This book takes up sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representations of femininity, and traces a curious pattern: women pose a threat when they willingly conform to social conventions. Exemplary texts of the period tell stories of literal violence, describing chaste women who kill their rapists, constant wives who make marriage a space of enervating desire and debilitating commitment, and devoted mothers who destroy the fitness of children and the durability of patrilines. These mythologies of damage may titillate through their extravagance, but they also gesture toward the more common ways in which intentional virtue unsettles the tenets of heterosocial hierarchy. To explore...

This chapter focuses on intersections of faculty theory and heterosocial subjectivity, and examines how a philosophical discourse of the well-ordered psyche participates in secular arguments about feminine roles. However, I take my epigraphs from two iconic accounts of the relationship between personal volition and divine power. The first is from Augustine’s meditations on grace and free will, in which he sets a paradox: the proper use of free will requires an intention to act as has already been intended, so that virtuous subjects will themselves into accord with a prior meaning.¹ Purposeful work pursues determined ends, and good faith becomes...

The claim of linguistic mastery is almost always a joke on the speaker, its punch line delivered in two familiar propositions: subjects are alienated by their constitution in language, and language exceeds the speaker’s intent. Early modern rhetorical theory highlights these predicaments through a gendered account of figurative speech. Here as in my discussion of faculty theory, I take seriously the feminization and sexualization of language, and consider how an impulse to populate intangible schemes with discrete and intentional figures connects specialized discourses to ideas about social contract. Patricia Parker gives a concise account of the link between linguistic and...

In “The Alchemy of Style and Law,” Barbara Johnson recounts her experience of writing a commentary for the Harvard Law Review. The commentary addresses the last essay written by Mary Joe Frug, and in it Johnson takes up a sentence left unfinished at Frug’s death. Johnson poses the question, “How does this gap signify?”

I sent my commentary to the Harvard Law Review for its round of editorial responses. When it came back from its first reading, the editors had changed “How does this gap signify?” to “What does this gap mean?” This is not at all the same question....

For a romantic comedy, All’s Well That Ends Well has an intractable image problem. “It has been customary since the late nineteenth century to call All’s Well That Ends Well a ‘problem play,’ ” one introduction begins,¹ inviting a question which, despite the historical weight of custom and consensus, should be more than rhetorical: what exactly causes the trouble? Throughout the play, the feminine protagonist remains constant to an ideal of chaste marriage, yet her pursuits inspire uneasy reactions onstage and off. One source of disquiet, of course, is that they are pursuits: for choosing and chasing her desired object...

Shakespeare’s sonnet 136 offers a curiously heterogeneous meditation on will. Its final statement inspires speculations ranging from get-to-know-Shakespeare literalism to Joel Fineman’s claim concerning “the specific materiality of absence that regularly defines what is in a Shakespearean name.”¹ Gordon Williams, in A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language, cites its unsubtle puns to illustrate the use of “will” as genital slang.² The reference to lovers in remarkable yet unremarked number takes homosociality to an extreme, leading to Eve Sedgwick’s observation that “the men, or their ‘wills,’ seem to be reduced to the scale of homunculi, almost plankton, in a warm but...

In Measure for Measure, Isabella offers two propositions that bracket the play’s action as they address the threat of death: “O, let him marry her,” and “Thoughts are no subjects, / Intents but merely thoughts” (1.4.49; 5.1.453–54).¹ These statements instantiate a complex interplay of solution and problem: they signal a progress toward comic ends, but hint that it might founder in the gap between intention and act. As Isabella argues for Angelo’s inadvertent innocence, she describes a fault line that runs through Measure. Angelo does not carry out his plan, but his reprieve exposes a more comprehensive disjunction, which...

King Lear revolves around a king’s misguided will. The wordplay seems irresistible: Lear’s errant will causes him to make a bad will, to banish the hope of unified accord and abandon his kingdom to unworthy heirs. But if we suspend the retrojected teleology of hindsight, does the succession Lear constructs guarantee conflict, insurrection, and death? Social disintegration is not compassed in a single sovereign act; it expands and escalates throughout the play, and finds its most incisive articulation in feminine subjects who assume autonomous states. When Lear cedes kingdoms to two daughters and banishes the third to a rival realm,...

In the passage I take as my epigraph, John Aylmer conveys a nationalist agenda through the familiar conceit of the mother country, which evokes an equally familiar tautology: masculine subjects guard feminine objects, and preserve the material habitations of their own sovereign states. But Aylmer’s vignette, which concludes a defense of female rule and appears with the marginal gloss “Englandes voyce to hir children,” is curiously at odds with this scheme. A personified nation (“your natural mother”) commands obedience; ravishment of the female body (“to pluck me from you”) transmutes into displacement of the male body (“to cast you out...