The Paradox of Women

The Legal Position of Early Modern Wives and Thomas Dekker's The Honest Whore

Bibliographic Data

ID7528010
AuthorsBarbara Kreps (corresponding author), Barbara Irene Kreps
Year2002
Volume69
Issue1
Pages83-102
Publication date2002-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueELH (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-8304 • E-ISSN: 1080-6547
PublisherJohns Hopkins University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/elh.2002.0007
OpenAlexW2066956873
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited13

The double function of marriage as the site of licensed sexuality and also as the creation of an economic unit links together two desires--sex and security--which may or may not reinforce each other and at times can enter into conflict. The relationship itself is obviously intensely private, but marriage represents at the same time a contract with the community, so that while sex and finance are to some degree regulated within the couple, these same issues are in all cultures also subject to communal laws and customs. Numerous studies focusing on gender conditions in early modern England have emphasized the extent to which sexual and financial questions were legislated to the disadvantage of women; but one purpose of this essay is to point out that there are a number of ways in which both sexual and financial matters, as far as women were concerned, were unevenly and at times conflictually provided for under the several jurisdictions of Tudor and Stuart law, and unevenly reflected and renegotiated in the literature of the period. The law's operation from general principles, from which follows its recognition of all individuals as in some way members of categories, left women few loopholes once the law had determined--long before the development of English common law--that women constituted a group for whom laws were to be made which distinguished them from men. This transformation of biological sexual difference into the disparity of legal, economic, and political gender roles created conditions which institutionally disabled almost all women--in particular married women--of whatever class; but that law makers were not blind to the difference between biological identity and the legal determination of gender roles can be seen in some special instances uncovering contradictions and double-think in the law's provisions for women, discrepancies I shall be exploring in the first part of this essay. Early modern dramatists, addressing issues of personal and social justice in their plays, frequently invoked real questions of English law, calling [End Page 83] attention to how legal praxis, in theory aiming for clarity and justice, is problematic in its application to specific circumstances. This is a tension apparently built into many of the history plays, for example, where the plots often explore and counterpoise the constitutional rights and duties of kings and the rights and duties of their subjects. In the numerous plays of the period either centrally or peripherally concerned with marriage, however--both marriage formation and the relations between husband and wife once marriage has been contracted--still other considerations than the law's sex-gender constructions are visible, and many dramatists waver between, on the one hand, depicting women as interesting and sympathetic individuals and, on the other, making dramatic use of the traditional orthodoxy that all women share an essential nature (a nature morally and intellectually inferior to that of men). As an example of this wavering, which creates one of the major fault lines in the ideology of early modern drama, I turn in the second part of this essay to Thomas Dekker's open engagement with the law and culturally defined gender roles in the two parts of The Honest Whore. 1

Disadvantage · Economics · Human sexuality · Political science · Politics · Position (finance · Sociology · Subject (documents · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Finance · Gender Studies · Law · Marriage and Sexual Relationships · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies

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