Fatal Attraction: Desire, Anatomy and Death in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (pt.2)

This post is a continuation of my previous post on the anatomization of desire in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, which, if you have not already read, can find in the following link:
Part One

This section focuses on the Death of Desire, and how Ford creates a "desire/death dynamic" through the genre of a Revenge Tragedy.

Michael Neill: Death was not only invented by those involved in the practices of burial and associated rituals, but also through art and literature, especially tragedy, which for Neill "was among the principal instruments by which the culture of early modern England reinvented death."

Barthes: "in the amorous realm, the desire for suicide is frequent", and desire is directed outward "aggressively against the loved object or in fantasy uniting myself with the loved object in death."

Jonathon Dollimore: "the absolute object of desire is, experientially, a fantasy of the absolute release from desire, i.e., death of desire/death of the self."
This is based on the Freudian contention that "the aim of all life is death".
ALSO
"socialised desire is a lack, impossible to appease because it is the lack of death itself , and life merely an enforced substitute for death."
ALSO
'Tis Pity is an exemplar text of desire as a supremely "death-driven, death-dealing and death-desiring" phenomenon, elucidating aspects of its early modern cultural moment of production and imbricated in a rhetoric of desire that seems not yet to be exhausted.

The relationship between death and desire takes two main forms:
1. Union with the other
2. Death

While Giovanni and Annabella's vows set up desire and death as mutually exclusive, antithetical possibilities, e.g. "Love me, or kill me.", as the play progresses we see that these terms are inextricably bound together and admit the possibility that to love is also to kill.

Giovanni's murder of Annabella can certainly be read as a desire to revenge himself upon Soranzo. However, both his and Annabella's deaths can at the same time be read as a desire to become one, or be united with the other.
This links to Barthes' desire "to be the other, I want the other to be me, as if we were united, enclosed within the same sack of skin."

Desire exceeds society's containing structures and ultimately manifests itself in death, killing those that uphold the law as well as those who transgress it.

Annabella's phrases, i.e. "Dying in favour with him I would die without pain" might stand as a precursor to a Wagnerian liebestod.

Catherine Belsey: the play participates in attempts in the early modern period to make desire "more thoroughly contained and confined within the institution of marriage, and thus brought under the control of the Law."
ALSO
"Desire, which is an absence, takes possession of the subject, tantalizes with an imagined omnipotence, and ultimately delivers nothing more nor less than an annihilation."

And that concludes this section on desire, anatomy and death in the play. I'll be uploading notes from more of the sections in the critical guide, but for now, try to wrap your head around these concepts, and if love or death come up as an exam question, you're sorted!