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Emily Good
Sex, Gender, and the Renaissance Body
Sexy Sneezes
The Non-Linear Path Between Virginity, Pleasure, and Whoredom in Thomas
Middleton’s The Changeling
The first time Diaphanta, waiting woman to Beatrice, experiences an orgasm is as a virgin.
In fact, the orgasm is played out as a testament to of her virginity. She had taken a sip from a vial
known as Glass M and Beatrice narrated her reaction:
Now is the experiment be true, ‘twill praise itself,
And give me noble ease. [Diaphanta gapes] – Begins already:
There’s the first symptom; and what haste it makes
To fall into the second, [Diaphanta sneezes] there by this time!
Most admirable secret! (4.1.104-108)
Beatrice, having taken the potion as well, but no longer a maid, feels nothing. The scene between
the two women is part of the pattern presented by Thomas Middleton in The Changeling where sex is
never a mutually enjoyable experience. Marjorie Garber dissects the symptoms of the reaction to
the poison through classic literature and modern research on sexuality, at one point noting the “sexy
sneezes” researched by Freud and his contemporaries (24). Sneezes, for reasons that will be
discussed in depth later on, are closely associated with female sexual pleasure, by depicting orgasm in
the allegedly non-sexual setting between two women, Middleton orchestrates a scene where the truth
of a woman’s orgasm is at the mercy of woman’s word (Beatrice) or woman’s body (Diaphanta); the
audience must take what they perceive at face value, thus laying the questionabilityof female
pleasure alongside the suspect of women’s virginity.
Thomas Wright, a Renaissance writer, has been a disputed source of ideology among
scholars for as long as he’s been known. Despite his relative unpopularity in his time, his supporters

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claim that his works are reflective of the culture consciousness that influenced some of his
contemporaries, like Shakespeare or Middleton. In his The Passions of the Minde In Generall, he
discusses in depth the idea of embodied passion. Wright’s Catholicism urged him to suggest that
objects used to center prayer would help ground the faith as his contemporaries believed that, “the
intellectivepart of the soul was wholly incorporeal” and that it would help to “deepen the faith,
making a stronger more material impression in the sensitive embodied part of the soul” (Sullivan
32). Wright believed in the inseparability of the body and soul and The Passions have helped scholars
to move past using the lens of the post-Enlightenment idea of dualism to view Renaissance
literature. Gail Kern Paster said, “We need to think harder about the ensouled body as well as the
embodied soul if a comprehensive understanding of early modern phenomology is ever to be
achieved” (Sullivan 36). So, though dualism must be at least slightly cast aside, it is a remarkably apt
descriptor for the duality of the ‘embodied soul’ and the ‘ensouled body’. For, while inverse
concepts, they are complementary and unique in the ways in which they manifest. Specific to this
paper is the question that arises in relation to virginity: where is virginity located? In The Changeling,
the virginity test is a potion, not a physical examination or even a question about knowledge or
experience. It is a reaction of the body with no explicit location of change (from virgin to non-
virgin). Dale B. J. Randall suggests that this was just a way to make the test fit for stage – “an
attempt to give serious persuasive, interesting, and effective form – stageable form – to the theme of
chastity” (361) – but in making the test act-able, Middleton also presents a virginity that is capable of
being dramatized in context as well. In fact, Beatrice acts out her virginity when Alsemero, her
betrothed, administers the test again on her: “I’ll put now to my cunning: th’effects Iknow, / If I
can now but feign ‘em handsomely” (4.2.38-39). The dualityof acted virginity both makes the play
stageable and makes virginity itself stageable.

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The real question presented by the play, in context, is one of virginal honesty; both in the
sense of honest virginity and of honesty about virginity. In 1613, Frances Howard was examined by
a panel of women in order to verify her claims that she was still a virgin in a petition for a divorce
from her husband. It was known as the Essex Divorce and, as Sara D. Luttfring says, “Howard’s
story consistently provoked anxiety about women’s ability to feign virginity” (97). After being too
quick to accept Beatrice’s offer of money for taking her place on Beatrice’s wedding night,
Diaphanta even questions herself: “She will not search me? Will she? / Like the forewoman of a
female jury” (4.1.99-100). This near-explicit reference to the Essex Divorce trial and Luttfring’s
analysis of it lends weight to the idea of questionable virginity in The Changeling. Luttfring writes,
“men were frequently forced to depend on women’s potentially unreliable words, behavior, and
appearance for ‘proof’ of physical and moral integrity” (98). Physical or metaphysical virginity is
supposedly the location of that physical and moral integrity that Luttfring discusses, but it has no
real place. In limbo between the metaphysical and physical – the embodied soul and the ensouled
body – virginity is anxiety inducing in all cases because, though Alsemero relies heavily on Glass M,
there is no fool-proof way to ensure virginity, thus, leaving women’s integrity questionable. As
virginity is the sign of integrity, Luttfring writes that even the panel of women who examined
Howard’s body were questioned. The narrative of truth shifted from Howard’s word to her body to
the word of other women. Interestingly, the socially accepted sexual conduct that prevented men
from examining Howard is the same code of conduct that renders her chastity questionable in the
first place; the importance of sexual decency ensured the question of sexual decency.
The idea of a virginity examination conducted by women suggested that women could
‘know’ other women in a way that men could not. Given Diaphanta’s question of the female jury,
this only strengthens the queer suggestion of a lesbian sexual encounter. Though chaste in its
performance, the scene testing virginity between Diaphanta and Beatrice is one of sexuality and

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intimacy in nature. As Luttfring notes, virginity is discovered through openness when it is defined by
being closed off or shut away from penetration. In the act of the female jury, there is no apparent
physical penetration, but a visual one. There is also the spiritual intimacy perceived by men who
were to take the female jury at her word that Howard’s hymen was intact, which relies on Howard’s
body, the women’s ability to gauge her virginity through her body, and the women’s word that what
they perceived was true. Luttfring says that there was secrecy involved in the report made by the
women and there is little on record of the actual results of the exam (102). This general intimacy
and closeness is even more suggestive than the examination itself. Additionally, the Essex divorce
combined the questionability of women’s word with the questionability of women’s body as
depicted by Beatrice’s narration of Diaphanta’s symptoms (of orgasm) as they occurred. There was
the simultaneous question of women’s word and women’s body and only answered through the
medium of woman’s word and woman’s body. The trial goes to show that virginity only counted in
there was actual penetration, which is not to say that other sex acts or sexual behavior would be
culturally permissible, but more likely that hegemonic sexuality (for women) was not regarded in all
of its potential permutations: there is only the maid or the whore.
There is also the matter of the actual orgasm Diaphanta visibly experiences. According to
Garber, the sneeze relates to the, “hysteria and body that unconsciously speaks its symptoms” (23).
More accurately, the sneeze resembles a visual reaction:
The animating of male fantasy... might be described as the (impossible) attempt to
capture visually the frenzy of the visible in a female body whose orgasmic excitement
can never be objectively measured... the woman’s sexual pleasure is elicited
involuntarily, often against her will. (Garber 24)
This suggests that the visual orgasm is an explicitly physical phenomenon, or it is as far as men are
concerned. The progression of gaping to sneezing to laughter to sadness is the progression from

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gasping to convulsions to pleasure and back to her natural state. As Glass M (denoting ‘maid’ or
‘maidenhead’) induces these symptoms – quote obviously, as noted, depicting orgasm – which
promote female sexual pleasure without explicit sexual acts. Freud described the “insincerity of
women” as lying about orgasm, giving Garber the title of the article quoted here. So much of The
Changeling is concerned with the insincerity of women in terms directly related to sexuality. If Glass
M actually induces orgasm, Beatrice wouldn’t have had to watch Diaphanta’s reaction in order to
mimic it unless she received no pleasure when she had sex. While watching Diaphanta, she seems to
recognize the symptoms, but there is also the suggestion of her having had seen the reaction of
Diaphanta as she fakes her own virginal presentation to Alsemero.
The scenario in which Beatrice lost her virginity was one best described by rape. Because it
is framed in the context of blackmail, it can theoretically be separated (though not in good
consciousness) from physical rape to rape of the body through mental or emotional avenues. It
could be argued, then, that it is the rape of the embodied soul. Similarly, Alsemero is raped by
Diaphanta who he thinks is Beatrice. Though willing in the act, he is not consenting to sleeping
with Diaphanta. Alsemero also qualifies as having his embodied soul raped. For both Beatrice and
Alsemero, they are physically willing and emotionally unconsenting, but it still does not denote a
separation between body and soul because sex is a site of connection between the two,
strengthening Paster proposal of scholarship focused on the embodied soul and the ensouled body.
Assuming Beatrice received no sexual pleasure through her rape, sex is once again denoted
by a single-sided pleasure within a mutual experience. Either way, it is a situation of her own
making. Randall writes that Beatrice’s “love-inspired actions ‘blasts a beauty to deformity’” (349).
The introduces the idea of visually appealing pleasure as it relates to sex. Beatrice’s initial reaction to
Deflores is one of disgust: “This ominous, ill-faced fellow more disturbs me / Than all my other
passions” (2.1.52-53). There is no reciprocity in attraction between Deflores and Beatrice, though

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he finds her to be delightful. Before their deal is struck, he states, “She turns her blessed eye upon
me now, / And I’ll endure all storms before I part with’t” (2.1.51-52). Once Beatrice realizes she
can use him to further her own ambitions, her attitude changes and upon seeing him she says:
“What ha’ you done / To your face alate? You’ve met with some good physician; / You’ve pruned
yourself methinks: you were not wont / To look so amorously” (2.2.73-74). This transparent falsity
is a further testament to the falseness of women in general. Beatrice’s manipulation of her visible
emotions is used to manipulate Deflores and goad his favor. When she finally agrees to Deflores
demand for sex, Beatrice says, “Murder, I see is followed by more sins”, but her first real sin was
lying to Deflores (3.3.163). Her lies about her affection for him were the catalyst that set the whole
play in motion.
Yet, she did not need to draw him in; he would have apparently willingly done anything for
her: “I can aswell be hanged as refrain from seeing her” (2.1.28). On their completely level playing
field – before any debt is owed – Deflores values the image of Beatrice, despite her hatred for him.
He even goes onto say, “She turns her blessed eye upon my now, / And I’ll endure all storms before
I part with’t.” (2.1.50-51). But this isn’t true. He is quite willing, after providing her with a service,
to let both of them die by admitting to the murder unless she rewards him with her virginity.
Though formerly enamored with Beatrice as a complete being, when pressed, Deflores only views
her virginity as something valuable about her. Before the murder, she tells him, “The reward shall
be precious” (2.2.129). After the murder, Deflores presents Beatrice with Piracquo’s finger and the
ring she had given him. As Garber writes, “The Changeling is not a play that will hide castration under
a bushel” (21). Thinking only in terms of the sexual relationships, not only have Deflores ‘castrated’
Piracquo, he has presented both the symbolic finger and the token of her affections, the ring, to her
as inseparable entities, thus he has assumed the position of her suitor and taken on the role of
husband, that is to say he has assumed the position of her lover. In this, he presents the finger as

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being a proposition for sex and a proposition of love. She refuses initially and it is clear that not
only does Deflores not value gold over Beatrice, but that Beatrice’s entire being is composed of her
virginity itself because it is the only basis for his affection. Marine Leslie writes that the Renaissance
virgin could sometimes take on the role of “sexless beings” in Church writings (182). Beatrice was a
manipulator and a virgin. Her power, by virtue of existing, was sexless or masculine. Even before
Beatrice gives into Deflores request, however, the power dynamic shifts in the scene between them
Beatrice and Diaphanta. The second her virginity enters the conversation within the context of
being payment, Beatrice changes from power player to pawn. Though she planned on giving him a
monetary payment initially, there is an element of desperation as Beatrice tries to bribe him away
from her virtue: “Look you, sir, here’s three thousand golden florins: / I have not meanly thought
upon they merit.” (3.3.61-62). Beatrice is the one who places a monetary value on her virginity,
hoping that it is worth less to Deflores than three thousand florins. However, as he expressed
earlier, he would rather die than have her taken from him. Later, before his death, he expresses no
regret because he was able to experience Beatrice: “Ithank life for nothing / But that pleasure; it
was so sweet to me” (5.3.168-169). Her value was completely tied up in her chastity to Deflores.
Despite his affection before he knew there was ever the possibility of having her virginity, it was
gone once she was no longer a maid. As Leslie notes,
...that the virgin’s refusal to submit to a man (in marriage) can bring about a greater
fall by submitting to men (outside of marriage) belies a profound ambivalence in the
patristic logic about female virginity, where the exaltation of the virginal body is
linked to its unequaled potential for debasement and degradation (183).
Though Beatrice did not refuse marriage altogether, she unwillingly submitted to a different man
outside of marriage. This led to her down downfall, or her ‘degradation’. Beatrice’s submission as a

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wife, would only be accepted or acceptable when she was entering into marriage as a maid so by
submitting to Deflores, she is rejecting proper marriage to Alsemero.
The power structure is similar to that of Diaphanta and Alsemero as well as Howard in her
divorce trial. Beatrice’s sexual experience removed her ability to be sexless and she is firmly defined
as woman. Though, with Diaphanta, she maintains the upper hand in her encounter because she is
aware of the identity of all of the players and she is being rewarded physically and monetarily. Leslie
gives an in-depth analysis of Margret Cavendish’s Assaulted and Pursued. When describing Miseria’s
encounter with her would-be-rapist, she writes that Miseria fought back and killed the Prince: “This
tableau reverses the position of victim and victor: the prince is the one bloodied, penetrated by the
discharged weapon of the Lady, who stands over him, statuesque and impassive.” (187). Though
highly suggestive of sexual experience, Miseria maintains her virginity and, thus, he masculinity.
Diaphanta reflects this model, but because her actual experience was sexual, she cannot escape the
poetic justice of punishment and Deflores sets her chamber on fire and she is killed when Beatrice
sends her there: “Hie, quickly to your chamber; / Your reward follows you” (5.1.78-79). By killing
her immediately after sex, the link between what Diaphanta’s reward would be and what her
punishment was is impossible to discount; her reward was to be Alsemero and physical pleasure and
to be paid by Beatrice. Instead, her body and all of her possessions were destroyed completely. Not
only were they denied to her, but they were erased from existence and just as quickly as she was to
answer Beatrice’s plea and Beatrice says to her, “You’re too quick, Ifear, to be a maid” (4.1.92).
While pleasure is markedly ungendered, punishment is coded as feminine.
Wright argues that passion should exist in a disembodied space while ‘affection’ is something
more holy altogether. Natural philosophers considered passion as part of the body and Wright
believed that passions were “drowned in corporall organs and instruments” (Sullivan 37). He also
argues that the exchange of sensual knowledge and intellective knowledgethat was discussed earlier

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is almost always negative, “with the passions having a corrupting influence on the will and reasons”
(Sullivan 38). Passion and desire could be seen as sexual desire, and the passion that Beatrice
actually names as a source of her distaste for Deflores is a source of that sexual (or lack of) desire.
Deflores’s lust for Beatrice – though seen wrapped up in one entity as his affection for her as a
person – has a negative effect just as Wright suggests. Because of her lack of affection for Deflores
and her fascination with watch Diaphanta take the virginity test, continuing the hypothesis that
Beatrice received no pleasure with Deflores, Beatrice actually experiences her first pleasurable sexual
experience with Alsemero when he administers the test. Diaphanta, assuming from the long time
that she stayed in his room, experiences pleasure through sex for the first time – as opposed to her
sexless orgasm during the test – with Alsemero. Female pleasure can then be coded as both desire
and female intimacy.
Diaphanta certainly enjoyed her experience with Alsemero, as Beatrice acknowledges when
she laments that Diaphanta has not returned by one:
One struck, and yet she lies by’t! O my fears!
This strumpet serves her own ends, ‘tis apparent now,
Devours the pleasure with a greedy appetite,
And never minds my honour or my peace (5.1.1-4)
Diaphanta makes the change from her virginity to experiencing pleasure, but, though she is
unmarried, she never quite makes it to ‘whore’ before her death. As Beatrice, though no longer a
virgin, is able to maintain her virginal status publicly because of the test, the secrecy shrouding the
women’s switch prevents Diaphanta from truly being labeled a whore. The reason the Essex
Divorce was so controversial was because it raised the issue for men that “a sexually active woman
could enjoy the prestige of a virgin if she could convincingly feign purity by assuming its outward
signs” (Luttfring 100). Diaphanta never had to confront the loss of her virginity, so she was still in

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possession of the prestige of virginity. In this way, she maintained virginity and obtained sexual
pleasure twice (at least) without marrying or being labeled a whore. Luttfring also writes that,
“Critics of Howard... questioned... the reliability of the female body as evidence of virginity” (104).
However, in the play, Alsemero swears by the virginity test which is falsely mimicked, but is fooled
by the substitution of Diaphanta in his bed. He relies heavily on the science rather than any sort of
examination of the body, but –sexually – is untricked by the body. When he is admonishing
Beatrice for betraying him, he states: “How should blind men know you from fair-faced saints?”
(5.3.10). Yet, he doesn’t know her. In the dark, when he is blind, he is unable to tell the difference
between Diaphanta and Beatrice, both of whom he believes to be virgins. He is only able to
confirm, in the dark, virginity. Much like virginity being Deflores’s main source of attraction to
Beatrice, it is the only thing Alsemero is detecting in his bride. Wright stated that the sensitive part
of the soul was the embodied soul. If the ‘location’ of virginity is unplaced, Alsemero and
Deflores’s recognition of virginity which supersedes vision is strengthened by the idea of a virgin-
like aura or spirit that is lost by interference though the body (sex). This suggests that there is some
sort of palpable virginity that overrides recognition or value of person. It has to be something that
could – in the moment – not be ignored, but the idea of sex with a non-virgin would be so
detestable that a test must be devised to ensure virginity before sex begins.
But is the question really about female virginity, or about being the first able to illicit the
response of the test? According to Ovid, Juno and Jupiter questioned Tiresias, because he had been
both a man and a woman in his lifetime, about which gender received more pleasure from sex.
Tiresias’s answer – that women received more pleasure – upset Juno, who blinded him. Garber
writes that this upset the goddess because he revealed her power and that “a woman’s pleasure is
her... power” (29). But power doesn’t explicitly lie within pleasure, it resides in the perception of it:
“it was precisely the impossibility of fixing virginity in any single body part or speech act that opened

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up the potential for even non-virgins to exploit virginity’s ambiguities and gain control over the
interpretation of their bodies” (Luttfring 98). Of course, Tiresias is believed not only because of his
dual experience, but because he is once again a man when answering the question. A woman’s
power may be located in her pleasure, but, as Luttfring notes, it is not because pleasure is power but
because visual pleasure is the power to control the perception of the body and therefore the body
itself. And, in regards to sexual pleasure, to control the body is control spirit, meaning that to have
control of sexual pleasure is to have agency of self. Juno is not upset with the truth of Tiresias’s
answer, but with the reveal of it. In the Essex Divorce trial, it is impossible to prove but widely
believed that Howard really was lying and that it was all a ploy to enable her to marry Robert Carr.
In that case, the trial and its spectacle were completely driven by Howard’s desire and though it
worked out much better for her, Beatrice’s narrativewas driven by her desire for Alsemero.
Howard’s husband said that she was still a virgin, but due to her defects, not his. His humiliation is
in his inability to capture the affection of his wife and he turns it on her inabilities rather than his
own. They attempted to have sex, but due to the physical restraints of either Howard or Essex, it
did not occur. Though this would have led to a socially unacceptable sexualencounter outside of
marriage, it does not break Howard’s virginity. It’s possible that virginity is not defined by sex, but
in the man’s ability to create the feeling of sexual pleasure within her. Essex did not have this ability
and Tiresias revealed to Jupiter the magnitude of that ability, taking power from Juno. In
Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, the lovers’ first sexual encounter is almost coded as a rape
that transitions into sex: “In such wars, women use but half their strength” and that she “destroyed
herself, yielded at last” (Boehrer 171). This scene implies that female sexuality does not answer to
will, but that chastity can be undone by a desire which, like the pleasure from sex, is stronger than
women would like to let on.

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The idea of the virginity test ensures the reality of the sinful female reduced to her lack of
truth – Deflores calls Beatrice “that broken rib of mankind”, insinuating that calling her ‘woman’ is
an insult in itself. Published as companion pieces in 1697, “The Character of a Bad Woman” and
“The Character of a Good Woman” were poems that simply described the qualities and character of
bad women and good women. The poems depict a woman as bad in every possible way, basically
creating a category for ‘bad’ women that could consume all women while ‘good’ women are an
impossible dream: “Should my presumptuous Muse pretend to draw / a Woman, which few Ages
ever saw” (1-2). As the opening line, this puts the good woman in a world of myth and by italicizing
both ‘muse’ and ‘woman’, the poet almost conflates the two as inspirational spirits, rather than
corporeal beings. ‘Bad Woman’ ends with, “All this of a Bad Woman’s understood; / But, prithee,
(Reader) shew me One that’s Good” (78-79). These two poems present an image of women inherently
as evaders of goodness. The virginity tests and the idea of virginity (which is feminine at its core)
both build up the idea of women’s insincerity. If the only standard against which to rule
truthfulness for women is men who do not need to subscribe to the same moral behavior as women,
any action of deceit in that area is reflective of the sinfulness of all women. Though both Alsemero
and Deflores had equal parts in taking a woman’s virginity as she did in losing it – and Alsemero
indicates he had on more than one occasion – Deflores’s rage upon finding out Beatrice was not
offering her virginity and Alsemero’s sense of betrayal when he discovered that Beatrice was, as
Deflores so eloquently puts it, “a whore” indicates that virginity is their only standard of decency
(5.3.108). Leslie writes that in the Caroline court, “chastity was very explicitly a social metaphor
used as an index of courtly favor and an instrument for the enforcement of courtly values” (180).
Not only is pleasure a source of power for women, but to admit that they enjoy sex would place it
even further into the realm of gluttonous debauchery. There are no sex acts that occur chastely in
The Changeling and the transition from sinner to whore (there are no wives) is never a linear

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progression, it is impossible to have one because as the poem notes, the actions of men suggest, and
Luttfring says, “virtue [ exists] as a female construct”. Not only does this erase the question of male
truthfulness in general, but it creates a society where were are no true virgins, only whores.

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