female persona, self-improvement, temperance, objectification, spurned lover, Tudor, Petrarchan lover, female subjectivity, courtier
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of self-improvement through education, the female persona provides the answer. She implies that learning nurtures temperance, and such temperance is presumably what fortifies her against the “flamyng fire” that her would-be lover attempts to rouse in her (l.16):
And some I see agayne sit styll and saye but small,
That could do ten tymes more than they that saye they can do all.
Whose goodly giftes are such the more they vnderstande,
The more they seke to learne and knowe & take lesse charge in hand. (ll.9-12)
The restless male persona, who as he says “walke[s] to and fro” (l.1), is in the throes of a futile passion, whereas the unspecified other – either the lady herself or a potential rival to the courtier
– “sit[s] styll” and derives temperance from quiet contemplative study and deliberation which leads to steady self-improvement. This gradual process of learning is juxtaposed with the impetuous behaviour of the courtier whose restlessness and wild temperament suggest his impatient desire for immediate gratification. Unlike his beloved and/or rival, whose learning has brought both peace of mind and soundness of intellect, he has not been subject to nurture. The spurned lover can neither attain nor even comprehend these two qualities and, as such, the lady presents him with an ideal of conduct, which is a suitable and a necessary model for imitation.
The empowering potential of reverse objectification, and the concomitant anxiety that male poets might find themselves the focus of such role reversal, is played out in the courtly mid-Tudor answer-poem. While registering this anxiety the male-authored, female-voiced answer is also a defence mechanism that colonises the subject position. The Petrarchan lover might be disempowered before the presence of his Laura, but she only exists within the confines of his delineations of her identity even when he gives her a voice. These answer-poems represent a weak point in the defences of a male-dominated poetics, since they are constantly sealing up and repairing openings for the intervention of female subjectivity either through supplying female-voiced answers or by assigning responses of
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