Queer rhetorics of women writers: articulating identity in Renaissance England
Date
2020
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Understanding rhetoric (speech and written texts focused on persuasion) and literature (drama, novels, stories, and poems) as separate fields is a modern division superimposed on the past rather than one made either when Greek and Roman rhetors were creating the terms, or when Renaissance thinkers were using them to define and analyze texts. In working to correct the current gap in scholarship that drives the two apart, this dissertation takes up four women writers’ literary texts from the Renaissance era for their ability to add to the feminist rhetoric canon. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) and Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) are two women who already exist as figures in the history of women’s rhetoric because of their contributions to speeches, treatises, and philosophies—in other words, texts already read as rhetorical—while Elizabeth Cary (1585-1639) and Mary Wroth (1587-1653) are rarely mentioned, because their texts were primarily literary. In addition to reading select literary works for the rhetorical choices they make and demonstrate, this dissertation analyzes how their rhetorical choices and persuasive abilities were used to represent women’s bodies and desires in print spaces, in ways that today would be deemed queer or outside the heterosexual norm. Finally, these readings are put into context with the ways these women’s lives have been interpreted historically, putting them in the context of how their bodies and texts have been understood. With a connection between words and bodies, the women discussed here redefine desire, gender, legacy, and family in their own words. Through rhetorical analysis, queer theory, and historical context, this dissertation works to add to the feminist rhetoric canon by reinterpreting the ways women use persuasive writing while communicating about bodies and desires in poetry, drama, and fiction.
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Keywords
Elizabeth Cary, Elizabeth I, Feminist Rhetoric, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Wroth