Open Ears, Appetite, and Adultery in A Woman Killed with Kindness

While critics discuss the link between female speech and sexual looseness, and silence and chastity, many have overlooked the prerequisite for obedience-hearing and its agent, the ear. The link between the ear and vagina is often ignored because of the proneness to perceive ears as passive orifices (Kilgour 131; Woodbridge 256). However, ears are vulnerable holes subject to penetration by external tongues. Reina Green shows that "in the early modern period, ears, like mouths and vaginas, were regarded not only as passive openings through which the body could be penetrated, but also as sites through which desire could be expressed" (Green 54). Bryan Crockett argues that in early modern Protestant culture, there was a "cult of the ear" (47-65). As Bloom has ably pointed out, the Protestant preacher Robert Wilkinson, in his sermon A Jewell for the Eare (1605), reveals that God touches the human soul through the ears: "God never cometh so neere a manssoule as when he entreth in by the doore of the eare, therefore the eare is a most precious member if men knewe how to use it" (original italics) (Bloom 118). As the act of listening is an organ of salvation, the agency is located in the hearer rather than the speaker, for the transfer of speech shifts authority from the narrator to the listener. Bloom argues that "[i]t is the act of audition, not vocalization, that attests to one's position in relation to God and one's potential for salvation" (114). In their discussion of the speaker-listener dynamic in Shakespeare's plays, Laury Magnus and Walter Cannon suggest that "[t] he resistance to hearing or downright refusal to hear indicates some harsh rigidity on the part of the recalcitrant hearers that compromise their essential humanity" (xii).

ODISEA. Revista de estudios ingleses, 2017

Cultural and material change described by historians of reading intersects with literary history in different and complex ways. An example is the cultural practice of silent reading in intimacy, which came to be pivotal for the literature of sensibility. It was gendered female in the eighteenth century and looked upon with disfavour, notably by moralists and pedagogues. However, not very long before, silent reading was associated with spirituality and women's religious experiences, and was compatible with the virtues expected of the "lady of the Renaissance". Several texts from the seventeenth century, notably diaries by women, will be discussed.

In a sense, women were subject to higher levels of social pressure than men in fifth-century Athens B.C. Driven by the deeply ingrained expectations associated with behavior and domesticity, women simply had minimal, if not any, control over their decisions and more significantly, their physical movements. It is only within the realm of tragedy in which gender boundaries are partially diminished and questioned. Nicole Loraux suggests that within tragedy, a woman who commits suicide is liberated because she achieves a certain power over her body, one that was formerly possessed by the men in her life (Loraux 8). However, this notion becomes paradoxical when the woman's motivations to end her life are intricately examined. As illustrated in both Euripides' Hippolytus and Sophocles' Antigone, the characters that commit suicide (e.g. Phaedra, Antigone and Eurydice) all do so only for the sake of preserving their feminine reputations and obligations. For after all, " Every woman who is mortal must compromise the totality of the female state with its tensions, ambiguities, and conflicts (Vernant 143) ". In this way, the status of femininity is not heightened by the tragic woman's choice of killing her body since her incentive for doing so is only to sustain the cultural feminine stereotypes. It is rather the public outcome and mourning produced by her suicide that achieve this imbalance of gender hierarchies in tragedy, as funerals for women were highly privatized and minor compared to the public processions given for men in ancient Greek society (Loraux 3). In addition, the visual possibilities of the theater help to expose a tragic woman's incentives of suicide through these staging elements: the location of the suicide (thalamos), the manner in which the woman commits suicide, and her concealment from the outside world. Essentially, the literal spatial positioning of the woman in combination with the dramatic action effectively symbolizes the psychological stress a woman incurs from adhering to the conventional characterizations of femininity. Nevertheless, because the product of a woman's suicide fundamentally fuels the rest of the plot, femininity attains higher levels of value and public appeal than it would in ordinary life. Thus gender limitations and stereotypes become fluid within the theater. First, it is crucial to understand the rigid principles that women of fifth-century Athens were expected to embody in order to better contextualize the societal pressures and motivations of the suicides in Antigone and Hippolytus. A prime source of these values lies in Xenophon's Oeconomicus in which the upper class Athenian, Ischomachus, " describes the lessons he imparted to his wife for running his home (Oost 226) ". According to Xenophon, one of the most important tasks for a man to accomplish is properly educating their woman, " in such a way as to have them as coworkers in increasing the households (Xenophon 3.10) ". If they are unsuccessful at this 'education', the wife most likely will ruin their estate and wealth (Xenophon 3.10). All in all, the groundwork of creating this submissive woman lies in the following generalizations: the wife conserves and secures the possessions that her husband brings into the household (Xenophon 3.15), she spins wool and makes clothes (Xenophon 7.6) and she makes bread from the crop (Xenophon 7.21). In addition, her fundamental duties are to nourish and successfully bring up their offspring and eventually to send them out to work when they reach a mature age (Xenophon 7.33). Most tasks that Xenophon sets up for a wife to uphold are reminiscent of common stereotypes women experience in throughout any generation of history. Consequently, these societal traditions alone do not promote the immense pressure in the minds of Athenian women, but when combined with the spatial polarity men and women were expected to maintain, women had no other choice but to feel literally imprisoned in their freedom to behave more literally, their positioning in physical spaces. Women are to remain inside their domestic sphere and men are to venture outside in the open air (Xenophon 7.20). More profound and influential on women is the divine explanation for their physical captivity: Since, then, work and diligence are needed both for the indoor and for the outdoor things, it seems to me that the god directly prepared the woman's nature for indoor works and indoor concerns. For he equipped the man, in body and soul, with a greater capacity to endure cold and heat, journeys and expeditions, and so has ordered him to the outdoor works; but in bringing forth, for the woman, a body that is less capable in these respects, the god has, it seems to me ordered her for the indoor works. (Xenophon 7.22-24) Clearly, there does exist biological differences in men and women and because of this they are not equal in that sense however, the attribution to a divine source for this physiological difference, implicitly convinces women that they are meant to oblige to these conditions and in turn it successfully keeps women shut off from the rest of society. This shame women are burdened with is lucratively reinforced by the allusion to Hesiod's Theogony in describing women as bees. On one hand, Hesiod stereotypes women as wasteful creatures that are lazy, stay inside, and contribute nothing of worth to the community:

Cambridge Opera Journal, 1994

Following historicist and materialist feminist criticisms, material food studies and the cultural attitudes towards food and female speech and hearing in early modern England, I argue that Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607) dramatizes the interrelatedness of oral, aural and sexual appetites. I contend that Anne's oral, aural and sexual openness to Wendoll is a complex form of subversive complicity; she subverts the authority of her husband while obeying him in submitting aurally and sexually to Wendoll whom Frankford invites to use his table and unconsciously his wife. I argue that Heywood perceived appetite as an instrument for revenge, penitence and redemption. While Anne's aural and oral openness to Wendoll's seductive speech leads to her sexual openness, I explain that her self-starvation is an oral revenge in which she consumes the flesh that has bred her sin. I argue that Anne's starvation is an act of political resistance against a patriarchal society that uses food and eating as forms of control.

Journal of Mormon History, 2014

2017

A s it usually happens with every discourse that results in opression, misogyny has been able to efface its presence by inserting doubts on its own existence into the community in which it works. However, certain inevitable contradictions within patriarchalism have made possible some readings denying the hierarchy male/female, in spite of the degree of acceptance that such a "common sense" attitude has amongst many societies. The plays that we study here offer an expected ambivalent position, regardless what part of the most conservative criticism has wanted to see in them; on the one hand, these plays certainly reproduce the terms of the dominant cultural environment, and although much has been said about the terrible position in which women are placed in these texts, perhaps something could be added in relation to the way they are scripted by males. But, secondly, we perceive what seems to be an uneasy incorporation of the process of construction of the notions of gender in these texts, which force a sort of intervention that questions, although with not much strength, this discourse. Dympna Callaghan reminds us of the difficulty of dealing with this topic in some kind of texts: