미들턴의 『과부』에 나타난 과부의 낭만적 환상과 구혼자들의 현실 인식
The Widow’s Romantic Fantasy and Her Suitors’ Reality in Middleton’s The Widow
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This paper examines the widow hunt in Thomas Middleton’s The Widow, arguing that the male suitors’ fantasy about a rich widow reflects their urgent need to seize the economic opportunity she offers. This paper also suggests that a rich widow pursues a fantasy of romantic love because she is well aware that her suitors woo her not for her virtue but for her wealth. A rich widow’s remarriage was anxiety-provoking in early modern England. Wives as femmes covert did not have any property rights, but widows as executrices could wield their legal and financial power at their own will. This circumstance imposed an anxiety on suitors about a rich widow, who was socially superior to, and older, wealthier, and more experienced than them. To handle this threatening gender reversal, suitors tended to sexually objectify a rich widow as a lusty widow, who is susceptible to her insatiable desire and hastens to remarry. The lusty widow stereotype thus could function as a compensation for a transaction between a rich widow’s wealth and her suitors’ masculinity. In The Widow, a young prodigal Ricardo puts a rich widow Valeria into a violent courtship because he wrongly assumes that she is a rich and hence lusty widow. But his sexual prowess ironically reveals his bitter reality that he has no other merit than his virility to take possession of Valeria. Meanwhile, as a clever and willful widow, Valeria is not blind to a disparity between romantic fantasy and reality. She puts her suitors to the test to find out whether they really love her by feigning to be penniless. Her test manifests that she is not and will not be under male control. Ricardo passes her test, but her remarriage to him does not seem to be the best bargain for her, because he covets both her body and her money. Consequently, The Widow shows that the lusty widow stereotype is an ideological construct, and Valeria’s romantic fantasy ends up being wishful thinking.
Abstract
This paper examines the widow hunt in Thomas Middleton’s The Widow, arguing that the male suitors’ fantasy about a rich widow reflects their urgent need to seize the economic opportunity she offers. This paper also suggests that a rich widow pursues a fantasy of romantic love because she is well aware that her suitors woo her not for her virtue but for her wealth. A rich widow’s remarriage was anxiety-provoking in early modern England. Wives as femmes covert did not have any property rights, but widows as executrices could wield their legal and financial power at their own will. This circumstance imposed an anxiety on suitors about a rich widow, who was socially superior to, and older, wealthier, and more experienced than them. To handle this threatening gender reversal, suitors tended to sexually objectify a rich widow as a lusty widow, who is susceptible to her insatiable desire and hastens to remarry. The lusty widow stereotype thus could function as a compensation for a transaction between a rich widow’s wealth and her suitors’ masculinity. In The Widow, a young prodigal Ricardo puts a rich widow Valeria into a violent courtship because he wrongly assumes that she is a rich and hence lusty widow. But his sexual prowess ironically reveals his bitter reality that he has no other merit than his virility to take possession of Valeria. Meanwhile, as a clever and willful widow, Valeria is not blind to a disparity between romantic fantasy and reality. She puts her suitors to the test to find out whether they really love her by feigning to be penniless. Her test manifests that she is not and will not be under male control. Ricardo passes her test, but her remarriage to him does not seem to be the best bargain for her, because he covets both her body and her money. Consequently, The Widow shows that the lusty widow stereotype is an ideological construct, and Valeria’s romantic fantasy ends up being wishful thinking.
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