Remembering Mothers: Representations of Maternity in Early Modern English Literature by Rachel L. Zlatkin, B.A., M.A. A Dissertation submitted in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, College of Arts and Sciences, at the University of Cincinnati, April 2, 2013 Committee Chair: Dr. Jonathan Z. Kamholtz Committee Members: Dr. Patricia Henley Dr. Beth Ash Abstract This psychoanalytic study focuses on representations of the maternal in early modern English literature, beginning with Errour and Glauce in Spenser's 1596 The Faerie Queene (Books One and Three) before shifting to analyses of the maternal on stage, from Gertrude and Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet, to the Duchess, Cariola, and the Old Woman midwife in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and closing with Hermione in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. The close readings of the literature are contextualized by a study of early modern beliefs surrounding female flesh, pregnancy, foetal development, and childbirth as presented in the medical treatises of the period. While the medical treatises contextualize the literary presentations of maternity, they also provide an introduction to Melanie Klein's phantastic mother and the development of the paranoid-schizoid position as a mode of human experience. This theoretical frame is further developed in a discussion of object relational theory's growth through the works of Hanna Segal, D.W. Winnicott, Thomas Ogden, Jessica Benjamin, and, to a certain degree, Julia Kristeva. As traditional scholarship tends to emphasize the Oedipal over the preOedipal, much of it enacts the same kind of forgetting as the literature itself, erasing the mother's relevance to contemplations of the body, subjectivity and even dramatic structure. Further, maternal figures are frequently mistaken for the phantasies projected upon them, instead of contemplated as characters in their own right. Arguing that the medical treatises and literature alike participate in the paranoid-schizoid position provides one means to articulating the continued importance of the maternal - beyond a mother's particular presence on stage. This dissertation explores the male imaginary as it revolves around a maternal body forced to enact its phantasies. It does so in an unyielding effort to dismantle the phantasy and to discover the mother in her difference, or, at the very least, to remember the possibility of that difference so as to contemplate her figure in relation to but not the same as the phantasies she is forced to enact. ii iii Acknowledgments This dissertation could not have been written without the help of my committee members: Thank you, Trish, for keeping me grounded in the text when I preferred many a flight of fancy. Thank you, Beth, for teaching me psychoanalytic theory. You gave me the language to say what I needed to say. Thank you, Jon, for bringing me into the fold of academia in the first place. The Faerie Queene chapter is for you. Thank you, all three, for keeping me writing, for the rigor, and for never losing faith. I also want to thank my friends for their support, inspiration, and laughter: Jenny, Missy, Peggy, Sue, Helen, Hara, and Jacque, and Bill and Byron for every Friday to here. I want to thank my family at large, most especially my brother Isaac, my sisters, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Ruth, my Aunt Julie, and my mom for meeting me on the other side of every growing pain. Aaron, my gratitude goes all the way around, as does my love. This dissertation is dedicated to my grandmother Marie. iv Table of Contents Abstract....................................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgments....................................................................................................................................iv Part One: An Introduction to the Embodied Imaginary 1. The Early Modern Medical Treatises and a Patriarchal Imaginary................................................1 The Medical Treatises as a Patriarchal Imaginary..........................................................................4 Conception: Sucking the Seed, Splitting the Difference..............................................................10 In Utero: Sucking the Abject, Birthing the Corpse......................................................................14 2. An Object Relational View...........................................................................................................25 Melanie Klein: that “inspired gut butcher with a child’s eyes”...................................................35 The Paranoid-schizoid Position...................................................................................................36 The Depressive Position...............................................................................................................44 Destruction and Relationality: D.W. Winnicott, an overview......................................................46 D.W. Winnicott and Jacques Lacan: Split over the Mother........................................................49 Matricide and Symbolization: Melanie Klein and Julia Kristeva................................................52 The Oedipal Complex: Melanie Klein to Julia Kristeva..............................................................56 Jessica Benjamin: Redefining the Self – Relations, Gender, and Culture...................................60 3. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: Making a Difference.....................................................64 Becoming and Unbecoming Errour..............................................................................................64 Errour “like a shade”: The Embodied Mirror Stage.....................................................................65 Making a Mirror of Britomart......................................................................................................73 The Glaucean Way.......................................................................................................................77 Part Two: Staging the Mother 4. The Mother in Shakespeare’s Hamlet..........................................................................................89 Remembering Gertrude................................................................................................................89 Mirrored Wishes: Gertrude and Ophelia......................................................................................99 Remembering Ophelia: Carol Chillington Rutter’s Ophelia......................................................105 Wanting Gertrude: The Final Scene...........................................................................................123 v 5. The Mother in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi................................................................130 Dressing in the Mother...............................................................................................................131 Bosola: Scooping out the Mother...............................................................................................138 Ferdinand: Fleshing out Phantasy..............................................................................................149 I will die with her........................................................................................................................156 Holding the Duchess..................................................................................................................160 6. Coda. The Mother in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale..............................................................167 Robert Greene’s Bellaria and a Maternal Sea............................................................................168 Hermione and Topsell’s She-Bear..............................................................................................171 Found Objects............................................................................................................................177 Bibliography...........................................................................................................................................180 vi Part One: An Introduction to the Embodied Imaginary Chapter One. The Early Modern Medical Treatises and a Patriarchal Imaginary The early modern medical treatises rely on a Hippocratic understanding of the absorptive nature of female flesh and Galen’s amplification of that belief in humoral theory. By definition, the early modern body is biologically predisposed to a flooding of fantasies, affect, and sensations due to imbalances in the humors. In this sense, early modern medical treatises, like Melanie Klein’s object relational studies, explore the ramifications of the forces felt inside and outside the body. Of any psychoanalytic analyst, Klein perceived how the object world was not only colored by phantasy, affect, sensations, and impressions, but in how that world (embodied by the mother) was imagined to absorb and return them. In the early modern literature I study, the mother is very much caught in the crossfires as relationships between the object world and the perception of that world are, or more often, are not negotiated. As object relations theorist Thomas Ogden describes the paranoid-schizoid mode of experience, “[i]nstead of the experience of ambivalence, there is the experience of unmasking the truth. This results in a continual rewriting