Dangerous Ornament: the Figure of the Veil in Early Modern English Literature

DANGEROUS ORNAMENT: THE FIGURE OF THE VEIL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE By Ashley Denham Busse B.A. 1999, The University of the South (Sewanee) M.A. 2003, Florida State University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 31, 2010 Dissertation directed by Jonathan Gil Harris Professor of English The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Ashley Denham Busse has passed the final examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of 5 May 2010. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. DANGEROUS ORNAMENT: THE FIGURE OF THE VEIL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE Ashley Denham Busse Dissertation Research Committee: Jonathan Gil Harris, Professor of English, Dissertation Director Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Professor of English, Committee Member Holly Dugan, Assistant Professor of English, Committee Member ii © 2010 by Ashley Denham Busse All rights reserved iii Dedication The author wishes to dedicate this dissertation to her family for constantly reminding her that, as Christopher Robin said to Winnie the Pooh, “You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” The author also wishes to dedicate this project to her husband Mark, whose steadfast, selfless support, encouragement and love daily prove Richard Wilbur’s claim that “whatsoever love elects to bless/ Brims to a sweet excess/ That can without depletion overflow.” Thank you. iv Acknowledgements The author wishes to acknowledge the generous gifts of the many people who made this academic and professional endeavor possible. First and foremost, my gratitude and admiration for Jonathan Gil Harris, who helped me believe in myself and my work, who went above and beyond the call of duty as teacher, mentor, and friend. Gil, you live, move and breathe a generosity of spirit, intellectual rigor, and kindness of heart that reflect the academic life at its best. Your selfless dedication to your students and to the world around you has given me an example I hope to emulate in my own life and work. From you I have learned not only volumes about early modern culture and the craft of writing, but also how to read and respond to others’ work in helpful, constructive, insightful ways. Thank you for your time, your support, your wisdom, and your encouragement; this project truly would not have come to fruition without you. To Holly Dugan, thank you also for your generous support, both inside and outside the classroom: for our discussions at Teaism and Le Pain Quotidien about my studies, about literature, and life in general; for your thoughtful, erudite comments on my works-in-progress (I am still in awe of your brain!); and for all of the ways, large and small, that your example continues to fortify my own pursuit of the academic life. To Jeffrey Cohen, thank you likewise for your support of my project, for your humor and kindness, and for the ways you, along with your colleagues, work so tirelessly to make GWU a place for early modern scholars to blossom and flourish. Thank you also to all of my fellow GWU early modernists for your camaraderie, your feedback, and the v intellectual stimulation your own work continues to provide: Nedda Mehdizadeh, Lowell Duckert, Jessica Frazier, Jennifer Wood, and Mike Smith. Liza Blake, thanks for being my “lizabrary” resource on everything from Thomas Nashe to Bruno Latour. To my fellow Folger Dissertation Seminarians, especially Kristina Lucenko, Niamh O’Leary, Edward Geisweidt, and Danielle Spratt: thank you for your advice and feedback on my work. To Jonathan Hsy: like Gil, Holly, and Jeffrey, you go above and beyond the call of duty; thank you for your kindness, generosity, and support and for agreeing to be my departmental reader; you, too, have shown me what a great scholar and mentor looks like. And Madhavi Menon, thank you for taking my project on, for your support of this dissertation and the inspiration your own work continually provides me. To the librarians and staff of the Folger Shakespeare Library, especially Georgianna Ziegler, thank you for all the assistance and advice in researching my project. To David Scott Kastan and Keith Wrightson, thank you for providing a stimulating and productive environment in your “Researching the Archives” Folger seminar. To Dan Vitkus, thank you for your support and advice both during my time at Florida State and in my work on the veil at GWU; your own work on Anglo-Islamic relations guided and continues to inspire my consideration of the veil in travel literature and Turk drama. Thank you for opening that avenue of research to me. To Melinda Knight and the George Washington University, thank you for honoring me with a Graduate Writing Preceptor Fellowship; the moral and financial support of this program helped me grow as vi a teacher, a writer, and a scholar, and allowed me the freedom and time to pursue my research. Finally and always, I wish to thank my family and my best friend, Susan. To my parents: thank you for giving me every educational opportunity I could hope for, for encouraging me in my studies for as long as I can remember, and for listening patiently as I struggled through my work. To my mom especially, I give thanks for “talking me off the ledge” on more than one occasion, when an unruly chapter refused to come together and made me question the whole project. Thank you for being a living example of perseverance, faith, strength, humor and hope. You continue to be my hero. Dixon, thank you for always encouraging my spirit of inquiry, for being proud of my every effort, and for being a fellow lover of the beauty of language. To my sisters, thank you for laughing with and loving on me when I got discouraged; to my best friend Susan, thank you for your steadfast and patient friendship, for envisioning me—and allowing me to envision myself—as an English professor all those years ago, for singing my song back to me when I forgot the words. Your love of language and learning, and your own intellectual and moral vigor daily inspire me to become a better person. And your laughter makes this world worth loving. To my sweet daughter Anne, child of my heart, thank you for giving up time with Mommy so she could pursue her passion; I hope this encourages you to follow your own. And of course, my deepest gratitude and love to my husband: Mark, I am so honored and blessed to share this journey with you and our children. vii Abstract of Dissertation Dangerous Ornament: The Figure of the Veil in Early Modern English Literature This dissertation argues that the veil was an important tool for negotiating linguistic, religious, ethnic, and gendered identities in the early modern period; in doing so this project traces a prehistory of the veil as it continues to structure systems of knowledge, experiences of desire, and understandings of the Other in contemporary culture. Chapter 1 considers the veil as a figure for apocalypse (literally, “unveiling”) in Protestant theology and in allegory, particularly as it is employed in Book One of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and George Herbert’s “The Church Militant” to represent the English Church and its adversaries within the long durée of Christian history. Chapter 2 also considers the veil in Christian tradition but this time with an eye to its untold (or seldom-told) story: rather than desiring to transcend the material veil, the tradition of mysticism embraces it, seeing the veil as the thing through which the entire narrative of Christian redemption is founded; this chapter analyzes St Teresa of Avila’s account of divine rapture alongside its reformulation by Richard Crashaw (in poems such as “The Flaming Heart”) to interrogate the ways that the veil enabled alternative experiences and understandings of the divine, and of desire itself. Chapter 3 explores anxieties about veils and veiling as they are performed onstage; I argue that Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Thomas Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy employ the veiled discovery space at the back of the early modern stage to materialize experiences of abjection, to stage what is unstageable or, literally, ob-scene . Chapter 4 collects the varied uses and histories of the veil discussed in the preceding chapters and considers the ways these traditions informed viii English engagements with Islam, particularly with the Muslim woman. Beginning with a consideration of the veiled Donusa in Phillip Massinger’s play, The Renegado, and the ways her portrayal was both informed by and reflected in early modern travel narratives such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters , I explore the manner in which, over the course of the seventeenth century, the veil began to shed some of its domestic and Christian valences and to solidify into a metonymy for the Orient as a space of mystery, darkness, and desire. As these varied readings show, the veil is a symbol whose “truth” is never singular or fixed; an understanding of the veil as both metaphor and object during the early modern period helps us account for its persistent allure in the Western imagination, as it continues to shape horizons of possibility in the present. ix Table of Contents Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Abstract of Dissertation viii Table of Contents x Introduction: Taking Up the Veil 1 Chapter 1: Apocalyptic Revelations: Allegories of English Protestantism in Spenser and Herbert 29 Chapter 2: Consecrated Flesh: St Teresa of Avila, Richard Crashaw, and the Mystical Veil 95 Chapter 3: “QVOD ME NVTRIT ME DESTRVIT”: Dis-Covering the Obscene Abject in The Merchant of Venice and The Revenger’s Tragedy 143 Chapter 4: (Un)Veiling the Muslim Woman: The Pleasure of Fetishistic Fantasy in Massinger’s The Renegado and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters 190 Afterword: Between Two Worlds 239 Works Cited 245 x Introduction: Taking Up the Veil For you must know right now: to touch “that” which one calls “veil” is to touch everything.

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