COMEDY

GENDER AND SEXUALITY 73discourse of marriage held that the domestic arena was a microcosm ofthe state, with the husband the head of the household just as a monarchrules over his people. While this trope of domestic governmentepitomizes a harmonious ideal, numerous treatises on the proper conductof husbands and wives also suggest that marriage was a precariousundertaking where ‘adultery and whoredom’ were ever-present dangersto marital harmony (Newman, 1991:20). In comedy, women’sreputations are forced to negotiate the opposing poles of subordinationand infamy. The courtesans of Roman comedy, for example,traditionally belonged to the hetaerae, a class of foreigners who enjoyedsome freedoms but were denied citizenship and generally consideredaliens. As an outsider, the courtesan’s sexual services were acceptable,although she remained culturally egregious. In order to become aRoman, the plot demands her transformation, and the reform of hersexual behaviour and ethnic identity. Terence’s Eunuch (161 BC)features such a device, in which the discovery of the slave Pamphila’strue identity clears the way for her marriage to the young Athenianaristocrat Chaerea. However, before the news of the marriage, Chaerea,thinking his beloved beyond his reach, switches places with a eunuchservant, enters her house and rapes her. Chaerea’s pride in his fortuneand pleasure in his escapade is not censured by his family or peers,aside the mildest chastisement for rascally behaviour. Rather, as the titlesuggests, the play diverts attention from the issue of rape to consider thecomic improbabilities of a eunuch’s sexual performance. That Chaereaand Pamphila are eventually married supposedly negates the crimeagainst her, and confirms for us the view that women are either marriedor legitimate sexual targets.A similar formulation is found in the comedy of the early modernperiod, where a woman’s acceptance is determined by the sexual statusshe has in the eyes of men. The sexual defamation of Hero in Much AdoAbout Nothing, for example, results in her supposed death, which canonly be reversed by a symbolic resurrection brought about after her namehas been cleared. Similarly, the tragi-comic The Winter’s Tale sees theaccused Hermione reborn after her innocence is assured after a periodof sixteen years; while Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid inCheapside (1613) features Moll Yellowhammer’s resuscitation whilelaid in her coffin. In these cases, women are wrongly accused of impropersexual conduct, an accusation that demands the highest penance thatstrict social codes allow. To all intents and purposes, Hero, Hermione,and Moll die, and remain dead until the slander against them has beendisproved. Only when the meanings that men attach to women have