Though set in the underworld of theft, John Gay's The Beggar's Play codifies a set of Marxist sexual politics in which marriage represents the great equalizer of desire and power . An often aphoristic overview of the traditional power struggle between men and women frames a world in which marriage reduces the suitor's desire but increases his power equally through ownership as a husband. This fetishism of the wife's commodity stimulates, in turn, the external desire of potential suitors, bringing balance back to the scales of eros. I will argue that Macheath's eventual capture (disregarding his brief escape and ironically crowd-pleasing ending) arises from the complications that his insatiable desire, at the expense of all-consuming greed, introduces into a capitalist society based on indirectly gender relations fair. .Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayAlthough the work contains stereotypical assessments of sought-after virgins, Gay goes beyond this system of authorship by exploring the source of their allure in monetary terms. Air V, sung by Mrs. Peachum, identifies the virgin with raw, yet-to-be-minted material: "A maiden is like gold ore, / Which has inherent guineas, / Whose value has never been known before / Is tried and impressed in the Mint" (Iv). Note the apparent contradiction in that "proven" means "refined" or "purified"; the virgin must undergo some sort of transmutation since she is dissolute. The monetary conceit, which permeates the entire work, is here an example of what Marx calls the use value of an object, which is, essentially, "[T]he utility of a thing" (Marx 421). The virgin is precious and her use value is high because she possesses a hitherto unknown sexual utility. We can see how this leads to an invented desire on the part of her suitors: "The virgins are like the beautiful flower in its splendor, / Which in the garden enamels the earth" (I.vii). Once again, Gay polishes the traditional metaphor of the virgin flower of the air with the monetary imagery of “shine” and “enamel.” The increased emphasis on the eroticization of the virgin creates a tension between her purity and the inevitability of sex: "If she is not soon made a wife, / Her honor is scorched, and then all her life, / She is the one who does not I dare to name" (I.iv). In a work that uses the words "slut," "slut," "jade" and every other permutation of "prostitute," Mrs. Peachum's abstention from the label for her daughter is a telling gesture at this point (she doesn't has trouble tagging Polly with "sad bitch" two songs later). Furthermore, the virgin's passivity "not getting married" (as "she is tested and impressed") exposes her to the threat of coitus which she must guard against. Along the lines of this anxiety, Ms. Peachum emphasizes the financial particularity with which the virgin must choose her first mate: "But the first time a woman is fragile, she should be a little nice, I think, because it's then or never time to make his fortune" (I.viii). Despite her apparent choice in the matter, the virgin remains a passive figure, defending her compromised virtue as a dark secret: "After that, there is nothing left for her to do but guard against being discovered, and she can do as she pleases" ( I.viii). The implication is that there is no interregnum between a woman's virgin status and doing "what she pleases"? The first act of the relationship is a slippery, sloppy slope. How, then, does the virgin milk her beauty and actively increase her value like? a desirable object? Polly is a wily flirt, who wins Macheath's favor in exchange for material goods. "A womanshe knows how to be mercenary," she tells her father. "If I grant Captain Macheath some trivial liberties, I have this watch and other visible tokens of his favor to prove it" (I.vii). This is suggested by the contradictory language of ownership which uses the " freedom" when his services are anything but free that this is not simply use value, but something else. Macheath bestows his gifts, as I wrote before, in exchange for sexual compensation from Polly. Polly's metaphorical coitus reservatus technique arouses and sustains Macheath's desire, his value increases through his financial expenditure on her. Marx separates the notion of exchange value from that of use value and defines it as a quantity of labor pure: next to the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put aside both the useful character of the different types of work contained in them, and of the concrete forms of that work, nothing remains but what is common to all; everyone is reduced to one and the same type of work, human work in the abstract. (423) What is now noteworthy and valuable about Polly is not the usefulness of the watch, which may well be broken, but the "visible signs of her favor which prove it." In other words, the net value of Macheath's “work,” the act of courtship and the labor that accompanies it, is a tangible and quantifiable term. We may also assume that the labor of a lothario like Macheath is worth more, per hour, than that of a secular suitor. Considering that an early definition of "brand" is "the stamp or imprint of a coin", then Macheath's (Marx?) "visible signs" become more than material gifts, but external signs of bodily possession by monetary means ( OED, 1.11a). Although Polly, unbeknownst to her parents, has already married Macheath and granted her estate, which I will discuss later, these are ostensibly (and once truly were) courtship rituals and must be criticized as such. During the courtship process, the woman continues to absorb her suitor's capital and increase her exchange value. When Mrs. Peachum complains that she is "sorry on Polly's behalf, the Captain has no more discretion," Gay calls our attention to the fiscal pun as Peachum utters "On Polly's behalf!" twice (I.iv). Polly's game as custodian of savings is made clear when Filch recognizes that love has a price: "For love's causes, like the law, are won with pay, / And beauty must be nurtured in our arms " (I .ii). When the suitor's desire reaches its peak and when the woman's exchange value reaches its breaking point (in fact, no reasonable man would continue to shower his woman with gifts if it did not come to fruition), she accepts the marriage, becoming property of her husband and losing her earnings. , while Peachum groans, "If the maiden know not her profit, she sure know her pleasure rather than make a property for herself!" (I.iv) Legal union and possession, as marriage therapists know all too well, usually repress the husband's desire as a typical push-pull antithesis, as Polly and Lucy express in a duet (which applies to all relationships, but especially marriage): "LUCY: If we become attached they avoid us. POLLY: And when we run away from them, they chase us. LUCY: But leave us when they have conquered us" (III.viii). The possible pun "pursue" on "purse" reminds us of the investments that suitors are willing to make that husbands may ignore. The eroticism of the virgin hunt has disappeared, and the wife's exchange value is returned to a use value, albeit of a different composition, as Peachum observes: "A good sportsman always lets the partridges fly, because the breed of gameit depends on them" (I.ii). The wife's sexuality (even, one might infer, her genitals), once the primary indicator of her mysterious use-value as a virgin, transforms from fueling desire, now absent , of man, a purely utilitarian (and narcissistic for man, in which he preserves his name and blood) task of reproduction. Under the control of the husband, the wife emerges as his commodity and imprinted” as coin; Both Polly and Macheath subsequently refer to the tactile act of insistence in courtship. Polly announces that she was forced into marriage “When he kissed me so closely he insisted,” and Macheath simply includes this in a list of directions for seducing a virgin: "Press her" (I.viii, II.iii). The husband's "visible signs" become so obvious that they obscure the rest of the wife's identity. Marx uses similar images in his classification of fetishism commodities: "A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labor appears to them as an objective character impressed upon the product of that labor" (436). The value of the labor, or what one might call the humanity, of an object is downplayed in comparison to the valuation of the final product. Before marriage, a woman's commodity fetishism derived from her clothes, perhaps purchased with the help of a suitor, but independent of him: "If any maid wore the girdle of Venus, / Though she were never so ugly; / Lilies and roses will soon appear, / And his face looks wonderful and pleased" (I.iv). After the fetishism of marriage, however, other men perceive the wife only as a transferable object (hence the money analogy) of her husband's possession in what Marx describes as a "defined social relation between men, which presupposes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relationship between things" (436). Who her husband is and the work/courtship he has invested in, at this point, is quite irrelevant to other men, according to Marx: "There, l The existence of things as commodities, and the value relation between the products of labor which characterizes them as commodities, have absolutely no relation to their physical properties and the material relations resulting from them" (436). In one particularly telling quote, Mrs. Peachum supports this concept: "All men are thieves in love, and as a woman all the better because they are another's property" (Iv). The thrill of enticing a married woman is enough for the suitor, and her sky-high desire balances her husband's obvious passion, who simultaneously compensates for his lost lust of the flesh with his tight leash of financial power. In this circular triangle, everyone benefits and loses in terms of power, if we consider the presence of desire as a benefit to one's life: 1) The wife no longer has financial or sensual power within the confines of her marriage over her husband 2) , who has abandoned his desire for the power that comes from economic ownership, but this libidinous power is returned externally to the woman (since the husband is now jealous) by the increased appetite of the 3) suitor, who has lost his right to any legal possession of the wife, who is now once again desired by the 4) husband out of jealousy, until he loses interest again, and the cycle continues ad infinitum. In order for society to proceed in an orderly and harmonious manner, the equation must cancel out, so that each player is as powerful after marriage as they were before marriage. How does Macheath disrupt this harmony, and how does this inevitably lead to his capture? ? Its resistance to the traditional behavioral cycle as defined above is whatit denies him access to the sure security offered by a conventional marriage, in which lustful lack is compensated for by pecuniary profit. His carnal appetite leaves no room for a pragmatic main course; he binges on dessert. Facing Polly, he sings "My heart was free, / Wandered like the bee, / ? Till Polly my passion was returned" and satisfied his need for more flowers (I.xiii). In parting, he even draws a direct parallel between his love for Polly and a miser's love of money: "The miser thus sees a shilling, / Which he is obliged to pay, / With sighs he gradually resigns himself, / And the fears are gone." for yes" (I.xiii). His sincerity is quickly demolished when he later reverses this monetary analogy: "And a man who loves money, might as well be content with a guinea, as I with a woman" (II.iii) He is not simply an eighteenth-century version of the male reluctant to commit, as stereotyped by modern sitcoms and the Hollywood vehicle, but, rather, a man burdened (or blessed, depending on your point of view) with an infinite scale of desire while others Gay's London men follow the adage "You can never be too rich or too thin" (perhaps reversing the "thin" component for the times), Macheath would add "or have too many women". , none holds a particular place in his heart. When the Captain implores Polly "Suspect my honor, my courage, suspect anything but my love" (65), Gay alludes to Hamlet's love letter to Ophelia Ma Macheath's indecision resembles Hamlet's paralytic vacillations less than Macbeth's ever-ambitious grasp for more power by any means; it is the indecision of the narrator in John Donne's poem "The Indifferent," who "can love her, and her, and thee, and thee." Macheath's boundless reserve of desire prefers the "free-hearted women" of the city to maidens (II.iii). The promiscuity of prostitutes is an obvious advantage, but their deep connection to money gives them an added allure to Macheath. The prostitute is a self-sufficient wage earner (if we ignore her debt to her lady), allaying Macheath's conventional male fears of a dependent woman, financially or otherwise. The emotionally independent and indifferent prostitute also has the seemingly paradoxical relationship with a "court lady, who can have a dozen young men in her ear without obeying one", as Peachum would like her daughter to behave. More importantly for the bandit, the prostitutes in The Beggar's Opera are all thieving souls akin to Macheath, to be sure that, combined with the sale of their bodies, they develop as sexualized commodity fetishes of theft and trade, as they are represented by the handkerchiefs they steal and the sex they engage in. This is irresistible to Macheath, and Freud might read his fetish of material/capital goods for prostitutes as a "sign of triumph". about the threat of castration and protection against it" by replacing their absent phalluses with shillings or another physical manifestation of money (Freud 154). In Macheath's case, castration is giving way to a sentimentality (which sometimes seems emerge in him) leading to a regular marriage, which would effectively kill his superhuman libido, just as the greed fetishist Inkle fears his marriage to the "Indian Maid" Yarico will expose his repressed sentimentalism in a popular 18th century tale century. But is Macheath really so fixated on sex that he ignores money, as when he states that "money is not so strong a cordial [as women are] for the time" (II.iii) Indeed, he loves gambling as much as, if not more than, sex,.