for the love of a degree

In Elizabeth Cary’s “The Tragedy of Mariam,” at least two conflicting views on the autonomy of women are presented and unevenly supported. Mainly, we have Mariam, arguably the heroine, who is faithful to her husband but questions him and speaks her mind; and we have Salome, who is unfaithful and more outspoken than Mariam. Mariam is condemned by the chorus and put to death by her husband, whereas Salome gets away with her indiscretions. By putting a speech on divorce in the mouth of Salome, Cary seems to be arguing that the important thing is not speech, but action. Mariam refused to act in any way, and she was killed. Salome acted wrongly, was unfaithful to multiple men, but she protected herself–and she survived. As is made obvious in the play, divorce won’t win you friends, but it might be worth it anyway.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20 seems to compare men and women in ways that almost equate them, using phrases like “master-mistress of my passion.” Shakespeare also uses wordplay, most notably saying that Nature “prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure.” So he’s definitely working from the Galenic one-sex model, I’d say. In Twelfth Night he does a lot of the same things, only in different ways. Sex/gender in the play is very fluid—not very stable at all. Shakespeare has Olivia fall in love with Viola while she is dressed as a man, and actually essentially marry her when Sebastian shows up at the end. He also has Orsino act like he isn’t in love with Viola-Cesario up until the very end, when he marries him…I mean her. Because, of course, same-sex attraction is unacceptable in Shakespeare’s time, even though, wait, aren’t the sexes the same?

The Houyhnhnms are ideal in that they suffer from no vices, diseases, or sorrows. They do not quarrel with one another or desire power over one another, and they rarely die from anything other than old age. These virtues, though, come at the expense of emotion. Houyhnhnms do not appear to experience joy, anger, or sadness. The parents are not attached to their children, and vice versa. They feel toward their mates the same way they feel toward every other Houyhnhnm—pleasantly affectionate. They have no concept of love, and do not mourn one another’s deaths. Similarly they do not mind dying themselves. This last point supports the idea that emotion makes life worth living. Without it, the only reason to exist or to do anything is to propagate the species. If humans could and did abandon their emotions, quality of life would be much higher–and no one would appreciate it.

John Donne covers a lot of ground in his Holy Sonnets, as evidenced by two of his most famous works: Holy Sonnet 10 (Death, be not proud, though some have called thee), and Holy Sonnet 14 (Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you/as yet but knock). These two sonnets are similar most obviously in that they both address “forces of nature,” so to speak, although technically of course God would have been seen as a force outside of nature. Both make strong use of words associated with war and violence—both use “overthrow,” for example, and speak of injury and captivity. However, the first addresses personified Death, while the second addresses God, who can be seen as Death’s opposite. The conceits of each poem support this opposition: Death is compared with sleep and stripped of his power: “from rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,/much pleasure…thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men”.  God, on the other hand, is with highly sexual language begged to overpower and “ravish” the speaker: “take me to you, imprison me, for I,/except you enthrall me, never shall be free,/nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”