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A Prezi Presentation

by Christina Katopodis @nemersonian

for ENG 220 @Hunter_College, CUNY

Freud's

"Oedipal Complex"

The brothers’ incestuous desire lends itself to a psychoanalytic reading, primarily concerned with the subconscious. Sigmund Freud outlines his concept of the Oedipal Complex in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), such that all people share the same desires but some remain unconscious and others conscious. Freud’s Oedipal Complex first assumes that all children desire the mother. A son has an unconscious desire to kill the father while fearing castration by him. This is termed "castration anxiety," which produces the superego, associated with authority and law. The son becomes a subject like the father and displaces his desire onto a more appropriate gender-similar object, another woman.

Materials adapted from Norton Critical

Edition (1st ed.) of The Duchess

of Malfi, edited by Michael Neill

In the Play...

Character Questions

In The Duchess of Malfi, Ferdinand's jealousy and violence is an incestuous—and, thus, inappropriate—displacement of desire for his sister: “You are my sister;/This was my father’s poniard, do you see?/I’d be loath to see ’t look rusty, ’cause ’twas his” (1.3.37-9). A psychoanalytic reading would interpret the poniard, a dagger, as a phallic symbol that represents Ferdinand’s castration anxiety. He replaces his father as the figure of authority and law, and threatens his sister, displacing his desire onto her. A feminist analysis, however, would also consider the wealth and power of the Duchess as threatening, perhaps protecting her from being raped or killed by Ferdinand’s dagger. Instead, Ferdinand gives her the dagger, hoping she will take her own life, which can also potentially be read as his castration or emasculation by the Duchess.

The Duchess's Double-Bind

Foreshadowing

Set in Roman Catholic Italy, the play begins as a love story of the widowed Duchess and Antonio, but the plot is riddled with tension. Antonio’s ominous reference to “poison” in the first scene foreshadows death in Malfi, where “diseases through the whole land spread” (1.1.14-5), hinting also at corruption in Italy. The Duchess’s newly gained autonomy as a widow is a source of conflict: Ferdinand and the Cardinal demand that she remain a widow in order to maintain the purity of their bloodline and to secure their family wealth. She secretly marries Antonio, but this ultimately results in her death, and the destruction of her brothers. Ironically, Antonio himself says, “It is a noble duty to inform them/What they ought to foresee” (1.1.21-2). Webster’s use of unforeseen and yet inevitable tragedy invites a reading in which the Duchess's free choise is also, quite tragically, her poison. Can the form of tragedy make this play more of a protofeminist text than a comedy like Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew?

  • Is Bosola a sympathetic character?
  • How does Bosola's former incarceration speak to today's system?
  • Does the Duchess have agency?
  • Does Freud's Oedipal theory change the way we read Ferdinand and the Cardinal? Can they be sympathetic?
  • What do you make of Antonio's character? Does he have agency?

The Duchess proposes marriage to Antonio, her steward, an act that is not only transgressive for a woman in the early 17th Cent but also a deliberate disobeyance of her brothers' wishes (to keep the family blood line "pure"). In Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Kate is forced to obey her father, Baptista, and her husband, Petruchio. What authority do the Duchess's brothers have over her? In what way is her second marriage both her remedy and her poison?

Plato's Pharmakon

In Jacques Derrida's analysis of Plato’s Phaedrus, he translates the word pharmakon as "remedy" and "poison." Derrida reveals the impossibility of fitting all things into binary oppositions because these binaries do not exist within this word; rather, pharmakon is a medium rather than the result of an either/or split. Derrida continues to read words as they generate a multiplicity of meanings within their own texts, calling into question accepted stable meanings.

Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” The Norton Anthology of Theory

and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,

2001. 1830-76. Print.

Plot Summary

Themes to Look For

Larger Questions

  • Secrets Conscious and Unconscious
  • Vanity of world power & inherited rank
  • Buying human services
  • Perpetual incarceration
  • Women's oppression
  • Class difference
  • Incestuous desire and maintaining control over the family blood line
  • Symbolic death
  • Does the "tragic" vs. "comedic" form effect whether we read a play as sympathetic to women's oppression?
  • What's class got to do with it?
  • What role does forecasting and foreshadowing play for Antonio, especially, but also the rest?
  • Are plays amoral? Does anyone

display a moral conscience?

Everyone Dies at the End

Based on an Italian novella, Webster’s play portrays the story of the Duchess of Malfi as a tragedy. The Duchess secretly marries Antonio, her steward, defying her brothers who prefer she remain a widow. Her brothers are motivated by greed, pride, and incestuous desire. They hire Bosola (a former convict) to kill their sister and Antonio, and in a confusion of identities in the final scene, the brothers are murdered as well. Webster’s gothic undertones portray the corruption of Roman Catholic Italy and the courage and noble character of the Duchess.

Since almost everyone dies at the

end of this very bloody play, read

the deaths and daggers as symbolic.

Pay attention to how characters die,

and who is killing whom for what.

The Duchess of Malfi

by John Webster

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