Wifely Conversion in <The Comedy of Errors>: Representation of Female Sacredness in Post-Reformation England
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This essay primarily discusses the character of the Abbess in The Comedy of Errors as an embodiment of the Protestant ideal for sacred women. She seems free from the conventional anti-Catholic accusation of hypocritical and deceptive Catholic clergy, and the transition of her religious and feminine identity to one of a faithful and productive housewife is an option ideally suggested by Protestant reformers for single women in post-Dissolution England. However, her “wifely conversion” is hardly sanctioned,for it is accompanied with a hypocritical, though only somewhat offensive, disguising of one’s true identity, and the ultimate goal of companionate marriage seems to be too hard to reach for women, who were considered to be corporeal, emotional, and immature by the same reformers. Her return to the family is not warmly welcomed, and her stage presence loses its due elegance when the corporeal duty of her symbolic pregnancy calls to mind the contradiction of her male body beneath. The vested Abbess on stage represents the intersection of contemporary antipathy toward Catholics, actors, and women, which demonstrates the representational crisis that Elizabethan theaters could not but face, the impossibility of staging the image of a sacred female saint, either Catholic or Protestant.
Abstract
This essay primarily discusses the character of the Abbess in The Comedy of Errors as an embodiment of the Protestant ideal for sacred women. She seems free from the conventional anti-Catholic accusation of hypocritical and deceptive Catholic clergy, and the transition of her religious and feminine identity to one of a faithful and productive housewife is an option ideally suggested by Protestant reformers for single women in post-Dissolution England. However, her “wifely conversion” is hardly sanctioned,for it is accompanied with a hypocritical, though only somewhat offensive, disguising of one’s true identity, and the ultimate goal of companionate marriage seems to be too hard to reach for women, who were considered to be corporeal, emotional, and immature by the same reformers. Her return to the family is not warmly welcomed, and her stage presence loses its due elegance when the corporeal duty of her symbolic pregnancy calls to mind the contradiction of her male body beneath. The vested Abbess on stage represents the intersection of contemporary antipathy toward Catholics, actors, and women, which demonstrates the representational crisis that Elizabethan theaters could not but face, the impossibility of staging the image of a sacred female saint, either Catholic or Protestant.
참고문헌 (15)
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