SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...

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One of the prevalent themes in Confessio Amantis, which appears in A King, and
No King, is the need for proper, moderated governance, both of the self and of the nation.
Amans repeatedly hears lessons on what happens when a man acts unreasonably and by
analogy when a king governs selfishly, as when he gives in to incestuous desires. It is
true that in both A King, and No King and The Duchess of Malfi the actual incestuous act
is averted. In the former, Arbaces had become overwhelmed by his passion, to the point
of committing the sin knowing full well that the object of his lust was his sister. The plot
allowed the last-minute save and restored him to his better reason. In the latter Ferdinand
was also “saved” from sexual intercourse with the Duchess but through his will she died
(“to die” being a well-known euphemism for sexual climax). He may not have engaged
in intercourse with her but he possessed her body in the only way that his warped psyche
could allow and following this, his inhuman, bestial nature emerged.
The Duchess of Malfi gains its dramatic strength from the horrific treatment of the
title lady by her brothers. As fear of women’s power rose, so did the methods used to
control them become more forceful. Though misogyny in literary works is ever present,
Eileen Allman argues that Jacobean revenge tragedy is a vehicle for misogyny because
men need to control women in order to exert dominance over other men. In a revenge
tragedy, control over women and the resulting ill treatment of them is
the flower of male rivalry. When a man is defeated by another man, he is both
unmanned and feminized; that is, he is stripped of cultural signs of dominance and
forced to assume those of submission. . . . For the loser, then, femaleness is not a
separate and distinct sex but a denial of maleness. . . that can easily be displaced
onto women in the form of misogyny. . . . Degendering authority means
deauthorizing maleness, severing the automatic connection between dominance
and maleness not only in the tyrant but also in the subject. (19-20)