histrionic, psychological distress, Petrarchan, objectified, bathos, pathos, subject position, spectacle
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256
extravagant histrionic gesture of self-pity designed to invoke guilt rather than love. Putting aside, so far as it is possible, the severe psychological distress which Rodney must have suffered in order to lead him to this desperate act, when interpreted within the context of this poem, his suicide seems calculated to prove that the Petrarchan heroine really does have the power of life or death over her lover. In his attempt to introduce the causality insisted upon by this literary convention into his lived experience Rodney seeks to define Seymour’s identity in a way that can only be sustained by her silence. By eliciting a response from her, and thereby provoking her to represent herself, he finds himself forced to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to prove his point and wrest the power of definition from her once more. Rodney sets out to prove the veracity of the Petrarchan viewpoint against Seymour’s refusal to be objectified in what is essentially a struggle for occupation of the subject position.
In her answer Seymour steps gracefully out of the Petrarchan bind into which Rodney attempts to ensnare her thereby ensuring that his suicide will be a farce. She warns him that he is mistaking fiction for reality: “I never yet could hear one prove/ That there was ever any died for love” (ll.139-40). Although what Rodney seeks is pity, his threat to take Petrarchan suffering to its logical conclusion will only induce bathos, he is warned. The intrusion of the fictional Petrarchan lover into social reality will quickly become subsumed by fiction again:
The earnest dare to such a sportive sin –
For that would prove a laughter for an age,
Stuff for a play, fit matter for a stage. (ll.142-4)
Like the lady of ‘The Answere’ (“Evyn when you lust ye may refrayne”, discussed pp.236-7) and like Elizabeth in her answer to Schede, Seymour turns the focus of attention back upon Rodney as a spectacle for consumption and, in this instance, substitutes the pathos of the emblazoned, inaccessible beloved for the bathos of a ridiculous histrionic lover. She recognises, just as Elizabeth does in her answer to Schede, the constraints placed upon her freedom of self
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