Engendering a bodily subjectivity: Romance literatures and the lives of seventeenth century women

My dissertation examines the emergence of a female subject at the nexus of romance and autobiography, through a recognition of the body as textual. Engaging early modern discourses that constructed woman negatively through the body, I examine how a conceptual fluidity between fact and fiction in seventeenth century texts by women enabled corporeality to be perceived as responsive to reinscriptions. After an introduction which historicizes the politics of female bodiliness, my first chapter analyzes Mary Wroth's Urania as an expose of the ideological production of gender and sexuality. I argue that by focusing on female characters whose bodily knowledge of desire and betrayal reveals romantic values to be instruments of interpellation, Wroth makes visible various means of resisting corporeal prescription. Chapter two reads Margaret Cavendish's A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life as inscribing a life-long dualistic tension between her relationally constructed social identity and the individualist demands of her author self. I contend that this tension is finally resolved in Blazing World where the slippage between her Duchess and Empress gestures toward an inclusive multiple selfhood. Chapter three reads the contradictions is The Life and Death of Mary Frith, Commonly Called Moll Cutpurse as signifying the divide between Frith's body and her self-fashioned gender identity, which is inscribed by traces of homosexual desire and fear/loathing of the potentially maternal body. I argue that this conflict leads Frith to figure androgyny as both loyal subjection and the sign of a proto-individualism, despite their political antagonism. Chapter four demonstrates how The Case of Mary Carleton Lately Stiled the German Princess destabilizes essentialist notions of identity through Carleton's performative understanding of the body as infinitely alterable, her deliberate conflation of distinctions between romantic hera and picara, and her subversion of the economics of courtship/marriage. My conclusion examines the extent to which the receptions of these texts participated in hegemonic assumptions regarding their authors as aristocratic and common bodies.