As she fled: Women and movement in early modern English poetry and drama

The argument of this dissertation stimulates the intersections of early modern performance, gender studies, and poetics as it investigates sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature that appropriates the figure of the chaste, fleeing woman. I argue that despite the insistence of early modern texts that female movement indicates sexual incontinence and that chaste women ought to stay at home, many early modern fictions betray a fascination with the idea of women in motion and, most specifically, with the figure of Daphne, who famously flees from Apollo, the god of poetry. In these texts, the fleeing woman becomes a complicated source of poetic inspiration with both historical and literary roots.;Edmund Spenser's Florimell, the best-known image of the fleeing woman in early English poetry, is all the more compelling because she follows the literary footsteps of both the Ovidian nymph and her Elizabethan counterparts in the court entertainments of John Lyly. Shakespeare's Helena likewise revitalizes and redefines the story of Daphne as she flies through the forests of A Midsummer Night's Dream in pursuit of her own love object. While sixteenth-century writers made a virtual project of setting literary women in flight, seventeenth-century poets such as Thomas Carew and Philo-Philippa take the figure one step further by asserting a stronger identification with the fleeing woman than with her pursuer, the god of poetry. In short, while literary scholarship tends to emphasize the way that poets and dramatists aim to control the fleeing woman in order to claim poetic authority, my work attends instead to the way that the subjectivity of the fleeing woman thwarts such poetic efforts. Her independent movement compels poets to engage with a form of female subjectivity that challenges gender norms and assumptions about passive female virtues. I argue that as early modern poets expand the imaginative boundaries of the fleeing female for their own poetic purposes, they unintentionally open up space for feminist writers to re-examine and reclaim female agency in early modern texts.