Monstrous Women: An Invention of the Vulnerable Man

Husband murder, infanticide, witchcraft− these are just a few of the many female-gendered crimes that obsessed the Renaissance.  These women were repeatedly constructed as a type of monster in Early Modern documents, such as pamphlets, ballads, and dramas.  Literature concerning monstrous female characters were often accompanied by a warning label that read along the lines of: MEN BEWARE WOMEN, WOMEN OBEY YOUR HUSBANDS.  This image of women extended from public entertainment to advice pamphlets.  In Martin Parker’s ballad, “A warning for viues…,” he writes that “Those women that in blood delight,/ Are ruled by the Devill” (1.118-119) while one Alexander Niccholes states in his pamphlet, “A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving,” that the task of a man choosing a good wife “is a matter of some difficulty, for good wives are many times so like unto bad that they are hardly discerned betwixt” (216).  Both of these Renaissance texts were written by men, and both define evil as an innate characteristic of the female sex.  It is also important to note that this outburst of negative portrayals of women occurred during a time when patriarchal power was being challenged by the questioning of roles in society and male-dominated social institutions, such as marriage.  Marriage was one area in society where women were expected to obey and respect a man.  A woman murdering her husband, the man who was ideally her caretaker and master, was then considered a horrific insult to Renaissance society.  It is arguable, then, that perhaps these murderous, monstrous women were not the prominent issue in Early Modern England but were instead a patriarchal invention driven by a crisis of masculinity among Renaissance men; that is, perhaps men portrayed women as murderous in a desperate attempt to confine women to traditional female gender roles and simultaneously maintain societal masculinity, power, and privilege in society.

Although the wide variety of literature involving murderous women suggests that husband murder was a common crime, research on trends in criminal behavior during the Renaissance illustrates that “the popular representations of women’s crimes in the period do not in any sense reflect the actuality of either the gender balance in real criminal activity or the multifarious, mostly unsensational, ways in which women infringed the law” (Clark 36).  Instead, “female criminality is seen in terms of dysfunction, an aberration of the norms of feminine behavior” among the traditionally male category of crime despite the fact that “women constituted a minority of those prosecuted for most categories of crime” (Walker 4).  This means that the abundance of pamphlets and ballads written to address crimes such as the Arden murder were far from accurate in their portrayals of murderous women as a majority in Early Modern England; the fewer number of murderous wives was exploited due to peculiarity and feelings of shock that public felt at the offenses.  In fact, husband murder was such a compelling idea that it was considered a type of petty treason in the eyes of Renaissance law.  Matthew Lockwood defines those guilty of petty treason as “a servant who killed his or her master, an ecclesiastic who killed his superior, or a wife who killed her husband− because they owed their victim a special obedience” (33).  Lockwood continues to write that “in practice, petty treason was a crime predominately aimed at women in general and wives in particular” and that “Women appear as petty traitors…much more frequently than men, a fact that demonstrates both a heightened concern over rebellious women and a sense that petty treason” was a female-gendered crime (33).  Literature and court documents illustrate that women were prosecuted for petty treason much more often than men, with more than 10 times as many women as men being charged with the crime (Lockwood 33-34). 

It is apparent that gender discrimination was happening towards female murderers during the Renaissance.  Men are documented as being charged with treason less often yet there are no instances of men being charged with petty treason for murdering their wives; instead, this crime was viewed as murder, not treason.  Dolan states that this double-standard was due to the face that “killing a husband or master challenged patriarchal, hierarchical social order as killing a wife or servant did not” (317).  Ranking women as less human than men reinforces the monstrous woman.  It seems as though the patriarchal government imposed the law of petty treason on women in order to prevent them from stepping outside of their assigned roles in society and to protect men’s threatened masculine power.  

Sources for this page can be found here.