Queer/Quean: The Tragedy of Mariam, Whiteness, and Queer Chastity

This article considers Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry (1613) alongside Amber Jamilla Musser’s theorization of masochism to read the titular character as embodying a queer chastity. Through premodern critical race studies and queer studies, this article suggests that Mariam’s adjacency to whiteness—affirmed by Petrarchan beauty standards, martyrdom narratives, and foiling of Mariam against other women—gives her ability to queer her chastity into a masochistic position that plummets her toward execution. Mariam rejects Herod’s advances, which would likely save her from an execution he commanded, to uphold her own narrativization of her white value. Chastity becomes mobilized as an erotic register that, as a white woman, Mariam can pervert for her own resistance and pleasures in Herod’s kingdom. Fundamentally, the abjectness of Mariam’s solitary existence in the play highlights the violence of white womanhood, which creates distance and rivalry rather than solidarity.