Difference as a means of defiance: a study of female subjectivity in six Jacobean plays

Abstract

The Hegelian dialectic clearly upholds patriarchal tradition by representing woman as the secondary sex. However, it claims validity for this representation only at a particular moment in an always changing history. Therefore, if Hegelian theory is to remain true to its assumption that the dialectic itself is always changing, taking on new aspects, new implications, throughout history, it must allow for a change in historical representations of women's and men's subjectivity both singularly and as they relate to one another. Although Hegel did not make a gender equation, his concept of the "unhappy consciousness" can be appropriated to explain the awakening of women who were not permitted to share in the cultural framework of the language. This "unhappy consciousness" is, according to Hegel, a necessary factor in the development of a "true" subjective self. By "turning inward" (relying on a dialogue with one's own internal voice, internal consciousness) women reject male interpreted external codes of family and church and begin anew by creating a sense of "self. Many critical readings of Jacobean drama fail to credit this struggle of the female for consciousness, focusing instead upon female passivity and resignation, expressed through the notion of the "female martyr." Interpretations of this kind allow the female figure only a fleeting subjectivity that ends in death. The fault with this notion is that it does not accomplish what it sets out to do: to allow the female a transient subjectivity. Instead, this view interprets the death of the female in the shadow of the grief experienced by her survivors, the major male figures. In such a reading, the experience of the male subverts not only the female's experience but also her interjected subjectivity. I will argue that some of the female characters in the plays I am examining achieve a heretofore unrecognized subjectivity that gives them a greater status as both subjects of and agents in these dramas.