Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance: Relative Values

218 Pages·2007·1.091 MB·English

by  Marion Wynne-Davies (auth.)

Early Modern Literature in History
General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty
of Arts and Humanities, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of
English, University of Sussex.
Advisory Board: Donna Hamilton, University of Maryland; Jean Howard,
Columbia University; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard McCoy,
CUNY; Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford.
Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both
within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different
theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in
seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures.
Titles include:
Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr (editors)
ENVIRONMENT AND EMBODIMENT IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Andrea Brady
ENGLISH FUNERARY ELEGY IN THE SEVENTEETH CENTURY
Laws in Mourning
Mark Thornton Burnett
CONSTRUCTING ‘MONSTERS’ IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA AND EARLY
MODERN CULTURE
Jocelyn Catty
WRITING RAPE, WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Unbridled Speech
Dermot Cavanagh
LANGUAGE AND POLITICS IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY PLAY
Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (editors)
‘THIS DOUBLE VOICE’
Gendered Writing in Early Modern England
Katharine A. Craik
READING SENSATIONS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
James Daybell (editor)
EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700
John Dolan
POETIC OCCASION FROM MILTON TO WORDSWORTH
Tobias Döring
PERFORMANCES OF MOURNING IN SHAKESPEAREAN THEATRE AND EARLY
MODERN CULTURE
Sarah M. Dunnigan
EROS AND POETRY AT THE COURTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND JAMES VI
Andrew Hadfield
SHAKESPEARE, SPENSER AND THE MATTER OF BRITAIN
William M. Hamlin
TRAGEDY AND SCEPTICISM IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND
Elizabeth Heale
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTHORSHIP IN RENAISSANCE VERSE
Chronicles of the Self
Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (editors)
THE LAW IN SHAKESPEARE
Claire Jowitt (editor)
PIRATES? THE POLITICS OF PLUNDER, 1550–1650
Pauline Kiernan
STAGING SHAKESPEARE AT THE NEW GLOBE
Arthur F. Marotti (editor)
CATHOLICISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN EARLY MODERN
ENGLISH TEXTS
Jean-Christopher Mayer
SHAKESPEARE’S HYBRID FAITH
History, Religion and the Stage
Jennifer Richards (editor)
EARLY MODERN CIVIL DISCOURSES
Marion Wynne-Davies
WOMEN WRITERS AND FAMILIAL DISCOURSE IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE
Relative Values
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the Renaissance Texts Research Centre at the University of Reading.
Early Modern Literature in History
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Women Writers and
Familial Discourse in
the English Renaissance
Relative Values
Marion Wynne-Davies
Professor, Department of English, University of Surrey
© Marion Wynne-Davies 2007
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-8641-2
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First published 2007 by
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wynne-Davies,Marion.
Women writers and familial discourse in the English Renaissance :
relative values / Marion Wynne-Davies.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.English literature—Women authors—History and criticism.
2.English literature—Early modern,1500–1700—History and criticism.
3.Family in literature.4.Domestic relations in literature.
5.Group identity in literature.6.Discourse analysis,Literary.
7.Women and literature—England—History—16th century.8.Women
and literature—England—History—17th century.9.Family—England—
History—16th century.10.Family—England—History—17th century.
I.Title.
PR113.W96 2007
820'.9'9287—dc22 2007016439
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07
For my Family: Geoff, Rich and Robs
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Women Writers and Familial Discourse
in the English Renaissance 1
1 ‘Though a temporall man, yet your very
spirituall father’: The Roper/Basset Line and the
Lives of Thomas More 12
2 ‘Sory coumfortlesse Orphanes’:
The Rastell/Heywood Line 27
3 ‘Worthy of their blood and their vocation’:
The More/Cresacre Line 48
4 Representations of Relations on the Political
Stage within the Fitzalan/Lumley Household 63
5 ‘As I, for one, who thus my habits change’,
Mary Wroth and the Abandonment of the
Sidney/Herbert Familial Discourse 89
6 Sisters and Brothers: Divided Sibling Identity in
the Cary Family 104
7 Desire, Chastity and Rape in the Cavendish
Familial Discourse 140
Conclusion 170
Notes 174
Bibliography 191
Index 200
vii
Acknowledgements
While researching, writing and preparing this book for publication I
have been aided and influenced by many erudite and generous
scholars, and my thanks are due to all those mentioned below, as well
as others whom space precludes; any errors in this work are wholly my
own and do not reflect their careful advice. To begin, I would like to
acknowledge the influence and support of those others working in the
field of Early Modern women writers and feminism, in particular
Catherine Belsey, Danielle Clarke, Stephen Clucas, Marguerite Corporall,
Rebecca D’Monte, Richard Dutton, Alison Easton, Alison Findlay, Akiko
Kusunoki, Nicole Pohl, Heather Wolfe, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright,
Helen Wilcox, Gweno Williams and Georgianna Ziegler. My thanks are
also due to S.P. Cerasano not only for sustained scholarly support over
more years than either of us care to mention, but also for friendship.
I am also grateful to the continued support offered by the staff of the
English and Women, Culture and Society programmes at the University
of Dundee, in particular Jane Goldman, Rachel Jones, Gail Low, Jim
Stewart, Aliki Varvogli, Pat Whatley, Mary Young and all those students
past and present who have made me rethink my own old-fashioned
ideas about women writers. My thanks are also due, more widely, to the
University of Dundee and to its library, as well as to the Folger
Shakespeare Library; the Bodleian Library; the British Library; the uni-
versity libraries of Nottingham and St Andrews; the Archives of the
Départementales du Nord at Lille; the Mediatheque, Cambrai; and the
Bibliotheque Mazzarine, Paris. I am grateful for financial assistance
from the University of Dundee, the British Academy and the Folger
Shakespeare Library. At Palgrave Macmillan I thank my editors: Paula
Kennedy for her faith in the project and Christabel Scaife for her help-
fulness. Finally, and perhaps inevitably, I wish to thank my family –
Geoff, Rich and Robs Ward. I am reluctant to suggest that this book
either participates in, or initiates, a familial discourse. Instead, I’d like to
say thank you to my family for all the splendid dinners, with their tales
of the day, the shared jokes, the heady wines and – most especially – for
the fish.
viii
Introduction: Women Writers and
Familial Discourse in the English
Renaissance
I
‘… the family, the immediate social group, the work
situation, the religious community.’1
In Archaeology of Knowledge Michel Foucault examines how discourses
and discursive formations emerge and he provides examples of possible
first surfaces including, as the quotation above notes, ‘the family’. As the
argument progresses, Foucault goes on to explain the processes necessary
for the identification of such discursive formations:
A discursive formation will be individualised if one can define the
system of formation of the different strategies that are deployed in it;
in other words, if one can show how they all derive (in spite of their
sometimes extreme diversity, and in spite of their dispersion in time)
from the same set of relations.2
The purpose of this book is to explore the ways in which Early Modern
families provided not merely sites for the initial appearance of dis-
courses, but developed distinct and ‘individualised’ discursive forma-
tions or familial discourses. Although most families devise their own
way of talking and writing, this does not necessarily constitute a specific
discourse in the way Foucault intends. For a familial discourse to occur
a family must develop a set of self-presentation skills that project a
defined identity across an array of cultural, social and political domains.
Equally important is the way in which familial discourses are initiated or
emerge onto a first surface; for example, they rarely form through peer
effort, but rather originate from the work and influence of one specific
1