“I Never Made / So Sweet a Bargain”: The Purchase of Virginity and the De-territorialized Female Body in The Changeling

“I Never Made / So Sweet a Bargain”: The Purchase of Virginity and the De-territorialized Female Body in The Changeling

In Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, attempts to institute patriarchal control come to a double failure: tragic in the main plot and comic in the subplot. As marriage is primarily a family business, a chaste marriage is crucial to the upper class for the legitimate succession of property and the security or advancement of status. For this functional significance of female virginity as a marketed commodity, patriarchal authority dictates chastity in maids, but female sexuality is not entirely under the male control. A virginity test and the surveillance of women per se do not guarantee female chastity and obedience. Virginity is even purchased and faked. This forged virginity reflects the female fear of sexual guilt and responsibility but at the same time, shows how regulatory control over female sexuality is ineffective and ridiculous. Female characters ceaselessly attempt to de-territorialize themselves from masculine enclosure. The impasse of male mistrust and constraints exemplifies Michel Foucault’s argument about the inherent nature of resistance within power. The resilience of female sexual transgression in resistance to masculine power suggests that a boundary between chastity and whoredom is always porous and permeable.

In Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, attempts to institute patriarchal control come to a double failure: tragic in the main plot and comic in the subplot. As marriage is primarily a family business, a chaste marriage is crucial to the upper class for the legitimate succession of property and the security or advancement of status. For this functional significance of female virginity as a marketed commodity, patriarchal authority dictates chastity in maids, but female sexuality is not entirely under the male control. A virginity test and the surveillance of women per se do not guarantee female chastity and obedience. Virginity is even purchased and faked. This forged virginity reflects the female fear of sexual guilt and responsibility but at the same time, shows how regulatory control over female sexuality is ineffective and ridiculous. Female characters ceaselessly attempt to de-territorialize themselves from masculine enclosure. The impasse of male mistrust and constraints exemplifies Michel Foucault’s argument about the inherent nature of resistance within power. The resilience of female sexual transgression in resistance to masculine power suggests that a boundary between chastity and whoredom is always porous and permeable.