AO4 – The White Devil: exploring the context of Webster’s presentation of women
NB: The below information is collated from various sources:
•
Dr June Waudby, ‘Contextualising Vittoria: Subjectivity and Censure in The White Devil’, This Rough Magic, June 2010 Issue
http://www.thisroughmagic.org/waudby%20article.html
•
Marcus Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640-1660
•
Joseph Swetnam, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women
http://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:sim568qag
The White Devil was written within the first decade of James I’s
reign, but as Hilary Hinds points out, even half a century earlier
there was already concern regarding women’s increased agency
and freedom, prompting legislation to regulate their speech outside
the home (32). Although misanthropic raillery and debate about
women’s nature had existed since classical times, the early
Jacobean era saw a renewed interest in the subject, which found
expression in the popular and accessible works of the querelle des
femmes, including printed ballads, raucous poems and
pamphlets. http://www.thisroughmagic.org/waudby%20article.html
Religious and legal texts, contemporary conduct books, and
especially “marriage guides,” which delineated the appropriate
roles of man and woman in marriage, advocated an idealised model
of obedient femininity. These precepts were formalised in
handbooks with titles such as A Bride-Bush (Whateley, 1617) and Of Domesticall Duties (Gouge,
1622) in which women’s roles were predicated on the trinity of chastity, privacy, and—if not
silence—self-censored speech. In this economy, women’s public speech was considered
symptomatic of latent moral laxity, hence, the era’s proscription on training women in the art of
rhetoric. The exhibitionism concomitant with public speaking was an anathema to the preferred
model of female self-effacement and containment. http://www.thisroughmagic.org/waudby%20article.html
A heated literary debate was precipitated by Joseph Swetnam’s Arraignment of Lewd, idle, froward
and unconstant women in 1615, which reworked available negative iconography of women found in
biblical sources, contemporary ballads, conduct books, and common
parlance. http://www.thisroughmagic.org/waudby%20article.html
A selection of Swetnam’s misogynistic invectives against women:
“There are three waies to know a whore: by her wanton lookes, by her speach and by her gate”
“For women have a thousand ways to entice thee and ten thousand ways to deceive thee and all
such fools as are suitors unto them: some they keep in hand with promises, and some they feed with
flattery, and some they delay with dalliances, and some they please with kisses. They lay out the
folds of their hair to entangle men into their love; betwixt their breasts is the vale of destruction;
and in their beds there is hell, sorrow, and repentance. Eagles eat not men till they are dead, but
women devour them alive. For a woman will pick thy pocket and empty thy purse, laugh in thy face
and cut thy throat. They are ungrateful, perjured, full of fraud, flouting and deceit, unconstant,
waspish, toyish, light, sullen, proud, discourteous, and cruel.”
AO4 – The White Devil: exploring the context of Webster’s presentation of women
“the beauty of Women hath beene the bane of many a man, for it hath overcome valiant and strong
men, eloquent and subtill men … their brests is the vale of destruction, and in their beds there is
hell, sorrow and repentance ….Then who can but say that women sprung from the Devill.”
Vittoria also represents a threat to notions of social order. Webster’s anti-heroine is a paradigm of
Swetnam’s covetous and evil women who “pick thy pocket, and empty thy purse, laugh in thy face
and cut thy throat” (16). Misogynistic habits of thought are apparent in both texts in the trope of
readily available wanton women circulating as commodities, to be exchanged or bought according to
male desire. Diane Purkiss points out that while denoting women’s only worthwhile contribution to
society as being the [sexual] pleasure that they can offer, Swetnam represents the enjoyment as
“polluting disease or waste” http://www.thisroughmagic.org/waudby%20article.html
Swetnam advises the “ordinary sort of giddy headed young men” that the “answer of a wise woman
is silence”, indulging them in the fantasy of homosocial interpretive community...he opens his
pamphlet by addressing the ‘common sort of women’ he actually assumes to eb reading his work:
“Let me whisper one word in your ears, and that is this: whatsoever you think privately, I wish to
conceal it with silence, lest in starting up to find fault you prove yourself guilty of those monstrous
accusations which are here following against some women.” Swetnam thus constructs a doublebind for his women; either they remain silent at this missognistic Arraignment, a silence which
apparently register assent, or they respond publicly and prove themselves as lewd, forward, idle or
unconstant as the countless, nameless women who fill his pages. His female readers, then, are
represented as just so many Vittorias. John Webster famously used his heroine in The white Devil
(1612) to explore the early modern gendering of silence by demonstrating that her conviction results
as much from her eloquent speech acts as her crimes. Marcus Nevitt Women and the Pamphlet Culture of
Revolutionary England, 1640-1660
Should Vittoria be considered as an anti-heroine, representing, as she does, characteristics
antithetical to the era’s model of ideal femininity?
AO4 – The White Devil: exploring the context of Webster’s presentation of women
Castiglione’s The courtier
As Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) confirms, these
tensions could compromise the integrity of female courtiers.
Although women of the court were expected to participate in
verbal repartee and even amorous play, the edifice of purity was
also to be maintained:
[I]n a Lady who lives at court a certain pleasing affability is
becoming above all else, whereby she will be able to entertain
graciously every kind of man ... with such a kind manner as to
cause her to be thought not less chaste, prudent and gentle than
she is agreeable, witty, and discreet: thus, she must observe a
certain mean (difficult to achieve and as it were, composed of
contraries). (Castiglione III:151)
http://www.thisroughmagic.org/waudby%20article.html