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
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