"Ears prejudicate" in Mariam and Duchess of Malfi

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Spring, 2003 by Reina Green

This essay examines the impact of gender on the speaker-listener relationship in Elizabeth Gary's Tragedy of Mariam and John Webster's Duchess of Malfi. Several characters demonstrate "ears prejudicate," preferring to hear views sympathetic with their own. However, while Mariam and the duchess are condemned for their listening behavior, they have no power to censure men who fail to listen to them. Moreover, these women are condemned in sexual terms as their listening behavior is considered a sign of sexual licentiousness. It is suggested that Webster and Cary may have particular reasons for exploring the impact of prejudicial listening.

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Several critics, including Lynda Boose and Douglas Bruster, have examined the position of the speaker in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly with regard to the effect of gender on the appropriateness of speech. (1) While this work has aided in the recovery of women's writing of the period, the intense focus on women's speech has left the listener and the impact of gender on this role virtually ignored until recently. (2) Frequently, discussions of speaking and listening focus on the speaker as actively controlling communication, with the listener being considered powerless, merely a receptacle for the speech of another, a role in keeping with those traditionally ascribed to women. Writers as diverse as Michel Foucault and Soren Kierkegaard have complicated this perception of the speaker-listener relationship as have a few speech-act theorists, (3) but even early modem authors noted the potential power wielded by a listener. In "Of Experience," Michel Montaigne states: "The word is halfe his that speaketh, and halfe his that harkeneth unto it. The hearer ought to prepare himselfe to the motion or bound it taketh. As betweene those that play at tennis, he who keepes the hazard, doth prepare, stand, stirre and march, according as he perceives him who stands at the house, to looke, stand, remoove and strike the ball, and according to the stroake." (4) According to Montaigne, speakers and listeners are engaged in volley and return; the listener must be ready both to receive and to return what is said. Communication is a game that requires two players and in which neither possesses sole power. In light of this perception of the speaker-listener relationship, I wish to investigate the representation of the power dynamic between speakers and listeners in early modern drama and to explore the effect of gender on this dynamic.

Ideal womanhood was defined in the period by the triad of chastity, silence, and obedience; nonetheless, the focus, both then and now, has been on the link between chastity and silence and has overlooked the prerequisite for obedience--listening. Unrestrained female speech is equated to sexual licentiousness, a view embodied in the belief that Eve seduced Adam to sin through her speech. (5) Women who spoke could entice men to sin. However, speech does not infect through the mouth; the orifice that is first infected is the ear. Eve was first persuaded by the serpent's speech; she was infected as a listener, not as a speaker. Thus, the demand that women listen in order to obey was inherently hazardous as listening put them at risk of being infected with dangerous (sexual) ideas, and of potentially transmitting such ideas through their own speech. Clearly it was necessary to control both aspects of female communication. Silence, although connected to chastity, was not necessarily recommended. If a woman was sile nt, there was no way to monitor what she had heard, or what she was thinking; a "few, reverend and meeke" words were required. (6) Robert Cleaver therefore represents the "silence" of an ideal wife by the way she responds to her husband: "as the Eccho answereth but one word for many, which are spoken to her." (7) As an echo, a woman revealed what she had heard. Moreover, by echoing her husband, a wife validated his speech, a validation that was conspicuously absent when she remained stubbornly silent.

While women could validate men's speech, male listeners could censure what women said. Violation of the boundaries surrounding female speech depended not on the woman's words or intention, but on the opinions of her listeners. William Whately notes that a wife must particularly guard her speech in the presence of her husband, even if she is not talking directly to him: "Her words must not be loud and snappish to the children, to the servants in his sight. If shee perceive a fault, yet must consider, that her better stands by, and not speake without necessity.,, (8) Whately reasons that a wife who asserts too much control over other family members in her husband's presence implies that he cannot control his family. In his absence, she can utter the same words without reproof. The appropriateness of a woman's speech was therefore determined not only by her marital status, the need for a wife to echo her husband, but also by her listener(s). Women could show their resistance to their husbands' words by remaining silent; men could censure what women said by accusing them of transgressive or inappropriate speech.