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Matters of the heart : gendering the heart in John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and William Harvey's The Motion of the Heart

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgetown University, 2010.; Includes bibliographical 
 references.; Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. I frame my reading of 'Tis Pity She's A 
 Whore in light of the period's medical discourses and obsession with the anatomized body. My 
 paper draws on Harvey's departure from the Galenic, gendered understanding of the heart and 
 discovery of a gender-neutral, androgynous heart. I argue that Harvey rhetorically genders the 
 heart as a phallic organ, thus re-inscribing the masculine as the privileged site of desire. I 
 posit that his masculinization of the heart is, in fact, an anxious reaction to his own 
 discovery and an attempt to re-inscribe a sex/gender system that casts the feminine as the 
 subaltern. Considering Harvey's rhetoric, I read the gendered heart in 'Tis Pity as a cultural 
 reaction to the possibility of an ontologically androgynous heart.; More specifically, I liken 
 Annabella's death, the stabbing out of her heart, to a dissection in an early modern anatomy 
 theater. Her murder reflects the period's uncomfortable tension between the desire to know 
 epistemologically the female body and to render the feminine as the unintelligible. The goal 
 of this project is, thus, to consider critically the ways in which non-normative feminine 
 desires become prone to a destructive and masculinist epistemology. By positioning 'Tis Pity 
 She's A Whore into conversation with early modern medical discourses, my work will interrogate 
 the containment and silencing of queer and feminine forms of erotic agency.