Pinpoint Optimism

What a rich, surprising work The Duchess of Malfi has turned out to be. It was gruesome, tragic, a brutal portrait of reality, and yet, at the end, I find myself counting it one of the more optimistic stories we have read this semester. Written in the Jacobian period (under King James, rather than Queen Elizabeth), it falls along what Dr. Staub describes as a "festering" portion of the literary timeline. But I think it offers an independency of hope that we have seen nowhere else to date.

I did not think so at first. The storyline grew darker and darker as the play progressed. Ferdinand pulled a Hamlet, the Duchess I had learned to love died imprisoned, the rest crumpled in her absence... Then, at the eleventh hour (and fifty-ninth minute - literally the last page), Webster introduces a solitary heir to her legacy in a single son to escape the massacre. To be fair, the first time I read it, I was not impressed. It was the quintessential "too little, too late." As usual, our class discussion gave me a broader view of the topic.

The Duchess of Malfi is a tale about aspirations against all odds. We saw this too in Dr. Faustus and Paradise Lost. In those, however, the protagonists' struggles ended in utter, irredeemable tragedy. Granted, the Duchess did not appear to fare much better, with one child left to carry on her name, and hardly a body standing to support him, but a single flame means a great deal compared to unbroken darkness. She diverted the patrilinear cycle; the child of a commoner took the throne. Her love had but a few years, but in those years it thrived, and triumped over tradition. She took the reins of her own life, and though she suffered the consequences, fate could not claim her.

Another interesting difference between this text and that of Dr. Faustus and Paradise Lost was that the protagaonist seemed to die with visions of heaven. This had two curious implications for me. For one, the Duchess was not damned for her actions. To her, at least, her death was not an end except to suffering, though others did not fare as well. Also, the fact that the Duchess saw heaven as a haven made something beautiful of it (I, for one, trust her opinion). In other works, all we have seen of heaven is force and judgment.

In The Duchess of Malfi, then, we get in its unpolished view of humanity not only a taste of free will that may not go entirely awry, but a promise of a second reality that may be sympathetic. There is no fairy tale happy ending, which would be, at any rate, too incredible for comfort. But there is a taste of hope, albeit faint and unexpected. That is a start.