Identifying the Real Whore of Parma

The following quotes are taken out of Chapter Five of Lisa Hopkin’s brilliant critical study guide for ‘Tis Pity. The chapter is titled, “Identifying the Real Whore of Parma” by critic Corinne S. Abate. Abate concludes this chapter by identifying the “whore” that the title refers to as “the dissolute town of Parma herself”, and the chapter explains how they reached this conclusion as well as analysing the female characters of the play and whether we can consider them to be “whores” or not (the answer is not!)

Martin Wiggins: [‘Tis Pity] “has been making some readers squirm for centuries.”

AND

“we cannot expect to be able to say, with the Cardinal, “’Tis pity she’s a whore” and leave the theatre confident in the victory of society over incestuous deviance”

“it depends on the characterisation of Giovanni whether it is a deliberate lie or a tendentious refashioning of the truth by someone who honestly believes in the power of human reason to change reality”

“the only excessive pressure on Annabella comes from the Friar and his alarming account of eternal torment”

The title when spoken by the Cardinal is italicised, self-referencing the play that has just been performed.

The Cardinal is a morally compromised man amid a morally corrupt society.

Thelma Greenfield: the Cardinal’s blithe condemnation of Annabella expresses “contradictory insight and callousness”

Mark Stavig: the title “is surely a deliberate assault on tender Puritan moral sensibilities” and speculates that those “deliberately outrageous” aspects of Ford’s plays “must have appealed to people who were becoming tired of the moralistic preaching of the Puritans.”

AND

When the Friar leaves “the symbol of true religion leaves the city, corruption and hypocrisy go unchallenged, and the powerful Cardinal is made a kind of symbol of the society’s venality.”

Clifford Leech: “ecclesiastical partiality”

AND

“wooing becomes seduction” (on Giovanni’s deception)

Laurel Amtower: “the Catholic Church itself – the “Whore of Babylon” – is deemed the same by Protestant critics”

Bruce Boehrer: the Cardinal’s closing couplet “smacks of the worst sort of glibness”

AND

“Giovanni has of course not told the truth, but neither has he violated it completely” “the lie to Annabella is both non-existent and double”

Marion Lomax: “Giovanni instigated the affair, but it is Annabella, the woman who scandalized society by daring to love the best of an unsuitable bunch of suitors, who receives the Cardinal’s final condemnation”

AND

“the undercurrent of violence running just below its [Parma’s] respectable surface”

The Cardinal does not criticise Giovanni personally or pass judgement on his fallen stature in society as does the female-specific epithet “whore”.

Kay Stanton: “whore” is employed as “a male-initiated inscription onto the female as scapegoat”

AND

“the term “whore” can be applied to any woman, usually by a man, as a reaction to her attempts, successful or otherwise, to take control of her own sexuality”

Dorothy Farr: “Annabella is a realist and while her deepest instincts prompt her to respond to Giovanni’s love, she understands, with a clarity he will not permit himself, the facts of their predicament because of the breeding she has received as the daughter of an important family”

It is only Giovanni who refuses to acknowledge that reality has impinged upon his dreams.

Larry Champion: The Cardinal closes the drama “almost flippantly belying the complexity of the tragic situation with his final judgemental quip.”

Yet despite their fallen moral standings, Putana, Hippolita and Annabella come to ends that I contend are unwarranted by and disproportionate to their given crimes.

Roper: the Cardinal is “the protector of well-born criminals”

It is Annabella throughout the play who keenly felt the palpable conflict between her personal desire and familial duties.

Bawcutt: “it would even be possible to read the play as a series of warnings against the destructive effects of passion”

Putana, Hippolita and Annabella all became whores because they stayed in Parma.

Laurie Finke: “All women are objects, defined solely by their sexuality, they are also all potentially sexual threats because they are all potentially false lovers.” The play reduces “all women to whores or potential whores.”

Theodora Jankowski: “their virgin condition marked them, paradoxically, as “deviant” as well.”

By not participating in patriarchally-determined roles, women could be perceived as irresponsible or dangerous and subversive to the male-constructed social order.

Parma established a slatternly ethos that allows for the creation of a whorish dystopia.

Stanton: the appearance of the word “whore” in Shakespeare’s plays 45 times “demonstrates that Shakespeare considered men’s failure to accommodate themselves to the idea of female sexual choice and integrity to be particularly instrumental in war, violence, and ultimately, societal suicide.”

Verna Foster: Parma can be read as a site marked by “a code of violence that suggests that the revenge ethic is ingrained in the society as well”

Given the deplorable and unceasing acts of revenge that occur within the town’s limits, an incestuous affair between a brother and sister is the least of Parma’s woes.

Amtower: “two potentially “savable” individuals find themselves contaminated by a surrounding culture whose spiritual depravity prevents the individual from achieving spiritual transcendence”

Parma allows private acts of carnal perversion, marital infidelities and ugly revenges to occur.

The argument that Parma is the true whore and allows whoredom and other immoral acts to occur is brilliant to include in your exam, as is Stanton’s comparison to Shakespeare. Be sure to link this section to your AO4 context on the position of women contrasted to the presentation of female characters, and if you can’t remember critic’s names in this instance, just say “feminist critics argue this”, and you should do fine!