Architectonics of the self: Negotiating male subjectivity in Elizabethan narrative poetry

This dissertation is a contribution to the critical debates regarding early modern subjectivity, as well as an attempt to integrate Lacanian psychoanalysis with historical analysis. The four major chapters, which should he read as case studies rather than as a continuous argument, address the ways in which narrative poetry presents stories of transformations and new models of being for male subjects, as these poets undertake what Richard Helgerson calls the "writing of England." The dissertation opens with a chapter surveying some of the changes that took place in England in the sixteenth century, and a discussion of how these changes may have contributed to alterations in male subjectivity. The second chapter argues that The Mirror for Magistrates' obsession with the mutilated bodies of its subjects is a representation of a cultural trauma caused by the massive social changes that took place in England over the course of the sixteenth century. Chapter three deals with Spenser's Faerie Queene. I argue that the transition from Aristotelian ethics to a Christian ethics that critics have observed in the first two books can also be read as the creation of a new imperialist subjectivity, which restructures the relation between mind and body. Chapter four reads several epyllia--erotic narrative poems based on Ovid's Metamorphoses--by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Marston and others as stories of a metamorphosis of a different kind. Whereas critics have often read these poems' rejection of Petrarchanisms as evidence of a maturation of English love poetry, I argue instead that they work to install a new relation between the sexes, one in which the male subject violently subjugates the female in order to avoid becoming the object of desire. The final chapter uses Gilles Deleuze's essay on the utopian impulse of masochism to argue that Sidney's Astrophil and Stella is the narrative of a masochistic scene, one which aims to create through the fantasy of the woman a new male subject who is beyond the law of the father.