The Duchess at the centre of John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi (1612-13) acquires a lot of her edginess in the original play from the fact that her husband has died before the action begins. She is a young – and according to her brother Ferdinand, “lusty” – widow, whose combination of financial independence and sexual experience makes many in her vicinity nervous.

The equivalent man would be called “eligible”, and receive a lot of invitations from women with marriageable daughters. But a woman in the same situation becomes the subject of a campaign of surveillance and torture which ends in her death.

The more I worked on Webster’s play, the more I noticed that the Duchess was part of a much larger cultural anxiety around the figure of the widow in English literature. She’s an extreme case, admittedly: few other fictional widows end up eating apricots grown in horse dung, kissing the severed hand of their husband or being strangled on the orders of their lycanthropic and potentially incestuous twin brother.

But a continual low charge hums around widows, from the comic grotesque of Widow Twankey to the alluringly threatening Black Widows of gangster novels. Via the Wife of Bath, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham and Aouda from Eighty Days Around The World, to take a handful nearly at random.

Of course it alters across the eras, but time and time again, the figure of the widow acts as a focus for drama.

Sometimes the charge seems to derive from the fact that she is no longer dependent upon any man, or socially “explained” via her relationship to a father or husband. Sometimes it comes instead from the way a widow is seen as over-defining herself in relation to a man no longer present.

Either way, widows in literature often hold the potential to disrupt social order in a variety of ways.

Widows and Pseudowidows

This article, however, is not about widows. It is about women who are not widows. Or rather, women who aren’t widows whilst still looking, sounding, or acting like them.

When considering famous widows in literature, it struck me that two of the names that sprang to mind – Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations and Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night – don’t technically fit the criteria.

Miss Havisham’s veil is worn to mourn the marriage that never happened, whilst Olivia’s is to remind her of her dead brother, whose memory stops her from wanting to receive suitors. Nonetheless, they both look to me as if they’re trying to take on the role, adopting some of the characteristics associated with grieving spouses.

They wear specific clothes to mark their separation from other people (and from their previous selves), withdraw from normal social life, and refuse to put themselves under the jurisdiction of men. Neither are exactly successful in their attempt to construct themselves positively within the role of a widow.

Miss Havisham has become an icon of “frustrated” and “twisted” womanhood, unsuccessful within the novel’s plot and the butt of jokes in subsequent culture. She becomes a “tragic” figure in both the classical and slang senses of the word: an image of wronged heroism in her own mind, and a sad bitter spinster to the world outside.

Her veil, usually a temporary garment to mark her passing between two states, becomes a fixture, blending with the cobwebs which now cover her wedding cake. In Miss Havisham, Dickens created a figure who memorably combines the revulsion and anxiety felt by Victorian (and later) society towards women who refuse to play out the social roles ascribed to them.

Olivia from Twelfth Night is similarly associated with a veil, at least at the beginning of the play. The first thing we hear about her is that for seven years the world “Shall not behold her face at ample view/ But, like a cloistress, she will veiled walk…all this to season/ A brother’s dead love, which she would keep fresh/ And lasting in her memory”.

When Viola (dressed as the male Cesario) manages to speak to her, Olivia prepares by putting her veil back on, setting up the comedy by-play in which Viola claims not to know who the lady of the house is, and the moment when Olivia pulls it back and demands “Look you, sir, such a one I was this present. Is’t not well done?”

Within the first act the grieving Olivia’s attempt to seclude herself is defeated by a combination of plot and Viola’s rhetorical skills. The play treats her mourning as one of the restrictive, self-imposed roles which so many of the characters are trapped in as the action begins. Orsino is locked into his schtick as self-obsessed Petrarchan lover, Sir Toby as the party knight who slinks home in the early hours of every morning, Malvolio as the image of Puritan rectitude and Olivia as the grieving veiled figure wandering inconsolably around her rooms as if her husband had just died.

These roles are all disrupted for the audience’s amusement and the characters’ correction during the ensuing scenes, with the play particularly conspiring to trick Olivia out of her image of herself as a grand widow. There’s an echo here of Miss Havisham, though in a very different key: women are not permitted to adopt the role of widow simply because they want to.

Both characters are diverted away from a successful performance as “pseudowidows” by the narratives in which they appear: Olivia to happy marriage and Miss Havisham to pathological bitterness and mockery.

‘A veil of wickedness’

In fact we don’t have to rely on my close-reading of these fictional texts to find anxiety around women “playing” at being widows. That harping on Olivia wearing a veil and walking secluded from men “like a cloistress” brings another group of women into play, whose apparent freedom from male jurisdiction has produced anger and revulsion in various eras.

I don’t have space to examine the way in which nuns in the Middle Ages navigated the rhetoric of “brides of Christ” alongside the reality that many entered the community after the death of a husband, or their social position. But one particular case stands out amongst the criticism of female religious orders: the bishop of Olmüt’s attack on the Beguines.

These women, who lived together in small self-governing groups, taking few vows and following the Rule of no specific order, were the subject of a lot of criticism in the later thirteenth century. Bruno, the bishop in question, wrote to the pope in 1273 to demand they be suppressed.

In R.W. Southern’s words:

he complained that…the women used their liberty as a veil of wickedness in order to escape the yoke of obedience to their priests and ‘the coercion of marital bonds’. Above all, he was indignant that young women should assume the status of widowhood against the authority of the Apostle who approved no widows under the age of sixty.

The bishop was referring to verses in the New Testament book of 1 Timothy, in which instructions are given for the way the “order of widows” should be run and who should be admitted. These women, who worked for the church and were provided with support, should all be over the age of sixty, have a good reputation and previously carried out pious works.

Obviously “widow” has a technical significance in this Biblical passage, but I was fascinated by Bruno’s line of attack: that the young women of the Beguines were setting themselves up as if they were widows, and thus escaping male authority.

His metaphor of a “veil of wickedness” once again acts as a focus for male anxiety over women who won’t accept their assigned role.

In part two of this post, I’ll delve into widow imagery in modern TV and film, including The Gilmore Girls and Four Weddings and a Funeral.

She’s just a hungry girl,
In a post-apocalyptic wooooorld…

When The Hunger Games came out, we were faced with possibly the most ludicrous and yet most predictable controversy in recent film history: was Katniss Everdeen too fat? More specifically, was Jennifer Lawrence the wrong body-shape to play the protagonist of these phenomenally successful novels, as a number of critics and fans said? One quotation from the New York Times can stand in for a lot of others:

A few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 21, her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission.

I’m not going to answer the question, because, y’know. But I do want to talk about why the question matters, because it’s not something so ludicrous we can dismiss it.¹

Cover design for an early UK release of the Hunger Games, by Jason Chan

Essentially, these readers were arguing the case for realism. Katniss has access to limited calories (though more than some other people, due to her own skills) – this is part of the plot, theme and indeed title of the novel – so an actor of a certain body type might be less able to inhabit the role convincingly onscreen. Just as Renee Zellweger visibly put on some weight to play Bridget Jones², Jennifer Lawrence was expected to appear strikingly underweight to embody the theme of the narrative. It’s a simple biological fact.

Except, of course, that fact assumes that the Hunger Games trilogy, beloved of teenage girls in particular, is taking place in a cultural vacuum. That it just happens to involve a young woman with a fraught relationship to food, who is contrasted to the decadence and self-indulgence of the inhabits of the Capitol and other characters. I’m absolutely not arguing that these are harmful books, or that they’re written thoughtlessly. Nor is it my place to tell young women how they should interact with art. But I am pointing out that novels don’t become popular for no reason, particularly YA novels with strong female leads.

The cultural factors which bear on the novels increase drastically when it comes to putting Katniss on screen. Again, there is an argument that the fictional situation happens to involve a character who would have a particular physical appearance. But that discourse of realism and “accuracy” totally ignores the hundreds of images which young women are bombarded with every day. It assumes that young women are never told they’re too fat or too skinny, that they lack self control or a sense of proportion, that their success in life is directly related to their dress size. It assumes that when actors like Jennifer Lawrence relax in between film-shoots, there aren’t packs of photographers with zoom-lenses feeding the websites which police their bodies and point out how they’ve “let themselves go”. Talk about “accuracy” is deeply naive because it ignores the way actors’ public personas are constructed, how their lifestyle is carefully confused with the roles they choose and how their bodies are used in advertising. It also ignores the power of performance to draw us into a fictional world and convince us of its reality, surely one of the main reasons anyone films a book in the first place.

So much for the hungry girl, but I don’t think we can ignore the post-apocalyptic world and its relevance to this controversy. Katniss isn’t just a young woman who finds herself short on nosh after the shops have shut, she’s the central figure in a futuristic wasteland. “Post-apocalyptic” has also come in for a bit of controversy recently, with Mark Kermode demanding with typically entertaining zeal that if the apocalypse is the end of the world, then how can a film be post-apocalyptic? If the apocalypse has happened, and there’s anything left to have a film about, then that my friend is a shoddy apocalypse and you want to demand another one, that works like it says on the packet. Highly pleasing as this is, and far be it from me to out-pedant the worshipful Doctor, but apocalypse does not mean the end of the world.

Apocalypse means “revelation” or the “lifting of the veil”. The book we get most of our apocalyptic imagery from – four horsemen, 666, Whore of Babylon riding on a seven-headed beast, you know the drill – is referred to as both the Apocalypse of St. John and the Book of Revelation. The fact that the most famous one is most frequently framed as a vision of the end of the world means that we tend to assume that they’re the same thing (if we’re not massive pedants and unhealthily obsessed with etymology – oh no, wait…). But the crucial aspect is the “lifting of the veil”, the revealing of a deeper reality which is obscured by the world around us.³

I’m not bringing this up for the sake of sheer quibble (though that would be reason enough), but because I think a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction still has this original meaning embedded in it. So many post-apocalyptic films and novels have this sense of being not only “after the disaster” but also “after the revelation”, trying to strip back the complexities and confusions of modern life to get to what is basic and essential about us. In The Road, that’s the emotional bond between father and son, in Mad Max the depravity of humans as pack animals, in Escape From New York it’s a macho code of integrity.⁴

And in The Hunger Games it’s a famished young woman. If a deeper reality is being revealed in this apocalypse, a profound truth about humanity which lies beneath the surface of modern life, then it’s one which looks very similar to the line peddled by fashion magazines, diet books and vast swathes of Hollywood’s output. That young women should look as if they’re slightly undernourished. The tendencies of post-apocalyptic fiction mean that this film risks holding that image up as not only an ideal to aspire to, but as the most “natural” and “essential” state for them to be in.

Again, this doesn’t make The Hunger Games a bad book or a bad film, but it means that the way Katniss Everdeen is portrayed onscreen cannot be reduced to a question of “accuracy” to a description in the book. A film which presents a teenage girl as the prototypical member of humanity is a wonderful idea – not least because she’s active, intelligent and fighting on behalf of her people – but this one sits at the intersection of some very powerful cultural influences which we can’t ignore.

• Jem Bloomfield is an academic who works on theatre and performance. A longtime BadRep reader, he’s very excited to be on the other side of the line, and the references to gin and tea in the other team bios make him feel very at home. Four years working on The Duchess of Malfi has given him a taste for writing about other things, so he blogs on culture, politics and gender at Quite Irregular.

1. Though it is ludicrous. Let no doubt be left about that.
2. No, I know. It’s not like I don’t have a problem with that too, but it’s awful in a slightly different way…
3. The titles of The Vision of Ezra and the Sibylline Oracles – both around during the first centuries of Christianity though neither made it into the Bible(s) – underline this point.
4. And with more time we could read right back from Snake Plissken’s tattoo to the Man With No Name, and wonder how much the classic Western is also driven by a desire to get its characters out into the oddly moonscapey deserts, to strip away the civilization. Or look at the fistfight between two astronauts which starts Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, suggesting that getting to the moon called earth morality into question…

That’s your lot! See you Monday!