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FROM EVE TO EVE: WOMEN’S DREAMING IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE by REBECCA DARK Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON December 2010 Copyright © by Rebecca Dark 2010 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My gratitude to all those who have supported and encouraged me in this endeavor exceeds expression. Likewise, the number of people whose names I should mention in acknowledgement exceeds the space allotted by decorum for thanking them. Of those I am able to name here, I must begin with Kevin Gustafson, Jacqueline Stodnick, and Amy Tigner, my wonderful committee, thanking them their continuous encouragement, assistance, and advice. Their patience with me in this project through both very good and very bad times has been remarkable. To the members of the University of Texas Arlington English department who contributed to my development as a writer and thinker over the course of more years than I care to define, I offer my eternal gratitude. I especially wish to thank Tom Ryan, whose kind comments on my Chaucer paper in 1991 gave me the confidence to dream that I could be a medievalist. I must add that this project would never have been completed without the invaluable assistance of Lorraine Walston and Susan Venable from the Dallas Baptist University interlibrary loan department and the many interlibrary loan workers from the University of Texas Arlington with whom I only communicated electronically and anonymously. In addition, I wish to express my gratitude to Renee Trilling and Jill Hamilton for their kind assistance with the Bedford Hours facsimile. Without my family and friends, of course, I could have neither begun nor completed this work. I would like to thank my father, who always wanted me to be a doctor, for his inspiration and encouragement. I am eternally sorry that he did not live to see his dream for me fulfilled. Many, many thanks go to my mother, without whose determined efforts I might never have even gone to college at all. To my husband Charlie, I owe the deepest debt of gratitude for his unfailing love, support, and encouragement. I also wish to thank my daughters, Audrey and iii Emily, and the rest of my family for standing with me through what must seem like endless years of my giving more attention to reading and writing than I gave to them. Finally, I thank God, who is the source of all my strength and the true author of any good thing that I have done or ever will do. November 3, 2010 iv ABSTRACT FROM EVE TO EVE: WOMEN’S DREAMING IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE Rebecca Dark, PhD The University of Texas at Arlington, 2010 Supervising Professor: Kevin L. Gustafson This project examines reports of the dreams of women in fictionalized as well as historical, biographical, and hagiographical accounts from the English Middle Ages and Renaissance. Because an unstable body/spirit dualism forms the basis for both dream theory and anti-feminism during these periods, in texts where women’s dreams are reported the instabilities of the two discourses are magnified, resulting in discursive discontinuities that reveal the presence of multiple cultural languages. My argument, based in part on the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia, is that these texts are characterized by the generally accepted misogynistic ideas of the period but also demonstrate the possibility of alternate expressions of feminine validation and agency. In fictionalized accounts of women’s dreams from Old and Middle English texts, women’s dreams are repeatedly connected with the concept of deception, portraying the woman dreamer in the position of deceived, deceiver, or both. Texts as diverse as Genesis B, Middle English poetic and dramatic portrayals of the dream of Pilate’s wife, and the works of Chaucer consistently demonstrate this association and often draw on traditions of Eve as the deceived deceiver who bears the guilt for the Fall of mankind. In dramatic accounts from the v early modern period, including among others A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and The White Devil , women’s dreams are generally aligned with both historical guilt for the Fall as well as ongoing danger to men. Accounts of women’s dreams in historical, biographical, and hagiographical texts (i.e. texts not considered fictional), however, demonstrate a pattern in which the intersection of the two dualistic discourses of anti-feminism and dream theory merge to provide an opening for feminine agency and power within existing masculinist power structures. The dreams of Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost , while fictionalized, follow yet another pattern because of Milton’s theological and philosophical rejection of body/spirit dualism. In Paradise Lost Eve is able to share the spiritual transcendence of dreaming without the damaging associations to deception and destruction that plague representations of dreaming women in other texts, and discursive cultural heteroglossia that both maintains masculine hegemony and validates femininity operates openly in the text. Through close examination of these texts, then, this dissertation offers feminist readings of the reports of women’s dreams that examine the operation of medieval and early modern anti-feminist discourse as well as the expressions of alternative discourses regarding women in these cultures. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................iii ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................... iv Chapter Page 1. DISCOURSE, DREAMS, AND WOMEN……………………………………..………..….. 1 1.1 Introduction....................................................................................................... 1 1.2 The Discourse of Dreaming ............................................................................. 7 1.3 Discourse on Women ..................................................................................... 19 1.4 Demonstrating Discursive Complexity through the Dreams of Women ............................................................................... 23 2. DREAMS, DECEPTION, AND THE DAUGHTERS OF EVE ....................................... 26 2.1 Introduction..................................................................................................... 26 2.2 Genesis B ....................................................................................................... 31 2.3 Pilate’s Wife .................................................................................................... 42 2.4 Chaucer’s Dreaming Women ......................................................................... 51 2.5 Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 68 3. DREAMING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN DRAMA .................................................. 70 3.1 Introduction..................................................................................................... 70 3.2 Early Modern Discourse on Dreams and Women.......................................... 71 3.3 Dreaming in a Dream ..................................................................................... 76 3.4 Dreaming of Power ........................................................................................ 86 3.5 Apotheosis and Destruction ........................................................................... 95 3.6 Political Prophecy and Death ......................................................................... 96 3.7 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 106 vii 4. REAL WOMEN, DREAMS, AND COOPERATING DISCOURSES ........................... 108 4.1 Introduction................................................................................................... 108 4.2 Hild, History, and the Authority of Women’s Dreams ................................... 112 4.3 Hagiography, Dream Authority, and Christina of Markyate ......................... 120 4.4 Visions, Personal Power, and Margery Kempe ........................................... 129 4.5 Politics and Visionary Authority: The Success and Failure of the Holy Maid of Kent .................................................................. 141 4.6 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 150 5. MILTON’S EVE .......................................................................................................... 151 5.1 Introduction................................................................................................... 151 5.2 Eve and the Critics ....................................................................................... 155 5.3 A Toad at Eve’s Ear ..................................................................................... 159 5.4 Unquiet Rest................................................................................................. 167 5.5 Of Evil Whence? .......................................................................................... 174 5.6 And Dreams Advise ..................................................................................... 177 5.7 Conclusion ...................................................................................................

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