Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Spring 1994 v34 n2 p425(18)

The appropriation of pleasure in 'The Magnetic Lady.' Ostovich, Helen.

Abstract: Ben Jonson's play, 'The Magnetic Lady,' belittles women and shows that pleasure is not a woman's prerogative. Although, women's ability to give birth to children is recognized, Jonson dismisses this ability as merely physical and contemptibly comical. The play also shows that when women are allowed to take control of their own sexuality and procreativity, the dominant male order is jeopardized.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1994 Rice University

What is true pleasure, and who is allowed to have it? Or rather, who is allowed to have her? In The Magnetic Lady, Ben Jonson reduces these questions to matters of gender and class, allegorizing pleasure as two nubile fourteen-year-old girls, one the heiress Placentia, the other her foster-sister and waiting-woman Pleasance. Both names suggest delights ranging from sweet amiability to sexual gratification, although neither girl offers much beyond her own ignorance in the way of personality. But then Jonson does not offer them as anything other than figures of male fantasy, to be contemplated and competed for in the presence of other men, ratifying and ranking male victories or losses. The girls are conventional objects of desire, tokens of economic and social exchange, female bodies whose reproductive power men appropriate as vehicles for transmitting and securing property. These blanket binaries inhibit more complicated characterizations that might otherwise mitigate the satirical context. But they do allow Jonson to establish the rightness of this system of feminine "nature" in the service of masculine "culture" by showing what happens when a household of women reappropriates maternity and motherhood in the course of their own pursuit of independent pleasure or profit.

The very idea of women taking control of their own sexuality and procreativity threatens the dominant male order with illegitimate heirs that might topple the established rule. Though The Magnetic Lady develops the most explicit matriarchal takeover bid in Jonson, the most compelling image of that horror appears in Jonson's unfinished last play, The Sad Shepherd.(1) There, the witch Maudlin describes the process by which her newly dead mother transmitted magic power to her through an embroidered belt. In relating this story to her own daughter, Maudlin implies that the matriarchal line will perpetuate itself through similar acts of female generation. The belt itself is both a sign and a product of sexual sovereignty:

A Gypsan lady, and a right beldame, Wrought it by moonshine for me, and starlight, Upo' your grannam's grave, that very night We earthed her in the shades, when our dame Hecate Made it her gang-night over the kirkyard, With all the barkand parish-tikes set at her, While I sat whirland of my brazen spindle. At every twisted thrid my rock let fly Unto the sewster, who did sit me nigh, Under the town turnpike, which ran each spell She stitched in the work, and knit it well.

(II.iii.39-49)

Independent female power emerges as malevolently unnatural, associated with howling dogs, eerie nights, and ghastly mortality. Hecate, originally goddess of women and nurturer of children, though by Jonson's day identified solely with witchcraft, presides over the graveyard scene with uncanny moonlight. The graveyard itself is "Under the town turnpike" at a crossroads, traditionally the site of hauntings. Perhaps as a sign of her associations with sorcery and magical transformation, Hecate was occasionally portrayed as three bodies, a concept which Jonson links here with the Three Fates, who spin, wind, and finally cut the thread of human life. The most remarkable and shocking evidence of maleficent witchcraft resides here in the phallic exercise of spindle and thread. This activity suggests the mimicry of male sexuality by women who not only exclude men but also usurp male privilege simply by redefining the spinster's tools, tokens of a woman's place. A similar redefinition dominates The Magnetic Lady: birthing and childcare become powerful weapons in the hands of a cabal of middle-aged women who reinterpret female sexual pleasure and fecundity for the perpetuation, biological and financial, of the matriarchal line. These independent women are engaged in activities that violate orthodox expectations for their gender. Like the emasculating women of The Masque of Queens, the hermaphroditic Ladies Collegiate of Epicoene, and the chorus of ignorant she-critics in The Staple of News, they invite conflicting responses from the (male) audience, who perceive a confederacy of women bent on achieving power as both "threatening and ludicrous."(2)

In The Magnetic Lady, the threat of the world turned upside down is compounded by the implications of witchcraft in the inverted household hierarchy: servants rule their employer while scolding and brawling among themselves.(3) The hero Compass describes members of Lady Loadstone's household as contentious, "so diametrall / One to another, and so much oppos'd" (I.i.7-8), that they cannot make it through half the day without quarrelling.(4) In an age of "anxious insistence on absolute sex difference," men were expected to be sturdy and robust, and women to be soft, delicately tender, and submissive.(5) Maleness implied autonomous thinking, clear decision-making, and direct action, whereas femaleness signified its opposite: emotionality, dependence, indecisiveness, requiring control by a male. Jonson takes pains to demonstrate that these gender binaries benefit society. Women who cannot conform undermine the existing social structures, as Jonson makes clear in his depiction of the effete males connected with the household. Although Lady Loadstone herself is first described as "a brave, bountifull Housekeeper, and a vertuous Widow" (Ind.106-107), her femininity catches her in a bind of contradictory gender roles. Despite her authority as head of a household, she cannot exercise her power efficiently. She needs to find a suitable husband for her niece Placentia, but cannot rely on her own judgment. With the exception of Compass, the companion of her late husband, Lady Loadstone's male advisers are vulgar, duplicitous, and exploitative. Doctor Rut and Parson Palate, as their names imply, pass judgments based on physical sensation. Her brother, Sir Moth Interest, Placentia's financial trustee, only wants to retain control of the niece's fortune, whether the girl marries or not. Lady Loadstone is merely confused by the competing versions of manliness among Placentia's suitors: Practice, the lawyer whose real desire is for public office and who in any case prefers the other girl, Pleasance; Sir Diaphanous Silkworm, the effeminate courtier; and Bias, the money-grubbing underling who, for instant cash in hand, would sell out Placentia's rights to her uncle. In fact, when a real man, Captain Ironside, disrupts Placentia's birthday party by throwing Sir Diaphanous's wine in his face and drawing his weapon in disgust at this "halfe man . . . perfum'd braggart" (III.ii.4-5), Lady Loadstone is so unnerved by the display of potent masculinity that she retires to her room in a near-suicidal swoon. There she remains virtually until the end of Act IV, fueling prejudices against female authority by abdicating responsibility in the crises that assail her house.

This view of women, I hasten to say, does not square with the evidence of women's domestic power as wives and widows in the seventeenth century,(6) nor does it square with Jonson's depictions in other plays where the women develop fuller characters outside the satiric or ironic outline demanded by the plot. Although the Lady Pecunia in The Staple of News is as empty and malleable a cipher as either of the two girls in The Magnetic Lady, Grace Welborne in Bartholomew Fair has sense and dignity. But then Grace refuses to become the kind of woman who supersedes a man's role as a head of household: she will not marry Cokes because she cannot respect him, even though she might gain control of his estate, "gouerne him, and enjoy a friend, beside" (IV.iii.15). Mistress Fitzdottrel of The Devil is an Ass has endured matrimony to a fool, but rather than demean herself by taking a lover, she prefers to take the other half of the political alternative which Grace rejects: to seize control of the estate which her husband has almost squandered away, and thus "govern him" as well. Perhaps the most fully developed woman of sense in Jonson is Prue in The New Inn, but the failure of that play on stage might have prompted a return to the more popular and demeaning views expressed in The Magnetic Lady.

The real power in Lady Loadstone's household is her female adviser and "sometime governing Gossip" (I.iii.41), Polish. Polish is the hic mulier or man-woman who determines to wrest her share of authority from a system that denies women the enjoyment of an "authoritative self."(7) She has engineered the long-term plot that exploits female control of birthing and childcare, and thereby subverts male control of marriageable virgins. Fourteen years ago, she switched her own infant with the orphaned heiress, planning to profit eventually from the Steel family fortune. In devising this plan, Polish recognized the value of women as tokens of male pleasure, sexual and economic: "They have no significant power or influence within a system which is controlled by men and works to their benefit. Men, not women, have the power to determine the value of women in the exchange and the meanings associated with them."(8) That is, in a phallocentric culture, men appropriate female reproductive power and use it to affirm patriarchal law: the father names and possesses the child, and the woman is merely the "conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it."(9) In her bid to appropriate pleasure for herself, Polish usurps the male appropriative function by assigning herself the right to name the child and place a value on her. But her construction of values is exposed as a lie by Compass, the superior male assigner of meaning, in a manipulative game that counters hers and restores patriarchal law. The contest between Compass and Polish pits fertility, the sign of a woman's strength, against chastity, the male control of that strength.(10) Polish is outdone in this battle because the rules in place, despite her rearrangement of the details, are still male rules, and she cannot finally defeat the male construction of female duality and duplicity represented by her own daughter, false Pleasure, and corroborated by her foster-daughter, true Pleasure.

The true condition of Placentia, the false pleasure, is what really shapes each act of the play. And her true condition, not recognized until the end of Act III, is that she is pregnant. In Act I, Dr. Rut attributes her physical weakness and odd cravings to "greene sickness," the affliction of post-pubescent virgins with strong biological urges. Hence, the birthday-party assembly of suitors, and the pressing need to fix a wedding-day. In Act II, Dr. Rut decides her bloated abdomen is a "Tympanites":

A wind bombe's in her belly, must be unbrac'd, And with a Faucet, or a Peg, let out, And she'll doe well: get her a husband.

(II.iii.19-22)

Pushed by Polish's desire for a titled alliance as well as by Placentia's apparently involuntary desire for a man, Lady Loadstone chooses Sir Diaphanous as the husband-to-be. Both Polish and Placentia seem to prefer him on the basis of his showy appearance and his influence at court. Placentia thinks "The Courtiers is the neater calling" (II.i.14), and Polish rhapsodizes:

O fine Courtier! O blessed man! the bravery prick't out, To make my dainty charge, a Vi-countesse! And my good Lady, her Aunt, Countesse at large!

(II.iii.70-73)

At this point Jonson is playing on the conventional "saint or slut" duality in characterizing the two girls. The obscenity of Polish's description is very close to the surface: the courtier seems sexually well furnished ("prick't out"), or at least fashionably well equipped enough to turn a girl into a "Vi-countesse"--punning on "vice" and "cunt"--with the help of her "aunt," the common euphemism for "bawd." This same joke is repeated in a subsequent conversation between Placentia and Sir Diaphanous:

Placentia. And will you make me a Vi-countesse too? For, How doe they make a Countesse? in a Chaire? Or 'pon a bed? Diaphanous. Both wayes, sweet bird, Ile shew you.

(II.v.76-78)

While Sir Diaphanous teases Placentia with sexual jokes, Compass warns Pleasance directly against sexual involvement with his rival for her love, the lawyer Practice. Curiously enough, Compass's language is just as heavily--perhaps even more crudely--loaded with explicit sexual puns:

But keepe your right to your selfe, and not acquaint A common Lawyer with your case. If hee Once find the gap; a thousand will leape after.

(II.vii.9-11)

The assumption here is that an unsupervised virgin, once initiated sexually, will devour all males in her path. Compass's unmerited reprimand emphasizes the value placed on a bride's chastity. "Acquaint," "case," and "gap" all refer to female pudenda, and "common" suggests engaging in brothel (or "leaping-house") traffic: whores were called "common customers." Whereas Placentia's reception of such language is ambivalent, Pleasance seems genuinely confused by it:

This Riddle shewes A little like a Love-trick, o' one face, If I could understand it. I will studie it.

(II.vii.12-14)

The other parallel to this concern with illicit sexuality is Sir Moth Interest's unnatural breeding of Placentia's money, which keeps compounding and expanding, very like Placentia's abdomen. Sir Moth defends his usury as an imitation of human generation: "this present world being nothing, / But the dispersed issue of the first one" (II.vi.58-59). In Act III, the violence at the dinner table frightens Placentia into labor, and her value as a bride plummets. Her labor ironically resolves the quarrel between Ironside and Sir Diaphanous, since the captain's attack on the unworthy suitor has provided the evidence that saves Sir Diaphanous from an unworthy bride and someone else's bastard. Like Sir Moth's illicitly generated funds, the girl has proved to be "Of light gold. / . . . And crack't within the Ring" (III.vii.19-20) and the child, a "slip" or counterfeit coin (III.vii.26-27). The male reaction to this news is to "laugh, and geere at all" (III.vii.10).

Jonson's jeering attitude towards the women in this play has been clear all along. The critical framework of the play establishes the crucial goal of subordinating female figures to male control. Although the printed play suggests an unusually respectful emphasis on women and their place by listing the six female roles first in the dramatis personae, this apparent female priority over the male roles is an illusion soon dispelled. The induction and the choruses between the acts are arguments among men clearly aimed at the privileged male audience. Here, as in most of the play proper, women are either absent or silent. Of the two on-stage spectators, Damplay has been characterized as the unruly audience, unable to discern true art from false and, like the women of the Loadstone household, twisting the evidence to suit his own pleasure. Significantly, he is the only member of the chorus to object to what he calls "a pittifull poore shift o' your Poet, Boy, to make his prime woman with child, and fall in labour, just to compose a quarrell" (III.Chorus.1-3). But Damplay's attempted defense of women simply labels him unobservant and mistaken, as Jonson's theatrical spokesman, the Boy-apprentice, contemptuously points out. Damplay's petulant reply, "I care not for marking the Play: Ile damne it" (line 19), stamps him as temperamentally feminine, illogical "Even to license, and absurdity" (line 26), in the Boy's words. The rational male audience is expected to discount Damplay's opinions.

From the male audience's point of view, Placentia embodies soulless mindless fecundity, outside the meaning conferred by patriarchal control. Conception itself, according to medical theory since Galen, is a sign of female sexual pleasure, usually moderated within marriage; conception outside marriage suggests the excessive pleasure in sexuality assumed to run rampant in whores and other bastard-bearers.(11) Placentia's belly, unsanctioned by holy matrimony, proclaims her fallen status; the shifting of her shape, like the shifting of her identity, announces her transgression of the laws of church and state. Act IV thus focuses on the delivery of the child and the concurrent travail of the gang of women--Polish, the nurse Keep, and the midwife Mother Chair--to protect Placentia and themselves from the consequences. They plan to deny the birth and convince Lady Loadstone that her niece has merely suffered "a fit o' the Mother" (IV.vii.29)--that is, hysteria. The midwife is the chief organizer of this scheme: she has sent the baby to a wet nurse, prepared an herbal remedy that will get the new mother up and about, ordered the bed linen bleached, and calmed the frantic recriminations between Polish and Nurse Keep: "Come, come, be friends: and keepe these women-matters, / Smock-secrets to our selves" (IV.vii.40-41). Such secrecy among women, especially over childbirth, raises threats of false attribution of paternity, substitution of children, and infanticide, all skeletal fears Jonson rattles in the last two acts of the play. The fact that Placentia's baby is a boy increases the seriousness of such threats. Women's exclusive control of childbirth implies, as Adrienne Rich puts it, "a potentially dangerous or hostile act, a conspiracy, a subversion" of legitimate male rights.(12) Further, the assumption that any midwife is a witch makes Mother Chair--that "Mother of Matrons" (IV.vii.18), "mighty Mother of Dames" (V.ii.21)--fit in neatly with the demonized motherhood articulated in Polish's and Keep's hysterical denunciations of each other as "witch," "Gipsey," "Hag," and "She-man-Divell" (IV.iv). Their innately female inability to control their emotions and their tongues is the loud and explicit means by which Compass learns the women's "horrid secret" (IV.iv.31).

The motif of childbirth in Act IV thus has issue on many levels: the true heiress, Pleasance, now drops into Compass's hands along with a valuable court appointment he has been expecting and even the delivery of a blank marriage license. Compass marries the girl and buys the support of the lawyer Practice with the reversion to the court office. Together they will prove Pleasance's right to the Steel fortune. Significantly, the focus on reproduction and who controls it has shifted: the female-controlled physical act has deviated into male-controlled economic and legal fact. The two mutually exclusive domains have their origins in gender and class, though both sides make the same claim to Lady Loadstone of having proof of her niece's purity. The crude wisewoman, Mother Chair, relies on natural magic to transform the evidence of childbirth into a statement of innocence; Polish hails her as a miracle-worker in effecting Placentia's restoration to Lady Loadstone's good graces:

Chair. See, who's here? she'has beene with my Lady; Who kist her, all to kist her, twice or thrice. Needle. And call'd her Neice againe, and view'd her Linnen. Polish. You ha' done a Miracle, Mother Chaire.

(V.ii.12-15)

But the gentleman-scholar Compass has counter-magic that nullifies this miracle when he promises Lady Loadstone knowledge that will "render . . . / Your Neice a Virgin, and unvitiated" (IV.viii. 53-54). The superior insights of males educated in the classical arts and sciences have from the beginning of the play quashed women's learning. Captain Ironside and Compass are Oxford graduates in philosophy and mathematics; even the Boy in the critical framework has studied Terence at Westminster, as has Jonson himself. In Polish's attempt to praise the religious learning of Placentia's putative mother, "witty Mrs. Steele" (I.v.31), she merely garbles references and exposes herself as laughably ignorant. Even Polish's name reflects only superficial worldly refinements in fashion and flattery, not the manly acquisition of hard knowledge. In traditional moral terms, the World, or Worldliness (Polish), and the Flesh (Mother Chair--la chaire is "flesh" in French, but her name also suggests the reproduction of one's flesh in the birthing-chair), leagued in a devilish compact, are not proof against superior Wisdom. When these two modes of knowing conflict, the results are predictable. Nurse Keep is frightened by Compass's uncanny perspicacity: "I told it? no, he knowes it, and much more, / As he's a cunning man" (V.ix. 16-17). Although Polish tries to dismiss him as "a cunning foole," she is finally unable to prevent his superior cunning from overriding her version of the true niece and heiress with his.

Act V completes the degradation of motherhood by demanding the name of the father. This exigency is both a routine call for responsible paternity and an amusingly Lacanian declaration of patriarchal law, which represses the mother in order to reassure itself about its masculine unity and identity.(13) At first, Polish attempts to protect her "world of secrets" by incarcerating the newly married Pleasance in an outhouse for kitchen trash--ideologically, another misplacing of daughter and birthright in the drama of switched identities. Pleasance is the only outsider-witness to the birth of Placentia's child and the only obstacle to Placentia's future security, even though Pleasance has no idea yet of the value of what she knows:

I know nothing But what is told me; nor can I discover Any thing.

(V.ii.7-9)

But after Pleasance is released from her imprisonment, she begins to learn about Polish's "Pretending to be Mother" (V.ix.3), and about Placentia's pretending not to be mother. When none of the gang of women will admit the truth of Pleasance's birth, Pleasance uses her knowledge of the other birth to expose the matriarchal plot. The charge is infanticide, only metaphorical in Pleasance's case--in the sense that the life that should have been hers was "killed"--but feared literal in the case of Placentia's infant:

Compass. Bring forth your Child, or I appeale you of murder, You, and this Gossip here, and Mother Chaire. Chair. The Gentleman's falne mad! Pleasance steps out. Pleasance. No, Mrs. Mid-wife. I saw the Child, and you did give it me, And put it i' my armes, by this ill token, You wish'd me such another; and it cry'd. Practice. The Law is plaine; if it were heard to cry, And you produce it not, hee may indict All that conceale't, of Felony, and Murder.

(V.x.68-76)

Pleasance's complicity with patriarchal power is what finally defeats Polish's conspiracy of women. Although Pleasance's act may seem to glorify feminine virtue, in fact she simply celebrates her subjugation in marriage and the domestic sphere delegated to wives. Her victory ironically completes the suppression of her self begun by Polish fourteen years before: Pleasance colludes in the appropriation of her own birthright in order to enhance the male authority to which she willingly submits. Here, more cogently than at any other point in the play, Jonson shatters the illusion of female power by co-opting a woman to strike the final blow.

Although the false Placentia remains silent, her mother Polish confesses and names Needle, Lady Loadstone's steward and tailor. Jonson has constructed a double gibe here at women's judgment. The first jeer is at women's work, needlework. The needle had, by 1630, become a signifier of sexual difference: women embroidered to promote the feminine virtues of chastity, humility, and obedience--recall Maudlin's embroidered belt as the deliberate inversion of those feminine virtues--and "Few men," Rozsina Parker writes in The Subversive Stitch, "would risk jeopardising their sexual identity by claiming a right to the needle."(14) As a woman's tailor, moreover, Needle is already trivialized and his sexual exploits reduced to a small prick. The second jeer targets women's perspicacity. In Discoveries, Jonson mocked certain bad poets as frivolous jinglers:

Others there are, that have no composition at all; but a kind of tuning, and rhyming fall, in what they write. It runs and slides, and only makes a sound. Women's poets, they are called; as you have women's tailors.

They write a verse, as smooth, as soft, as cream; In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream.(15)

Jonson sees these inadequate versifiers--would-be poets--as merely mimicking and thus undermining the privileged position of true poets, in the same way that unruly women--would-be men--ape and sabotage male behavior in their attempts to disrupt patriarchal control. This clownish repetition by inferiors temporarily displaces the worthy originals by challenging, even ridiculing, the assumption that the established authority is supreme, genuine, and inimitable.

The embroidery references are thus pertinent to the play in establishing the difference between true art and false, true judgment and false, and hence true pleasure and false. In the induction of The Magnetic Lady, Jonson tells us:

A good Play, is like a skeene of silke: which, if you take by the right end, you may wind off, at pleasure . . . how you will: But if you light on the wrong end, you will pull all into a knot, or elfe-locke; which nothing but the sheers, or a candle will undoe, or separate.

(lines 136-41)

In the chorus that ends Act IV, Damplay complains that the poet has "almost pucker'd, and pull'd into that knot" the whole thread of his argument. But as Act V demonstrates, the male poet has controlled his material, and with Compass says: "I ha' the right thred now, and I will keepe it" (V.x.81). It is the household of women who have puckered the thread and pulled all into a knot that must now be cut out. By implication, women who refuse to devote themselves to women's work end up unfitted for any role. Although Polish defends her stratagems as her "right" and "power" as a mother, Compass denies her gender identity: "Out, Hag. / Thou that hast put all nature off, and woman" (V.ix.5-6). When she claims, "Love to my Child, and lucre of the portion / Provok'd me" (V.x.86-87), she claims no more than motivated any of the men to compete for either girl's hand, but the fact of her gender displaces her argument. Although Polish had managed to get Placentia married to Bias with a settlement of ten thousand pounds, Jonson ironically straightens Bias out, patriarchally speaking. Bias repudiates the bargain, refusing to "take a wife, / To pick out Mounsieur Needles basting threds" (lines 115-16).

A similar predicament of being snagged in the threads of his own making afflicts Sir Moth Interest. His wayward lust for money, aroused in Act V to feverish intensity, continues to parallel Placentia's misguided sexuality, with Needle as the misleader who causes both their falls. Needle wants to reconcile the differences that have arisen among Lady Loadstone, Sir Moth, and Dr. Rut as a result of Placentia's misdiagnosed pregnancy. In order that Rut may demonstrate his medical competence by curing the tailor, Needle pretends to suffer from walking and talking in his sleep, a condition thought to be prophetic: "Hee'll tell us wonders" (V.v.1), Dr. Rut promises. The "wonders" concern messages from the ghost of a city alderman's widow, who, for love of Sir Moth, had supposedly buried three hundred thousand pounds in the garden, and dropped another six hundred thousand down the well. The planting of the money in the muck both parodies natural propagation and sullies it: Interest tries to harvest the coins by pulling "these five peices / Vp, in a fingers bredth one of another" but "The durt sticks on 'hem still" (V.vii.62-64), thus emblematizing Compass's already expressed opinion that Sir Moth's "thoughts" are "Baser then money" (IV.iii.51-52). Interest's decision to go down the well for the larger sum of money burlesques, even more broadly, the merging of voracious sexual and economic appetites, and their material issue in "the possession of a fortune . . . newly drop't him" (V.x.4-5). As Interest remarks, in a testament to his own prowess:

There never did accrew So great a gift to man, and from a Lady, I never saw but once.

(V.vii.83-85)

When Interest climbs into the bucket to enter the well, the chain breaks, and he falls ignominiously into the water, a nightmare of the greedy man swallowed by the object of his consuming desire, the libidinous man engulfed by the monstrously feminized "conduit" of his lusts. Needle delivers the old man from the well in a mock rebirth that echoes the earlier childbirth with its comment on the result of precipitate and insatiable passion. The fact that Interest was seduced into this fall by the thought of a woman he met at "Merchants-Taylors-hall, at dinner, / In Thred-needle street" (V.vii.86-87) links his illicit hungers to the other needlework allusions in the play. He admits finally that he trapped himself in "nets of cous'nage" spun out of his own avarice: "each thred is growne a noose: / A very mesh" (V.x.109-11). Compass, however, holds on tight to "the right thred," his bride Pleasance and her sixteen-thousand-pound portion, with interest, even though he coerced the parson into marrying them unlawfully in noncanonical hours.

Why, you may ask, does Compass win Pleasance, the true Pleasure? Metaphorically, pleasure is the true pole to which the compass-needle points when it enters a lodestone's magnetic field. The compass-needle, according to William Barlow's Magneticall Aduertisements (1616) is "the most admirable and vsefull instrument of the whole world" and its substance "ought to be pure steele, and not iron. For most assuredly steele will take at the least tenne times more vertue then iron can doe, but especially if it hath his right temper."(16) (Jonson cites Barlow as a popular source of magnetic knowledge at I.iv.5.) A compass's circular shape makes it "most fit to be vsed for the obseruation of the variation alone,"(17) that is, for surveying a whole plot accurately without the directional points marked on a compass-card. In Compass, then, Jonson creates a character whose status over the course of the play is already allegorically confirmed. Captain Ironside is another predictable winner in the magnetic context; Barlow explains that a lodestone should be capped and set in an iron mold in order to protect its power. Although Needle certainly obeyed the first principle of magnetic motion, mutual attraction, or coition--in fact, he obeyed it only too literally--Barlow's experiments with the "common sowing needle," a lodestone, and a thread indicate that these just prove attraction and repulsion without the compass-needle's versatility and responsiveness.(18) Needle is essentially outclassed. Polish is, of course, discredited by her gender and her class from effective participation in the magnetic metaphor, even though she is more than once called a "fly," a term for the compass-card. Barlow points out that, if the combined weight of the compass-needle and the fly presses too heavily on the pin connecting them to the lodestone, then the motion of the fly will be dull and uncertain, and hence the fly itself will be unreliable as an analytical tool.(19) Polish's behavior indicates that she cannot compete effectively under pressure: she can act as a guide in plotting only some, but not all, of the angles. Other meanings of "fly" elaborate on her inadequacy as a surveying instrument. As a parasite, "with her buz, / Shee blowes on every thing, in every place!" (V.vii.1-2), and as a demonic incarnation, she is "good at malice; good at mischiefe; all / That can perplexe, or trouble a busines, throughly" (V.vi.11-12). Discretion, not simply direction, in seeking true pleasure is what divides the deserving from the undeserving. Pleasure merely draws men into competition--whether to enjoy legal rights or social privileges, to arouse scholarly wit or soldierly valor, to delight in material possession or physical sensation. Just as the lodestone identifies metals with natural magnetic force, so pleasure itself becomes the testing ground which separates men of true mettle from false. The victor is the one who is best able to contain and control pleasure's magnetic pull until he measures its purely objective value.

What is true of the design of the inner play is also true of Jonson's construction of the entire play. The magnetic device Jonson has in mind is the mariner's compass, a navigational tool which consists of a box, a compass-card, and a magnetized needle turning freely on a pivot. In simple terms, the analogy works as follows. The frame-play is the box of a mariner's compass. It contains the compass-card or inner play, which measures the diverse desires of Lady Loadstone's household by displaying various directional goals. Compass, as the poet's mouthpiece in the inner play, is the true guide to social and economic pleasure, just as the Boy in the frame-play is the playwright's mouthpiece and true guide to theatrical pleasure. In plotting the course of the inner play, Jonson shows the household of women guided back to patriarchal rule by Compass's discovery of the true heiress and exposure of the false. In the frame, the Boy guides the audience to the discovery of Jonson's art: Probee is the man of probity, guided by and eventually espousing Jonson's idea of true comedy; Damplay is exposed as inadequate and unruly, because he will not accept the poet's judgment as superior to his own. The mariner's compass, then, promises, to those who view it correctly, the satisfaction of correctly reached destinations. Jonson's play promises the same pleasure. Hope of pleasure draws the spectators to the theater, just as it draws the suitors to Lady Loadstone's house. And the theater, like the two girls, offers the occasion to test the powers of discrimination, an option reserved for male participants.

Although their bodies are magnetic, Placentia and Pleasance themselves are entirely passive, giving no readily interpretable signs of their actual desires or responses. Placentia never utters a word during her labor and childbirth--a remarkable feat of endurance that few women could emulate. Pleasance reveals none of her feelings about Polish, Lady Loadstone, or the rights she has been denied through changing places with Placentia. Even when Compass asks her to trust and obey him without question, she simply replies, "With you the world ore" (IV.v.17). She makes no outcry at their furtive wedding ceremony, nor at her later imprisonment by Polish. Marguerite Waller traces a similar pattern of female absence in Thomas Wyatt's sonnets: the women vanish in the text, only registering as fetishes which allow for the emergence of a dominant male who can remove obstacles and appropriate what he desires.(20) Structurally, Jonson's text embeds crises of female purity within an overarching plot of male competition. The true heiress justifies the wit of her victorious suitor with her virtues of devotion, chastity, and subservience, and retrieves what she has lost simply by waiting.(21) Her value, her honor as a female, is measured by what she lacks: sexuality and volition.(22) Since the false heiress cannot provide the same empty unsexualized body, she cannot serve as a pretext for, or enhancer of, male social exchange. Richard Brathwaite shares this conclusion when he advises: "Now (gentlewomen) . . . if you prefer honor before pleasure or what else is dear or tender, your fame will find wings to fly with. This will gain you deserving suitors. Portion may woo a worldling, proportion a youthful wanton, but it is virtue that wins the heart of discretion."(23)

Pleasure, whether true or false, is not a woman's prerogative in The Magnetic Lady. What strikes a female audience of Jonson's play most insistently is the complete nullification of a woman's point of view. Although pregnancy and childbirth have been the chief physical correlatives of the struggle to emerge victoriously on the social and economic scene, the infant itself never appears on stage. Presumably for the playwright and his male audience, the metaphors make the point by dismissing female power as merely physical and thus contemptibly comical; for women in the audience, especially those who have given birth, the baby is the point. Nevertheless, the play ultimately shrugs off mother and child. Placentia's fate rests entirely at the discretion of the patriarchy that condemns her as worthless. Coupled with Needle, who can neither provide for her nor marry her, she awaits the verdict of Captain Ironside, Lady Loadstone's new husband. The childless widow and the virginal child are appropriated by the strongest and wiliest males, who aggrandize themselves by putting "the magic stamp of men's meaning"(24) on their women's passivity and silence. The mothers are disempowered and cast down, if not out. In the patriarchal victory that ends the play, their final place is simply not important.(25)

NOTES

1 The Sad Shepherd, in Ben Jonson's Plays and Masques, ed. Robert M. Adams (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1979), pp. 275-310.

2 The words are Margaret Maurer's, from "Reading Ben Jonson's Queens," in Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley, eds., Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1989), pp. 233-63, 247.

3 D.E. Underdown, "The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England," in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 116-36, 118-19.

4 Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 6:499-597. Subsequent references to act, scene, and line number will appear parenthetically in the text and will be to this edition.

5 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: The Women's Press, 1984), p. 61.

6 See Margaret J.M. Ezell, The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill and London: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987), chaps. 1 and 2. Ezell points out that widows usually arranged their daughters' marriages and also often acted as executors of the estates; in fact, the women of both families of prospective in-laws, supported by friends of the family, did most of the fact-finding and decision-making in arranging matches throughout the seventeenth century. In chap. 2, she argues that women in private were very powerful; although patriarchalism seemed rigid in public institutions, it was, in domestic life, challenged, argued, and undermined by both men and women.

7 The words are Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's, quoted by Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn, "Feminist Scholarship and the Social Construction of Woman," in Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn, eds., Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), pp. 11-36, 21.

8 Greene and Kahn, p. 7.

9 Roberta L. Krueger, "Double Jeopardy: The Appropriation of Woman in Four Old French Romances of the 'Cycle de la Gageure,'" in Fisher and Halley, pp. 21-50, 23. The same point is made in Janet E. Halley's article in the same volume, "Textual Intercourse: Anne Donne, John Donne, and the Sexual Poetics of Textual Exchange," pp. 188-20, 198.

10 Parker, p. 58

11 For the historical view of paternity suits and other effects of illegitimate births, including the incidence of abortion and infanticide, see Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (London: Basil Blackwell, 1988), chap. 4, especially pp. 111-18. For popular views of conception, see Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), chap. 1, especially p. 16. For other theatrical treatments of culpable sexuality and conception, see Coppelia Kahn, "Whores and Wives in Jacobean Drama," in Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker, eds., In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama (Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press, 1991), pp. 246-60, especially 248-53.

12 Cited in Parker, p. 55.

13 Nelly Furman, "The Politics of Language: Beyond the Gender Principle?," in Greene and Kahn, pp. 59-79, 73.

14 Parker, p. 81.

15 Discoveries, in Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (London: Penguin, 1988), Appendix 1, pp. 373-458, lines 880-86.

16 William Barlow, Magneticall Advertisements (London, 1616; rprt. Amsterdam and New York: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and Da Capo Press, 1968), pp. 66-67.

17 Barlow, p. 69

18 Barlow, pp. 21-28.

19 Barlow, p. 71.

20 Marguerite Waller, "The Empire's New Clothes: Refashioning the Renaissance," in Fisher and Halley, pp. 160-83, 177.

21 I have reapplied Krueger's argument concerning the structure of medieval French "wager" romances (pp. 26-30).

22 Sheila Fisher, "Taken Men and Token Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," in Fisher and Halley, pp. 71-105, 76.

23 Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentlewoman (London, 1631), in Joan Larsen Klein, cd., Daughters, Wives, and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500-1640 (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 250.

24 The quoted phrase is from Ann Rosalind Jones, "Inscribing Femininity: French Theories of the Feminine," in Greene and Kahn, pp. 80-112, 99.

25 I would like to thank Alexander Leggatt and R.B. Parker for their helpful comments on the first draft of this paper. It was subsequently discussed in the seminar on "Literary and Historical Representations of Women's Alliances," led by Karen Robertson and Susan Frye, at the 1993 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Atlanta; my final revision of the paper owes a debt to remarks from Valerie Wayne and Jean Howard, and to a provocative question from Valerie Traub, one of the auditors.

Helen Ostovich is an Assistant Professor in the department of English at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. She has published articles on Jonson and Shakespeare, and is completing a modern critical edition of Jonson's middle comedies for Longman Annotated Texts.