Susan is in dire straights without Charles. No one will help her except Francis, but she refuses help from him. Francis decides to help them anyway, helping Charles's charges to be dropped, paying all their debts. The couple contemplates giving Susan to Francis as a gift for the kindness.
A Woman Killed With kindness is a critically acclaimed seventeenth-century domestic tragedy by famous English dramatist Thomas Heywood. It which deals with the themes of murder, adultery, honour, friendship, kindness, virtue and debt, with the artistic employment of double plots.
essays on a woman killed with kindness
Symmetry can be drawn between the two plots as Charles Mountford and John Frankford both kill people, albeit, the latter does it passively with kindness. Also, by the end of the play, both Francis Acton and Anne Frankford find ways towards making amends to those they had wronged and seek to redeem themselves.
However, most important of all, in both the main plot and sub-plot, the treatment of women as a commodity, and the indication that the gateway to all resolutions is somehow related to the chastity of a woman, is difficult to ignore. The main plot also resonates with the sub-plot in its depiction of male friendships and how communities of men do not only exclude women from the narrative of decision making entirely, but also seem to have no qualms about using women as their most valuable form of capital for strengthening bonds between men.
Contributors Derek Attridge, Professor of English at Rutgers University and Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation, is the author of Well-weighed Syllables (1974), The Rhythms of English Poetry (1982), Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (1988), and is the co-editor, with Daniel Ferrer, of Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French (1984). He is currently editing a selection of essays by Jacques Derrida on literary texts, to be published by Routledge in 1990.
Diana E. Henderson, Assistant Professor of English at Middlebury College, has published an article on A Woman Killed with Kindness and is working on a study titled "Her Infinite Variety: The Social Performance of Elizabethan Lyric Poetry," in addition to essays on Elizabethan lyric and gender and on the theatrical framing of women in Jacobean tragedy.
Ellen Carol Jones, Guest Editor of this Special Issue, is Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University and Managing Editor of Modern Fiction Studies. She was Guest Co-Editor with Margaret Rowe of the MFS Special Issue on "Feminism and Modern Fiction" and has published articles on Woolf in Critical Essays on Virginia Woolf (1985) and on Joyce m James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium (1986), James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth (1988), and Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium (1989). Her current projects are a book on Joyce as read through feminist and poststructuralist theories, as well as an edited collection of essays of feminist readings of Joyce.
Patrick McGee, Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University, is author of Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce's "Ulysses" (1988), as well as articles on theory, Faulkner, and Woolf, and essays on Joyce published in the James Joyce Quarterly, Works and Days, and Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium. At present he is writing on "Ishmael Reed's Contradictions."
Women from the lower ranks dominated the production, preparation, and selling of certain types of food and drink in the early modern period and this is reflected in the literature also, for example in the manufacturing and selling of dairy produce and ale and the selling of specific foodstuffs such as herbs, oranges, and oysters. When these women feature in the literature of the period they are often mocked by other protagonists, as happens with Ursula the pig woman in Bartholomew Fair. Moreover, women who sell food are not to be trusted since their product is usually inferior in some way. Ursula sells tobacco and beer as well as pork, and cheats her customers by adulterating the tobacco with colts-foot and providing frothy beer that is taken away from the customer prematurely and then sold back to them.41 Jonson here suggests the medieval ale-wife who produced small, home-brewed batches of ale, often sold and consumed in her own house; the ale-wife was still a feature of early modern life although (like her ale) considered rather old-fashioned.42
You can tell a person to kill someone with kindness when you see that they have encountered a rude or cruel person. Instead of advising them do something cruel in retaliation, you advise them to be the bigger person and choose kindness and politeness. Not many people may be willing to smile and be nice to people who have slighted them, though, so only people who are strong and confident that they are right are the ones capable of killing with kindness.
In a casual conversation, you can say that a person killed someone with kindness when they chose to take the high road and fight violence with kindness. The idiom is used in a positive light, so someone who is said to have killed with kindness is a good person who chooses all other methods before deciding to be evil or cruel.
I think her anger is asking a question, and I think that question demands an answer. How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative? Fetishize: to be excessively or irrationally devoted to. Here is the danger of wounded womanhood: that its invocation will corroborate a pain cult that keeps legitimating, almost legislating, more of itself.
I feel deeply disturbed by your words. Not the ordinary disturbed which means bothered, rather, think more of a pile of leaves tossed by the wind. I'm male, but I have lived my entire life in the shadow of a creature I call female, such a subtle,mysterious creature, that I long to understand. Thank you for having the energyand the persistence to vocalize your thoughts. I feel the need to respond. My abilityto respond is completely inadequet, you overwhelm me- but I shall try a few words.I will say, at least, I understand the mask better, but there is still something lacking. Such a vivid horror, the evolution of the subtle psychology of identity. It develops through culture, through passed-down behaviors, through linguistics. We don't even see the traps that we fabricate.And yet, it would seem from an objective standpoint that a woman is, biologicallyspeaking, both of the capacity of her brain to register pain, and in the wiring ofher body to experience it, capable of a phenomenally high level of sensitivity.Perhaps Eve was weak. Maybe humans are flawed, humanity itself a mistake.Even you could say, with your present maturity, that in juxtaposition all thingsseem to have aquirred a mellow contrast, and each in turn as well as newexperiences that could not parallel past, each have lost the ability to seize the highlight, possess the one who does experience, transform them into an agent ofthat experience as well as the primary audience of it. Circumcision is a violentword, but you do not experience it as I have had to, and yet it has not brought mepain, but an inability to experience both some pain and some pleasure.In the end, perhaps, pain is meaningless. From a larger perspective, it doesn'tseem to teach much, but to cause problems, to break the psyche, the mind and the body. Perhaps we should find a way to avoid all pain. I would iterate at length onthat thought trend, but I think you can imagine what utopian possibilities are concievable, I leave the mental narration to you. Suffice it to say that our species has gained the ability to objectify, to remediate nature through artificeand complicated logic(read lies), and this transforms how we experience existance,as well as what we experience. Suffice it to say as a monkey you would not haveexperienced 9/10 of the wounds you have experienced. Suffice it to say you wouldbe just as happy, not to have eaten of the tree of subjective ability to assigngood and evil, but only the tree of nature.Again, setting aside my personal musings on the dispicableness of reality,I applaud you- champion your words. I shall not speak of how this seems to leavewoman alone if alive, betrayed and assaulted by a horribly alien male world. I shallnot speak of how this seems to leave male horrible and alien. I only ask thatthose who might read your words and these look to see that they apply to allwho feel pain, and I champion that you have explored the why we experience it theway we do. Thank you. If anything else does not register, if you do notappreciate anything else, understand that even to such a thoughtless anduncomplicated creature such as myself, your words have registered a unique quality and they will continue to impact how I understand others.--------------------But really. I must commit an antithesis. I also could be pursuaded to see this essay as a thesis with one purpose, to vindicate and validate your identityas a wound-dweller. Perhaps mind over matter is mind over body, is a real, if elusive,ability to not only block out pain but never experience it. Many experiences arenot objective but subjective. We can take them how we want to. One person'sfoot amputation is another's spilled mcfries. Should we discard the objectivemeasure of severity, if one might be said to exist, for the subjective whiles andwhims of a capracious conciousness? I ask only for a reply to this.
Joshuah, this may not be the reply you want. Althought, I am a woman, I tend to respond to distress with advice rather than consolation, hoping that if the problem can be rectified, there is no need for consolation. 2ff7e9595c
Comments