Despair, Death and Human Dignity In The Duchess of Malfi


Qaid-e-Hayaat-e-Band-o-Gham, Asll Mein Donoon Ek Hain
Maut Se Pehle Aadmi, Gham Se Najaat Paaye Kyun?
Imprisonment of life, or captivity of grief are but the same
Can man before death ever find his sorrows gone?
~Mirza Ghalib
This couplet by Mirza Ghalib seems to give a voice to the Duchess’s emotional state preceding her death. The Duchess, like many other literary figures of her time, reflects a growing figure of falling victim to the temptation of despair after being led to believe that her husband and children are dead. A deep sense of hopelessness and despondency seems to grip her imagination leading to an active state of the abandonment of hope impelling to a furious struggle against the thus created adverse circumstances with utter disregard of the consequences of her actions. Like most of the characters of The Duchess of Malfi, the duchess suffers from transient melancholy that forces her to think of death as an escape route to human suffering. The Duchess does not give in to these temptations and begins her journey towards the achievement of human dignity.
The Christian indoctrination of the play deems despair particularly dangerous to those facing death because it could lead to eternal damnation by denying ‘the saving power of the divine grace’.
“Oh, fie! Despair? Remember You a Christian”.
                                                                                    Basola to Duchess. [Act IV, Scene ii,72]
Before moving on any further, it is important to understand the idea of attainment of human dignity within the framework of the play and the Christian ethos of its characters and the medieval audience.
“Human dignity originates from God and is of God because we are made in God’s own image and likeness.”
                                                                                                [Gn 1:26,27]
According to the Christian doctrine, human life attains a sacred position because of the belief that the human person is the most central and clearest reflection of God amongst human beings. Human beings have transcendent worth and value that comes from God. This dignity is not based on any human quality, legal mandate, individual merit or accomplishment. Human dignity is inalienable- that means it is an essential part of every human being and is an intrinsic quality that can never be separated from other essential aspects of the human person.
This biblical doctrine - that later evolves and forms the basis of Christian morality -, qualitatively distinguishes human beings from other created life forms because they are capable of ‘knowing and loving God’ unlike other creatures. Belief in the dignity of the human person is the foundation of this morality. The principle of human dignity later lays the foundation of all the Catholic social teaching and principles.

Webster manages to orchestrate a fearful comfort through the murder of the Duchess by Basola. This macabre transcends all earlier questions of Duchess’s guilt or innocence in what has been called “the long ecstasy of pain”[1]. Webster’s genius is visible in the creation of this transcendence through an integration of symbolism borrowed from the ars tradition and his own poetic voice.

It would be illogical to assume that the intricacies of Webster’s dramatic poetry spring forth miraculously without roots. The symbolism of the ars moreindi in varying degrees of literalism and displacement is integral. Within this tradition, the deathbed in The Duchess of Malfi became the greatest moment for testing the complex issues of death, despair and dignity – partly because it comes at the end of a lifetime of living well or not well, partly because it seems to represent the last opportunity for turning the soul and union with the beloved – a turning point upon which hangs an eternity. The old folklore surrounding the tradition had it that the devil was making a last mighty attempt to capture the soul on its deathbed, at the moment when it is the weakest. But the tradition also dramatizes one’s guardian angel as an opposition to demons – God’s mercy against diabolical forces of temptation.

The theology at the heart of this deathbed ritual that developed in the devotional literature[2] seems to balance fear and promise. The opposition between virtue and vice and the old structure of the psychomachia[3]  seem to appear in the background. On one hand, the warning to prepare for the demonic onslaught is constant; on the other, the promise of mercy seems to be built into the symbolism from the moral baggage.  Even though the visual and virtual iconography does not explicitly show the presence of the both sides of the theological equation; fear and comfort, hell and heaven, justice and mercy, the reconciliation of these opposites has been implicitly build into the visual and verbal expressions of the play by virtue of the subjection of these ideas to Tragicomedy Christian structure for over a period of two hundred years.

The central critical argument that his essay attempts to make is that the predominance of the Despair image as the mighty opposite to the trust in the mercy of God is linked more closely to images of bad death than to those of a good one. For this reason it may be helpful to begin establishing the fact that the Duchess is pre-occupied – like the Jacobean society – to die a ‘good death’ in order to attain human dignity here and hereafter. 

Despising the world, living a good life, mediating on death as a way of self-knowledge, coming to an existential experience of the necessity of mercy through facing one’s sin, and finally attempting to overcome despair by throwing oneself on the mercy of God are a major part of the structure of understanding demanding assumptions in an obvious and expressive form. The symbolic language of the play is larded in particular with allusons to the devotional tradition. More specifically, the death of the Duchess is played against brilliant allusions to the language of ars moreindi while echoing Counter Reformation techniques for revitalizing the conventional theological ideas and placing them within a meditative context that moves the affections.

Webster incorporates these assumptions in the texture of the play’s imagery, forcing the audience/reader to become aware of the sensuous reality of the drama. The death of the Duchess has been created as a kind of composition that leads an audience into a meditation of death. The death of the Duchess is powerful in arousing the emotions because it is a violent killing, an unjust murder of a virtuous and heroic figure.
In the context of comfort of the tradition, the reader is in a sense reassured about the end of her suffering. We can see her virtue almost isolated in the midst of a political and personal corruption that forms a major chunk of the texture of the play. A balance between good and evil figures in the The Duchess of Malfi does not seem to strike a balance. The Duchess seems terribly alone in a corrupt world except from the powerless Antonio. Traditional symbolism points outside the play towards a heavenly justice in contrast to the vicious and worldly injustice she suffers from her brothers.

It is important to note that although the murder occurs in the second scene of act 5,the first scene leads up to it in an important way. In fact, scene 1 is the displaced enactment of the temptation to despair performed by the demonic and melancholy Basola on behalf of the satanic Ferdinand. After encountering the fabricated dead bodies of Antonio and her children, her response is one of despair, the very response intended by Ferdinand. Her Longing for death is expressed so piteously, that even the demonic Basola is also moved. Though she does not kill herself, she says she is “full of daggers.” Her curses on the stars and seasons in response to a servant’s conventional wish for her long life ends in a curse upon her brothers.    
                        Let heaven a little while cease crowning martyrs
                        To punish them.
                        Go howl them this and say, I long to bleed.
                        It is some mercy when men kill with speed.
                                                                                                            (4.1, 107-110)

Basola insists to Ferdinand that he will make his business that of “comfort”.

Within the context of the actual murder scene, Basola’s role shifts in terms of the ars tradition from that of the demonic tempter to despair to that of the angel who brings comfort. Ironically, him also being the murderer increases the tragic power of the scene.

A firm belief in the life after death is reiterated by the character of the duchess when she asks Cariola whether we shall “know one another / in th’ other world.” To increase her horrors, Ferdinand sends several kinds of madmen to the Duchess’s place whose languages are filled with obscenity and demonic imagery creating a context of earthly reality as an experience of hell itself around the Duchess in this world.

The literary theme of Contemptous Mundi[4] becomes clearly visible when Basola says to the Duchess after being asked that “Thou are a box of worm-seed.” This statement begins to signify the frailty and mortality of the flesh, descrying the body as the prison house of soul.

The way of death by strangling is said by Basola to be particularly terrifying. It may suggest the death of despair by one’s own hand but the Duchess more or less rules out that association by her courageous denial that the manner of death is important. Her heroism, in fact seems to reassure her heavenly end.

                                    Pull, and pull strong, for your able strength
                                    Must pull down heaven upon me.
                                                                                                            (4.2, 230 -31)



She immediately becomes conscious of her Christian identity and displays humility despite of her virtuous heroism.

                                    Yet stay; heaven-gates are not highly arch’d
                                    As princes’ palaces: that they enter there
                                    Must go upon their knees. – (Kneels)
                                                                                                            (4.2.232-34)

Basola strangles her. The irony is instantly heightened in which Basola as murderer largely shifts his demonic role to that of the angel of comfort. She is not afraid of death, “, “Knowing to meet such excellent company / In th’ other world.” Her last words to Cariola are requests to give her little boy syrup for his cold and to hear the bedtime prayers of her daughter. Her behaviour is stoically brave and Basola by the scene’s end is brought to genuine tears of contrition.

The fate of the Duchess is doubtful. The ars assumptions and images are used mainly to establish the melancholy sense of dying and corrupt polis, its ministers those of despair and its comfort from hell. However splendid the heroism of the Duchess, it stands upon a somewhat flimsy romantic eroticism.  Even her Christian dying provides the conventional hope for a future justice, and in spite of Basola’s conversion to a minister of revenge, it is still left doubtful that the world can change. The power and the truth of transcendent reality to affect a person’s life in The Duchess of Malfi is an emerging question. Death, comfort and human dignity at one level is an unanswerable argument. It raises a broader question. Does literature allow for final and absolute answers? Webster, to some extent leaves spaces for ambiguity as well as ambivalence in its treatment of reality. Extending the argument of the Christian doctrine, God alone knows the truth and is the best of the judges. One does not know if “human dignity” is ever achieved by the Duchess, although she continuously strives for it.

   

























BIBLIOGRAPHY

1: Bettie Anne Doebler, ‘Continuity in the Art of Dying: The Duchess of Malfi’, Comparative Drama, 14 (1980), 203–15, (p. 203).
Comparative Drama, 14 (1980), 203–15, (p. 203).

2:. J. R. Mulryne, ‘Webster and the Uses of Tragicomedy’, in John Webster, ed. by Brian Morris (London: Ernest Benn, 1970), 133.

3: Jacqueline Pearson, Tragedy and Tragicomedy in the Plays of John Webster( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 1.

4: Lee Bliss, The World’s Perspective: John Webster and the Jacobean Drama (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1983), 151.

5:. Catherine Belsey, ‘Emblem and Antithesis in The Duchess of Malfi’, RenaissanceDrama, n.s. 11 (1980), 115–34 (p. 115).

6: Frank Whigham, ‘Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi’, PMLA 100 (1985), 167-86, (p. 167)



































Despair, Death and Human Dignity
In
The Duchess of Malfi





Syed Faizan







Miss. Sneha Sharma

Jacobean Drama

12th October 2013


[1] Clifford Leech, “Webster, The Duchess of Malfi”. Barron's Educational Series, Inc
[2] Desiderius Erasmus, “In Praise of Folly” L. Stultitiae Laus, 1511.
  William Perkins, “A Case of Conscience”, 1592
[3] Psychomachia (Battle for Man's soul), Latin poet Prudentius.
[4] Contempt of the World.

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