Productive Misogyny in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: Women, Justice, and Social Order.
- Author/Editor
- Herrold, Megan.
- Title
- Productive Misogyny in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: Women, Justice, and Social Order.
- Published
- Herrold, Megan. Productive Misogyny in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: Women, Justice, and Social Order. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Southern California, 2018. 267 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A84.12(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
- Review
- In her dissertation, Herrold shows how in medieval and early modern literature "misogyny offers surprising ethical and political philosophical opportunities to explore gendered constructions of personhood." She considers "how authors ranging from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, including Chaucer, Gower, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Aemilia Lanyer, appropriate conventionally misogynistic figures to rethink radically the ethical and political capacities of personhood, and therefore justice, in society" (7-8). Literature of "productive" misogyny, Herrold tells us, contemplates "the place and/or the idea of women in a system of social order . . . ethically and seriously," and, in this literature, either society changes "to more justly accommodate the troubling woman within it" or, more conservatively, the troubling woman is herself transformed "to render the systemic injustice she elucidates moot in her particular case" (8). She reads Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, Gower's Tale of Florent, and "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle" as examples of her more conservative category, together comprising "a commentary on the limitations of individual autonomy in society-building: the just social order is forged by shunting the notion of compromised subjectivity onto women in general and the loathly lady in particular" (21). Each of the individual versions "stages and restages the fiction of men’s autonomous subjectivity; [while] the recursive nature of the tales reveals the toll patriarchy takes on women." When considered together as a "genre"--arguably, not a very precise use of the term here--the loathly-lady stories come "very close to an exploration of a radical, post-patriarchal order" (27). In each poem, the presiding social order is tested by a "loathly" woman, but that social order--unjust though it is--is neither corrected nor replaced. Nevertheless, the reiterated challenges--and ongoing feminist readings of them--prompt questions for Herrold about how such corrections or replacements might be imagined when individual women are no longer subsumed allegorically into a single, universalized, compromised subjectivity. Extending her arguments into early modern England, Herrold incorporates queer attention to Spenser's Britomart as a "gender-bending loathly lady" (22). She moves to analysis of Shakespeare's uses of troubling women in several of his plays, including those where the traditional bed-trick plot engages questions of justice and those where Lady Fortune is involved in depictions of gambling with justice. In her final two chapters, Herrold addresses Lanyer's fusion of Petrarchanism and Marian compassion in her "Salve Dues Rex Judaeorum" and closes with exploration of "the ways in which the tradition of representing justice as female--as Lady Justice--allegorically justifies the exclusion of women from the political order even while acknowledging its dependence on them" (23). [MA]
- Date
- 2018
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations