Pushing through paradox: Conduct literature and the making of the virtuous woman in early modern England

This project examines a range of texts about women's conduct, circa 1529-1650, from the more historical to the more literary, including prose advice, prose fiction, poetry, drama, and street literature. At the nexus of these varied genres, we find not only rigid behavioral models (often constructed out of unyielding and sometimes baffling paradoxes) but also vividly nuanced representations of virtuous women whose conduct "pushes through" such paradoxes in ways that come to be socially sanctioned. I argue that models of conduct in the period---especially of the virtues chastity and obedience---are in fact much more multivalent and open than critics have so far acknowledged. My dissertation complicates the conventional wisdom about the role of codes of behavior in the lives of women by exploring how prescriptions for women's behavior engage in facilitating representations of women's ability to penetrate by retooling rigid and confining paradoxes of behavioral expectations.;The first chapter examines the language authors use to describe chastity---a language that often paradoxically turns in upon itself---in both conduct literature and literary texts. Moving from the seemingly impossible to negotiate contradictions of representations of chastity to a more performative model of virtue, my second chapter argues that early modern women were not taught to be unquestioningly obedient, but rather they were taught that they had a responsibility to be virtuous, which requires performing submission, so that they could reform others. Proceeding from the notion of performance to theater, I look at the theater of Shakespeare in my third chapter. In particular, two of Shakespeare's women, Ophelia in Hamlet and Paulina in The Winter's Tale, serve as instances of the nuanced understanding of the virtues of chastity and obedience. I argue that, paradoxically, Ophelia's madness is in fact caused by the advice she receives and that Paulina's seeming disobedience is actually a form of properly performed obedience. In my final chapter, I show that while many critics argue that popular literature offers only two opposing choices for women, ballads in fact present a complicated spectrum of possible roles for women in which, for instance, a "shrew" might paradoxically be socially effective.