Ventriloquization, Renaissance, Thomas Whythorne, secular, love lyrics, translated, Elizabethan, Jacobean

<< previous   next >>

246

servys”. ⁴⁰⁷ Whythorne’s account is illuminating since he attributes the maid’s dismissal to her initiation of the amorous exchange, rather than because she participated in it. Privately accepting an unsanctioned suitor might carry hazards, but actually precipitating amorous discourse was considered even less acceptable, at least in this instance.

These examples illustrate the dangers for women writers’ across the social spectrum of attempting to become authors of themselves and the sole arbiters of their desires. Other women who participate in verse exchanges exhibit considerably more caution, and are usually the respondents rather than the initiators of verse dialogue. One strategy employed to avoid censure is to mimic men’s impersonations of women as Petrarchan heroines. Characteristically, women writing as Petrarchan heroines resort to reflexive re-utterances of what has been said on behalf of women by men and/or conform to the Petrarchan paradigm of the inaccessible beloved as it is manifested in mid-Tudor court answer-poetry. As Elizabeth Harvey writes,

Ventriloquizations of women in the Renaissance achieved the power they did partly because so few women actually wrote and spoke, but the representations of feminine speech that were current in literary and popular accounts, as well as in ventriloquizations, fostered a vision that tended to reinforce women’s silence or to marginalize their voices when they did speak or write.

A few late-Elizabethan and Jacobean ladies also began to break free of the limitations imposed by male representations of a female literary identity. Harvey continues:

As women struggle to repossess a power taken from them, as they challenge patriarchal institutions that have deformed them and limited their potential, the synecdochic expression of that liberation is often localized in the voice.⁴⁰⁸

These literary voices are anomalies, drops in the ocean of a literary environment otherwise peopled with male-authored ventriloquisms of the female voice. Bell claims of this minority of women writers that “the few secular love lyrics written and translated by [them] all strive in one

⁴⁰⁷ Osborn ed. (1961), p.32.
⁴⁰⁸ Harvey (1992), p.5.

<< previous   next >>

	Enter your search terms Submit search form
	Web www.cultureandrhetoric.net