Early Modern Dramatizations of Virgins and Pregnant Women (Critical Essay‪)‬

Within the bonds of the marriage covenant and the walls of the family home, early modern man seeks to contain his bride. Something lurks in his mind, however; something is not quite right. Yet the comfortable categorizations of fairy or witch do not apply; he is dealing with, in all appearances, a regular woman. At certain transitional points women are in an in-between stage in reference to patriarchal female norms--when they are maidens, they are not quite wives, when they are pregnant, they are not quite mothers, and when they are old crones, men cannot be sure what they are because they are no longer beautifully bewitching or reproductively useful. Women at these three key phases seem to embody a power greater than themselves; they seem to have knowledge that escapes the rational framework of males and that connects with the natural world in an almost uncanny way. The witch trials of the early modern period are one manifestation of "a crisis of order, focusing on gender relations, that began around 1550, peaked in 1650, and passed by 1700"; however, representations of women in early modern plays dramatize this crisis with female characters that exude threatening magical power without the label of witch or she-devil cast explicitly upon them. (1) These types of characters show, in a sense, the roots and psychology behind superstitious beliefs of the time. Early modern women are Diane Purkiss's fairies as they embody "the dual promise of bliss and terror" by manifesting their power at key life stages and mystifying the rigid patriarchal definitions of women. (2) Virgins and pregnant wives appear in various incarnations throughout early modern drama. Maidens such as Margret in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Perdita in The Winter's Tale, the two sisters in John a Kent and John a Cumber, and the sisters in The Birth of Merlin encompass not only a natural virginal beauty but also an agency that can keep these women perpetually out of the domestic space relegated to them by men (as some maidens demonstrate by choosing the convent over the kitchen). (3) Once in that domestic space, however, we find pregnant wives--perhaps best illustrated by Hermione in The Winter's Tale and Joan Go-to-'t in The Birth of Merlin--who respectively demonstrate female power allied and unallied with nature. The figure of the virgin and the pregnant wife are particularly worth examining as they present different-yet-connected configurations between women and the natural world--a certain kind of magic--and the attempts to contain, control, and perhaps understand that magic by the patriarchs at large.