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Claire Underwood: Feminist Warrior or Shakespearean Villain? Re-visiting Feminine Evil in House of Cards

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Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television

Abstract

This chapter offers a comparative textual analysis of two female villains more than four centuries apart, Claire Underwood in the political thriller House of Cards (2013–2018) and Lady Macbeth in Shakespearean play Macbeth (1603), focusing on the themes of motherhood, seduction, and madness. The Underwoods, as the perfect Machiavellian figures—ruthlessly pragmatic and manipulative—also correspond to other Shakespearean characters, such as Iago from Othello and Henry Bolingbroke from Richard III. This chapter follows the storyline of House of Cards where Claire Underwood takes center stage in the show’s final season by bringing many feminist issues, such as rape and abortion, to the narrative and transforming herself into a cruel anti-heroine, even exceeding her husband’s moral transgressions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press; Hollway, Wendy. 1989. Subjectivity and method in psychology: gender, meaning and science. London: Sage; Allen, Amy. 2008. The politics of our selves: power, autonomy, and gender in contemporary critical theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

  2. 2.

    Garner Nelson, Shirley and Sprengnether, Madelon. 1996. Shakespearean tragedy and gender. Indiana University Press; Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. 2000. The madwoman in the attic. The woman writer and the nineteenth century literary imagination. Yale University Press; Alfar, Cristina León. 2003. Fantasies of female evil: The dynamics of gender and power in Shakespearean Tragedy. Associated University Press; Chamberlain, Stephanie. 2005. Fantasizing infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the murdering mother in early modern England. College Literature 32-3: 72–91; Sentov, Ana. 2014. Unnatural hags: Shakespeare’s evil women in Titus Andronicus, King Lear and Macbeth. European English Messenger 23: 27–31.

  3. 3.

    Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 18.

  4. 4.

    Kristeva, Julia. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection, p. 4.

  5. 5.

    Creed, Barbara. 1993. The monstrous feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. Routledge; Wee, Valerie. 2011. Patriarchy and the horror of the monstrous feminine. Feminist Media Studies 11-2: 151–165; Mubarki, Meraj Ahmed. 2014. The monstrous ‘other’ feminine: Gender, desire and the ‘look’ in the Hindi horror genre. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 21-3: 379–399; King, Amy K. 2017. A monstrous (ly-feminine) whiteness: Gender, genre, and the abject horror of the past in American horror story: Coven. Women’s Studies 46-6: 557–573.

  6. 6.

    Alfar, Cristina León. 2003. Fantasies of female evil: The dynamics of gender and power in Shakespearean tragedy. Associated University Press, p. 15.

  7. 7.

    Hill, James L.1986. What, are they children? Shakespeare’s tragic women and the boy actors. Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 26-2: 244.

  8. 8.

    Roberts, Jeanne Addison. 1999. The Shakespearean wild: Geography, genus, and gender. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, p. 13.

  9. 9.

    Gohlke, Madelon. 1980. I wooed thee with my sword: Shakespeare’s tragic paradigms. In The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, 150–170. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; French, Marilyn. 1982. Shakespeare’s division of experience. London: Cape, p. 243; Erickson, Peter. 1985. Patriarchal structures in Shakespeare’s plays. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  10. 10.

    Shanley, Lyndon J. 1961. Macbeth. The tragedy of evil. College English 22-5: 305–311.

  11. 11.

    Muir, Kenneth (ed.) 1997. Macbeth. Arden Shakespeare, p. xvii.

  12. 12.

    Shakespeare, Macbeth I.VII. 27.

  13. 13.

    Muir, Macbeth, p. xviii.

  14. 14.

    Shakespeare, Macbeth I.V.11–12.

  15. 15.

    Shakespeare, Macbeth V.IX.35.

  16. 16.

    Crouch, Ian. 2013. Richard III’s House of Cards. The New Yorker, February 4, Reinhoud, Eline. 2019. ‘Dive, thoughts, down to my soul’: The politico-aesthetic function of the vice and the Machiavel in Richard III and House of Cards. https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02324710/. Accessed 23 December 2019.

  17. 17.

    Crouch 2013. Para. 6.

  18. 18.

    Season 1, Chapter 1, 0:35ʹʹ–1ʹ:26ʹʹ.

  19. 19.

    Henry VI, Part III, ii, 182–193.

  20. 20.

    Season 2, Chapter 14, 31ʹ:20ʹʹ–31ʹ:38ʹʹ.

  21. 21.

    The accusations against Kevin Spacey began October 29, 2017 when Anthony Rapp, an actor known for his work in Rent and Star Trek: Discovery, alleged that Spaces had made a sexual advance toward him when Rapp was 14 years old. Several more accusations followed led to Spacey’s firing from House of Cards. CNN also alleged that Spacey’s behavior made the House of Cards set a “toxic” work environment. It quotes a number of former and current workers on the show, one of whom accuses the actor of sexual assault.

    https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/02/media/house-of-cards-kevin-spacey-harassment/. Accessed 20 December 2019.

  22. 22.

    Season 6, Chapter 66.

  23. 23.

    Young, Bruce W. 2009. Family life in the age of Shakespeare. Westport: Greenwood Press, p. 90.

  24. 24.

    Macbeth, 1.7.54–59.

  25. 25.

    Davis, Marion A. 2009. A brief look at Feminism in Shakespeare’s Macbeth Inquiries. 1:11, p. 1.

  26. 26.

    Adelman, Janet. 2010. Born of woman: Fantasies of maternal power in Macbeth. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Baltimore: John’s Hopkins Press, p. 40.

  27. 27.

    Young, Bruce W. 2009. Family life in the age of Shakespeare. Westport: Greenwood Press, p. 92.

  28. 28.

    Chamberlain, Stephanie. 2005. Fantasizing infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the murdering mother in early modern England. College Literature 32-3: 84.

  29. 29.

    50’.44”–53’.49”.

  30. 30.

    See, Tracey Egan Morrissay. House of Cards’ Claire Underwood is a feminist warrior anti-hero. Jezebel, https://jezebel.com/house-of-cards-claire-underwood-is-a-feminist-warrior-1524425272. Accessed 23 December 2019.

    Eric Sassen. 2014. Is Claire on ‘House of Cards’ a “feminist Warrior”? Jezebel wrongly thinks So. The New Republic, February 18. https://newrepublic.com/article/116652/claire-house-cards-feminist-warrior-jezebel-wrongly-thinks-so. Accessed 23 December 2019.

  31. 31.

    See Conor Friedersdorf. 2014. Feminism, depravity, and power in House of Cards. The Atlantic, February 20. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/feminism-depravity-and-power-in-em-house-of-cards-em/283960/. Accessed 23 December 2019.

  32. 32.

    Macbeth, 1.5.33–44.

  33. 33.

    J. La Belle. 1980. A strange infirmity: Lady Macbeth’s amenorrhea. Shakespeare Quarterly 31-3: 382.

  34. 34.

    Rackin, Phyllis. 1999. Staging the female body: Maternal breastfeeding and Lady Macbeth’s ‘unsex me here.’In Corps/décors: Femmes, Orgie, Parodie, eds. Catherine Nesci, Gretchen Van Slyke, and Gerald Prince, 17–29. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi.

  35. 35.

    Chamberlain, Stephanie. 2005. Fantasizing infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the murdering mother in early modern England. College Literature 32-3: 72–91.

  36. 36.

    Sentov, Ana. 2014. Unnatural hags: Shakespeare’s evil women in Titus Andronicus, King Lear and Macbeth. European English Messenger 23-1: 31.

  37. 37.

    Smith, Kirsten 2017. Seduction and sex: The changing allure of the femme fatale in fact and fiction. At the Interface/Probing the boundaries 90: 37.

  38. 38.

    McGuire, Philip C. 1994. Shakespeare: The Jacobean plays. London: Macmillan, p. 3.

  39. 39.

    McGuire, Philip C. 1994. Shakespeare: The Jacobean plays. London: Macmillan, p. 4.

  40. 40.

    Psychanalyse de Claire Underwood: « la lady Macbeth » de House of Cards: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/premiere/emissions/plus-on-est-de-fous-plus-on-lit/segments/chronique/64458/house-of-cards-netflix-nicolas-levesque-manon-dumais. Accessed 23 December 2019.

  41. 41.

    Francis Bacon. (1561–1626). Essays, civil and moral. The Harvard Classics. 1909–1914.

  42. 42.

    Neely, Carol Thomas. 2004. Distracted subjects: Madness and gender in Shakespeare and early modern culture. New York: Cornell University Press, p. 180.

  43. 43.

    Macbeth, 2.2.33–34.

  44. 44.

    Macbeth, 2.2.66–69.

  45. 45.

    Tally, Margaret. 2016. The rise of the Anti-heroine in TV’s third golden age. Cambridge Scholar Publishing, p. 61.

  46. 46.

    Berggren Paula S. 1980. The women’s part: Female sexuality as power in Shakespeare plays. In The woman’s part: Feminist criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, 314–335. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

  47. 47.

    Rackin, Phyllis. 2005. Oxford Shakespeare topics: Shakespeare and women. New York: Oxford University Press.

  48. 48.

    Klein, Joan Larsen. 1980. Lady Macbeth: Infirm of purpose. In The woman’s part: Feminist criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, 314–335. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, p. 243.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Media, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Aslı Tunç

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Transmedia, Digital Art and Animation, School of Computing, Engineering & Digital Technologies, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK

    Diğdem Sezen

  2. Department of Cinema, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Feride Çiçekoğlu

  3. Department of Media, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Aslı Tunç  & Ebru Thwaites Diken  & 

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Tunç, A. (2020). Claire Underwood: Feminist Warrior or Shakespearean Villain? Re-visiting Feminine Evil in House of Cards. In: Sezen, D., Çiçekoğlu, F., Tunç, A., Thwaites Diken, E. (eds) Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_6

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