Boundaries and Disgust in The Duchess of Malfi

Developing recent research on emotion in early modern literature, this essay argues that disgust is the primary emotional mode of Webster’s classic tragedy The Duchess of Malfi. According to modern affective science, disgust is the emotion designed to protect the physical body from material contaminants and protect the social body from symbolic contaminants; as such, it is intimately concerned with the preservation of boundaries. I argue that Malfi stages the thematic collapse of key existential boundaries of the human experiences—boundaries of social class, boundaries of kinship, boundaries between species, and boundaries between life and death—and the result is a compensatory atmosphere of disgust that pervades the play.