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women and stereotypes in 'volpone'

Author: nouamaneer
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Women and stereotypes in ‘Volpone’

A work of literature is above all a world of literary techniques and devices. Some of the devices, of particular aims, may stem of common concerns of society, as they may stem of its own beliefs and conceptions. Before considering it a literary device, stereotyping is a social practice that is culture-specific. That means that every society’s culture has its own stereotypes that might come along with other stereotypes of other cultures, but that tend to be different in general considerations.

In the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, we read that a stereotype is a “fixed idea, image, etc that many people have of a particular type of person or thing, but which is often not true in reality.” Certain works of literature use stereotypes to supplement their works from reality. It can be also aiming at changing these stereotypes by including critical views on the stereotypes in themselves. Sometimes the aim of changing or obliterating the stereotypes might backfire to get deeper and deeper engraved in the culture’s literature and beliefs. It can even reach the level of universality. Generally, writers tend to fight back through their works as these stereotypes tend to be all results of a falsehood.

All is held to be true, the work of Ben Jonson ‘Volpone’ has got its own share of stereotypes, especially those that touches woman. This short paper is about the use of stereotypes relating to women in ‘Volpone’.

Two main women that contribute to the development of the play’s plot are: Celia and Lady would-be (Lady Politic would-be) and they are thus the only carriers of stereotypes. “Where are you, wife? My Celia? Wife?” (Corvino, Act two, Scene seven, line 1, page:119) stands as a reference to a sex role stereotype. As such it is believed that women should play the role of good wives. They are to serve their husbands, attend for their sexual satisfaction and “ease the heavy burden of sexual desire, a burden as heavy as a kicking ass” (The Bucket and The Rope), rear kids if they have and so on. It is, in fact, a case of a new Feudalism in which the man is the lord and the woman is the peasant who works for his living by showing servitude to the lord.

Earlier, we find Corvino saying, “death of my honor, with the city’s fool? A juggling, tooth drawing, parting mountebank? And at a public window? Where, whilst he, with his strained action and his dole of faces, to his drug lecture draw your itching ears” through which he lampoons his wife Celia for getting her head out of the window to participate in the mountebank show. Here, he gets into frenzy simply because he believes in the stereotype that a woman’s perfect place is home and that she should not appear before any stranger, especially if this stranger is a man. This goes back in origin to the belief that woman is the object of temptation and thus disloyalty and unfaithfulness.

Another stereotype that is strongly felt in the play is that women are prostitutes. Lady would be symbolizes this stereotype especially when she made a sign to Peregrine for a meeting for love. It is a stereotype that started to gain grounds and grounds in the British society as more cases of woman’s prostitution and adultery were witnessed.

Finally, we can give a guess to why all these stereotypes on women and not on men as they are usually the other part-contributors. That goes back to religion, I mean Christianity. In Christianity children are the product of a sin of which a woman is the trigger, thus, women are made to seem as originally and naturally sinful and wicked and stereotyped as such in negative terms.

Nouamane ERRIFKI