Quilligan 2005

Quilligan, Maureen. Incest and Agency in Elizabeth's England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Halting the Traffic in Women: Theoretical Foundations

"We have been taught by feminist scholarship that women are constrained by family structures; we have taken this as a foundatinoal principles of arguments for the liberation of women, at least in part because we have so poorly understood the activities women havea ctually undertaken within kinship structures in traditional societies. If, however, we understand that traditional family and kinship structures may be radically dfiferent from our own, we may see how family rank could work to empower highly placed women rather than to limit them. In the sixteenth century the family dynasty became far more pivotal in political arrangements in absolutist Europe than it had been throughout the cloistered Middle Ages, a development that would make the Renaissance aristocratic family a potential site of real agency for women." (1)

Lear's Cordelia refuses to express incestuous love; her "predicament offers us with admirable clarity the cultural paradigm in Renaissance society within which any attempt to claim female agency had to work": silence (3)

"association of appropriate female silence with a woman's perfect and passive willingness to be exchanged (4-5)

Milton's Sin (5-6)

"the fundamental source of authority denied the obedient woman is language that leads to action" (6)

Levi-Strauss: exchange of women between men to cement social bonds; woman becomes a sign (even as she manipulates signs) (10-11)

Gayle Rubin's critique: what's at stake in the exchange of women is female agency, active female desire

three ways to halt the traffic in women

• incest
• voluntary celibacy (e.g. becoming a nun)
• lesbian desire

feminist thinkers try to get outside the bind of language by positing a feminine writing (Irigaray, Kristeva)

• yet, "if such poststructuralist female writing is destined to happen only in the future, how does scholarship evaluate the writing that women have already done centuries earlier?" (16)

"What does it mean to dquate female subjectivity with incest? Is there anything we can learn from leaving open this radical theoretical possibility?" (22)

Annette Weiner, revisiting Malinowski, Mauss, Levi-Strauss

"Weiner's critique helps us see that placing some real value on the objects which women circulate among themselves within a family over generations allows us to calibrate an increase in that family's prestige: when the inalienable possessions do not have to be traded out but may circulate among women in the family, the family stnds to gain over time an ever-incresing degree of prestige, and expansion of property." (25) -- cloth especially important

"female agency empowers and is empowered by an endogamous assertion of family prestige" (27)

"neither early mdoern men nor early modern women trascend their moments; both are very different from us and it is easier to recognize these differences, and so to see what we may have imposed on male texts when we juxtapose them with texts by women" (27)

Christine de Pizan, Livre de la cite des dames -- unlike Boccaccio or Dante, Christine is not concerned with the incest of Semiramis with her son Ninus; "Semiramis lived prior to the 'written' law -- 'la loi escripte' -- and she appropriately inaugurates a text that resolutely refuses to confine women to a non-public, non-self-owning silence. Christine does not see women as relegated to the status of signs; theya re for her -- in a multitude of ways -- the makers of signs." (31)

Elizabeth I (with a Note on Marguerite de Navarre)

Elizabeth I and Mary I both products of incest in some way

"at the place of 'halt'[, the female who is not traded out by a male family member may then turn inward to a nonexogamous arena in which she can exercise some, if not total, control. She may thereby claim an active agency for herself." (36)

Marguerite de Navarre's Mirror

• theme of "holy incest"
• first published 1531, again in 1533
• 1533 edition included translation of psalm by Marot; was burned at the Sorbonne
• man who printed the 1533 edition was later executed for his reformist views

"The familial metaphor of incest thus provides, from the outset, a response to a desire for an unmediated relationship to God, one that bypasses church-authorized intercessors." (39)

incest story in Heptameron (41-3)

Church's early prohibitions against intermarriage and incest, rooted in accumulation of property (44-5)

Elizabeth's translation of Mirour, dedicated to her stepmother Katherine Parr

• Boleyn had brought Mirour home from the court of Marguerite of Navarre, where she was a lady-in-waiting
• volume presented to Parr is covered in Elizabeth's embroidery
  • "it is very suggestive that the text of this translated poem, sent from one female family member to another, covered in persoanlly worked textile, resultes in a gesture that oddly ressembles the symbolic nature of the trade in woven heirloom items that anthropologist annette Weiner has found to be foundational for female communities in remote modern Oceania" (48)

pen and needle usually opposed in protofeminist discourse of the Renaissance; "but here, in Elizabeth's first literary production, pen and needle go together to reinforce a gesture of intrafamilial authorship" (48)

textiles of Hardwick Hall (48-9)

"the metaphorical fluidity of the shifting family positions in the miroir nto only rested upon marguerite's reading of scripture, but also cohered with the metaphorical flex made necessary by reformist doctrine about the decreasing materiality of the act of communion." (50)