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Abortive Hedgehogs: Prodigies and Trans Animality in The Duchess of Malfi

Abortive Hedgehogs: Prodigies and Trans Animality in The Duchess of Malfi <p>Abstract:</p><p>This article offers a new interpretation of John Webster&apos;s tragedy The Duchess of Malfi (ca. 1613). It treats The Duchess of Malfi&apos;s stable of creatures, which includes grave-robbing werewolves, hermaphroditic hyenas, and vermiculated corpses, as an early experiment in trans-animality that emerges in the text&apos;s fixation on prodigies. According to religio-medical tracts of the Renaissance, prodigies were portentous signs of divine anger that included sweating statues, speaking animals, human-animal hybrids, and monstrous births, particularly hermaphrodites. As rigid distinctions between gender roles become unmoored, the category of the human also frays, a process culminating in Ferdinand&apos;s descent into hysterical lycanthropy. With an eye to the creaturely transformations threaded through the text, this article considers how the play&apos;s hermaphroditic imagination erodes the boundaries between human and nonhuman forms of life to explore what Mel Chen calls "the transness of animals."</p> http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies University of Pennsylvania Press

Abortive Hedgehogs: Prodigies and Trans Animality in The Duchess of Malfi

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies , Volume 19 (4) – Sep 24, 2020

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Publisher
University of Pennsylvania Press
Copyright
Copyright © JEMCS, Inc.
ISSN
1553-3786

Abstract

<p>Abstract:</p><p>This article offers a new interpretation of John Webster&apos;s tragedy The Duchess of Malfi (ca. 1613). It treats The Duchess of Malfi&apos;s stable of creatures, which includes grave-robbing werewolves, hermaphroditic hyenas, and vermiculated corpses, as an early experiment in trans-animality that emerges in the text&apos;s fixation on prodigies. According to religio-medical tracts of the Renaissance, prodigies were portentous signs of divine anger that included sweating statues, speaking animals, human-animal hybrids, and monstrous births, particularly hermaphrodites. As rigid distinctions between gender roles become unmoored, the category of the human also frays, a process culminating in Ferdinand&apos;s descent into hysterical lycanthropy. With an eye to the creaturely transformations threaded through the text, this article considers how the play&apos;s hermaphroditic imagination erodes the boundaries between human and nonhuman forms of life to explore what Mel Chen calls "the transness of animals."</p>

Journal

Journal for Early Modern Cultural StudiesUniversity of Pennsylvania Press

Published: Sep 24, 2020

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