Zur Frage der Präsenz ‘starker Frauen’ und der Dekonstruktion des Patriarchats in der Englischen Renaissancetragödie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von John Websters The Duchess of Malfi
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Stefan Horlacher
Abstract
Stressing the function of Renaissance tragedy as “an arena of ideological turbulence in which orthodox political, social and religious assumptions of the culture are reproduced, questioned or even contradicted” (Callaghan), this article examines to what extent “strong, central female figures” (Rose) exist in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy and why, even if they are endowed with political power, they often fail to adopt a non-ambivalent subject position. Especially in The Duchess of Malfi, which has been read “as a masculine wish fulfillment” (Jardine) while others have called its eponymous protagonist the “first fully tragic woman in Renaissance drama” (Whigham), ambivalent and mutually revoking structures abound. Not only is a ‘female prince’ an oxymoron personified, but in a curious double bind, female power, female economies and anti-patriarchal positions are initially foregrounded, only then to be annihilated all themore spectacularly. Ultimately, however, Webster's tragedy demonstrates on the level of its content as well as of its form that a ‘pure’ patriarchal system is haunted and finally deconstructed by precisely those elements it has vigorously struggled to exorcise and to expel. This leads to the question in how far the “self-contradictions” and “inadequacies” many critics claim to have detected in the play are less due to Webster than to the very ‘nature’ or economy of patriarchal discourses (tragedy included) and power structures.
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- Patrick D. Murphy, Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies
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Articles in the same Issue
- Distance Learning: How Literature Teaches Ethics
- Ästhetik der Faszination? Überlegungen und Beispiele
- Medusa's Gaze and the Aesthetics of Fascination
- Zur Frage der Präsenz ‘starker Frauen’ und der Dekonstruktion des Patriarchats in der Englischen Renaissancetragödie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von John Websters The Duchess of Malfi
- Beyond Beginning: Walter Scott's (Para)textualisation of Scottishness
- ‘Not all of them are Paddies’: Irish-Americans and the (Un-/Re-)Embracing of Irish Identity
- Christina Sanchez, Consociation and Dissociation: An Empirical Study of Word-family Integration in English and German
- Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, with additional material from A Thesaurus of Old English, ed. Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels & Irené Wotherspoon
- Philip Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology
- Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Nick Higham
- The Old English Boethius. An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine with a chapter on the Metres by Mark Griffith and contributions by Rohini Jayatilaka
- László Sándor Chardonnens, Anglo-Saxon Prognostics, 900–1100: Study and Texts
- Christoph Schubert, Raumkonstitution durch Sprache: Blickführung, Bildschemata und Kohäsion in Deskriptionssequenzen englischer Texte
- Udo J. Hebel, Einführung in die Amerikanistik/American Studies
- Civilizing America: Manners and Civility in American Literature and Culture, ed. Dietmar Schloss
- John Wrighton, Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry
- Nine Eleven: Ästhetische Verarbeitungen des 11. September 2001, ed. Ingo Irsigler & Christoph Jürgensen; 9/11 als kulturelle Zäsur: Repräsentationen des 11. September 2001 in kulturellen Diskursen, Literatur und visuellen Medien, ed. Sandra Poppe, Thorsten Schüller & Sascha Seiler
- Patrick D. Murphy, Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies
- Eingegangene Schriften
