Metamorphosis and the Unbound Subject in Early Modern English Literature
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Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations Arts & Sciences Spring 5-15-2020 The Object of Affection: Metamorphosis and the Unbound Subject in Early Modern English Literature Emily Barth Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Barth, Emily, "The Object of Affection: Metamorphosis and the Unbound Subject in Early Modern English Literature" (2020). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2163. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/2163 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts & Sciences at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of English Dissertation Examination Committee: Joseph Loewenstein, Chair Jami Ake Anupam Basu Robert Henke Jessica Rosenfeld Lynne Tatlock The Object of Affection: Metamorphosis and the Unbound Subject in Early Modern English Literature by Emily Barth A dissertation presented to The Graduate School of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2020 St. Louis, Missouri © 2020, Emily Barth Table of Contents Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... iii Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ v Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Languages of Disarticulation ....................................................................................... 23 Chapter 2: True Love Alone .......................................................................................................... 54 Chapter 3: What Cannot Be Spoken Of ........................................................................................ 80 Chapter 4: ‘No more now, but a shadow’ .................................................................................... 104 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 134 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 139 Appendix ..................................................................................................................................... 148 ii Acknowledgments There are many people and institutions I would like to thank for their role in my graduate education, and particularly for their support in the completion of this dissertation. I am grateful for the generous funding, and tremendous flexibility, of Washington University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and of the English Department. I would not be where I am now without the Humanities Digital Workshop, Douglas Knox and Stephen Pentecost, the Folger Shakespeare Library, support from Mellon seminars, and the kind encouragement of Jami Ake, Eve Keller, Musa Gurnis, Robert Henke, David Lawton, Anne Lake Prescott, Ayesha Ramachandran, Jessica Rosenfeld, Lynne Tatlock, and Steve Zwicker. I do not know how to adequately thank Joe Loewenstein. Thank you for believing in me when I was sure no one would, for your patience and keen editorial guidance, for your mentorship and kindness, and for pointing out to me repeatedly that I actually do know things. I have deep gratitude for my family: for my husband, for swapping long hours with me; for my children, for putting up with my writer’s life; for my in-laws, for giving me space and time to work; for my sisters, for always listening; and for my mother, who started down this path with me way back when. Emily Barth Washington University in St. Louis May 2020 iii For Sophie and Jakob iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION by Emily Barth Doctor of Philosophy in English and American Literature Washington University in St. Louis, 2020 Professor Joseph Loewenstein, Chair This project explores examples of metamorphoses in early modern English literature, and argues that metamorphosis becomes a means of affective expression for characters who are otherwise constrained. The Ovidian assault on the firm distinction between subject and object tells us something about affective life in the early modern world – and perhaps especially, if not exclusively, the affective life of early modern women. My primary texts include Thomas Lodge’s Scillae’s Metamorphosis and William Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece; Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book III Cantos 10-12, and Book IV through Canto 10; Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and John Lyly’s Woman in the Moon; Anne Cecil’s Pandora sonnets, and selections of Katherine Phillips’ and Mary Sidney’s poems. In considering these texts, I explore how radical changes respond to or incorporate violence as a core facet of the expression of subjectivity, and how such change may provide opportunities for affective communication. Because of the way the subject may be construed in early modern England, much of the literature grapples with the fine line separating subject from object, and the idea that it is not difficult to cross that line oneself through a deterioration of boundaries. This progression is always disruptive, though not necessarily negative. This dissertation is indebted to Julia Kristeva’s model of subjectivity as being consistently mutable and reflective of external reality. Kristeva’s essays hinge on “the turning points” that situate the v individual in relation to community, and the porous boundaries between self and other. Signification is a necessary ingredient for the formation of a definite subject, but signification is unstable, particularly in poetic language. What Kristeva describes is traumatic subject formation that can occur repeatedly. It is an ongoing process informed by external events that occurs “between social and asocial, familial and delinquent, feminine and masculine, fondness and murder.”1 Metamorphosis renders these interstitial spaces visible, and produces a mimetic image that reduces the subject to a singular object, undoing complex organizing fantasies of self and shattering inner cohesion. The Ovidian epyllia develop an idea of metamorphosis in which transformation is made available as an individual response, as it is for Scilla, whose originates in “The wondrous force of her untam’d desire,” an emotional pageant that culminates in her fusion with the shoreline in a demonstration of how she had become “enthrald” (118.6, 126.2). The tool that the epyllia develop has a mobility of its own, and becomes portable to other genres; so one can find the same sort of crying-out in Hermione’s statue, and in Anne Cecil’s lamentations: the drive toward ossification becomes also a drive toward emotional force. 1 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 135. vi After great pain, a formal feeling comes – The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs – The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’ And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’? The Feet, mechanical, go round – A Wooden way Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone – This is the Hour of Lead – Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow – First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go – (Emily Dickinson) vii Introduction Take me alone death let my babe stil move, To sue a pardon from Joves court above I am wth childe makes oft a judge to give The mother pardon so yt both do live, But death loves not this play, it cryes I’le have Both childe and mother, neither wil I save O death tis hard, yet having don no sin To take out of ye world a not entred in Yet peace sweet babe, for I wil even bee A coffin and a grave, stil unto thee.1 ‘The complaint of a woman dying with child’ appears in multiple manuscripts. The speaker in the poem imagines her body first as something that might be traded for her child’s life, and then – as it becomes clear that this is not an option – as “a coffin and a grave.”2 This imagery draws on the well-recognized womb:tomb topos common in sixteenth and seventeenth century poetry. The metaphor asks the reader to imagine the mother’s womb as “a coffin and a grave” but the content of the poem asks us to move one step further, to construe the metaphor as ‘literalized’: we are asked to believe this complaint is that of a woman dying while pregnant, the child remaining ensconced in her body actually making the womb a coffin. Such imagination relies on an understanding, derived from new translations and adaptations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, that the body’s metamorphic potential might be called upon to perform one final maternal task. The idea that the mother’s body could be called upon to provide a tomb or monument for her child 1 This transcription is my own. This version of the poem appears in the following manuscripts: Bodleian, MS. Rawl. Poet. 147, f. 73; Bodleian,