47Webster, 90. Lines 117-119.

48Webster, 93. Lines 31-33.

49Webster, 97. Lines 120-21

50Webster, 89. Lines 95-98.

51Webster, 97. Lines 127-134

52Oakes, 65.

53Oakes, 65.

54Webster, 97. Lines 138-140.

55Webster, 101. 220-224.

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