“Some Women Are Odd Feeders”: Male Fantasies of Perverse Female Desire in 17th-Century English Tragedy

Abstract

The idea of taking a ‘frightful pleasure’ in things we are not supposed to like is a common feature of early modern literature but a challenge for early modern theories of literature, which typically privileged normative beauty and virtue. Concerns about the appeal of the ugly or evil become even more acute for early modern writers considering the possibility of women desiring people or qualities that run contrary to what men want them to want. Male characters in early modern drama often seek to engender disgust for female desires in order to police their potential disruption of the patriarchal order. Hamlet, Othello, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Changeling demonstrate how some early modern playwrights navigated the tension between allowing audiences to take a certain kind of pleasure from disgusting descriptions while reckoning with the use of disgust as a tool of patriarchal control. In these plays, male characters’ pervasive descriptions of diseased female desire are almost invariably shown to be fantasies in which the men project their own demonized appetites onto the women and then blame them for it.