Rhetoric, Courtship, Courtiership, response, court manuscripts, 1530s, courtly ladies, reason
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Chapter 5: The Rhetoric of Courtship and Courtiership in Women’s Answer-Poetry and in the Female-Voiced Response
In this final chapter I argue that an understanding of an emergent women’s poetics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might depend considerably upon the recognition of the role played by answer-poetry in facilitating the cultivation of authoritative female literary voices. I pay particular attention to the influence of female-voiced verse answers found in the court manuscripts of the 1530s, and later in printed verse miscellanies such as Tottel’s. These provided women with a readymade mode of writing freed greatly from the implicit association between textual activity and sexual promiscuity through which they might begin to challenge and redefine a female literary identity and become the authors of themselves.
Simultaneously, they were constrained by their adoption of the literary stereotype of the courtly female respondent and by the formal linguistic parallelisms characteristic of verse answering which limited their potential to cultivate original voices. Extant women’s answer-poetry often articulates a struggle, and even at times an inability or reluctance, to reposition themselves in relation to their male interlocutors in the face of the dialectically restricting dilemma posed by men leading with the opening verse and women following in response. This pattern of dialogue reinforces the hierarchical notion of male attributes as primary and female ones as secondary, even while it subverts the gender dichotomy of reason/rationality (male) and emotion/irrationality (female). Frequently, these women answer-poets are also situated cripplingly by their addressee’s objectification of them even though, as respondents, they are given the dialectical upper hand as judges and critics of the verses addressed to them. As I try to show in the second part of this chapter, a few late-Elizabethan and Jacobean aristocratic and courtly ladies resist actively such objectification using the trope of mirroring in order to deflect the male gaze and rearrange the subject-object positions, while others that I examine use the trope as a deliberate means of effacing
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