Speaking Silences: Lyric Poetry in the Narrative Strategies of Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, and Jane Barker

Speaking Silences: Lyric Poetry in the Narrative Strategies of Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, and Jane Barker by Jamie Sky Kinsley A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn, Alabama May 10, 2015 Copyright 2015 by Jamie Sky Kinsley Approved by Anna Riehl Bertolet, Chair, Associate Professor of English Craig E. Bertolet, Professor of English Paula R. Backscheider, Professor of English Abstract My dissertation is an exploration of how Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, and Jane Barker co-opted Philip Sidney’s prose romance interpolated with poems, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. I explore how each writer uses her own poetry to fill silences and create alternative narratives in her prose fiction. In Arcadia, Sidney integrates poetry into the narratives as a means by which to explain motivations behind human behavior. Conjured by the heroines, poems enter these narratives as creations springing from the heroines’ need not only to express themselves emotionally and lament injustices, but also, crucially, to imagine worlds where they are not restricted as writers. Important for my reading of the narrative form of prosimetrum in these fictions is the theory that silence as a rhetorical technique provides women writers with a space to work both in and against conventional patriarchal discourses. Poems in prose fiction by Wroth, Cavendish, and Barker occur at moments when silence takes over the prose. Silence invades these romances as a testament to limitations faced by early modern women fiction writers as they attempted to express the experience of the woman writer. These silences speak forcefully to the ways in which early modern women writers found themselves restricted by patriarchal discourses. Poems then enter as recourse for female expression. Innovations in narrative discourses enable women writers to question available plots, support structures, and means of emotional expression. Furthermore, the space provided by narrative innovation gave women the power to transform ii that which they questioned and criticized into what they imagined the world should allow for them. iii Acknowledgments First and foremost I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my committee chair, Anna Riehl Bertolet, for her kindness and generosity. Without her support this project never would have been completed. I am indebted to Craig Bertolet for his invaluable comments. His enthusiasm and understanding have encouraged countless sighs of relief throughout the course of this project. I am especially thankful for the example of excellence in scholarship that Paula Backscheider has provided for me. I am grateful for funding provided by the Defoe Fellowship, Summer Writing Fellowship, and Archival Research Experience Award. I also would like to thank Robin Sabino and Timothy Hayes for their crucial feedback. I have been blessed with so many people who have supported and encouraged me throughout this process. In particular, I would like to thank LMB, KC, CB, SBA, and AFS for their guidance; AZT, JLH, JS, LKS, and DAM for their unfailing faith, strength, and wisdom; MAP for the comfort, the inexpressible comfort; and a special thanks to MMB for her words. Importantly, my deepest appreciation goes to DGAS and VBK for their never failing warmth and thoughtfulness. I am also grateful for my family, for the enthusiasm and joy that they breathe into life. Finally, I would like to thank JRT for all the inspiration and life lessons that have motivated me and taught me never to give up, no matter what life throws at you. iv Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to Anna (Anya) Riehl Bertolet, without whom the silence would have prevailed. And to Mary, Margaret, and Jane for never failing to inspire. v Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………… iv Dedication ……………………………………………………………………………………… v Introduction, Prose, Poetry, and Silence: Co-opting Sidney……………………………………. 1 Chapter One, Spoken in Silence: The Early Modern Woman Poet in Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania ………………………………………………………………………. 27 Chapter Two, Reconfigured Authority: Margaret Cavendish’s Assaulted and Pursued Chastity and Publically Acclaimed Woman Poets ……………………………………………………… 81 Chapter Three, Alternative Patterns: Jane Barker’s Poetic Intrusions in Love Intrigues and Patch- Work Screen for the Ladies…………………………………………………………………… 128 Conclusion, Places of Possibility Beyond Bounds…………………………………………… 170 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………175 vi Introduction Prose, Poetry, and Silence: Co-opting Sidney The Experiential Reveal Scholarship continues to uncover female voices lost, muffled, or misread in early modern literature in an effort to reveal missing stories, experiences, and histories. One of the ways to recover lost voices is to examine rhetorical techniques used in texts written by women. Often, writers of fiction deploy narrative strategies such as broken syntax or unresolved plots in order to express what they cannot pursue within the narrative conventions of their time and place. This dissertation demonstrates that early modern British women writers expressed their experiences as writers in poetic passages integrated into their prose narratives, often in the voice of the heroine. An analysis of these moments in their fictions reveals consistencies in narrative strategies created in the space before and after an interpolated poem attributed to the poet-heroine in the prose narrative. These consistencies deal with more than the form of prosimetrum; rather, early modern women use this space to assert their perspectives on writing.1 This project shows how early modern women voiced not only the limitations they faced regarding lack of respect, space, and 1 Prosimetrum is a text composed in alternating segments of prose and verse. Often these verses are connected to the prose narrative. Differentia of variables is wide and some are still not wholly understood. Definition from The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 981. 1 support, but also the power they possessed concerning presence of talent, knowledge, and audience. Philip Sidney’s prose fiction, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593), marks an important moment in the history of English prose fiction. One convention established by Arcadia is the integration of poetry into prose narrative. Sidney’s reputation as a master of poetic technique unites with his deliberate use of poetry in prose fiction in Arcadia to respond to the prosimetrum form of medieval literature from Boethius to Dante. Generally, the purpose of the poetry was to allow a character an opportunity for lyric reflection or self-reflection. While not every writer of prose fiction after Sidney imitated this technique, its importance to the development of the genre as a means by which to further transfer upon readers the experiences, thoughts, and emotions of characters suggests the sustaining belief among early modern writers that, often, inwardness is best expressed in poetry.2 Early modern writers used poetry within the prose of their fictions in order to support what the prose offers. That is, when reading these works, we can see the poetry interpolated in the narrative of the prose; the poems are interpolated into the story with clear directives to the reader as to the motivation behind a character reading, reciting, or writing verses (i.e. to express emotion, because the event recalled a poem that best describes their reaction, etc.). The prose and poetry work together to move the narrative along, yet remain distinctly separate from one another – notably creating a first blank gap on the page where the prose ends and the poetry begins, and then another where the poem ends and the prose begins again. Although the prose and poetry work together, they are aesthetically different. While the poems contain a variety of subjects, the narrative surrounding interpolated poems, as well as the poems themselves, 2 By inwardness I refer to the innermost personal thoughts and feelings. 2 functions as a site for ideas, experiences, and emotions that might otherwise be lost because they are taboo, unacceptable, or dangerous to express for women writers. Important to my argument is the narrative pattern in the prose that announces the entrance of a poem. Since poems are interpolated into the prose with reasons for the motivation behind writing, reading, or reciting them, a shift occurs in the prose of the narrative before and after their appearance. In many of Arcadia’s poems Sidney presents a brief sentence about what a character is thinking or feeling, then signals the entrance of a poem by creating a statement along the lines of “he began thus.” 3 After the verses that enter the narrative at this point, the prose picks back up with “when he ended,” “concluded,” “was finished,” or “would proceed.” These signals that begin and end the shift from prose into poetry are apparent throughout Arcadia. They provide Sidney a forum from which to assert firmly the reasons for including poetry in his epic romance, their precise relation to the narrative, and their definitive end in the narrative. For the women writers that are the subject of this dissertation, these shifts are not as clearly defined. Female poet characters often find themselves struggling to find a private location in which they can express themselves in poetry. Even when they locate this space, they are interrupted upon completion of their verse. However, their shifts from prose to poetry and back to prose mark a pattern that the writer often deploys each time she is about to include a poem. At this point in the narrative, we can see a voice emerge in this space that expresses her experiences as a woman and as a woman writer. That these shifts are less clearly delineated than the shifts in 3 I am using The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593) because as late as 1725 it was still popular enough to produce a fourteenth edition.

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