4 - Wrestling with the Eco-Self in The Duchess of Malfi

Summary

Abstract

This chapter reassesses the macabre nihilism of The Duchess of Malfi, showing how the distinctive chill of the Websterian universe derives from a relentlessly materialist conception of humanness. Enforcing this definition of the human, the play epitomizes early modern tragedy’s reluctant ecology, which concedes but laments humans’ indistinguishability from the rest of nature. Webster offers a provocative meditation on this theme, so his play anticipates the hypermaterialist hegemony currently governing academic work and pervading the varied domains of popular culture. By negative example, Webster confirms the necessity of harmonizing self and world so that the former is recognizably coterminous with the latter yet capable of periodically claiming some distance from it.

Keywords: Ecocriticism; eco-self; indistinction; materialism; Webster; Duchess

The decision to include John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi (1623) in a genealogy of the eco-self might strike some readers as misguided or perverse, given this playwright’s relentless focus on fragmentation and decay, which puts the self under siege. As T. S. Eliot reminds us in “Whispers of Immortality,” “Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin” (1–2). In this provocative passage, Eliot accords Webster something akin to x-ray vision, an ability to pierce flimsy exteriors and see the truth—rotting and putrefaction—lodged within a fragile dermal coating. As this chapter seeks to demonstrate, The Duchess of Malfi constitutes a reliable index of psychological preoccupations precisely because it obsesses over fleshly frailty, concerns that acquire a fresh resonance in our own era of hypermaterialism. With this in mind, Webster’s play enables certain refinements to the eco-self.

At times, as Eliot intimates, Webster’s necro-obsession verges on madness. Ironically, however, psychic dis-ease does not originate in a fever-swamp of delusions or hallucinations. Rather, as The Duchess of Malfi demonstrates, trouble ensues from a putatively realistic apprehension, a de-mystified, demythologized version of humanness understood to be precisely coterminous with embodiment. Notably, the declining status of the human paralleled the increasing vulnerability of the natural world, plagued as it was by a series of interlinked crises. Given the rampant environmental insecurities of the era, including hunger, disease, and deforestation, a blazing awareness of vulnerability makes sense.