Hero\'s body in Hero and Leander PDF

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Summative Essay for end of module, in which I discuss the portrayal of Hero's body in Marlowe's epic poem Hero and Leander....

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Wonder not, sov’reign mistress, if perhaps Thou canst, who art sole wonder, much less arm Thy looks, the Heav’n of mildness, with disdain. (Paradise Lost, 9.532–4)

Discuss the ways in which one module text uses the body to figure abstract states (e.g. moral, social, political).

Whilst undeniably Hero and Leander is transgressive in its treatment of male sexuality through the description of Leander’s body, I will instead focus primarily on the representation of Hero’s body and Marlowe’s figuring of female sexuality through it. By exploring the use of Hero’s physical body, it becomes clear that the poem combines the political with the erotic. I posit that Marlowe uses Hero’s body to suggest a conflict between the interior and the exterior, and a disjuncture between sexual desires that ultimately leads to Hero’s subjugation. With a particular focus on virginity, Marlowe uses the body of Hero to investigate the limits of female sexuality in Early Modern England.

Whilst many critics argue that the poem presents a liberation of sexuality for both protagonists and a kind of sexual spectrum of desire, I would suggest that Hero and Leander are instead a dichotomous couple in terms of sexuality. The poem importantly transgresses the boundaries of sexuality in its implied homoeroticism, yet a preoccupation with male sexual desire, figured through Leander’s body, results in a lack of consideration for female sexuality. Through Leander’s conquering of Hero’s body, she is ultimately subjugated and humiliated by the end of the poem. Marlowe clearly does explore aspects of female sexuality but he explores it in relation to male sexuality: how Hero’s reluctance becomes Leander’s desire: “the more she strived / The more a gentle pleasing heat revived” (1.67-8). Leander therefore uses sexuality as a force against Hero and does not allow her to express her own desires. Marlowe can be seen as using Hero’s physical body to represent repressed female sexuality whether intentionally or not, in contrast with Early Modern moral ideas surrounding chastity and virginity.

Hero’s body can be viewed as a ground for figuring two conflicting representations of the interior and the exterior and how this transforms into ideas about feminine desire. From the outset, Hero is assigned the role of a woman looked upon by the male gaze: “she should sit for men to gaze upon” (1.8), “all that

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viewed her were enamored on her” (1.118). However, the description of “Hero the fair” (1.5) actually includes little about her physical body, rather, Marlowe satirizes the Petrarchan poetic convention of the blazon through an extensive description of her veil and elaborate clothing, Hero’s body is hidden behind a ‘veil’ of artifice: “Her veil was artificial flowers and leaves, / Whose workmanship both man and beast deceives.” (1.19-20). Through this image of deception, Marlowe introduces ideas about conflicting desires and how a falsified exterior appearance deceives men. The narrator can be seen as setting the reader up to believe that her later resistance and feminine coyness is also artificial.

Leander’s lust for Hero provokes a conflict between her important societal status and her growing desire for Leander. She is given a duality of attitude initially represented by her role as “Venus’s nun” (1.45). She both fears yet desires sexual intimacy which creates an interior conflict. Rather than being fleeting and unreliable, this can be seen as a reason for her dismissive and ambiguous actions in response to Leander’s relentless courting. Her feminine identity is fundamentally split as though her body and mind are separate entities, on the outside she is chaste but inside “Treason was in her thought” (2.293). She is duplicitous in her discourse and actions: “Hero’s ruddy cheek Hero betrayed” (2.323), “her tongue tripped, / For unawares “Come thither” from her slipped” (1.357-8), “Hero’s looked yielded but her words made war” (1.331). The oppressive notions of physical love prevalent in Early Modern society sentence her to alternating between the two oppositions of lust and coyness.

Marion Campbell asserts that “Marlowe’s poem is concerned with the immediacy of desire, with love freed from all external constraints.” (253). However, I would argue that through the analysis of Hero’s body, many external constraints can be seen as actively working against their supposed love and desire. This presentation of Hero as she “strove to resist the motions of her heart” (1.364) reaffirms the social context of their love as part of a cultural framework. The narrator seems to mock feminine coyness and the idea of the coquetry, through her eventual acquiescence, in order to justify the abandoning of “fruitless cold virginity” (1.317). But, I would argue that it is less of a calculated, purposive act and rather a genuine internal conflict caused by contemporary societal values, figured by Marlowe through Hero and her body.

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Furthermore, by analyzing the presentation of Hero’s body in the consummation scene we can see these ideas expressed more clearly. The image of the body is emphasized as the poem both starts and ends with a gaze. Gordon Braden suggests that Hero “draws herself up to the full dignity of her erotic presence” (150). I would disagree with this sentiment as she is likened to “heaps of gold” (2.326) gazed upon by Leander, exposed and vulnerable. Marlowe constructs the sexual encounter as a struggle, Leander’s pursuit is animalistic and the narrator likens Hero’s body to a struggling bird “at his mercy” (2.286), emphasizing his role as predator. She is confined by male lust through her physical restraint by Leander and she is stripped of the liberation of sexuality that is granted to her sexual partner, as the poem concludes with the “all naked” (2.324), blushing Hero. Perhaps Marlowe is suggesting that excessive heterosexual desire, as displayed by Leander, is a danger to Hero’s sexual liberation. Hero’s body is therefore used to demonstrate the dangers of relentless and perhaps unwanted advances by men: “Love is not full of pity … But deaf and cruel where he means to prey” (2.287-8). Perhaps she can be seen as being “o’ercome with anguish, shame and rage” (2.333) just like night at the end of the poem.

Therefore, whether purposely or not, Marlowe presents a female body confined by the rules of feminine propriety. Through Hero’s physical body, Marlowe figures abstract states of indetermination in regard to female sexual liberty and the fragmentation of feminine self-consciousness, due to a conflict between shame and desire, in order to show that the sexual societal rules restrict women more than men. He explores transgressive, marginal sexualities and female erotic desire in the body of the poem but ultimately conforms at the poem’s conclusion as Hero becomes entrapped by her materiality yet Leander can roam free. Leander’s sexuality is liberated whilst Hero’s is confined. Ultimately, Hero’s exposed body becomes a metaphor for the vulnerability of female self-expression and the complexities of feminine sexuality.

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Works Cited: Braden, G. Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies, Yale University Press, 1978, pp. 150.

--- “Hero and Leander in Bed (and the Morning After).” English Literary Renaissance, vol. 45, 2015, pp. 205–230.

Campbell, Marion. “‘Desunt Nonnulla’: The Construction of Marlowe's Hero and Leander as an Unfinished Poem.” ELH, vol. 51, no. 2, 1984, pp. 241–268. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2872945.

Cleland, Katharine. “‘Wanton Loves, and Yong Desires’: Clandestine Marriage in Marlowe's ‘Hero and Leander’ and Chapman's Continuation.” Studies in Philology, vol. 108, no. 2, 2011, pp. 215–237. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23055988.

Keach, William. Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe and their Contemporaries. Rutgers University Press, 1977.

Leonard, John. “Marlowe's Doric Music: Lust and Aggression in ‘Hero and Leander.’” English Literary Renaissance, vol. 30, no. 1, The University of Chicago Press, 2000, pp. 55–76. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24463719.

Marlowe, Christopher. “Hero and Leander”, The Complete Poems and Translations, edited by Stephen Orgel, Penguin Books, 2007, pp. 3-27.

Miller, David Lee. “The Death of the Modern: Gender and Desire in Marlowe's ‘Hero and Leander.’ (1989) The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, edited by Patrick Cheney, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 757- 87.

Tromly, Fred B. “Frustrating the Story of Desire: Hero and Leander.” Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization, University of Toronto Press, 1998, pp. 153–173. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/9781442678545.13.

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