Introduction: intersections of race and sexualityTo extend the previous chapter's discussion of representations of female same-sex intimacy in early modern texts, this chapter focuses on the public ...status of bonds between women in the work of Lady Mary Wroth. While I have discussed drama in the last three chapters, by shifting genres I hope to show that the definitional struggle over intimacy was carried out in multiple literary venues in the period. Wroth's prose romance and verse are not literary in the same way as the period's commercial drama, though the dramatists themselves hardly agreed on the literariness of plays. Nevertheless, Wroth's texts and the dramatic texts I discussed in previous chapters share many of the same concerns about relationality. I hope that the scope of my analysis will encourage Renaissance scholars to develop their own rubrics through which they might assemble unexpected canons, break down traditional generic boundaries, and bring women writers into further dialogue with male-dominated milieux of literary production, such as the commercial theatre.Several affective economies structure Wroth's work, but the relationship between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus seems to be the organizing principle of both the prose romance The Countess of Montgomery's Urania and the sonnet sequence that bears their names. Yet the centrality of this relationship is complicated by the significance Wroth invests in her texts’ female-female relations, which interact with the cross-gendered bond of Pamphilia and Amphilanthus and other heteroerotic bonds. Wroth repeatedly returns to the problem of publicizing intimate bonds that are based on private, interiorized desire. This psychic depth model's near-exclusive control over intimacy in Wroth's work is also exclusionary. As I will show in this chapter, homoerotic and heteroerotic bonds do not achieve representational parity despite both being underwritten by interiorized desire in her work. In fact, the psychic depth model inhibits the achievement of parity. Though her sonnet sequence and prose romance are different as narratives, the teleology structuring both erases, appropriates, and transforms female-female bonds in order to advance the public status of marriage and heterosexual coupling.
Happily ever after: narrative closure and affective relationsTo many readers of Renaissance texts, Christopher Marlowe's name serves as a by-word for dissident sexuality in the period. Yet, as ...Stephen Orgel has recently suggested, though work on Marlowe has made sexual dissidence in the Renaissance visible for modern readers, the assumption that Marlowe himself was a sexual rebel rests on the testimony of his enemies and on a conflation of the author with his characters. A narrow pursuit of the biographical relevance of his texts obscures questions about how those texts are situated within his culture; furthermore, such a dualistic view – either he (or his text) is or is not queer – effaces the complexities of both Marlowe's writing and Renaissance attitudes toward sexuality. Though the intimate sphere was coalescing around long-term monogamy in the period, the modern outcome of this process was by no means inevitable, and neither marginality nor outsider status was a prerequisite for contesting it. Marlowe's Hero and Leander, in its representation of short-term, situational intimacy, challenges the centrality of the long-term monogamous couple in terms that were also widely available to his culture and accessible to his readers.Historical research into intimate life reveals that while texts from the period touted long-term coupledom, practices differed markedly from this ideal because of low life expectancies, the late age of marriage, and the frequency of remarriage in the period. Lawrence Stone argues that “the incessant preaching on the imminence of death must have been a constant reminder of the essential transience of all human relationships. In practice, the probability of a durable marriage was low, since it was likely to be broken before very long by the death of the husband or the wife.” According to Stone, the average early modern English first marriage lasted about seventeen years and almost a quarter of all marriages performed during the period were remarriages. While seventeen years is not short-term, it stands to reason that individuals entertained the possibility that for at least one partner, a marital relationship might be temporary and succeeded by another. Stone, controversially, has concluded from this high mortality rate that closeness, between parents and children and between husband and wife, must have been unlikely and imprudent. In contrast, Alan Macfarlane advises caution in deducing from these figures early modern attitudes toward marriage: “If marriages were relatively vulnerable and partners often replaced, does this tell us anything of the depth of the emotion involved? The problem is a complex one, for swift remarriage can be interpreted in two ways: as evidence of lack of affection – or as the opposite.” The “opposite” situation, according to Macfarlane, is one wherein a widow or widower finds affection in marriage so plentiful and pleasurable in spite of the possibility of losing a partner, that one is willing to risk marriage again. Macfarlane exposes the equation of longevity and intimacy that operates in Stone's interpretation of these data, and he suggests that relations in the Renaissance, including marriage itself, may not all have been evaluated based on their longevity. Only when marriage attempts to assert itself over the entire relational field does it elevate longevity as a signifier of pleasure and value and, in turn, advance itself, somewhat fantastically and fictitiously, as the definitive long-term relation. One has to remain open to the possible significance of short-term relations in texts from the Renaissance, when this transition had not been fully achieved.
Introduction WILL STOCKTON; JAMES M. BROMLEY
Sex before Sex,
02/2013
Book Chapter
We open on an apparent misunderstanding. When Hermia and Lysander get lost in the woods in the second act of Shakespeare’sA Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lysander suggests that they stop and rest for the ...night. Hermia tells him that they should sleep apart, yet Lysander has a different idea: “One turf shall serve as pillow for us both; / One heart, one bed; two bosoms, and one troth” (2.2.47–48).¹ The knowing tone of Hermia’s response—“Nay, good Lysander; for my sake, my dear, / Lie further off yet; do not lie so near” (2.2.49–50)—prompts Lysander to protest
Love and Friendship Bromley, James M
A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies,
09/2017
Book Chapter
In this chapter, I argue that Lady Mary Wroth's Love's Victory depicts queer alternatives to heteronormativity, such as friendship and chastity, becoming themselves instrumental to the dominance of ...heterosexual coupling over the intimate sphere. As they are called upon to secure the past, present, and future for heterosexual culture, these queer alternatives are evacuated of their dissident political and ethical possibilities. I connect Wroth's pastoral play to recent debates within queer theory about the political efficacy of utopianism by showing how the play's resolving of queer alternatives into supports for heteronormativity mirrors critical moves to recuperate negativity into positive forms.
The National Report Card on the State of Emergency Medicine Epstein, Stephen K., MD, MPP, FACEP; Burstein, Jonathan L., MD, FACEP; Case, Randall B., MD, MBA, FACEP ...
Annals of emergency medicine,
2009, 2009-1-00, Letnik:
53, Številka:
1
Journal Article
My dissertation argues that Renaissance texts offered their readers and audiences alternative models of intimate life that contested the increasing cultural importance granted to long-term monogamous ...coupling. Current reading practices, however, are frequently inattentive to the competing intimate economies in which texts situate alternative forms of affection. Insofar as they privilege closure in meaning-making, approaches to narrative often assume that a text endorses the forms of affection that are established at the end of its plot. Marriage, especially in comic texts, seems to garner textual endorsement because it precipitates narrative closure and implicitly promises the perpetuation or renewal of society. Meanwhile, the other, nonnormative types of affective bonds that the text imagines are ostensibly abandoned as "failures" of intimacy. It is my contention that these alternative bonds are often invested with value in the texts that represent them. To recuperate these representations of nonstandard intimacies, I articulate a non-teleological reading practice that does not assume endorsement is coextensive with narrative closure. When applied to texts from the Renaissance and their representations of situational, temporary, nonmonogamous, and other nonstandard forms of affection, this reading practice reveals that a more heterogeneous intimate sphere existed in the period than has been previously recognized. I survey the pleasurable alternatives to long-term heterosexual monogamy imagined and even favorably represented in a generically diverse array of texts, including Christopher Marlowe's narrative poem Hero and Leander, William Shakespeare's so-called "problem comedies," Thomas Middleton's tragicomedy The Nice Valour, and Lady Mary Wroth's prose romance The Urania. These alternate forms of affection include situational nonmonogamy, male masochism and eroticized submission, communal life in convents, and cross-racial female homoeroticism. Often only briefly entertained, these possibilities are nevertheless made available through representation and function as potential scripts for the intimate lives of their readers and audiences. Thus, as these texts encoded resistance to the dominance of long-term monogamy over the intimate sphere, they also opened up pathways for such resistance to be put into practice in the culture at large.
Failures of intimacyIn his 1583 The Anatomy of Abuses, Philip Stubbes famously charged that drama taught audiences how to “play the Sodomits, or worse.” Stubbes's capacious “or worse,” I would ...suggest, refers to certain affective relations that eventually became illegible under the rubrics of modern intimacy. In this book, I map the circulation of knowledge about these queer affections, not only in the plays that Stubbes targets, but also in poetry and prose written between 1588 and 1625. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the intimate sphere coalesced around relations characterized by two elements: interiorized desire and futurity. Interiorized desire locates the truth about the self and sexuality inside the body, thereby organizing and limiting the body's pleasures based on a hierarchized opposition between depths and surfaces. Access to futurity involves the perceived sense of a relationship's duration and its participation in legitimate social and sexual reproduction. These changes, of which Stubbes's charge is one of many indices, laid the foundation for modern understandings of normative intimacy as coextensive with long-term heterosexual monogamy. Coupling, and more specifically marriage, was invested with value as a site where affection was desirable – as opposed to a primarily economic and political arrangement with emotional bonds as a secondary concern – through its figuration as the interpersonal relation with the proper combination of interiorized desire and access to futurity. Other interpersonal relations were excluded from the category, becoming instead what I call “failures of intimacy,” despite being characterized by affect, care, and pleasure for those involved, sometimes to a greater degree than relations typically understood as intimate in modern Western culture.Nothing about the heterosexual couple inherently implies the automatic presence of affect, care, or pleasure, any more than any other form of relationality. Yet modern Western culture's relational economy assumes precisely the opposite in its conferral of cultural prestige and value on long-term heterosexual monogamy. In his landmark discussion in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was “a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy” wherein “the legitimate couple, with its regular sexuality, had a right to more discretion.” I demonstrate that in the Renaissance, while the heterosexual couple was still actively, loudly, one might even say indiscreetly, asserting itself over alternate forms of relationality, it was nevertheless possible to challenge the authority of couple form intimacy. Various literary texts of the period critiqued the consolidation of intimacy around long-term heterosexual monogamy and instead invested value in alternate forms of intimacy, including short-term, situational relations; non-monogamous and polyamorous sexual practices; erotic practices that involve non-normative understandings of the body's pleasures, such as masochism; and beyond. In this book, I analyze Renaissance texts where these “failures of intimacy” do not fail to provide satisfaction and pleasure to those involved in them. Empowering readers to reimagine their own intimate lives, these literary texts offer a counterdiscourse to the period's marital advice conduct books and other texts that attempt to naturalize the consolidation of intimacy around monogamous coupling. This counterdiscourse is present even when texts ostensibly demonize alternate forms of intimacy, as a greater flexibility in Renaissance narrative allowed readers to resist what appears to be textual foreclosure on transgressive intimate practices. Insisting on diversity within relational life, the texts I discuss not only scrutinized the heterosexual couple's attempts to co-opt intimacy's signifying powers; they also sustained otherwise denigrated affections in the representational spaces they opened up for them.