The Function of the Rhetoric of Maternity in the Representation of Female Sexuality, Religion, Nationality, and Race in Early Modern English Literature and Culture by Cecilia Morales A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2020 Doctoral Committee: Professor Michael Schoenfeldt, Chair Dr. Neeraja Aravamudan, Edward Ginsberg Center, University of Michigan Professor Peggy McCracken Professor Catherine Sanok Professor Valerie Traub Cecilia Morales [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0001-7428-3777 © Cecilia Morales 2020 Acknowledgements Throughout my doctoral studies, I have been fortunate to have the love and support of countless individuals, to whom I owe a great deal of gratitude. I’d like to begin by thanking my committee members. Cathy and Peggy taught me valuable lessons not only about my work but about being a thoughtful and compassionate scholar and teacher. Valerie’s reminders to always be as generous as possible when discussing the work of other scholars has kept me sane and stable in this competitive world of academia. Mike helped me, a displaced Texan, to feel at home in Michigan from our first meeting, during which we chatted about both Shakespearean scholarship and Tex Mex. Finally, the most recent addition to my committee is Neeraja Aravamudan, who I consider my most active mentor and supporter. One of the best decisions I made during graduate school was accepting an internship at the Edward Ginsberg Center, where Neeraja became my supervisor. Neeraja and the other Ginsberg staff remind me it’s possible to take my work very seriously without taking myself too seriously. During my dissertation process, I was part of two writing groups, and the members of both groups constantly amazed me with their generosity and brilliance. I was introduced to Joshua Morrison, Natasha McCauley, and Cheryl Yin through the Sweetland Writing Center, which provided funding and support for our group. Being part of this interdisciplinary community inspired and shaped my work in ways I could not have predicted. The other writing group, informally known as the Ladies Dissertation Writing Group, consisted of me and five truly inspiring women from my cohort. I can’t express my admiration enough for Margo Kolenda-Mason, Kayla Grant, Dory Fox, Megan Behrend, and Sunhay You. These women make ii academia more intelligent, loving, and just, and I’m so grateful to call them my colleagues and friends. Thankfully, not all my friends are literary scholars. I couldn’t possibly list all the amazing individuals I have met in the last several years through the University of Michigan and beyond. Among other activities, my precious free time in graduate school was spent climbing with Maryam; playing board games with Caitlyn, Nick, Sara, and Emma; watching reality TV with Teresa; cooking with Lila; having dinner with the many occupants and friends of the Traver House; and hiking, drinking, and generally commiserating with Lorena. Of course, surviving graduate school also necessitates financial and material support. I’ve learned that it takes the labor of many to run a graduate program, and I owe a big “thank you” to the administrators and donors of the English Department and the Rackham Graduate School of the University of Michigan. I also received generous travel and research grants from Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) at U of M and the South Central Renaissance Conference. I’d also like to thank the countless student volunteers and the professional staff organizers of the Graduate Employee Organization. Solidarity forever. Thank you, Joe, for always knowing how to love me: making me waffles, encouraging me, distracting me from my stressors when necessary, and helping me take care of the true hero of this story – my yellow lab Dusty. Finally, thank you to my parents and other family. Though my visits home to Texas were never as frequent as I wanted them to be, your love and riotous humor kept me grounded along the way. To my sister Amy, thank you for inspiring me to be a stronger, more diligent person and for your endless love and support. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii List of Figures vi Abstract vii CHAPTER I Introduction: Defining Maternity 9 The Language of Maternity 14 The Lives of Early Modern English Mothers 20 Maternity’s History: Cycles of Salience 30 Key Themes 33 Chapter Summaries 40 (Dis)locating the Essence of (Good) Motherhood 44 CHAPTER II Lanyer’s Blessed Mother: Redeeming Maternal Pain in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum 47 The Cultural Politics of Maternal Pain and Suffering 50 Lanyer as Working Mother 52 Maternal Affects: Building the Case for Mary 54 The Marian Affective Economy 58 Longing for the Past: Lanyer’s Historical Investment 63 Childbirth Pain: from Divine Punishment to Spiritual Redemption 68 Marian Historiography 71 Reformation Anxieties: Donne’s Turn from the Virgin Mary 75 Conclusion: Cookham as Utopia 87 CHAPTER III Mother Egypt: Rethinking English Nationalism and the Ambivalence of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra 93 The (Dis)placement of Egypt 97 Virginal Mothers 101 The Multiple Meanings of Egyptian Maternity 104 Experiencing Ambivalence in Antony and Cleopatra 108 Reproducing Nilus 114 Connected Histories 121 Desiring Egyptian Knowledge in Shakespeare 127 Maternal Inheritance and the Politics of Grief 130 Conclusion: Desiring Mother Egypt 139 CHAPTER IV The Nature of Maternity: Understanding Gender and Racial Paradigms in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko 144 Colonial Anxieties about Enslaving Maternity 147 Maternity, Racialism, and Ecophobia 152 Foreign Ecologies and the Colonial Imagination 157 iv Sexual Exceptionalism and the Nature of “Innocence” 164 “Eternal Spring”: Imoinda’s Body and the Surinamese Ecology 171 Colonialist Interpretations of Non-European Maternity 181 Conclusion: The Nature of Empirical Science 191 CHAPTER V The Surprising Pleasure of Maternity: The Function of the Mother Figure in English Whore Dialogues 197 Defining Early Modern Erotic Writing 206 Satirizing the Mother in The School of Venus 209 Maternity and Surprise in Venus in the Cloister 218 A Dialogue between a Married Woman and a Maid: Balancing Maternal Expectations 224 Conclusion: The Pleasure of Maternity 238 CHAPTER VI CODA: Defining Maternity Today 242 Bibliography 250 v List of Figures Figure 1a (left): Cleopatra. 1b (right): Madonna with the Green Cushion. Both paintings are by Andrea Solario (1460-1524). 125 Figure 2a (left): Cleopatra. Figure 2b (right): Lucrezia. Both paintings are by Guido Reni (1575-1642). 125 Figure 3 Isis Suckling Horus, Ptolemaic period. 127 Figure 4 Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire Generale des Antilles Habitées par led François. 163 Figure 5 In this image from Du Tertre’s Histoire Generale (1667), the natives of the Antilles are reminiscent of Adam and Eve (356). 170 Figure 6 Pietre De Marees, Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (1602). 183 Figure 7 Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, “Menagerie,” Histoire Generale. 187 vi Abstract This dissertation tracks the use of maternal rhetoric in the literature and culture of early modern England and reveals how maternity intervenes in complex cultural and political conversations throughout the period. It shows how maternity impacts (and is impacted by) English attitudes and understandings of gender, sexuality, race, nationality, religion, and the natural world across the seventeenth century. The title of the introduction, Defining Maternity, plays with the notion that maternity is both a concept that is defined by a host of historically contingent factors as well as a politically potent, malleable rhetoric that gives definition to readers’ values as they encounter a text. For example, in Salve Deus ex Judaeorum, Aemilia Lanyer invokes maternity – particularly the rhetoric of maternal pain and suffering – to buttress not only her authority as a female writer but also her unique intervention into the moment’s Protestant poetics. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the ambivalence that surrounds maternity in the early modern period structures readers’ ambivalent response to Egyptianness. Examining maternal rhetoric in Shakespeare’s play reveals the multiple strategies the early modern English deployed to elevate English nationalism by selectively incorporating and rejecting Egyptian culture. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko uses maternal rhetoric to describe not only the human body of Imoinda but also the nonhuman plant and animal bodies of Surinam. Portraying Imoinda in parallel with these nonhuman reproducing bodies opens a critique of English exploitation of enslaved subjects and the foreign ecologies that they colonize. Finally, Maternity plays a key role in shaping readers’ erotic experience of three canonical whore dialogues – The School of Venus, Venus in the Cloister, and A Dialogues between a Married vii Woman and a Maid – highlighting the sexual knowledge and experience that is frequently erased from representations of maternity. When maternal rhetoric appears in these texts, it invokes and manipulates readers’ expectations for women’s sexual behavior, adding nuance to the paradoxical assumption that “good” mothers are asexual. Throughout the seventeenth century, maternity returns to the foreground again and again as a site within which early moderns explored a host of contemporary concerns and debates that extend beyond women’s reproductive function. Rather than attempting to ask what maternity is or what the early modern