Your Change Is Still Behind: Futurity in Early Modern Literature
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2010 Your Change Is Still Behind: Futurity in Early Modern Literature Tripthi Pillai Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Pillai, Tripthi, "Your Change Is Still Behind: Futurity in Early Modern Literature" (2010). Dissertations. 175. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/175 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2010 Tripthi Pillai LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO ‘YOUR CHANGE IS STILL BEHIND’: FUTURITY IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY TRIPTHI PILLAI CHICAGO, IL MAY, 2010 Copyright by Tripthi Pillai, 2010 All rights reserved. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS viii ABSTRACT xi CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER TWO: “THE HOUR MUST HAVE HER PORTION”: 56 MATERIAL FUTURITY IN EARLY MODERN DRAMA CHAPTER THREE: “YOUR CHANGE IS STILL BEHIND: 85 APPROPRIATED BODIES AND BIOLOGICAL FUTURITY IN MARLOWE AND MIDDLETON CHAPTER FOUR: “IN HOPE TO ALTER KINDE”: 116 MAPPING POLITICAL FUTURITY IN LANYER AND MORE CHAPTER FIVE: “NOW I WILL BELIEVE THAT THERE ARE UNICORNS”: 137 DISRUPTIVE VISIONS AND POLITICAL FUTURITY IN SHAKESPEARE’S ROMANCES CHAPTER SIX: “IF WISHES WERE HORSES, BEGGARS WOULD RIDE”: DESIRE, ARTICULATION, AND MOVEMENT IN EVERYDAY PERFORMANCES OF FUTURITY 187 BIBLIOGRAPHY 249 VITA 264 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I could not have written this dissertation without the invaluable criticism and nourishing intellectual support of my director, Dr. Suzanne Gossett. Dr. Christopher Kendrick and Dr. Wendy Wall provided me with consistent and productive feedback, engaging my work at each point with rigorous enthusiasm. I am thankful to my committee for their brilliant insights and knowledge, their generosity, and for their tireless support of my ideas. Various faculty members and colleagues have helped me navigate my graduate student experiences at Loyola. Their mentorship has been priceless, and I hope in future to emulate their pedagogy and model/s of companionship. Dr. David Chinitz was the Graduate Programs’ Director when I joined the English department. I want to thank him especially for standing by me through thick and thin. Without his support, none of this could have materialized. Dr. Andrew Cutrofello of the Philosophy department has helped me better understand Deleuze in the context of futurity. His enthusiasm for Shakespeare is infectious, and he has made me a better reader and appreciator of literature and theory. Dr. Jack Kerkering has advised me on matters ranging from the teaching of close reading practices to the all-important realities of the academic “job market.” I will never be able to thank him enough for his help and his ceaseless generosity toward me. Dr. Paul Jay’s support during this difficult year on the “market” has made my application process both enjoyable and successful. I want to thank him for his optimistic spirit, which combines wonderfully with his critical insight to the academic profession. As Chairs of the English viii department during my graduate student years, Dean Frank Fennell and Dr. Joyce Wexler ensured that I received ample teaching experience; it is because of their help that I consistently have been able to improve myself as a teacher of literature and writing. As Graduate Programs’ Director during my dissertation writing years, Dr. Pamela Caughie did everything she possibly could to make the administrative processes smooth-sailing. Loyola libraries have been my home away from home and have sustained me, both intellectually and economically. In particular, I want to thank Jeannette Pierce, Niamh McGuigan, and Brenda Overton of the Reference department for having made work a delight. My respect for the centrality of libraries within university culture is doubly solidified owing to the tireless efforts of the librarians and student workers at Loyola, who embrace their responsibilities with admirable dignity. My friends have lifted me out of some of my most painful experiences of loss while at Loyola, notably the times of my divorce and the death of my father. They have also listened with patience to my ideas about futurity, and have helped me give shape to my project. My heartfelt thanks to Kanika Batra, Donovan Braud, Matthew Clarke, Roger McNamara, and Mark Owen. Natalie and Matt have been wonderful roommates; they have, moreover, been true friends. Two other friends, Karthik Krishnaswamy and Sherri Saltzman, have taught me by their examples that it is possible to be both courageous and fabulous. My thanks to them for being there for me. There is not space enough here to express my love and respect for Eric Byville; he is my best friend, and I would not have it any other way. ix Finally, my humblest and greatest thanks are reserved for my family at home in Delhi—Momma, Chechi, Mohan Chetta, Proni, and Binsu. They make my happiness meaningful. x ABSTRACT A study of Renaissance literature’s engagement with temporality, my project is a critical evaluation of the concept of early modern futurity, of which I propose three categories: “Material futurity”; “Biological futurity”; and “Political futurity.” In the moments that I identify in texts composed during the Tudor and early Stuart reigns in England, I demonstrate that the future—as an idea—structures individuals’ actions and ruptures social formations. Futurity, which I define as a play of multiple desires that exist simultaneously within our present beings, is a volatile agent of imagination in early modern literature. Futurity collides with the cultural sites of memory and pulls characters in different directions, destabilizing the organized spaces defined by their bodies, kingdoms, and locations. While the characters in these texts may return to regulated forms of thought and being, it is in their moments of flux, I argue, that they present the most complex engagement with futurity. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, Helena initiates a material futurity when she chases down the scornful Demetrius in the woods outside Athens and promises him that she will write a “story” that “shall” change the future of female lovers (2.1.230). It is precisely because Helena resists material conditions—the silence and immobility imposed upon Athenian women, who “cannot” act and “fight for love as men may do”— that she strives to transform the future of female subjectivity and citizenship (2.1.241). The Changeling’s Beatrice-Joanna, on the other hand, appropriates a futurity that is xi biological, when she plans carefully to avoid the virginity and pregnancy tests designed for her by her new husband Alsemero. Having lost to De Flores her virginity, that “loved and loathed” passage to the site for the generation of patriarchal futures (1.1.125), Beatrice-Joanna sabotages her own marriage bed as well as others’ bodies, thereby avoiding her fundamental sexual responsibility to patriarchs—her husband and her father—of legitimate biological propagation. In my third example, Paulina in The Winter’s Tale relies on political futurity to topple Leontes’ absolutist monarchy. As she orders the king to “[c]are not for issue” but follow the example of the “Great Alexander,” who died and left his kingdom to no particular heir (5.1.46-47), Paulina instigates in Sicilia such a politics of unpredictability as will culminate in the succession of a new kind of political leadership. Through these and other examples, I establish the various means by which characters in Renaissance literature operate within one or more categories of futurity, and I argue that the future in these works is a persistent if problematic source of inspiration and agency. Futurity, that condition of our present experience in which we want, need, wish, hope, and plan for diverse objects and states to be realized in our future, initiates in characters such as Helena, Beatrice-Joanna, and Paulina a contradictory desire that often leads to their perverting (making monstrous) the social apparatuses of their past and present. Through such manipulations, characters in early modern literature not only imagine the future as a controllable component of time, but also amend the seemingly concrete elements of temporality—their historical past and present—in order to propel change. xii CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: TEMPORALITY, DELEUZE, AND EARLY MODERN FUTURITY The topic of my study is Renaissance futurity. An interplay of multiple desires that exist simultaneously within our present beings, futurity is a volatile agent of imagination in early modern literature. In the moments that I identify in texts composed during the Tudor and early Stuart reigns in England, I demonstrate that the future—as an idea—structures individuals‟ actions and ruptures social formations. Futurity, that condition of our present experience in which we want, need, wish, hope, and plan for diverse objects and states to be realized in our future, initiates in characters a contradictory desire that often leads to their perverting and making monstrous the social apparatuses of their past and present. Simply put, futurity is an unstable condition and it disturbs the institutions within which we function as beings organized by linear temporality. Our experiences of the past and present apply force to our construction of our ideas of the future; these forces pull in unpredictable ways, often in opposing directions, thereby destabilizing the basis of linear temporality and organization, of progress. Futurity, moreover, collides with the cultural sites of memory and pulls characters in different directions, destabilizing the organized spaces defined by their bodies, kingdoms, and locations.