Fair maids and golden girls: Early modern girlhood and the production of femininity

Fair Maids and Golden Girls takes as its point of departure the striking absence of girlhood in recent studies of early modern literature and drama, an absence that is particularly noteworthy in view of the considerable attention this scholarship has given to boys. Although girls occupied a crucial and contested position in the early modern sex-gender system, our critical frameworks have not known how to account for them. We often read past their distinct positions as "girls," "maids, "damsels," and "wenches" by subsuming all female characters into the category of "women." From royal infants like Elizabeth I in Shakespeare's Henry VIII to cross-dressing heroines like Bess Bridges in Thomas Heywood's Fair Maid of the West, literary "girls" challenged the boundaries of the early modern sex-gender system.; Chapters one and two focus on girlhood as a discursive gender category. The first chapter uses dictionaries to chart the emergence of "girl" into early modern English, tracing the major developments in the vocabulary of female youth over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The second then investigates the way these lexical changes produced gendered identities in literary texts. Because female children were not yet women and were not expected to behave like adults, they had more freedom to move between gender roles. As a result, the term "girl" was extended to include unruly adult women.; The third and fourth chapters subsequently focus on the connections between girlhood and female childhood. Shakespeare's late romances participated in a minor vogue on the early seventeenth-century stage for using infants as stage props. By exploring the connections between childhood and gender in performance, chapter three suggests infancy troubled early modern constructions of gender identity as a whole. Pre-adolescent girls, unlike infants, did not appear frequently in drama, and my fourth chapter approaches this absence obliquely, by looking at two places they did appear: lyric poetry and women's life writing. In contrast to lyric poems, where young girls function as desirable objects without voices, women's writing preserves the residue of girls' voices---material traces of female life that appear only as an aporia on the stage.