Love Her After: Desire, Death, and Tragic Subjectivity on the Early Modern Stage
Abstract
This dissertation argues that spectacles of eroticized female corpses in Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s tragic works contributed and responded to early modern English culture’s obsession with death. Rather than merely suggesting a containment of female sexuality or a management of male anxieties, erotic death highlights the period’s gender politics surrounding the fetishization of death and the fetishization of chastity. Using Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and its cultural legacy as a pivotal point of reference for examining the nexus of desire and death, I explain how embodied performances in early modern drama disrupt expected associations between the corpse and female passivity and abjection. These moments invite audiences to reflect on the hoped-for containment of female bodies and containment’s impossibility, revealing it as a powerful but not all powerful fantasy of patriarchal control.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
White, Purdue University.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
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