BDSManfred: Kinkin' it old school

In a notable passage Act II Scene IV, Manfred implores Astarte, a silent spirit who is summoned back from the dead, to speak to him. Manfred's speech draws upon many tropes of the Romantic understanding of love.

Of great importance is the initial dynamic that exists between Manfred and Astarte: that she is silent, deprived of a voice. There is a heightened sexual tension of Astarte's maintained unattainability despite her physical proximity. "And I would hear yet once before I perish / The voice which was my music: speak to me!" (945). The love denied is a source of continual enticement, whereas the fulfillment of love marks the end of imaginative intrigue. The sense of their love being denied continues, Manfred calls it "The deadliest sin to love as we have loved" (945). Here the sense of a denial of love is highly connected with the notion of the transgressive. Those fantasies which are the most transgressive attain a heightened level of enticement in the denial of their fullfilment through the threat of social exclusion or a moral self-censorship. The use of the word "sin" frames their relationship in a specifically religiously transgressive context, and paints religion as a sexually repressive force. If Manfred's love is "his music", all that he sees as giving worth to life, then his reference to it as the "deadliest sin" leads the reader to question the legitimacy of a religious moral structure that can justifiably censure such beauty.

By referring to the "sin" of their love as "deadly", the notions of love and death are brought closely together. This proximity is also suggested in that Astarte is already dead. More than just a sense of death, there is a general Gothic darkness that exists throughout Manfred's speech. He mentions "The grave", "the still night" and "the caves", all which contribute to a motif of darkness that pervades Manfred's profession of love. Furthermore, there is a suggestion of a sadomasochistic mode of sexuality that has been shared between the two lovers. "To torture thus each other" connects an extremity of pain with an extremity of passion. "I do bear / This punishment for both" suggests a sexuality in the exertion of power to 'punish' a lover for an imagined transgression. "To bind me" potentially refers to use of physical restraint in sex or 'bondage'. "Speak to me, though it be in wrath" further suggests a sexualized supplication to the 'anger' of a lover.