“I Would I Had No Tongue, No Ears”: Oral, Aural and Sexual Openness in Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness

Abstract

Following historicist and materialist feminist criticisms, material food studies and the cultural attitudes towards food and female speech and hearing in early modern England, I argue that Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607) dramatises the interrelatedness of oral, aural and sexual appetites. I contend that Anne’s oral, aural and sexual openness to Wendoll is a complex form of subversive complicity; she subverts the authority of her husband while obeying him in submitting aurally and sexually to Wendoll whom Frankford invites to use his table and unconsciously his wife. I argue that Heywood perceived appetite as an instrument for revenge, penitence, and redemption. While Anne’s aural and oral openness to Wendoll’s seductive speech leads to her sexual openness, I explain that her self-imposed punishment of self-starvation is an oral revenge in which she consumes the flesh that has bred her sin. I argue that Anne’s starvation is an act of political resistance against a patriarchal society that uses food and eating as forms of control.