Getting the last word: Suicide and the 'feminine' voice in Renaissance literature (William Shakespeare, Ovid)

Over two thousand years ago, Ovid's Heroides established a version of the “female voice” that continues to influence literary representations of women today: abandoned and complaining, Ovid's heroines mark the beginning of a long tradition in which male poets have, through their “ventriloquizations” of female characters, repeatedly associated the feminine voice with suicide. This association becomes embedded in certain poetic conventions that are later revised and translated in ways that reveal male poets' attitudes and anxieties about gender and poetic representation. Alongside the tradition of the abandoned, complaining woman, a tradition of a paradoxically powerful woman develops: the powerless, garrulous, complaining woman of the complaint tradition is translated into a powerful, if ultimately silent, suicidal woman, enabling an act that is on the surface one of abject cancellation to function equally as an act of triumphant creation. “Feminine” self-expression, figured as the unrepeatable act of suicide, emerges as an alternative and a challenge to the limited (and limiting), repetitive poetic processes of male rhetoric and of female complaint.; The first chapter introduces the subject of suicide in Renaissance literature and traces the evolution of the rhetoric that came to define “male” and “female” characters. The second chapter discusses the origins of the connection between the female voice and suicide, outlining the rhetorical techniques through which Ovid gives the voices in the Heroides their psychological authenticity and examining the heroines' acts of self-definition as artistic revisions of their characters both for themselves and for Ovid. The final chapters focus on three works by Shakespeare, two narrative and one dramatic: The Rape of Lucrece, Venus and Adonis , and Antony and Cleopatra. These works question and undermine the values of both the “feminine” genre of complaint and the “masculine” traditions of seduction poetry and the blazon, first illustrating, then criticizing the literary construction of gender through the repetition of poetic and dramatic conventions. The suicide's eventual escape from those conventions is figured as an artistic act of creation, a metaphor for the poet's project of creating realistic individual characters against the backdrop of the literary conventions that define “male” and “female” character.