Quilligan 2005 - Revision history

Wtrettien: /* Shakespeare's Cordelia */

2011-10-17T19:00:23Z

Shakespeare's Cordelia

← Older revision		Revision as of 19:00, 17 October 2011
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	== Shakespeare's Cordelia ==		== Shakespeare's Cordelia ==

			unlike in Shakespeare's sources, Cordelia dies
			* Lear's incestuous fantasy; Cordelia is victim, but early modern period would have blamed her too (213-5)

			incest fantasy allows her to come back conquering, at the head of an army
			* from quarto to folio version, Cordelia gains greater agency at the end of the play (226-7)
			* "The Folio's cuts, then, generally deny us a sense that Cordelia has a legitimte life elsewhere, married, with a husband with whom she shares Lear as 'our' father." (227)

			Oedipal themes of blinding (228-9)

			most read Cordelia's refusal as autonomous agency; "in contrast, I have argued that this moment reveals Cordelia's specific lack of protomodern autonomy, as she does not even name a specific beloved. She intends to have her desire follow all the established laws for female desire and to become a mere conduit between men." (234)

			:"In the final scene, Cordelia's agency is no longer sacrificed; she has come back, after all, at the head of an army. This remarkable change in Cordelia, which Adelman laments as a ''loss'' of agency, is actually the asumption of the same kind of agency her sisters exercised when they spoke the language of incest. '''Incest opens the space for female agency because the traffic is halted; Cordelia's presence on stage -- finally answering her father's transgressive desire for her -- after she has been banished in silence, reveals the paradigm at work.'''" (234)

			:"If, however, what is released in the play is Cordelia's own desiring agency, if we can continue tos ee her as a daughter and not join with Lear in seeing her as mother, then her heroism is her fulfillment not only of Lear's fantasy but of her own distinctly gendered activity, a woman rescuing her father." (235)

			:"In concerted coherence with its cultural moment, the text of the play presents female autonomy as inherently transgressive against the passivity required by the proper traffic in women. the incestuous halt of this traffic allows women a space in which to act." (235)

Wtrettien: /* Wroth */

2011-10-17T18:50:13Z

Wroth

← Older revision		Revision as of 18:50, 17 October 2011
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	== Wroth ==		== Wroth ==

			Urania frontispiece and Drayton's Poly-Olbion frontispiece compared
	:"Thus the frontispiece not only stages the climax to the plot of Book I, but also represents the site of the female author's creativity" (181)		:"Thus the frontispiece not only stages the climax to the plot of Book I, but also represents the site of the female author's creativity" (181)

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	windmill -- "there to announce a subtly ironic slant on a subtler kind of romance, including the reality of ealing with gender relations (191)		windmill -- "there to announce a subtly ironic slant on a subtler kind of romance, including the reality of ealing with gender relations (191)

	:"~~the~~ frontispiece is, in a very real sense, a visual illustration of the place of halt in the traffic in women, where female authority can find a discursive space for itself to expatiate and display. In the process the exercise of that female agency elevates the status of the family and increases its cultural prestige." (191)		:"The frontispiece is, in a very real sense, a visual illustration of the place of halt in the traffic in women, where female authority can find a discursive space for itself to expatiate and display. In the process the exercise of that female agency elevates the status of the family and increases its cultural prestige." (191)

	rewriting of Urania at the beginning of Sidney's ''Arcadia'' (192-3)		rewriting of Urania at the beginning of Sidney's ''Arcadia'' (192-3)

Wtrettien: /* Spenser's Britomart */

2011-10-17T18:48:18Z

Spenser's Britomart

← Older revision		Revision as of 18:48, 17 October 2011
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	== Spenser's Britomart ==		== Spenser's Britomart ==

			Elizabeth's two bodies: Belphoebe, Gloriana

			:"when Spenser borrows language from Ariosto's Fiordespina, who laments a monstrous same sex-passion for Bradamante, he is recasting Ariosto's materials and unintentionally demonstrating the close connections between incest and same sex desire, as parallel evasions of the proper traffic in women." (135)

			skeptophilia, "gaze" in Venus and Adonis tapestries

			Amoret's torture
			* birthing scene (147)
			* Busyrane exhibiting writerly torture, his verses wounding the female body
			* "attempt to textualize Amoret's experiment; that is, to turn Amoret's physical, material experience into a poetic text by '''borrowing her fecund, bodily-based creativity in order to make poetry of his own'''" (147)

			Britomart's later birth in dream sequence

			:"In III, Senser aims at understanding female agency in terms very different from the passivity required by patriarchal codes (if Florimell flees, she is, in fact, also seeking Marinell). In book IV those codes are resolutly in place." (153) -- trade in women between men

			erotic attachment between women barely present in Spenser (159)

			Radigund and Britomart
			* "In some fundamental sense, the political 'liberty of women' is imaginable only as an outlying alternative to the domesticity of women." (160)

			:"Britomart's narrative reveals the agency that women may legitimately engage in. It also depicts the violent suppression of an illegitimate political female agency when Britomart vanquishes the Amazon queen Radigund and Talus massacrews the Amazon nation. her rightful agency is not merely to be the mother of her children, but to have those children by a man whom she has seen, in some fundamental way, as her own brother. Only once does Britomart embrace Artegall, and that is the guise of an incestuous coupling in her dream." (162)

			:"Britomart's agency is thus being buitl upon a familial power which stabilizes social hierarchy. It is the same power that brought Elizabeth I to the throne -- that raised her up, uniquely, to single sovereignty. The structure of Canto vii strongly suggests that it is this endogamous agency by which Britomart is able to repeal the 'liberty of women' fantasized in the stories of the seemingly outlandish Amazons." (163)

	== Wroth ==		== Wroth ==

Wtrettien: /* Sir Philip Sidney's Queen */

2011-10-17T18:25:22Z

Sir Philip Sidney's Queen

@@ Line 88: / Line 88: @@
 == Sir Philip Sidney's Queen ==
 :"By counseling the queen not to enter the traffic herself, Sidney asserts the one authority left to men in her court for use against her sovereign agency: the cultural mandate whereby males, not females, choose the men women could marry." (76)
 == Mary Sidney Herbert (with a Note on Elizabeth Cary) ==

Wtrettien at 18:05, 17 October 2011

2011-10-17T18:05:29Z

@@ Line 90: / Line 90: @@
 :"By counseling the queen not to enter the traffic herself, Sidney asserts the one authority left to men in her court for use against her sovereign agency: the cultural mandate whereby males, not females, choose the men women could marry." (76)
 == Wroth ==
@@ Line 121: / Line 146: @@
 :"Hers [Pamphilia's] is an active volition that is to be distinguished from the personified abstraction she not so much refuses to become (liek Dante's Francesca), in Teskey's formulation, but that she contains within herself to make it a defining characteristic of her own will. What Wroth has done, then, is to reformulate a transgressive active female desire, dressing it up in a traditional female virtue, patient constancy." (212)
 == Shakespeare's Cordelia ==

Wtrettien at 18:02, 17 October 2011

2011-10-17T18:02:28Z

@@ Line 86: / Line 86: @@
 Ward, 1590 reprint of Bale
 == Sir Philip Sidney's Queen ==
@@ Line 144: / Line 121: @@
 :"Hers [Pamphilia's] is an active volition that is to be distinguished from the personified abstraction she not so much refuses to become (liek Dante's Francesca), in Teskey's formulation, but that she contains within herself to make it a defining characteristic of her own will. What Wroth has done, then, is to reformulate a transgressive active female desire, dressing it up in a traditional female virtue, patient constancy." (212)

Wtrettien: /* Mary Sidney Herbert (with a Note on Elizabeth Cary) */

2011-10-06T19:12:40Z

Mary Sidney Herbert (with a Note on Elizabeth Cary)

← Older revision		Revision as of 19:12, 6 October 2011
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	Countess of Pembroke's main metaphor for poem she sends Elizabeth is a ''cloth'' (114)		Countess of Pembroke's main metaphor for poem she sends Elizabeth is a ''cloth'' (114)
			* "not only is the text a ''textus'', a woven thing, the English translation of the Psalms provides a different 'dress' for the Hebrew King David. In presenting the translation as woven material, or 'stuff', the countess includes her brother in the process of weaving (although she differentiates between the two), just as he had included her in the ''Arcadia'' by giving her the 'stuff', the haberdasher's glasses and feathers" (114)
			* cloth --> given to Elizabeth to make livery robes for Sidneys --> holy garments
			* "There is no praise of Elizabeth's beauty, her chastity, no compliment by way of mythological reference; instead the poem insists upon duty, upon the time-consuming and arduous task of ruling over a Protestant realm, as if this were a poem above all about work" (116)

			:"The power lies at the site where the traffic in women allows certain females to take full possession of the space of endogamous halt." (120)

			Elizabeth Cary, ''Tragedy of Mariam''
			* play "poses the demands on a woman to be chaste, silent, and obedient in terms of a wife's willingness to forget her loyalty to her natal family. Yet Mariam insists that this bond has its own rights." (127)
			* "Exiting the traffic in women altogether by dying, Mariam fulfills a saintly sacrifice; in this way, her story ceases to be a secular piece of history about marriage relations and becomes a sacred prophecy." (132)

	== Sir Philip Sidney's Queen ==		== Sir Philip Sidney's Queen ==

Wtrettien: /* Sir Philip Sidney's Queen */

2011-10-06T15:41:58Z

Sir Philip Sidney's Queen

← Older revision		Revision as of 15:41, 6 October 2011
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	Ward, 1590 reprint of Bale		Ward, 1590 reprint of Bale

			== Mary Sidney Herbert (with a Note on Elizabeth Cary) ==

			:"By marking the Countess of Pembroke and her female associates the privileged readers of his text, Sidney was free to play with gender codes in creating his five-act comedy." (105)

			:"The countess inheretied her position as patroness of Protestant poets ... from her uncle Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, via her brother Philip Sidney; such an inheritance underscores the familial nature of the agency for building cultural capital." (106)

			"immense prestige displayed by the family in their exchanges with each other": "They are not purveying goods to the public; they are instead offering noble gifts to each other." (108)

			:"What needs to be stressed here is that the tactic undertaken by her, a textual endogamy of the most intense and intimate kind, fundamentally increases the prestige not only of brother but also of sister, as members of the same family. Hence Philip Sidney's illegitimate fathering is turned into the greatest possible gentility by his sister's memorial act." (108)

			Spenser's ''Calendar'', "Doleful Lay for Clorinda" -- public print vs. private coterie circulation

			Countess of Pembroke's main metaphor for poem she sends Elizabeth is a ''cloth'' (114)

	== Sir Philip Sidney's Queen ==		== Sir Philip Sidney's Queen ==

Wtrettien: /* Wroth */

2011-10-04T23:26:12Z

Wroth

← Older revision		Revision as of 23:26, 4 October 2011
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	== Wroth ==		== Wroth ==

			:"Thus the frontispiece not only stages the climax to the plot of Book I, but also represents the site of the female author's creativity" (181)

			frontispiece also points to the tradition of "an idealized view of a family seat" (181)
			* embodies both the "ancient pile" of Penshurst, Wroth's childhood home, and the Palladian architecture of renovated Wilton, the Countess of Pembroke's home for her son, Earl of Pembroke

			:"If what we see between the two pillars in the allegorical ''Rainbow Portrait'' is a representation of the imperial but also erotic Elizabeth herself, what we see beyond the Palladian frame fo the ''Urania's'' frontispiece is a picture of the kinship from which Wrote draws her endogamous power." (181)

			Ann Clifford, Bess of Hardwick: exogamous traffic in marriage allows them to bring their wealth back to their original family (184)
			* links to country-house poem and landscape depicted in the frontispiece

			windmill -- "there to announce a subtly ironic slant on a subtler kind of romance, including the reality of ealing with gender relations (191)

			:"the frontispiece is, in a very real sense, a visual illustration of the place of halt in the traffic in women, where female authority can find a discursive space for itself to expatiate and display. In the process the exercise of that female agency elevates the status of the family and increases its cultural prestige." (191)

			rewriting of Urania at the beginning of Sidney's ''Arcadia'' (192-3)
			* in Sidney's ''Old Arcadia'', love for the absent Urania elevates the shepherds to a higher class

			reading of Petrarchan discourse, Echo poem: "Wroth's use of Petrachan discourse to have a female speaker lament her own lack of self-presence paradoxically works to insert that female into the generically well-defined position of the Petrarchan speaker. It is a way of saying that even though she is but a late echo of an already defunct genre, Wroth is appropriating quite self-consciously its discursive possibility for expressing a self, commention as she does so (in the figure of Echo) on the very lateness of her start" (194-5)

			:"it seems almost as if Wroth wre inserting the reality of gender difference into each narrative turn to see what other eventuality would be the outcome" (196)

			rewriting Spenser's episode of Britomart rescuing Amoret from Busyrane's castle but "moral values are completely reversed" (197)

			unlike Spenser, Wroth refuses to use cross-dressing (198)

			:"Wroth mocks the theatricality of the woman who would, Britomart-like, pursue her lover actively. She eols in her place the domestic and withdrawn nature of Pamphilia's unexpressed desire, unexpressed in all ways except in poetic discourse with herself. This withdrawal into a private, yet quite open outdoor space indicats just how hospitable the aristocratic familial site was for female agency." (198)

			:"Hers [Pamphilia's] is an active volition that is to be distinguished from the personified abstraction she not so much refuses to become (liek Dante's Francesca), in Teskey's formulation, but that she contains within herself to make it a defining characteristic of her own will. What Wroth has done, then, is to reformulate a transgressive active female desire, dressing it up in a traditional female virtue, patient constancy." (212)

Wtrettien: /* Sir Philip Sidney's Queen */

2011-10-04T23:25:59Z

Sir Philip Sidney's Queen

← Older revision		Revision as of 23:25, 4 October 2011
Line 90:		Line 90:

	:"By counseling the queen not to enter the traffic herself, Sidney asserts the one authority left to men in her court for use against her sovereign agency: the cultural mandate whereby males, not females, choose the men women could marry." (76)		:"By counseling the queen not to enter the traffic herself, Sidney asserts the one authority left to men in her court for use against her sovereign agency: the cultural mandate whereby males, not females, choose the men women could marry." (76)

			== Wroth ==