Aristotle University of Thessaloniki School of English Department of English Literature
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ARISTOTLE UNIVERSITY OF THESSALONIKI SCHOOL OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ÖZ ÖKTEM THE REPRESENTATION OF THE MUSLIM WOMAN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DRAMA DOCTORAL THESIS THESSALONIKI 2013 Contents Acknowledgments Abstract Chapter 1 Introduction: Re-Orienting Gender and Islamic Alterity in the Early Modern English Drama 1 Chapter 2 Erasing the Cultural and Religious Difference: Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Greene’s Alphonsus 42 Chapter 3 The Muslim Woman and A Christian Turned Turk: Islamic Apostasy and the Gender Paradigm on the Jacobean Stage 94 Chapter 4 Redeeming the Islamic Eve inside the Palace of the Ottomans: Philip Massinger’s The Renegado 134 Chapter 5 Dark Female Sexuality and the Fear of Ottoman Colonialism in The Knight of Malta 176 Chapter 6 The Island Princess: Colonialism, Religion, (Inter)sexuality, and Intertextuality 217 Conclusion 250 Works Cited 254 Acknowledgments I would like to thank several people for the material and moral support they offered me while I worked on this PhD thesis. I express my deepest gratitude to Tina Krontiris, my supervisor, who put considerable time and effort in guiding me, both academically and intellectually, throughout my studies. I appreciate her sincere attention to my project and her insightful recommendations. She also patiently helped me edit my work and provided me with constant encouragement. Professor Krontiris is an outstanding scholar and teacher and will always remain a role model for me. I also wish to thank George Kalogeras and John Alexandropoulos, the members of my Supervisor Committee; their comments on particular sections of the study were very helpful. I am grateful to both of my parents for their continuous love and support. My mother’s financial gift enabled me to settle in a new country with ease and my father has always been my best advocate and advisor in all matters. Also, I wish to thank my cousin Aslı, in New York, and her husband Evren, who provided me with accommodation while I conducted research on my topic in several libraries in the United States. Thanks to their hospitality I accessed many original historical resources, which otherwise would be near impossible to obtain. Many friends in Greece supported me in various ways. Jeni, Popi, and Aristotelis in Thessaloniki and Thodoris in Amorgos offered me graciously their friendship and ensured that I always felt at home. Nadia and Theodora read several of my draft chapters and shared their ideas and suggestions with me. Dimitra helped me a great deal with the final editing. I kindly thank them all. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude for both the academic and the administrative staff of the Department of English Studies of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. They have always been very helpful to me and treated me with kindness, and the faculty generously provided me with a scholarship between the years 2009 and 2012. Abstract Recent scholarship in early modern studies often reads the representation of the Muslim woman in English dramatic works in the light of postcolonial identity politics, which sees an organic relationship between the West’s historical domination of the East and the Western discourse on the East. Within this view, the Islamic woman is rendered a symbol for her land and people and her conquest by European men is supposed to signify the Western superiority over Islam. This thesis problematizes the above trajectory, which is largely informed by Said’s theory of Orientalism, by arguing that the assumption of a power relation between a dominating West and a subordinate East cannot be sustained within the context of the political and historical realities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although the English acquired an experience in the New World that enabled them to articulate their first colonial aspirations, in the East they were far from the position of superiority that they assumed in later centuries. Against the Islamic superpower of the Ottomans, which was a threat to the entire Europe, England was only a nascent nation seeking the Ottomans’ commercial and military support to rival the other nations within the radically fractured Christendom. For this reason, the image and the function of Islamic femininity in the period’s drama should be re-interpreted so as to reflect this overturn in the world’s power balances, as well as the complex and intricate dynamics of England’s intensified contact with Islam in the Mediterranean. While referring to historical and theoretical texts, the present study analyzes in detail a series of early modern plays that thematize Islam, including plays by Marlowe, Massinger, as well as Beaumont and Fletcher. The analysis discusses the representation of the Muslim woman by reformulating Said’s theory in line with the unique global dynamics of the age. At the same time, it pays attention to the interconnection of gender notions across the Muslim and Christian cultures. The early modern era witnessed significant transformations with respect to the position of women within the English society. Humanism, the Reformation, and new forms of production enabled Englishwomen for the first time to articulate ideas of equality and defend their rights for greater liberties. Women’s transgression of their culturally prescribed roles caused serious patriarchal anxieties, which are evidenced by the substantial effort observed in the writings of many male writers and moralists to legitimize women’s subordination. The same constant preoccupation with proper gender roles can also be seen in the dramatic works with Islamic themes and characters, and in these plays Muslim women are constructed as negative feminine figures who embody what the patriarchal understanding found threatening and undesirable in women. By extending the arguments countering the post-colonial theory with references to the period’s gender debate, this thesis shows how the fictional Muslim female figures of the early modern English stage functioned as a versatile dramatic material that allowed playwrights to reflect on the Christian patriarchal anxieties with respect to both the overwhelming power of Islam and the oppositional voices of Englishwomen. 1 Chapter 1 Introduction: Re-Orienting Gender and Islamic Alterity in Early Modern English Drama The relationship between gender and cultural difference has been theorized by a number of scholars of early modern literary studies. In general, these critics tend to regard sexual, racial, and religious difference as overlapping categories, intensifying a variety of cultural and social effects in Renaissance England. In Literary Fat Ladies (1987), for example, Patricia Parker has shown how various economic, sexual and rhetorical links come together so as to provide a mode of description for a patriarchal discursive strategy in which “a particular mode of control over a woman’s body” expresses mercantile ambitions and imperial desire “through conquest of a territory traditionally figured as female” (132). Similarly, in his insightful essay “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery” (1991), Louis Montrose has demonstrated that the female body in the English proto-colonial discourse functioned as a metaphor for the colonized land, and identified gender difference as the language in which colonial relations were first articulated. This critical approach observing a particular pattern employed in early modern English representations in which gender hierarchies naturalize colonial domination has been adopted by a number of scholars who extended the discussion to English cross-cultural relations with the peoples of the Old World as 2 well as to racial prejudices intensified with the increasing black presence in England as a consequence of the slave trade. In Things of Darkness, Kim Hall has emphasized the value of women as a means for the appropriate transfer of property and formation of blood lines in the early modern age and argued that black women were coded as “the ultimate in undesirability” and thus were not “suitable objects of social exchange” (22). This coding, as Linda Boose has noted, pointed to a crucial juncture in the historical development of racial fiction and its deep association with the negative primacy of skin color (41). Most prominently, Ania Loomba’s extensive research has shown how the notion of skin color and religion, as markers of difference, informed understandings of gender, the state, political life, and private existences, as well as the early modern connections between the formation of the modern family, the consolidation of the imperial state and Europe’s global domination.1 The work of these critics has covered an important gap in the early modern studies by pointing to the dynamic and intricate intersections of categories of cultural and sexual difference in the creation of Renaissance culture. Yet, the great majority of this body of literature concentrates on English interactions with non- European peoples mainly in the New World, the East Indies, and Africa, where England could claim or, at least, had projections to claim colonial control. In other 1 See for example: Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford University Press, 2002), Colonialism/ Postcolonialism (Routledge, 1998; Second Edition, 2005), and Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester University Press; 1989; Oxford University Press, 1992). Other scholarly studies that focus on gender and cultural difference include Joan Pong Linton’s The Romance of the New World: Gender and Literary Formations of English Colonialism (1998), Michael Neill’s Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (2000), Shankar Raman’s Framing India: The Colonial Imagery in Early Modern Culture (2002), Claire Jowitt’s Voyage Drama and Gender Politics 1589 – 1642: Real and Imagined Worlds (2003). 3 words, these critics are not interested in divorcing their ideas from concerns of a materialistically and culturally overpowering Europe; thus they offer mostly a unidirectional mode of analysis for understanding English perceptions with respect to foreign people. However, the cross-cultural interaction of England was not restricted to these geographies in the early modern age.