The Gift: Economies of Kinship and Sacrificial Desire in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (Critical Essay‪)‬

John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore stages multiple exchanges of gifts, and operates within a complex web of erotic, spiritual, and sacrificial economies. The text engages with the metaphors of gift and exchange on several levels. The gift of a poisoned cup exchanges hands with fatal consequences, jewels are pledged and returned; a ring, the sacred memento of a dead mother, changes hands from husband to brother. Living whores trade places with dead mothers, and surrogate fathers transact on behalf of the heavenly one. Vows and pacts are made and broken, and over the entire play loom the shadows of myths and legends darkened with incest, rape, and sinister crossings between animal, human, and divine: Juno's incestuous love for her brother, Prometheus's transgression, and Jupiter's watery translation into a swan to perform the rape on Leda. This essay centers on the central crossing that illuminates all of these other gifts and exchanges. I situate the incestuous relationship between sister and brother - Annab ella and Giovanni - within the theoretics of gift exchange. Ford's play offers rich, metaphorical readings in terms of gift giving, social exchange, and sacrifice. As the title indicates, the essay acknowledges a debt to the central importance of Marcel Mauss's work in the discursive field of gift theory. But the essay also profits from the rich plurality of post-Maussian dialogues initiated by cross-disciplinary theoretical perspectives on gifts, exchanges, and social transactions. Conceived in the broadest possible terms, the gift itself is central to this essay. Yet the essay's announced focus on the nature of the gift simultaneously interrogates related concepts of reciprocity, obligation, and altruism, and allows it to participate in the interconnected discourses of anthropology, feminism, psychoanalysis, economics, and literary studies. While Mauss's crucial insights in The Gift (1925) shape the core of my argument, subsequent developments of those ideas inform my own understanding of the issue. Post-Maussian exchanges on the social, economic, and psychological ramifications of the gift have highlighted the rifts between market and gift economies and the culture of credit, between self-interest and altruism in gift-giving, and above all, inflected the critical debate about the notion of erotic economies and creative space for women with powerful agencies within social exchanges. This essay marks its entry at the crossroads of all of these exchanges.