Women's spaces, bodies and voices: a cross-cultural study of female-authored fiction in early modern Europe (1500-1700)

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Taking issue with the politics of tradition, the book focuses on the works by five women writers from Italy, England, Spain and France: Giulia Bigolina, Moderata Fonte Mary Wroth, Maria de Zayas and Madeleine de Scudéry. Although all four elicited male admiration, they have only begun to re-emerge from the obscurity to which a tradition of historiography has consigned them for more than two centuries. Ironically, what first links these women writers is partly the fact that they stepped out of the only authorial part deemed to be acceptable for a woman to play, by not choosing devotional writing, but instead a genre, the romance, traditionally decried as unworthy and morally corrupting by virtue of its 'femininity'. Despite the stylistic discrepancy between these authors' works and their intrinsic specificities, what ideologically links them is their representations of women. These in turn inform us about these women writers' internalisation of dominant cultural values in the broader context of early modern Europe - that is in the context of what we could call 'parallel mentalities', encapsulated in the centuries-long debates of the 'Querelle des femmes', with regard to woman's appropriate place in society and access to culture. The book first focuses on the representation of women's bodies in Bigolina's, Fonte's, Wroth's, Scudéry's and Zayas's texts, and the ways in which these women writers respond to the prevailingly partriarchal ideology that informs the various manifestations of ambivalence that govern the mapping of womanhood in the early modern period. In particular, the book uncovers the ways in which these women writers manipulate with some defiant twist the canonic images of women that were available to them through the visual arts and the various literary genres from Petrarchan poetry, epic and pastoral romances to non-literary genres (such as courtesy books; pamphlets against, and apologies for, the 'fair sex'). The argumentation then shifts to the analysis of women's voices and performances in the private and public spheres of these texts' fictional patriarchal societies. While these (dis)empowering performances may recall those of female personae in early modern theatre, one particularly innovative aspect in these women's works is their responses to misogynistic writings, whereby they often emerge as the unbiased historiographers of women and assertive defenders of women's access to culture, and transform their texts into a 'locus memoriae', 'lieu de mémoire' for women. In particular, I consider the extent to which the various manifestations of salon culture in which these women writers were immersed enabled them to articulate a counter-discourse in their own fiction. Owing debt to a far-reaching tradition that uses landscape as the locus of the feminine, many of the feminocentric spaces found in these women's texts serve as a backdrop for social gatherings in which women are portrayed as cultural agents. As I argue in this book, this counter-discourse and transformation of the text into a 'locus memoriae' for women culminate in these women writers' textual and spatial representations of female literary creativity. Their innovative multiple positive representations of the woman of letters, undoubtedly played an important role in the fashioning of their female readerships and in the formation of a feminist consciousness. Lack of records often make the task of identifying the cultural impact of early modern works which have been written out of the canon. Nevertheless, this has also been hardly explored, mainly because the bulk of the primary sources and their relative inacessibility have made it an almost impossible task to achieve. In taking up this challenge, my book sheds light on early modern women writers' agency in the creation of a cultural memory for women by women, while addressing the limits of their feminist agendas.