"REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN'S SUBJECTIVITY" IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE

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As to the nature of representation of women'S subjectivity in Early Modern English literature, the investigator has come to an conclusion that there is a substantial difference of ways of representing women's subjectivity between male authors and female authors. In The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry by Elizabeth Cary, the representation of womwn has several distinctive features because its author is a woman. Elizabeth Cary is fully aware of the repressed status of contemporary wives resulting from their socially and exonomically handicapped situation. She incorporates their mental sufferings and struggle in the characters of wives in Herod's age, and investigates the ways Mariam tries to attain autonomus subject position in relation to her husband. Shakespeare is also aware of the women's desire for autonomous subject position in Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, and Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, but he represents their merits in t … More erms of his contemporary patriarchal ideologies of good women and wife. But Cary's mariam opposes such ideologies, because Mariam'S idea of dignity as a human being as well as a wife is perceived to be intolerably eroded by the ideological demand of "humility". The partiarchal society of the early modern England expects the virtues of humility and chastity on the part of women, and regards the two virtues as inseparable. But a female author like Elizabeth Cary takes a different view about the virtue of "humility". This testifies that female authors exert "female imagination", which might be quite different from "male imagination" of Shakespeare, Middleton, Webster and Ben Jonson, in representing female characters in their literary works. The nature of "female imagination" should be more fully investigated by analysing the works of Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth, Rachel Speght, and Aemilia Lanyer. But at present, there seems to be something in common among these women writers as to what I call "female imagination." Less