Serpents Sting: Female Transgressive Sexuality and Metaphors of Syphilis in Elizabethan and Jacobean England

Abstract

The focus of this project is twofold: firstly, this thesis establishes an understanding of the history, the medical and psychological impact that syphilis had on women as well as why writers like William Shakespeare and John Webster found this disease so intriguing. And secondly, this study analyzes the way in which Elizabethan and Jacobean writers used metaphors of the new disease to punish their female characters metaphorically. This thesis also relies on the metaphor of syphilis, as serpent, which illustrates the way many early modern men viewed the disease, a corruption, a poison, stemming from women who transgressed social norms; the female body hid corruption and the unsuspecting male fell victim to the duplicitous seductions of the erring female. The female characters in the included plays transgress by ignoring the prescribed roles that the Elizabethan and Jacobean societies expected women to follow. These women are punished because they step outside of their prescribed role. The imagery of syphilis acts as a punishment whether metaphorical or literal.