| This study examines how the presence or absence of the female voice, beginning with early Virgilian Eclogue origins and its English and Italian Renaissance variants, hints at the precarious status of the male-centered pastoral ideology, whose redundant stereotypes resonate throughout the genre. Indeed the female voice destabilizes the patriarchal genre in earlier versions, introducing seeds of its deconstruction, which then develop into the ironic parody in later versions of pastoral texts. This book traces the textual trajectory of the evolving female voice from those Virgilian beginnings through a number of male-authored pastorals, and concludes with the female-authored Urania by Mary Wroth. My project identifies points in the primary texts where that female voice disrupts, disturbs, and humanizes the male-centered pastoral, unraveling its specious ideology and providing remedial tonic irony to a tired construct. My conclusion examines the impact of the disruptive and unraveling nature of the female voice upon the pastoral genre, as it heralds a “re-vision” of pastoral attitudes, virtues, and events otiose otium of Virgil's solitary pastoral scene. Wroth's Urania asserts a female revision of pastoral values and virtues.; There is a gap in the critical literature about pastoral concerning the implications of females in male disguise, or the investigation of gender interplay and interdependency in these texts. Here the contemplative Virgilian-influenced English Renaissance male author seeks to capture (fetishize) a female voice or mark upon a page. While other scholars hint at the way this evolving female voice deconstructs the pastoral genre, they do not examine the impact or implications of the emerging female voice. In order to demonstrate this construct, four major concepts emerge from close study of the female voice in these texts, including a male longing for an absent female voice, a male desiring to capture the female via purchase as object, a female voice both elusive and disruptive that acts as a remedial tonic, and a female voice moving the genre toward self-parody. My work concludes with an analysis of how Wroth's Urania presents a female-authored literal revision and ironic “re-vision” of the genre itself. |
