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

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knife as phallus. Eros (Cupid) is famously portrayed as being blind and is sometimes
accompanied by his brother, Anteros, whose task it was to seek revenge for unrequited
love (Eros). His sister is forbidden to the Duke as a sexual partner but the attraction
remains, causing a psychomachic struggle that leads to madness. He internalizes the
incest taboo. Unable to couple with her, he seeks revenge by wishing to obliterate her.
Jankowski finds that the phallic poniard given to the Duchess by her brother is a
“technique of asserting his power over his sister by symbolically dismembering her
body . . . Ferdinand’s implication that all a woman can enjoy of a man is his tongue/penis
[which] suggests that all she is a mouth//vagina, a container for these objects. . . . The
boundaries of the Duchess’s two bodies are indistinct and perpetually slipping” (229).
The fact of the Duchess’s female-ness confuses her role as monarch and her actions as a
sovereign, as does the conflict between the “conflicting claims of the Duchess’s bodies
natural and politic” (Jankowski 223).
Frank Whigham conceives Ferdinand as a “threatened aristocrat, frightened by the
contamination of his ascriptive social rank and obsessively preoccupied with its defense”
(169). Try as he might, he is unable to control the boundaries of the Duchess’s “two
bodies” or the boundaries around his own identity. This led to “friction between the
dominant social order and the emergent pressures toward social change” (167) and fears
of a “gradual contamination of the ruling elite by contamination from below” (ibid.).
Men such as Antonio and Bosola, notes Whigham, are part of a new class of royal
administrators that began to rise in the social hierarchy during the reigns of Henry VIII,
Elizabeth, and James. Ferdinand perceives a threat that may mean the end of his own