Painting Women: Images of Femininity in Jacobean Tragedy

Abstract

Gloriana's skull functions here and throughout the play as a grisly emblem uniting two dialectical notions of femininity: woman as ideal, as an object of adoration, and woman as death's head, as a figure which evokes fear and hostility. Both of these images are, in effect, reflections of Vendice's mind, masculine perceptions of woman that transform her into extreme projections of man's own fears of mortality. Gloriana's skull is, for Vendice, a kind of fetish, a sallow picture, or studies' ornament. It has become a fragment of a once whole, living woman. Yet, as it plays a past

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