misogynist, satires, Petrarchan, idealisation, female subject, position, Lady Mary Cheke, Lady Mary Wroth, self-representation, narcissistic, objectifying, male gaze
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upon the literary and intellectual roles available to them were also compounded by misogynist satires and invectives that degraded and denounced women as moral and intellectual inferiors. As we have seen, Petrarchan idealisation of the female subject offered a space from which to challenge male hegemony of the subject position by proffering to women a morally sound position from which to write. Antifeminist satire, however, appears to present less scope for successful self-representation through response, due to its tendency to affirm the impropriety, and associated promiscuity, of women who attempt to broadcast their voices publicly. Specifically, answers by Lady Mary Cheke and Lady Mary Wroth respond respectively to satirical verses by Sir John Harington, the younger, and Lord Denny, Baron of Waltham, by employing the technique of mirroring in ways that evade self-representation conspicuously. Both are deprived of inventiveness and their answers become vacant mirrors reflecting back at their adversaries the image of their own text.
Both Harington and Denny attest that the female writer or wit is a contradiction in terms. The responses of Cheke and Wroth, while contesting this position, employ tropes of echoing and mirroring in ways that verify the antifeminist viewpoints they attack by abnegating their own presence from their otherwise lively rebuttals. Rather than being caught in the objectifying, narcissistic mirror of the male gaze, these two women place themselves in this position and render themselves Echoes to the Narcissi of the poems they answer. Nothing could be further removed from the Petrarchan or courtly love poem than the anti-feminist satires of Denny and Harington and yet their respondents seem to situate themselves as if they were under an objectifying male gaze.
Rather than challenging the implicit connection between sexual and textual activity Wroth’s response to Denny actually confirms this; a tendency that Cherbury appears to acknowledge in his ‘Merry Rime Sent to the Lady Wroth’. In this poem he congratulates her upon the birth of an illegitimate child, fathered by her first cousin, William Herbert,
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