The Politics of Early Modern Women's Writing

Danielle Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138161535
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317883814
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

The Politics of Early Modern Women's Writing provides an introduction to the ever-expanding field of early modern women's writing by reading texts in their historical and social contexts. Covering a wide range of forms and genres, the author shows that rather than women conforming to the conventional 'chaste, silent and obedient' model, or merely working from the 'margins' of Renaissance culture, they in fact engaged centrally with many of the major ideas and controversies of their time.

The book discusses many previously neglected texts and authors, as well as more familiar figures such as Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, Isabella Whitney and Lady Mary Wroth, and draws attention to the importance of genre and forms of circulation in the production of meaning.

The Politics of Early Modern Women will be of interest both to those encountering this material for the first time, and to students and scholars working in the fields of women's writing, gender studies, history and literature.

CHAPTER ONE

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Women, Language and Rhetoric

In any period language is a powerful signifier of position and status, as well as being the system through which relationships of power are produced and maintained. In most societies, in most historical periods, one of the primary axes around which such power relationships are organised is that of gender. As Susan Gal suggests, ‘verbal interaction … is often the site of struggle about gender definitions and power; it concerns who can speak where about what’.¹ This formulation posits two levels of linguistic significance: what is said, and how what is said signifies at a social and cultural level. These are not readily separable, and rather than attempting to disentangle the reality of women’s speech from its representation, this chapter seeks to uncover what is symbolised by women’s language in the early modern period. For us, the process of reconstructing the past means that there is only ever a representation of language, and no authentic original to which we can return. All accounts are mediated accounts, even at the most obvious level of the transcription of speech – a translation, and thus a transformation, from the oral to the written.

Despite two decades of work on gender in early modern criticism and historiography, little is known about the relationship of women to language, or the place occupied by gender in the complex linguistic alignments found in the period. Few of the linguists who have delineated and described early modern English have paid more than passing attention to women’s language, despite the centrality of debates on the topic at all cultural levels. Manfred Görlach, for instance, devotes a short paragraph to the issue in his Introduction to Early Modern English, citing two examples which display negative constructions of female speech which in fact act metonymically for other linguistic concerns: they are not in any sense clear or unproblematic examples of how women spoke.² This chapter aims to uncover the contexts in which women’s words were produced, circulated and understood in the early modern period, and the social and cultural ‘rules’ to which they were subject: it cannot claim to provide evidence of how actual historical women spoke or read. We can reasonably assume that the wide range of prescriptions circulating in both high and popular culture regarding when, how and to whom women should speak are, to some extent, reactive rather than descriptive. But such discourses about language do have cultural power, serving to frame and contextualise what women actually said in crucial ways. Any attempt to think about women’s language in the Renaissance has to be understood within the framework of the gendering of language more generally in this period: for example, the alignment of hierarchies of linguistic value with gender, such that Latin is revered for its ‘masculine’ qualities of order and logic over the relative chaos of English, while French and Italian are condemned for their feminine qualities when contrasted to the ‘virile’ virtues of English.³ The gendering of language and the language of gender are mutually reinforcing.

The evidence is partial and fragmentary, skewed by the fact of its preservation, namely, by its written form. The fact of writing marks the surviving record as belonging to a particular social category – the nobility, upper gentry or ‘middle class’ – even if a text can be attributed unproblematically to a female hand.⁴ The written record is not only haphazardly preserved, but the available documents represent less than complete inscriptions of women’s voices. Versions of the female voice may be mediated by male ‘authors’ at a number of levels. The surviving traces of women’s voices are multiply mediated, filtered through frameworks and generic demands laid down by men, whether the resulting representations are positive or negative. Female voices may be unconsciously made to conform to cultural norms, edited or erased, incorporated into other frameworks, anthologised or appropriated. Prescriptive literature mainly characterises women’s speech as licentious, uncontrolled and threatening, for reasons which often go beyond their ostensible constraining purpose: often such texts are responses to the power of female speech to destabilise established power structures and social hierarchies. Most frequently, such texts illustrate one aspect of early modern society’s concern with linguistic facility as a marker of power and social status, requiring the devaluation and inefficacy of female eloquence for the patriarchal system of power distribution to be maintained. The close, but arbitrary, connection between masculinity and valid public speech or writing means that it can be difficult to uncover female voices which could be said to be authentic or autonomous. Even in the hypothetical instance of finding an unmediated female voice, it can be difficult to untangle the specifically gendered elements of her words from other variables, or from the discursive constructions in which her utterance makes her a participant.

There is little consensus as to whether women share distinct speech habits, and how this might relate to other kinds of variables. Deborah Cameron has suggested two main motives for the study of sex difference in language. The ‘positive’ is ‘the quest for an authentic female language’, and the ‘negative’ is the desire ‘to identify the sexual power dynamic in language use, the conventions and behaviours through which speech reflects and perpetuates gender inequality.’⁵ Cameron suggests, however, that the identification of a sex-specific usage or register can work to reify women’s exclusion from socially or politically powerful forms of speech, and that we also need to look at ‘what significant social uses are made of [sex differences in language], or more accurately of discourse about them’ (39). It is necessary therefore to look closely at the contexts in which women’s speech is represented, and the relationship between style, register and situation; ‘the determining factor might be who is being spoken to rather than who is speaking’ (41). The sections which follow attempt to uncover the conditions, both material and ideological, surrounding when, where and how Renaissance women could speak, read and write.

Education and literacy

Education in the early modern period did not embrace or advance the democratising principles or the meritocratic ideal that we might see as its primary rationale. Rather, it reinforced existing social distinctions, largely due to the specifically goal-orientated nature of educational philosophy. Based on classical principles, mixed with compulsory religious instruction, education was causally linked to virtue and morality, while being carefully tailored to the individual’s future social role. The system occasionally produced a wordsmith of genius but on the whole education was repetitive, unimaginative and based upon rote learning, and concentrated upon language as a system to be mastered, rather than as a medium for knowledge.⁶ Far from being the arena where self-fashioning through linguistic manipulation was encouraged, in general early modern schooling inculcated social values, acculturated the individual, and provided the learning deemed appropriate to the social status already held by the pupil.

Schooling proceeded in clearly defined stages, although these were not strictly tied to age. The child, usually aged 5 or 6, began by learning letters by rote, orally from the ‘hornbook’ (a hand-held piece of horn with the alphabet inscribed on it). Once these had been mastered, the child moved on to basic words, and was considered literate once he could deal with the primer and the catechism. It was quite possible to pass as functionally literate on the basis of what had been memorised, and many children would have remained at school only until they had mastered basic reading. Next came writing, learned by the pupil tracing over his letters until he knew them fully. In some cases these elementary skills were supplemented by basic arithmetic, generally orientated towards keeping accounts. All three skills were functional, a useful preparation for the pupil’s future life in trade, service or agriculture. For those who remained at school (moving from the ‘petty’ school to the grammar school), or were tutored at home, the educational programme moved on from basic competence in the vernacular to the learning of Latin grammar. Pupils were taught to construe Latin sentences, to translate accurately to and from Latin, and then progressed to stylistic analysis of Latin texts. The flagship humanist schools also taught Greek, and occasionally Hebrew.⁷

The Renaissance school curriculum has four key elements: (1) it is programmatic; (2) it is explicitly functional, tied to social status and future occupation; (3) it is almost exclusively confined to boys, especially at the more advanced stages; (4) it is not confined to institutional sites of learning. The debate about the training of girls shares the principle that ‘[ejarly modern education was … directly vocational’ and was an ‘education for society’.⁸ For women and the lower orders, this function-driven principle general...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Longman Medieval and Renaissance Library
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• A Note On Texts
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Women, Language and Rhetoric
• Chapter 2. The Renaissance Debate about Women
• Chapter 3. Drama and the Gendered Political Subject
• Chapter 4. Writing the Divine: Faith and Poetry
• Chapter 5. Poetry, Politics and Gender
• Chapter 6. Women Reading and Writing Romance
• Epilogue
• Select Bibliography
• Index