Chapter two: "ramping cannibals" and "dove-like virgins": Technologies of Gender
and Sexuality in The Dutch Courtesan
Jacobean city comedy developed as a genre between the years 1585 to 1625, nearly contemporaneous to Shakespearean drama. As usual, defining a genre exactly is difficult; however, generally city comedy is set in London and is about London citizens, it excludes romantic tendencies in favor of contemporary social and political issues, and it is characterized by satiric criticism aimed at public morality. Thus, while earlier Elizabethan drama is characterized by interest in the court and aristocracy (e.g. historical plays valorizing national identity), Jacobean city comedy explicitly focuses on social issues arising from the confrontation with an increasingly commercial and urbanized economy. At this time, England is well underway in trade with the New World colonies, people are leaving the rural areas to work as ‘free-floating’ laborers, and London has grown to a busy city of shops and theaters and taverns. With all this change in a relatively short period, the atmosphere of London is one of confusion as the obsolete coexists with the novel, the aristocracy with the "middling" class, and traditional conventions with emerging bourgeoisie ideologies. Thus, for example, marriage can be promoted as a (modern) relationship between equals simultaneously with the (feudal) doctrine promoting marriage as an institution to insure "an orderly transmittal of property through inheritance" (Susan Baker, 218). For as Baker states, "In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the status and nature of marriage were debatable; no one version of marriage was fully naturalized" (219). Obviously other un-naturalized ideologies also abounded—including the nature and place of sex in society. And it is precisely such conflicting and contradictory discourses that Jacobean city comedy stages—or presents and represents—as it critiques the social roles and behaviors of London citizens.
Typically categorized as Jacobean city comedy, John Marston’s play The Dutch Courtesan (1603-05) is among those plays distinguished by an "interest in practical social issues"—including the sexual behavior and financial abuses of a predominantly middle-class milieu (Leggatt 4). The main plot of The Dutch Courtesan (with Freevill, Beatrice, Malheureux, Francischina, Tyesfew, and Crispenella) is concerned with the nature of sexual desire and its place in public morality; the subplot (with Cocledemoy and the Mulligrubs) contains elements of trickery aimed at punishing the bourgeoisie Mulligrub for his pretentiousness and cheating—thereby fulfilling city comedy’s interest in the sexual and financial abuses of the middle-class. Baker points out that The Dutch Courtesan garnered a reputation for being "lecherous and dirty"; certainly a survey of criticism will reveal that, whatever else is said about it, the play undoubtedly brings to the foreground discussions of "normal" sexual behavior. And certainly Freevill’s use and then disposal of the courtesan Francischina (in order to marry the innocent Beatrice) and Malheureux’s prudish rejection of and then enslavement to lust (which he finally overcomes) participates in the "domestication of sexual energies" (Baker 219), or the channeling of sexual energy into acceptable, legitimate institutions.
As The Dutch Courtesan reveals, with the reordering of economic and social conditions in the Renaissance, ideas of sexuality—and by this I mean the knowledge that orients or informs subjectivity, one’s sense of self as male or as female—also underwent change. Michel Foucault writes that the sexualizing of subjects (bodies oriented to a "proper" sexuality) occurs through the body’s "integration into systems of efficient and economic controls" (The History of Sexuality 139). These systems of control are what he calls "technologies of sexuality"—or the ideological, economic, and institutional structures which inform and support a specific subjectivity or sense of identity. Teresa de Lauretis extends Foucault’s theory on the basis that he ignores the construction of "difference" for male and female subjects—she argues that there are "technologies of gender" operating as well (Technologies of Gender 88). Sexuality, then, refers to "object choice" or location of erotic desire which orients bodies into either "normal" or "abnormal" sexual behavior. Conversely, gender refers to the culturally defined roles and behaviors specific to men and to women, that which defines them as either "feminine" or "masculine." Freevill explicitly addresses this bifurcated construction when he tells Malheureux that "only men give to loose [behavior] because they are men, therefore manly" (I.i.122).
Thus, in The Dutch Courtesan sexual desire and technologies of proper masculine and feminine behavior, are both satirized and (re)constructed: the Dutch courtesan, Francischina, is the "foreign devil" who embodies the type of feminine sexuality that is unwanted and unacceptable, while her counterpart Beatrice embodies the Idealized Woman, the "lawful love" of the play. Thus, female sexuality is constructed as either abject or pure; women can be either "ramping cannibals" or "dove-like virgin[s]" (IV.iv.83-5). As for masculine behavior, Malheureux must be taught the proper place of lust: his blood passion for Francischina threatens to overwhelm his sense of self, his identity as a man, and even more dangerously, his unchannelled desire exposes Freevill and Beatrice to harm. Rather than viewing the "lesson" Malheureux is ultimately taught as a "moral lesson," I suggest that his "education" affords us an opportunity to see the technologies of sexuality within the play work to define and (re)contain desire in a way that accords with emerging standards.
Before beginning an analysis of The Dutch Courtesan, I would like to consider some of the fears, anxieties, and desires circulating outside the theater —in the form of sermons, conduct books, pamphlets and other documents—in order to more fully situate Marston’s play in its historical context. Precisely because Jacobean city comedy is concerned with "practical social issues," it takes as its subject matter "people as they exist in society" (Baker 219). And people "as they exist in society" are never without conflicting and contradictory desires and anxieties, for everyone always works in and between multiple ideologies, in the midst of social technologies. As mentioned above, citizens of Jacobean London were faced with the clash between residual and emerging ideologies as nascent capitalism disrupted the institutions and practices by which identity had previously been produced and maintained.
One such emerging notion—replete with its own contradictions—was that marriage should be a "mutuall naturall loue" between husband and wife. Of course, this belief did not immediately eclipse the inherited Christian doctrine of wifely obedience and submission to her husband’s authority, but by 1617 William Whately could encourage "matrimoniall meetings" and state that "the husband is not his owne, but the wifes, and the wife the husbands" (221). Similarly, Tysefew tells Crispenella, "If you will be mine, you shall be your own" (Iv.ii.45). Whately, however, endorses "matrimoniall meetings" only as long as they are not governed by lust:
the married couple must not provoke desires for pleasure’s sake, but allay desires…Excessiveness inflameth lust…the married must no oftener come together, than for the extinguishing of this passion in grafted in the body….Secondly, their meeting must bee sanctified. Paul saith, meate, drinke and marriage are good, being sanctified by prayer. Men and women must not come together as brute creatures and vnreasonable beasts, through the heat of desire; but must see their Maker in that his ordinance, and crave his blessing solemnly as at meales (221-222).
Whately’s sermon conflates sex and food—appetites of the body rigidly repressed by the Catholic church—and, in essence, modifies the repression to a kind of "moderation." In part, this language can be seen as an attempt to come to terms with the church’s own contradictions regarding sex and marriage: sex as "dirty" and, yet, sex as necessary for procreation. But, also, it can be seen as an attempt to (re)instate the church, the authority in areas that threaten to escape its control: by legitimizing one type of sexual act (that "sanctified by prayer") all other sexual activities become that of "brutes." In other words, sex is either "good," if it is sanctified, or beastial, if it is not sanctified. And it is on this fine distinction between good and bestial sexual activity that The Dutch Courtesan, and much of Jacobean society, pivots.
Notably Marston separates his play into two spheres (with, for the most part, only Freevill and Malheureux moving between them): Francischina works and associates with the rogues and lower ‘strata’ of the city, while Beatrice is a nobleman’s daughter who lives in a world of romance and, as she says, "truly severe modesty" (III.ii.45). Even their physical distance represents the (symbolic) separation between a good woman and a whore. As Coppelia Kahn remarks, The Dutch Courtesan illustrates the "Jacobean obsession" with "polarization" because, along with other city comedies, the "action and metaphorical structure pivot on either fixing or crossing the boundary between the chaste wife and the lustful whore" (252). Thus Freevill’s cynical retort "Since, then, beauty, love, and woman are good, how can the love of a woman’s beauty be bad?" (I.i.50) when Malheureux cautions him against visiting a prostitute, works because the audience recognizes that his remark is satire aimed at the severe Puritans (Malheureux) who were gaining power during King James’ reign—it works because the knowledge that there is a difference in kinds of women already in place.
Marston begins The Dutch Courtesan with the words "The difference betwixt the love of a courtesan and a wife is the full scope of the play": the full meaning of this quote consists of a double entendre on the word "play"—as both the content of the stage-play and as the limit (or scope) in sexual behavior allowed. It is this second meaning that I would like to follow, that of difference in types of love or the allowed expression of sexual energy. For, as Marston states outright, the play is crucially concerned with this difference "betwix" courtesans and wives. And, again, Marston takes as his material ideas current in society:
Wedlocke hath for his share hounour, justice, profit and constancie: a plaine, and more generall delight. Love melts in onely pleasure; and truly it hath it more ticklish; more lively, more quaint, and more sharpe:…there must be a kinde of stinging, tingling and smarting (Montaigne, The Essayes).
Whether or not Marston actually used Montaigne as his source, there is a remarkable similarity between Montaigne’s distinction between wedlock and love and Freevill’s own "bifurcated philosophy" towards women. Freevill, saying that lust is a "lively sin," absolves his "sometimes incontinecy" on the knowledge that she "sell[s] but only flesh" (I.ii.104; II.i.142), and then procures marriage with Beatrice in order to secure his "health and name."
Yet only men had the ability to separate love from marriage and have both; women had to choose either one or the other. To engage in sexual activities before marriage—or as a widow, or too much during marriage—branded women as whores. Of course, any type of deviant behavior could warrant such labeling: even women who visited the theaters were subject to suspicion and rebuke. In 1579 Stephen Gosson, addressing "the Gentlewomen Citizens of London," says "The best counsel that I can give you, is to keepe home, and shun all occasion of ill speech" (Evens 20). Gosson’s concern is addressed to maintaining women’s purity and reputation, for at the theater—the "generall Market of bawdrie"—she is subject to men who "vieweth you." Or as Jean E. Howard restates, "the female playgoer is symbolically whored by the gaze of many men" (The Stage and Social Struggle 77). Yet, the danger is not only that women will be tainted by becoming "spectacles," objects of (lustful) male gazes, nor that women in theaters threaten the distinction between good wife (who should be at home) and whore (objects of common "currency"), but that these women become themselves spectators, those who look (Howard 79-81). Spectators who, along with gallants, bawds, citizens, whores, and any other patron of the theater, collapse the "power of look" traditionally held only by wealthy noblemen. In other words, that "Jacobean obsession" with "polarization"—on maintaining social categories—is disrupted by the material practices and conditions attendant upon and surrounding the theater and theatergoing.
Thus, it is not surprising that women on the stage were often figured as sources of disruption to social harmony and order. The whore—a woman who is not controlled by only one man—particularly represents a source of social disorder and evil. Indeed, in The Dutch Courtesan, Malheureux begins by warning Freevill to stay away from the courtesan because "lust is a most deadly sin" (I.i.69). Malheureux’s concern about losing "health and strength and name…to the stale use,/The common bosom of a money-creature,/ One that sells human flesh, a mangonist" (I.i.98-105) seems to be based on a fear of male vulnerability. It is a vulnerability of losing his name, his "signifier" of social positioning, to the consuming and debasing "common bosom" of a prostitute. But Freevill answers that Francischina is "none of your ramping cannibals that devours man’s flesh" (I.ii.92); in other words, he does not (yet) recognize her as a threat to his masculinity.
Malheureux is so puritanical, however, that he accompanies Freevill to Francischina’s in order to "make her loathe the shame she’s in" and also to cement his own righteousness since "the sight of vice augments the hate of sin" (I.i.171). Marston, arguably, casts Malheureux as a stock figure, a "moral absolutist" in order to mock the Puritan’s doctrines against both excess sex and the theater. For the theater and lascivious sexual behavior were explicitly linked in the Puritan view. Philip Stubbes, in The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) writes an especially heated attack on theaters:
Do they not induce whoredom and uncleanness? Nay, are they not rather plain devourers of maidenly virginity and chastity? For proof whereof but mark the flocking and running to Theatres and Curtains, daily and hourly, night and day, time and tide, to see plays and interludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes, and the like is used …if you will learn to become a bawd, unclean, and to devirginate maids, to deflower honest wives…if you will learn to rebel against princes, to commit treason, to consume treasures, to practise idleness, to sing and talk of bawdy love and venery; if you will learn to play the whoremaster, the glutton, drunkard, or incestuous person [then go to the theater]
Likewise, in The Schoole of Abuse Gosson writes that women who "lack customers all the week… flock to theatres, and there keep a general market of bawdry" (Evens 20). It is this vein of thought, this language that Marston’s character Malheureux speaks: he directs very similar complaints against the "common house of lascivious entertainment" where "warmth and wine and youth" tempt men into indulging in the "head sins" (I.i.83).
But, ironically, Malheureux, the man of "professed abstinence," is afflicted by blood humors and is "caught" by Francischina’s beauty. Freevill—now planning to marry Beatrice, the modest and virtuous daughter of a landed nobleman—"resign[s] her freely" but cautions Malheureux that prostitutes "sell but only flesh, no jot affection" (II.i.143). Thus while Freevill, according to Francischina, is "a fool, an unthrift, a true whoremaster …a constant drab-keeper" (II.ii.42), he always maintains his reason; he does not forget that Francischina is "an arrant strumpet" (III.i.135) and, more importantly, he operates within that dichotomy outlined by Montaigne whereby lust is reserved for whores and (sanctified) love for wedlock. Malheureux, however, is unable to tell the difference between love and lust; he rails against the "tyrannous respects" of man which "fetters" his passion, "calling that sin in us which in all things else/ Is Nature’s highest virtue" (II.i.78-9). Thus Malheureux of the Puritan conduct books (Stubbes and Gosson) disappears and in his place comes an equally monologic voice: this time, as desire to satisfy his lust without regard for any social codes.
In fact, Malheureux’s passion so overwhelms him that he accedes to Francischina’s wish for revenge and agrees to kill Freevill: "Let me be vicious, so I may be loved./ Passion, I am thy slave" (II.ii.123). Obviously, by this point Malheureux is totally controlled by his passion, his body and not, as is Freevill, by his reason. Thus while Freevill says "my soul showed me the imperfections of my body and placed my affection on a lawful love" (II.i.99), Malheureux maintains that "There is no God in blood, no reason in desire…I must enjoy Francischina" (IV.ii.). Malheureux, then, swings from virulent misogyny ("I shall hate the whole sex to see her") to collapsing the very distinctions between "sanctified" love and "beastial" lust that men like Whately and Montaigne preached: "No love’s without some lust, no life without some love," he says (I.iii.156). Significantly, both Malheureux’s collapsing of love and lust together and Freevill’s comment about his soul teaching him the imperfection of his body invoke the classical distinction between lust/love, body/soul, and abject/symbolic—a distinction which informs the technologies of sexuality by constructing what is acceptable and what is inadmissable in society.
The distinction between body and soul was not by any means invented in the Renaissance but, rather, was inherited from the classical tradition and the Christian Church. Even by the late middle-ages, influences of Aristotle’s distinction between masculine spirit and feminine flesh are echoed in the church’s condemnation of the body: "To restore the image betrayed by Adam, one sought to subjugate the Flesh again to the authority of Reason" (Millar 400). Theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin explains this subjugating of the body as an attempt to deny materiality, to rid the body of its "lower bodily strata." While folk culture of the medieval world saw the body as unseparated from the "material and bodily roots of the world," increasingly the body was seen as "a strictly completed, finished product" (Rabelais and His World 29). Thus, in order to conceive of the body as complete and cleansed "of all the scoriae of birth and development" (Bakhtin 25), in order to contain the body and its flows, the symbolic body, as it were, necessarily depends upon the negation of the "unfinished body."
Like Bakhtin’s unfinished or grotesque body, Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject is that which "disturbs identity, system, order" (Powers of Horror 4); however, the abject (which Kristeva associates with Nature/Woman) is something internal to the very identity it disturbs—there can be no "symbolic system" without the abject lurking in the margins. For, as Kristeva argues, abjection is the process and state of being "jettisoned from the ‘symbolic system"’: the abject "is what escapes that social rationality, that logical order on which a social aggregate is based" (65). Thus, the abject (what is seen as impossible, alien to identity) and abjection (defilement, degradation of the body; externalization of the abject) provide the possibility of a "complete" and pure body.
Consider both Richard Rolle’s violent condemnation of men who "pant" after women: "There is nothing more dangerous, more degrading, more disgusting than that a man should exhaust his mind in love for a woman, and pant after her" (Millar 349), and Malheureux’s fear of the courtesan’s "heat": "Know, sir, that the strongest argument that speaks against the soul’s eternity is lust…to grow wild in loose lasciviousness, given up to heat and sensual appetite" (I.i.95-99). Rolle’s condemnation stems from the worry that "the soul is cut off from the sight of heavenly things by this unclean and evil love, and cannot fail to show outward signs of damnation" (349). And Malheureux’s fear that Francischina’s "heat" and "sensual appetite" will harm his (and Freevill’s) "health" and "name" bespeaks to this very same anxiety: that the abject (her sexual appetite) will corrupt the symbolic (his name).
Malheureux’s fears, then, are perhaps grounded in the recognition that the abject is "what does not respect borders, positions, rules" (Kristeva 4). As such, it is the "in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" (4)—in other words, the abject defies definition or symbolic coding. Thus, the abject also serves as what Slavoj Zizek would call the spectre. In Mapping Ideology, Zizek’s primary thesis is that ideology, far from being an illusion that hides an underlying truth, allows subjects to experience ‘reality’; ideology gives meaning and structure to the encounters and desires we experience. In other words, reality is not a pre-represented thing in itself, but is always-already represented or symbolized (we must use language to produce/define meaning). And in the process of symbolizing reality, "something has to be foreclosed from it—that is to say, ‘reality’, like truth, is, by definition, never whole" (21). What is "foreclosed" or non-symbolized is the spectre, the material which emerges from the "gaps" in reality and returns to disrupt the symbolic order. Thus, in order to conceive of the self as unified, symbolic, untainted by the "lower bodily stratum," what has to be "repressed" is the uncompleted body itself—but this repression is never complete and, thus, the abject-spectre remains to "disturb identity, system, order." At this point it is possible to see the abject (the becoming body, lust, death, excrement) as that which is unacceptable to the symbolic order but also as that which gives the symbolic order meaning: Freevill’s soul can only teach his body because the "primordially repressed"—that there is no separation—has already taken place and the effect (a separation between soul and body) misrecognized as "natural."
Especially, then, in The Dutch Courtesan the separation between abject and symbolic can be seen in the distinction between whore (Francischina) and virgin (Beatrice). Kahn argues that "the aim of such oppositions is to split off woman’s body from her soul. A whore is all body, all lust, without soul; a wife or a virgin, all soul without body or lust" (251). Thus, splitting "woman’s body from her soul" allows for the possibility of an idealized women: Beatrice can only be the "lawful love" of the play when divested of all (feminine) materiality. In essence, Beatrice has to transcend her own body in order to escape the spirit/male and female/body dictum whereby the unfinished, "becoming" body is displaced unto the female body. Or as de Lauretis says, "as in all patriarchal representations of gender in Western culture, sexuality is located in Woman, but, like desire and meaning, it is the property and prerogative of men" (104-05). In other words, men control definition of desire: women who desire are whores, are abject. Only a woman without "body or lust" eludes the position of whore/Woman. Beatrice thus serves as the example of the "natural" and legitimate femininity—one who exists to be glorified—while Francischina is "unnatural" and a "money-creature." Thus, as Foucault explains, sexuality is a "historical construct," a "complex political technology," based on the "formation of special knowledges" (105)—including the belief that "Woman corrupted is the worst of devils" (II.ii.219) and that love informed by the soul is pure.
Freevill’s courtship of Beatrice is important for the language he uses echoes the Petrarchan love sonnets which idealize women and love. In fact, his desire for Beatrice (which includes desire for higher economic standing) is couched in terms of the soul, the symbolic which curbs the body’s imperfections. In a passage mocking the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, Freevill says:
This is my Beatrice’s window, this the chamber
Of my betrothed dearest, whose chaste eyes,
Full of loved sweetness and clear cheerfulness
Have gaged my soul to her enjoyings,
Shredding away all those weak under-branches
Of base affections and unfruitful heats.
Here bestow your music to my voice…
Always a virtuous name to my chaste love (II.i.2-9)
Beatrice in essence saves Freevill from baseness by her own purity: his desire for her is viewed as "lawful love" because she is not abject; even the courtly love rhetoric of their wooing is "up above" the "low appetite" of the body. So instead of losing his ‘name’ in sinful desire, Freevill gains status in society and a perfect wife: "Heaven; to have such a wife/ Is happiness to breed pale envy in the saints" (IV.iv.83-84). The Petrachan sonnet, however, is a highly conventional form that Baker suggests is already outdated in Marston’s London (232). Freevill’s use of this language, however, may serve to mask the material underpinnings of marriage—rather than recognizing, as do Tysefew and Crispenella, that marriage is an economic arrangement, he uses rhetoric that transcends material love to the Platonic plane.
Freevill’s unwillingness to recognize his marriage to Beatrice as an economic/social arrangement and, instead, focusing on the idealization and glorification of her body, deflects attention away form the place of sex in capitalist society. Because capitalism makes prostitution—commodification of sex—possible, and because Francischina as a whore makes this evident, Freevill and Beatrice occupy a position of mystification: their relationship is posited as "natural" and normal rather than the effect of social technologies. In Gilles Deleuze’s terms, these technologies can be seen to"codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated" (Capitalism and Schizophrenia 33). This coding of desire is, Deleuze states, the primary function of every society, for it determines the acceptable desires and behaviors of every age. Yet, as Deleuze points out, capitalism is a major "de-coding" force for it depends upon "decoded flows" as its raw material (33). The Mulligrub’s pretensions to nobility—buying gold plates and crests and rubbing shoulders with the gentlemen—serve as example of the decoding force capitalism unleashes in Jacobean London; the traditional marks of nobility, before (mis)recognized as innate, can now be bought with money. Thus Cocledemoy’s tricks can be seen as reactionary or conservative impulses to curb Mulligrub’s "sins and iniquities" (V.iii.103) for challenging the social hierarchy, to, as it were, "re-territorialize" nascent capitalism’s disruptive unregulated flows. Similarly, the main plot of The Dutch Courtesan works between these de- and re-coding forces as capitalism disrupts the traditional relationships by which identity is constructed and maintained. Most directly, Freevill serves as an agent of re-coding because he, more so than any other character, depends upon elaborate constructions which hide the materialist underpinnings of his society. For in order to "produce and reproduce class and gender difference within a social order dependent on these differences to justify inequalities of power and privilege" (Howard 57), his reality depends upon a carefully maintained distinction between pure and impure women.
Thus, the courtship scene between Freevill and Beatrice participates in capitalist recoding. Freevill, in other words, speaks as an integrated subject in the capitalist order, as one who functions according to its technologies: "Your virtue won me; faith, my love’s not lust" (3.1.217). Malheureux, however, does not follow the rules. Unlike Freevill’s Petrachan love—delayed and, as far as the play is concerned, never satisfied—for Beatrice, Malheureux’s desire for Francischina will make him "loseth all appetite and givith satiety"(II.ii.231). His ‘courtship’ of Francischina exists in uncouched terms as sexual passion: when Francischina says "Fait, me no more can love" he answers, "No matter; let me enjoy your bed" (II.ii.139). Even Francischina rebukes Malheureux for "call[ing] things by their right name": "vat do you tink on me? do you take me to be a beast, a creature that for sense only will entertain love, and not only for love, love? O brutish abomination!" (II.i.140-44). In this rather convoluted outburst, she nevertheless does not manage to hide the fact that she only "entertain[s] love" for a profit. Of course, Malheureux still wants her "love" even when he knows that he will lose his "virtuous self" (II.ii.228). At this point, he is a dangerous force to society; he does not operate according to the normal, legitimized structures.
Foucault writes that "the idea of ‘sex’ [as it developed in the seventeenth century]…enables one to conceive power solely as law and taboo" (155). This type of power—an internalized orientation or subjectivation to cultural codes rather than adherence through physical repression or violence—obviously is in operation in Courtesan. Freevill perceives desire in terms of law and taboo and is concerned that Malheureux does not conform to the cultural definitions of licensed and transgressive sexual behavior. As the play progresses Francischina becomes more and more monstrous and Freevill asks Malheureux "Cannot all these [warnings] curb thy low appetite/ And sensual fury?" (IV.ii.11). In other words, love, desire purified by the language of the symbolic, is acceptable while "sensual" lust, the language of the abject body, is taboo: "Abjection persists as exclusion or taboo" and also as "transgression (of the Law)" (Kristeva 17). Malheureux, in essence, transgresses the "Law" of capitalist society by attempting to conflate the dichotomy between abject and symbolic, pure and impure: his desire for Francischina is, within the bounds of the play, impure yet he still "must enjoy" her (IV.ii.15). Malheureux thus nearly threatens to show the distinction between impure and pure as simply social constructions.
However, faced with death Malheureux has a change of mind: "O, how I loathe The very memory of that I adored" (V.iii.22). His own near de-territorialization of the social codes is forgotten in the face of Francischina’s plot to kill Freevill; all danger, all anxieties about the decoding force of capitalism are displaced onto the whore: he that "would loose all," need "but love a whore" (V.iii.29). Consequently, Freevill and Malheureux’ eventual repression of Francischina is informed by that "idea of sex" which allows them to "enjoy her, and, blood cold…laugh at folly" once they’re through (III.i.278). Freevill’s ability to make use of a "common bosom" and then also marry Beatrice without contradictions, at least in his mind, stems from that split between two kinds of women—saintly and the fallen, the symbolic and the abject.
Freevill’s cynical acceptance of Francischina at the beginning of the play and then his violent rejection of her later, thus serves to uphold the construction of sexuality where abjectivity is located solely in the woman:
O heaven,
What difference is in women and their life!
What man, but worthy name of man, would leave
The modest pleasure of a lawful bed,
The holy union of two equal hearts….
To twine th’unhealthful loins of common love…How vile
To love a creature made of blood and hell (V.i.66-78).
Because Freevill gives up Francischina for the "holy union" of marriage, he operates through the technologies of sexuality that define woman as either abject or pure and then misrecognize this difference as natural and innate.
When Francischina invades the home of Beatrice, stating that Freevill is dead and that she alone is the object of Freevill’s affections, Beatrice only moans, "He did not ill not to love me, but sure he did not well to mock me…yet peace and my love sleep with him!" (Iv.iv.63). Francischina, by contrast, becomes violent and revengeful when she discovers that Freevill intends to marry Beatrice: "If dat me knew a dog dat Freevill love,/ Me would puisson him" (V.i.14). Indeed, her reaction fulfills the stereotype of a foreign whore, a stereotype Marston exploits to cement Francischina’s difference from the proper citizens. Not only is Francischina Dutch with an atrocious accent but she wants to control her self and those who interact with her. Unlike Beatrice who accepts her position passively, Francischina has a "will to power"; she not only roundly curses Freewill ("ick sall have the roge troat cut…St. Anthony’s fire, and de Neapolitan poc rot him"[II.ii.49-51]) but she also actively and cunningly plots his and Malheureux’s death. Thus Beatrice is the most faithful and "patient" of lovers, one who gives men manliness, not robs them of masculinity like Francischina: "I am not now myself, no man" complains Malheureux after seeing her (IV.ii.28).
In her essay on sexual difference, titled "Historical Difference/Sexual Difference," Phyllis Rackin argues that during the Renaissance, "Excessive passion in either sex was condemned, but it was especially dangerous to men because it made them effeminate" (46). Effeminacy is less a fear of ‘acting like a woman’, however, as it is a fear of slippage between the symbolic and abject. Malheureux’s initial misogyny thus perhaps stems from a refusal to acknowledge the grotesque, the becoming of his own body: "the strongest argument that speaks Against the soul’s eternity is lust" (I.i.104-05). For as Rackin says, "Despising lust as a mark of weakness and degradation, Renaissance thought gendered it feminine" (47). Thus, perhaps, in his excessive passion Malheureux makes that slip between the (feminine) abject and the (masculine) symbolic and this is why Malheureux continues to be "no man" until he realizes his folly and gives up Francischina in the final act.
In regaining his reason, Malheureux learns to contain his desire and becomes a man again; "I am myself" (V.iii.61). Hence he joins Freevill in legitimating the construction of female sexuality: the dichotomy between abject and pure is a social technology which misrecognizes or ignores the truth of capitalist relations—that commodification of labor is at the heart of a capitalist system, and thus commodification of sex is also ruled by this same "freedom of exchange" which governs the emerging commercial marketplace of Jacobean London. As Cocledemoy says, prostitution is a trade "most honorable" because "divine virtues as virginity, modesty, and such rare gems" are sold by "wholesale" (I.ii.32-41). And thus Francischina’s reduction to silence at the end of the play—"Ick vill not speak. Torture, torture your fill, For me am worse than hanged; me ha’ lost my will" (V.iii.68)— literally and symbolically indicates the repression of lust.
Thus, the proper place of desire is informed through the technologies, the "systems of knowledge and control" that define women as abject if they are not modest virgins. To be abject is worse than a simple lack of virtue, however—it is equated with being less than human: "O thou tearless woman, how monstrous is thy devil?" (V.i.100). Or as Malheureux says before meeting Francischina, "behold an imprudent prostitution? Fie on’t! I shall hate the whole sex to see her; the most odious spectacle the earth can present is an immodest, vulgar woman" (I.i.165). Returning to Malheureux’s anxiety about losing ‘strength and name’ through love of a bawd, it is possible to see, then, that Francischina occupies a position of disgust and fear: she is the ultimate Other, the most "odious spectacle" on earth because she represents something within the emerging society that nobody wants to accept.
Theodore Leinward in The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy argues that "What made the prostitute a threat was her unwillingness to conform to contemporary measures of social and feminine order" (143). Leinward’s analysis stops short, however, for he, like the citizens of London, misrecognizes Francischina as an external disruption: she is, in this view, the producer of rather than a product of social disorder. Rather than being an "emblem for anarchy" because she does not conform, the courtesan serves as the scapegoat for a society uncomfortable with nascent capitalism. Consequently, Francischina not only represents the fallen woman, the whore, but signifies the extent to which Jacobean culture has produced sex as a commodity. In other words, Francischina, the abject Other, serves as the spectre who does not allow the reality of Marston’s London to close into a ‘unified whole’ but whose existence allows society to misrecognize the source of social disruption as something external.
Ultimately, The Dutch Courtesan satirizes the insatiable hunger (the cannibalism) of a social economy governed by exchange—a satire in which no one escapes criticism. Even Freevill must apologize to Beatrice for testing her loyalty and virtue to such an extreme degree. Since satire, however, denotes dissatisfaction with the direction of society, Courtesan also functions at times as a re-coding force that attempts to regulate the "flows of desire" and thus reorder society in the face of capitalism’s disruptive, disunifying force. Crispinella, for instance, participates in satirzing marriage but in the end does not threaten society or the social order: "virtuous marriage? There is no more affinity betwixt virtue and marriage than betwixt man and his horse" (III.i.88). Yet, after all is said and done, Crispinella does not subvert the cultural gender roles: she and Tysfew get married and she agrees to be "silent in [his] house, modest at [his] table, and wanton in [his] bed" (Iv.ii.85). Francischina, on the other hand, not only attempts to kill both Malheureux and Freevill, but her unchanneled (decoded) erotic desire poses a threat to the social order by making evident the very foundations of capitalism (that exchange value is the only value that counts). Thus she serves as a reminder that society needs to recode desires. Or as Deleuze would say, capitalism depends upon recoding in order to provide its subjects with the illusion that its ‘reality’ is not constructed, that it is a universal, ahistorical truth.
The play, then, participates in decoding and also recoding the contradictory values and actions exposed in this polyglot of voices: in order to fill the gap created by the breakdown of ideological structures, Francischina ultimately is cast as a cannibal, a foreign devil who does devour man’s flesh and must be repressed: "O thou comely damnation, Doest think that vice is not to be withstood?" (V.iii.49). And in expelling her from society, the citizens of Courtesan legitimate chaste love and "holy" marriage, forgetting that Francischina’s "damnation" is a product of the society, not an inherent quality. Thus, the technologies of sexuality—those material practices which workd to naturalize the virgin/whore split—work to such a degree that although Cocledemoy maintains that the whole play has been "hurtless mirth" and the fun of "trivial wit" (V.ii.54), he cannot dispel Freevill’s last words to Francischina: all that "has been extremely ill is only" yours.
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