Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T08:12:43.715Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Ocular proof: sexual jealousy and the anxiety of interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2009

Get access

Summary

Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!

Othello III.iii. 174

In all the discussions so far, men have shown a tenacious preoccupation with female chastity. It thus seems appropriate to conclude this study by addressing that singularly most dreadful exhibition of anxious masculinity in the early modern period: sexual jealousy. Burton is not at all unusual in his depiction of jealousy as the most prominent and devastating of the melancholy tempers: “it ought to be treated as a Species apart,” he writes, “being of so great and eminent note, so furious a passion, and almost of as great extent as Love itself” (821). Burton's humoural psychology finds in jealousy perhaps the most severe example of the body's perturbed and imbalanced fluidity, the most complete overthrow of the rule of reason. But he also suggests throughout The Anatomy, mostly in his citations of numerous other writers on the subject, that male sexual jealousy is an unavoidable consequence of love and desire and, as such, a constituent part of masculinity. This is true for Burton because all men share the same material basis for jealousy as a result of their volatile fluidity; indeed, jealousy and melancholy are so inextricable that Burton wonders which is the cause and which the effect. In the following discussion, I suspend the humoural explanation that this period took for granted in order to pursue jealousy as an anxiety and a potential source of violence engendered in men by an economy that constructs masculine identity as dependent on the coercive and symbolic regulation of women's sexuality.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×