The Duchess as a moral ideal

The Duchess is by far one of the strongest female characters portrayed. She is confident in her personal choices and is continually forced to defend those choices to the men in the play. The contrast between how the Duchess is played and how her brothers perceive her actions point heavily to a precast notion of how a woman should act in almost EVERY situation. Her brother Ferdinand in particular has much to say about who his sister should marry as well as when. Despite the constant issues with her brother, the Duchess is still able to retain an amazing amount of power over her estate, considering that the Duchess is able to have three children by Antonio without her brothers discovering who the father is till much later. To me, this points to a certain amount of control over her environment despite several attempts by Ferdinand’s spy to infiltrate her secrets. I scanned through EEBO using the terms incest, bastard and widow in an attempt to see how these issues were dealt with in law. I found several transcripts of trials for women who killed their own bastard children to men who killed their wives over bastard children. I was surprised to find clustered in this search a positive towards women. “Female pre-eminence, or, The dignity and excellency of that sex above the male an ingenious discourse / written orignally in Latine by Henry Cornelius Agrippa ... “, a heck of a title for what seems to be a rather positive take on the superiority of women over men. While it is clear from the text that this is an attempt to pander to Queen Katherine, this article seemed heavily out of place with the majority of texts claiming women as loose and not to be trusted. Many of the stories in the article include women who leave their positions of high status to follow after banished husbands or women who go against political odds to show a higher moral authority. In the Duchess of Malfi, the moral high road seems to be given to the Duchess despite her murder. It is her brothers, the men, that show this same contrast between the sexes. The Duchess’s loyalty to Antonio over her brothers seems to put her in a higher category of praise than that of her evil brothers.
http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:13337383