Masculine Foes, Feminist Woes: A Response to Down Girl

In her book, Down Girl, Manne proposes to uncover the “logic” of misogyny, bringing clarity to a notion that she describes as both “loaded” and simultaneously “politically marginal.” Manne is aware that full insight into the “logic” of misogyny will require not just a “what” but a “why.” Though Manne finds herself largely devoted to the former task, the latter is in the not-too-distant periphery. Manne proposes to understand misogyny, as a general framework, in terms of what it does to women. Misogyny, she writes, is a system that polices and enforces the patriarchal social order (33). That’s the “what.” As for the “why,” Manne suggests that misogyny is what women experience because they fail to live up to the moral standards set out for women by that social order. I find Manne’s analysis insightful, interesting, and well argued. And yet, I find her account incomplete. While I remain fully convinced by her analysis of what misogyny is, I am less persuaded by her analysis of why misogyny is. For a full analysis of the “logic” of misogyny, one needs to understand how the patriarchy manifests in men an interest in participating in its enforcement. Or so I hope to motivate here. I aim to draw a line from the patriarchy to toxic masculinity to misogyny so that we have a clearer picture as to why men are invested in this system. I thus hope to offer here an analysis that is underdeveloped in Manne’s book, but is equally worthy of attention if we want fully to understand the complex machinations underlying misogyny

Nightingales never lose : forced closure and irresolution in some middle English debate poems

Bibliography: pages 62-63

Thomas Hoccleve and the Poetics of Reading

Thomas Hoccleve, the early fifteenth-century London poet who first promoted the notion that Chaucer was the father of English literature, demonstrates an acute awareness that readers would change the form of his own texts over time. Although many scholars consider Hoccleve\u27s style to be derivative of his English predecessors, I argue that his awareness of readers contributed to an innovative style that casts writing and reading as mutually dependent acts of performance. Thus, in depictions of manuscript production and circulation processes, Hoccleve treats his audiences as his creative collaborators. The rich surviving manuscript history for Hoccleve reveals how his texts reflect and incorporate the experiences of readers. Additionally, owing to the fact that Hoccleve\u27s manuscript record includes three autograph manuscripts of his verse, I argue that Hoccleve himself must be counted among his own readers. In this dissertation, I first explore the relationships between autograph and scribal manuscripts of his texts, and between the content and form of his poems in variant scribal manuscripts. I then discuss how readers and copiers interacted with his poems\u27 visual layouts, and how this impacted future reading performances of his texts. Finally, I examine the relationship between Hoccleve\u27s explicit criticism of readers of his poem, the Letter of Cupid, and his own rereading of the poem in one of his autograph manuscripts. From these investigations, I propose that the poetics of reading in Hoccleve\u27s works represent his response to cultural concerns with the instabilities of literary authority in the late Middle Ages. Hoccleve\u27s effort to involve readers both literally and figuratively in the construction of his texts, and his recentering of literary authority in his audiences, are his major contributions to English literature in the fifteenth century

Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615-91): science and medicine in a seventeenth-century Englishwoman’s writing

Katherine Jones, better known to scholars as Lady Ranelagh, was one of the most eminent, politically influential and intellectually respected women in seventeenth-century England. By the time of her death in 1691, she had the rare honour of having been esteemed by every ruler and his government from Cromwell to William and Mary. She was active in diverse intellectual networks across most of the seventeenth century, including the Great Tew Circle, the Hartlib Circle, and the ‘invisible college’, and was associated with many Fellows of the Royal Society during the first three decades of the Society’s existence. As pious as she was intellectually dexterous, Lady Ranelagh elicited respect and admiration from a group of contemporaries who were remarkably diverse in their political opinions, religious views and social status. Over the past decade, there have been several brief surveys of Lady Ranelagh’s life and works; this, however, is the first doctoral thesis to focus exclusively on her. By drawing on over one hundred of her letters and three receipt books associated with her, together with references to her in the diaries of her contemporaries and extant letters written to her, this study contextualises her medical and scientific writings in contemporary religious and socio-political thought. By manipulating generic conventions and employing a rhetoric of modesty, Lady Ranelagh presented her intellectual contributions in a manner appropriate for a gentlewoman. Her extant manuscripts make Lady Ranelagh a representative case study of how women could participate in the radical medical and scientific advances of seventeenth-century England. This interdisciplinary approach creates an informed conversation between two subjects which rarely interact — history of science and medicine, and early modern women’s literature — to consider the material practice and social networks of a remarkably important, but hereunto almost ‘lost’, woman

Anthologizing women : medieval genre, gender and genital poetics

This study investigates three medieval manuscript collections – compiled in the 14th and 15th centuries in Herefordshire, Derbyshire and East Anglia, respectively – that are significant in their similarly implied female readerships, their thematic treatment of the “problem of women,” and their vocalization of the perspectives, and indeed often complaints, of female characters. At the intersection of feminist and bibliographic and textual methodologies, this project traces the interpretive effects of reading gendered, and specifically genital, discourse in the context of the medieval household books and literary anthologies that contain them, investigating representations of the body in various generic texts – from the speaking “Daun Cun” of the Anglo-Norman fabliau to the metaphorical “purs” of the Chaucerian complaint ballad, and lastly, to the saint’s “castle” in East Anglian religious drama. We will find, for example, that the variant of the raunchy fabliau “Le Chevaler qui fist les Cons Parler” in MS Harley 2253 resonates with the editorial concerns of the manuscript, namely a dialogic critique of misogyny and a commitment to unveiling societal injustice and gendered violence. In the case of the Findern manuscript, we posit a gendered reading of Chaucer’s “Complaint to His Purse” in the context of the “feminist sequence” of canonical texts as well as the original female-voiced lyric poems contained in the collection, one that draws parallels between the “feminization” of the pregnant female, the (masculine) poet, and the courtly subject. Finally, I investigate the representation of the saint’s body in the Digby Play of Mary Magdalene as a gendered edifice, in all its vulnerability as well as spiritual power. Ultimately, I argue that this poetics of the body is employed in a range of genres as disparate as fabliau, complaint and religious drama in order to expose the inherent violence against women that props up the patriarchal ideology of chastity, marriage and courtly culture. According to this poetics, political poems written by male artists for the king become allegories for love, sexual rather than political union, and pregnancy; and religious dramas about devout women ring with unruly resonances of prostitution and rape.Englis

Properties of Desire: Performing Women on the Early Modern Transvestite Stage

This dissertation explores how stage properties contribute to the enterprise of depicting the desires of women on the early modern English public stage. It posits a trinity of female character, boy actor, and stage property in performance, the three unified by a shared occupation of subordinate places in the hierarchies that govern the home, the state, and the stage. It considers a Renaissance theatre informed by Pre-Reformation stages that employ religious and salvific objects and variably signifying geographical spaces. I argue that props can shift from locus mode to platea mode as actors do. Catching a spectators attention as props, these objects can contradict their scripted functions in a way that amplifies the resistance of a plays daughter or wife to patriarchal authorities. My project draws upon the work of Frances Teague and Andrew Sofer on early modern stage properties; and upon the work of Erika T. Lin, Richard Preiss, Robert Weimann, and Bert O. States on stage theatricality. Chapter 1 argues that the travels of a salvatory in the Digby Mary Magdalene construct the nature of the Magdalenes erotic desire as the basis of her spiritual authority. It compares this play to A Woman Killed with Kindness, where the journey of a lute foregrounds the damage done to women by male constructions of female erotic desire. Chapter 2 imagines a trial performance of Arden of Faversham in order to introduce a play whose title page condemns Alice for her crimes but whose props offer an affective experience to spectators that would prompt fellow-feeling for her. The final chapter takes up the props in Pericles that drive scenes where daughters resist the identities assigned to them by patriarchs. I argue that these props fail to do what they have been employed to do but potentially afford these daughters a way to negotiate with the powerful for a life in a home conducive to their desires. My coda considers the larger implications of props in the platea that destabilize hierarchies of authority on the stage, in the world, or in the cosmos

Nec ancilla nec domina: Representations of Eve in the Twelfth Century

This thesis seeks to demonstrate the extent to which the figure of Eve operated in twelfth-century commentary on Genesis as a crucial means by which to examine some of the most fundamental and problematic areas of the hexaemeron and fall narratives. Amid the twelfth-century’s flourishing corpus of writing on the creation and fall of mankind, Eve emerges not as an expedient model of female iniquity or a credulous victim of diabolic casuistry, but as a valued equivalent and peer to Adam (‘nec ancilla nec domina sed socia’, in the words of Hugh of St Victor). Moreover, Eve lies at the heart of twelfth-century debate surrounding the challenging issues of how and why mankind was created, why the existence of sin and evil was permitted, the action of temptation and sin, and the composition of the created world. However, there has been no substantial treatment of representations of Eve in the central middle ages, and modern scholarship has frequently been content to assume that medieval responses to the first woman are universally misogynistic. This thesis aims both to address this historiographical lacuna, and to examine the hitherto neglected function of Eve as a means by which to elucidate some of the major theological and philosophical preoccupations of this formative period. In order to do this, the thesis examines representations of Eve as the first woman (Chapter I), the first wife/mother (Chapter II) and the first sinner (Chapter III) in a corpus of texts centred around six of the major twelfth-century treatments of Eve and the creation/fall narrative. These are Guibert of Nogent’s Moralia in Genesim, Abelard’s Expositio in hexameron, Hugh of St Victor’s De sacramentis, Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias, Peter Lombard’s Sentences, and the Anglo-Norman Jeu d’Adam

An analysis of the plays of Margaret Macnamara

This dissertation presents Margaret Macnamara’s career as a playwright and dramaturg while exploring the cultural and political context of her works. It explores the influences of the Fabian Society on Macnamara’s work and places her among such leading independent theatre artists as George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville Barker, and Nugent Monck. The political context of her work is examined as her play, Mrs. Hodges (1920 is compared with Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses and the theatrical context of her work is established as productions of The Gates of the Morning (1908) and Our Little Fancies (1911) are analyzed. Her plays are grouped by thematic concerns but also presented in chronological order. First, two plays that feature pacifist themes, The Baby in the Ring (1918) and In Safety (1924), from the interwar period, are analyzed for their allegorical interpretation of controversial subject matter. As Macnamara highlights women’s struggles in a patriarchal system in her play, Light-Gray or Dark? (1920), The Witch (1920) and Love-Fibs (1920), she espouses women’s rights for independence at a time when there was pressure to revert to traditional gender roles. Discussion of her adaptations of three nineteenth-century novels reveals her desire to examine the influences that impacted her Victorian childhood. Finally, her play, Florence Nightingale (1936) is examined for the manner in which it encompasses the social, pacifist, and feminist themes of her earlier works. This dissertation attempts to resurrect Macnamara’s work and place it back into circulation in order that it might provide important information and insight for scholars of theatre and women’s studies

Hallowed ground: literature and the encounter with god in post-reformtion england, c. 1550 - 1704

This dissertation examines the ways in which the encounter with God is figured in post-Reformation English writing between the years 1550 and 1704. The introduction contextualizes the ways in which individuals might encounter God within cultural and historical circumstances of the period: the gradual disappearance of the tradition of spiritual direction that accompanied the suppression of Catholicism in England during the period and the growing influence of more purely scientific modes of inquiry, especially after Descartes. Because of these changes, the ways the encounter with God could be experienced were also changing. The introduction also shows how developments in religious studies deriving from Continental philosophy can offer a fresh perspective when considering the phenomena of religious experience. Chapter one, John Dee: Mysticism, Technology, Idolatry, considers the career of early modern polymath John Dee and his conversations with angels as a kind of mysticism compromised by the technology of magic and early modern science. In chapter two, A Glass Darkly: John Donne\u27s Negative Approach to God, I explore the Anglican priest and preacher John Donne\u27s reimagination of negative and mystical theologies as both his way of approaching God and as a tool for the cura animarum, the care of souls. Chapter three, Love\u27s Alchemist: Science and Resurrection in the Writing of Sir Kenelm Digby, considers Digby\u27s scientific researches into palingenesis, the attempt to raise a plant or animal phoenix-like from its ashes, as a kind of unconscious religious experience. In chapter four, The Rosicrucian Mysticism of Henry and Thomas Vaughan, I trace the influence of Rosicrucianism in the writing of the poet Henry Vaughan and his twin brother, the alchemist and priest Thomas Vaughan, as a symbiosis disclosing a kind of mysticism more consciously informed by scientific inquiry. Chapter five, The Pauline Mission of Jane Lead, argues that the seventeenth-century mystic Jane Lead, founder of the Philadelphian Society, deliberately modeled her career on that of St. Paul. It explores the way she follows Paul as one remaining true to the religious experience that initiated his conversion while she deviates when necessary from some traditional and Pauline teachings that do not cohere with her religious vision, much as Paul did in his own historical context