Lindsey Lanzisero - Hold your tongue Female Speech and Male Anxieties in Early Modern England(1), Gender in ...
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
HOLD YOUR TONGUE: FEMALE SPEECH AND MALE ANXIETIES
IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
by
LINDSEY LANZISERO
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH
THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON
December 2006
Copyright © by Lindsey Lanzisero 2006
All Rights Reserved
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Dr. Kevin Gustafson for the guidance and direction he
supplied throughout the thesis process and for his unending patience as we worked
through my ideas and multiple drafts and manifestations of this thesis. I would also like
to thank Dr. Jay Scott Chipman for encouraging me to continue my studies in graduate
school, Dr. Miranda Wilson for encouraging the development of the original idea for
this thesis, and Dr. Jacquline Stodnick for her help and insights on this thesis and
throughout my career at UTA.
.
November 20, 2006
iii
ABSTRACT
HOLD YOUR TONGUE: FEMALE SPEECH AND MALE ANXIETIES
IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Publication No. ______
Lindsey Lanzisero, MA
The University of Texas at Arlington, 2006
Supervising Professor: Kevin Gustafson
For early Modern England, containing female speech was essential to
maintaining order. Women’s speech was supposed to be non-existent, and excessive
verbosity indicated a woman who could not or would not submit to societal patriarchal
authority. Through their speech, women could raise questions of patriarchal power and
potentially subvert that power. The frequency of this trope in literature, educational
handbooks, dramatic works, and public documents shows that there indeed was a great
apprehension about what exactly speech and the tongue could accomplish. As a result
of this need to contain female speech, the female tongue became a common literary
iv
trope and was used as a metaphor for many problems and issues within the culture.
This thesis analyzes two body politic metaphors in which the female tongue as a
character wreaks havoc on the social body. Thomas Tomkis and William Averell write
two very different body politic metaphors. Tomkis’s
Lingua
is a comedy that
communicates with rhetorical discourses, while Averell’s
Mervailous Combat of
Contrarieties
is written as a serious dialogue communicating with both anti-Catholic
and print discourses. I argue that male authors’ utilization of the female tongue
illustrates male anxieties not only about the place of women, but about their own places
within the strict hierarchy of Early Modern English culture.
v
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]