The Female Grotesque Amid the Carnival of Renaissance Drama
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THE FEMALE GROTESQUE AMID THE CARNIVAL OF RENAISSANCE DRAMA BY C2009 Corinee Guy Submitted to the graduate degree program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ____________________________________ Chairperson: David M. Bergeron ____________________________________ Richard F. Hardin ____________________________________ Geraldo L. de Sousa ____________________________________ Patricia W. Manning ____________________________________ Misty Schieberle Date Defended_____________________________ 24 April 2009 2 The Dissertation Committee for Corinee Guy certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: THE FEMALE GROTESQUE AMID THE CARNIVAL OF RENAISSANCE DRAMA Committee: _________________________________ Chairperson: David M. Bergeron _________________________________ Richard G. Hardin _________________________________ Geraldo L. de Sousa _________________________________ Patricia W. Manning _________________________________ Misty Schierberle Date approved:_______________________ 24 April 2009 3 Corinee W. Guy The University of Kansas Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction…………………………………………………………………...4 Chapter 2: Bartholmew Fair: The Female Grotesque Heats Up………………………..26 Chapter 3: Whoring Viragos…………………………………………………………….52 Chapter 4: The Sexually Grotesque……………………………………………………..88 Chapter 5: Witches: The Indeterminate Body………………………………………...118 Chapter 6: Shrews……………………………………………………………………...146 Chapter 7: Language and the Female Grotesque………………………………………181 Chapter 8: Purgation and Reformation………………………………………………...208 Chapter 9: Conclusion………………………………………………………………….231 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………233 Endnotes………………………………………………………………………………...250 4 Chapter 1 Introduction A warm September Saturday drew me and my daughter into the county fair. As our feet marked the path through poof dirt rising and falling around our shoes, a mix of cotton candy, caramel apples, and puke bathed our senses. A synthesized calliope beat the rhythm of a slowing carnival, tired from a week of barkers’ husky voices promising wonders, sleight of hand robbing naïve fairgoers, female dancers enticing young men into dark spaces, and mechanical thrills thrusting riders to inverted positions. Amid the now- still bumper cars stood an abjected figure, a child of the carnival; a haunting image evoking pity and fear, a little girl, about the age of four, about the age of my own daughter, an innocent unposed but made spectacle nonetheless. The carney child’s cherub face, lined with smears of her home, gazed emptily at us. Dusty blonde hair crawled down her back, her body tented by a brown dress made of what seemed like burlap. When she lifted the hem to inspect her scabby knees, I saw rickety legs, bent sticks holding no promise for track meets or prom nights. Sadly, no bright lights and dark shadows masked the ugliness of the fair, the reality of the inside carnival world. Before me stood the mirror potential of my own blonde-haired daughter, and I wondered what would become of these children in their womanhood. True, whoredom, performance, masking, and thievery pulse through the fair like diseased blood, but, then, “normal” society oozes these same infections. After all, didn’t Jonson imply that although he wrote about Bartholomew Fair, a carnivalized world inhabited the streets of London, one as inverted and as interesting as Ursula’s? Surely, this idea applies equally to modern society. Something, somewhere would make the difference between my 5 daughter’s life and the carney child’s. At least, I hoped so; the danger of no difference existed. This dissertation contains a collection of women, some carnivalized by their societies and others who instigate the inversion, comedy, and tragedy of their play worlds. Certain of the women have the potential to become the ideal, but society changes them; others suffer reinterpretation; still others choose marginalization through transgression. Some come from historical London and France; others caricature types circulating in the authors’ world, women drawn on the pages of manuscripts to comment about an historical moment. Fictional or real, these women represent the female grotesque, a term proffered by Mary Russo for female anomaly. 1 I will first discuss carnival, its ties to comedy and tragedy, and its production of the female grotesque and will then move to the tedious world that Hal fears in 1 Henry IV: holiday become everyday in unlicensed festivity. After connecting carnival to its social context and discussing perceptions of the grotesque, I will examine the ideal female as a measuring stick for aberration before investigating definitions of the female grotesque. The dissertation claims that the female grotesque exists as a scapegoat for masculine insufficiency, as an explanation for the ill-health of society, as a demonization of Other, and as a portraiture of authoritative anxiety. She distorts language and plays an integral part in purgative and reformative processes, with results falling out generically. I will examine carnival and the female grotesque in Ben Jonson’s Bartholmew Fair, 2 Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, 3 Shakespeare’s 1 Henry 6, 4 Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore Parts 1 and 2, 5 Middleton’s Women Beware Women, 6 and Shakespeare’s King Lear. 7 6 The carnival experience transcends festival into the everyday and relates to comedy and tragedy. The female grotesque inhabits a marginalized space but as a major player produced by and in sync with the comic or tragic carnivalized world around her. To examine the interrelatedness of genres and of the plays themselves while judging the complex effect of the female grotesque, I must move beyond Bakhtin’s interpretation of carnival as a glimpse into utopia and peer into a dark world where liminal transgression means the breakdown of society expressed through murder, degeneration, and humoral disease. The female grotesque poses herself at the nexus of two generic visions, comic and tragic, waiting to “become” and to assume power. Amid feasting and bodily evacuation, like Gargamelle of Rabelais’ The Fearsome Life of Gargantua, 8 she often gives birth to social satire. Carnival in this dissertation will represent an inclusive term that relates to festival as denoted in Carnival, festival, or Saturnalia and as suggested in the term “carnivalesque.” Containing attributes of Carnival as described by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, these plays manipulate inversion, language, the grotesque, and the return of sobering Lent to comment on their societies. Only Bartholmew Fair has an actual carnival experience, but all of the works include feasting and festive weddings as rites of passage, 9 so that carnival spills into the everyday without official consent. Bakhtin’s vision of carnival resembles a schoolboy’s love of the fair. He experiences the glitter, changes, and release and calls them good because he has escaped school’s official authority for a day. The palm reader, the female dancer, and the hermaphrodite open a world of possibility alien to the ordered nature and society he negotiates every day. While only mildly in tune to the scripted prophecy, sexual danger, anguish, and thievery existing in the shadows of the fair, he responds with laughter, fear, 7 and relief that the fair contains them, and that by the grace of God, he remains within the bounds of normality and can discuss the “others” inhabiting the fair. This view interprets carnival as a contained, marginalized celebration recurring at a specific place, during a specific time period, and under official license, but one incorporating the grotesque. During Carnival proper, a season just prior to Lent, behavior and dress changed as daily life became a celebratory performance of parades in which people wore masks, men dressed as women, women sported men’s clothing, and people acted the parts of clerics, devils, fools, wild men, and wild animals. People became more aggressive, exchanged insults, made accusations, and sang satirical verses. 10 Rooted in religious celebration, much of the activity emerged from abbeys and included the female grotesque. For instance, abbey plays depicted the unruly woman, and in Wales men conducted the ceffyl pren or rough music and wore women’s garb. 11 English travelers to Italy relate that Carnival participants elected Kings or Abbots of Misrule who ruled over mock sieges featuring the figure of Carnival, a barrel-riding, fat, cheerful man who fought with Lent, his opposite: a thin, old woman, wearing black and having fish hung on her. 12 Carnival closed with a mock trial of Carnival and Lent in which they confessed, and Carnival experienced an execution and a funeral. Serving as social discipline, the battles and trials contained the figure of Carnival who refused “to understand any fixed and final allocation of authority” and who alerted the people of the ephemeral and episodic nature of the festival, as “a limited release that is all the more appreciated for its rarity.” 13 Since Carnival has roots in pagan ritual sacrifice, officials in Venice beheaded a pig, and in Madrid they buried a sardine with full honors to signify order’s return. 14 In the “world-upside-down” of festival, religious occasions took on secular meaning, as pagan 8 rites transformed into Christian observances, so that an uneasy relationship between Church and performance developed in England as it distanced itself from Catholicism.