The sexual turn: Emotional bonds and the social world in early modern English literature (Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney)

The central concern of my dissertation is to detail the ways the authors I discuss—Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare—use a contradiction between modern and archaic models of social relationships to define specifically sexual bonds. The humanist discourse of civility projects new, potentially universal norms of restraint and refinement designed to respect a human core theoretically shared by everyone in the social world; at the same time, however, civility reinforces a sense of blood-borne status by claiming to find models of cultural sophistication in courtly elites. As such, civility captures the way a modern conception of a fluid society organized around a contested ideal of humanity fails to displace a traditional social imaginary that sees society as defined by a rigid hierarchy. The contradiction between these two social imaginaries opens a space of sexuality; relationships that fail to be successfully humane because they are undercut by a resurgent emphasis upon traditional hierarchy come to seem sexual. The authors I discuss turn to a language of emotions to describe such sexual connections. Whereas historians who describe the rise of companionate marriage during the eighteenth century typically see emotions as private components of personal psychology that are “shared” during moments of intimacy, the authors I examine tend to see emotions as physiological and tend to value them because they define relationships between bodies that spring up when intimacy between persons becomes impossible. Because the definition of sexuality I describe is based on discourses of status or class, I go on to explore the different consequences a sexual turn has for men and for women and the different ways sexuality is experienced within male-male, female-male and (less frequently) female-female bonds. Throughout my discussion I emphasize the role that depictions of asocial, emotionally-charged relationships play in early modern cultural debates about the function of literature. For Spenser and Shakespeare, investigating the sexual turn becomes the specific task of a literary realm that is beginning to shed its traditional ties to the social elites around court.