The female example in Renaissance English literature: Rhetoric, narrative, and the construction of gender

This dissertation analyzes exemplarity and explores the conflicting forces creating a figure capable of representing ideals of femininity in English Renaissance literature. Narrative of perfect women produce stasis, with repetition the only possibility for continuance, while narratives of "bad" or, more commonly, ambiguous female examples create unsettling dilemmas that are avoided by generation of repeated examples in place of more thorough readings of the implications of these examples.;Chapter 1 introduces problems involved in the rhetorical construction of exemplarity, and in defining exemplarity for women. Elyot's Zenobia illustrates the problems of using an example as argument, and the figure of Dido explores contradictions in female roles.;Chapter 2 discusses the collections of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and de Pisan, and the conduct books of Castiglione and Vives. Patterns that recur later begin here: narratives generated by female exemplarity fail to achieve conclusion, and point to either incompletion of the project or the production of separate narratives.;Chapter 3 examines Sidney's Apology, which defends literature because of its exemplary potential, and follows images of feminine virtue through his two Arcadias. One factor in the failure to complete the second version was the impossibility of continuing the narrative once the primary female example had been perfected.;Chapter 4 discusses fragmentation of female virtues through the secondary female characters in Book III of Spenser's Fairie Queene. The titular example, Britomart, is exceptional rather than exemplary, while other examples often become too ambiguous to provide clear exemplary force. Their narratives are often dropped as Spenser turns to new female characters to provide exemplification, then repeats the cycle.;Chapter 5 looks at the problems of exemplary women on stage, and examines some early works through those women of the controversy and collection books who became characters in later plays, including Shakespeare's Cressida, Volumnia, and Cleopatra.;Chapter 6 studies funeral orations to analyze what effect exemplary literature may have had on renaissance women. Writings by women then provide an idea of what women themselves saw as the exemplary female.