Wrestling with the Eco-Self in John Webster's Duchess of Malfi

Abstract

The evocative lines of Eliot’s poem capture John Webster’s necro-obsession, a tilt toward morbidity that often seems to verge on madness. For example, The Duchess of Malfi (1623) obsesses over intransigent flesh, judged so because of its proneness to decay. The play’s Malcontent, Bosola, cogently outlines the problem, asserting, “Though we are eaten up of lice, and worms, / And though continually we bear about us / A rotten and dead body, we delight / To hide it in rich tissue” (2.1.57–60). Here, he evinces ecological awareness, insisting upon humans’ thorough embedment in the natural world. Yet this realization incites dread rather than comfort. Perhaps this is why Bosola subtly divides putrefying (hence rebellious) flesh from the sentient selves who vainly try to mask the inevitable. In this light, dualistic thinking (segregating mind from body, person from world) should be understood as a compensatory maneuver, a means of coping with morbid psychologizing. As Bosola’s complaint about fleshly frailty suggests, simply asserting biological imperatives will not yield a satisfying definition of humanness. The issue, most directly engaged by ecocriticism and in the related field of ecopsychology, is where to locate the boundary between self and world.