Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal

ISBN-13: 9781472474186 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 244 str.

Cristina Leon Alfar

Opis

How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina Leon Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female sexuality that recur in the form of a slander narrative throughout William Shakespeare s work. She argues that the plays stage a structure of accusation and defense that unravels the authority of husbands to make and unmake wives. While men s accusations are built on a foundation of political, religious, legal, and domestic discourses about men s superiority to, and rule over, women, whose weaker natures render them perpetually suspect, women s bonds with other women animate defenses of virtue and obedience, fidelity and love, work loose the fabric of patrilineal power that undergirds masculine privileges in marriage, and signify a discursive shift that constitutes the site of agency within a system of oppression that ought to prohibit such agency. That women s agency in the early modern period must be tied to the formations of power that officially demand their subjection need not undermine their acts. In what Alfar calls Shakespeare s cuckoldry plays, women s rhetoric of defense is both subject to the discourse of sexual honor and finds a ground on which to shift it as women take control of and replace sexual slander with their own narratives of marital betrayal."

O autorze

Cristina León Alfar is Professor of Shakespeare, Early Modern English drama, and Women's and Gender Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. Her first book, Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy, was published by the U of Delaware P in 2003. Her third book, Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne: Marriage, Separation, and Legal Controversies, edited with Emily G. Sherwood, documents Mistress Bourne’s petition for divorce, its resolution, and ongoing disputes (forthcoming from Routledge 2021). She is co-editor, with Helen Ostovich, of the series "Late Tudor and Stuart Drama: Gender, Performance, and Material Culture" for MIP. Currently, she is at work on women parrhesiasts in early modern English drama.