A Woman Killed With Kindness

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, rape, sexual harassment, death by suicide, death, graphic violence, sexual content, and suicidal ideation.

Heywood’s play is set in the early 1600s, in which women in England did not have many legal rights and were subject to strict sexual mores—particularly in the upper classes, where marriage was often a matter of wealth and inheritance (making concerns about children’s paternity paramount). By contrast, men of means had near total freedom within the law to travel, own property, advance themselves, and pursue sexual relationships outside of marriage. In A Woman Killed with Kindness, the conflict between Frankford, Anne, and Wendoll best encapsulates the gendered disparities in rights and roles, while the resolution of Charles, Susan, and Francis’s conflict highlights the status of women as property.

The storyline centering on Wendoll and Anne’s affair starkly exposes the difference in how society approached sexual transgression in men versus women. When Frankford finds Wendoll and Anne in bed, his first instinct is to kill both of them, and other characters emphasize Frankford’s legal right to do so. While his response may seem to involve a kind of gender parity, it speaks to Anne’s subordinate status as a wife; a woman whose husband was unfaithful would not have been able to exact similar punishment because her husband did not “belong” to her in the way a wife “belonged” to her husband. Moreover, Frankford’s reaction presumes Anne and Wendoll are equally culpable, despite the fact that, by modern standards, Wendoll effectively coerced Anne into sleeping with him. 

Frankford’s ultimate decision to banish Anne and Wendoll from his life further clarifies the disparity, including how the characters have internalized it. For Wendoll, the scandal is something he can escape, which he resolves to do by leaving town, going “first to France, / And so Germany and Italy” (202); he even speculates about a successful career upon his return to England. Besides illustrating Wendoll’s greater ability to recover from sexual impropriety, the result of both personal mobility and societal leniency, this demonstrates that he views himself as essentially blameless. Anne, by contrast, cannot live with herself because she has lost the virtues the play has associated with womanhood, including obedience, grace, and fidelity: “O women, women, you that yet have kept / Your holy matrimonial vow unstained, / Make me your instance” (190). Moreover, Anne does not have the resources to escape her situation; though Frankford gives her a home of her own, she is effectively imprisoned there. The impossibility of recovering her reputation and social standing, even in her own eyes, ultimately leads to her death.

Susan’s plight, though it in many ways inverts Anne’s, reveals similar disparities in men’s and women’s statuses. When Charles and Susan learn that Francis paid Charles’s debt, Susan’s reaction is fear and anger since she hates Francis for pressing the suit against Charles but also recognizes Francis’s interest in her. Charles, too, recognizes this, saying, “I have enough, though poor: my heart is set, / In one rich gift to pay back all my debt” (180). To Charles, Susan is another asset he can sell to satisfy his own sense of honor, and he pursues this scheme even when Susan says she will die by suicide if forced to sleep with Francis, modifying it only to give Susan permission to die rather than lose her “virtue.” Much like Anne, Susan has no means of extricating herself from this situation; that Francis offers to marry rather than rape her removes the specter of social condemnation but does not alter the fundamental power dynamics.