Gender Roomours I

11      Habermann's last chapter explores slander's most complex formation and most potent fantasy, the "virtuous woman wrongly accused of incontinence" (135) or "slandered heroine" (chapter title). Slander in this context becomes a strong image of the "linguistic interpellation of the subject" (137) as explored by Judith Butler in that - as an assault against both property/matter and psyche - it stands for the interpellatory fusion of body and mind, things and words. In this context, Othello, with its absolutely unstoppable and almost joyful drive to kill Desdemona, appears as the tragedy of "an erotic embrace," in Stephen Greenblatt's words (141), of the interpellating power structures. Elizabeth Cary's Mariam, on the other hand, dramatises the female assertion of honour and subjectivity as tragic and figures the death of her heroine as active resistance against the paradoxical praise/slander dialectics and as "obedience to a higher principle" (150) beyond the world of patriarchal interpellation.

12      All in all, slander appears as the projection onto women of what is in fact a human fallibility - the dependence on an unstable language and a restrictive social order. This is perhaps the most profound insight of Habermann's book but ultimatley also the most frustrating one. Slander, as the site in early modern culture where a far-reaching cultural and social transition was negotiated and played out, was also the field where women appeared as the victims of this development - both discursively, in that they were associated with the 'archaic' and unruly sphere to be overcome, and practically, in that their political and social practices, or their participation in them, became increasingly marginalised. Women bore the brunt of what was of course a transitional development in the history of both sexes. In this respect, Habermann's exploration of the relationship of slander and (human) subjectivity is what impressed me most about her study, but it is also at this point that I would tend to disagree slightly. Compared to early modern theatricalised and feminised subjectivity, Habermann sees the subsequent period of the 18th century as a phase of the "autonomous" (136) and self-contained subject and of the on-stage celebration of self-silencing femininity. However, the problem of (self-)expression of the subject within (and by means of) political and legal institutions as well as cultural media is a transhistorical one, and both this problem and its gendered 'solutions' haunted the 18th century just as much as the 16th and 17th. Having read Habermann's book, one finds just as much exteriorised and feminised (inter-) subjectivity in Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments as in Renaissance treatises and just as much gendered slandering in William Wordsworth's tragedy The Borderers as in Othello.