Women Writers and Gendered Reading: The "Resisting Reader" and the Hesitant Writer

        Judith Fetterly's The Resisting Reader argues that male authors presumed for centuries their readers all were male.  Especially in lyrics about love poetry, this could have an enormous effect upon female readers.  In fact, Fetterly argues that, in order to successfully read works of literature which presumed their readers to be male, female readers unconsciously have to forget they are female and to read as if they were men.  This is the only way one could follow the overt and covert assumptions that make the literature operate.  For instance, Volpone (and Jonson) appear to assume that the audience will find Lady Politic Would-be entirely funny as a satire on the "learned court lady," as well as a send-up of the upstart nouveau riche courtiers, etc.  However, some women in the audience who read books and contested the books' meanings with men might have seen in her yet another attempt to portray their learning as shallow and incorrect, and their conversation as impertinent even for mentioning such "male" subjects as books.  Others might be laughing at Lady Pol only to go along with the majority male audience, concealing their reactions even from themselves so as to "fit in" with the language community they aspired to join. 

        According to Fetterly, in such a circumstance, the female reader "eavesdrops" upon a literary conversation that was intended entirely for male authors and readers.  Because women were and are raised in a language system and literature that still presumes its authors and readers are male, Fetterly argues that they become psychologically "immasculated"--not "emasculated," in the sense of having "maleness" taken away from them, but rather they learn to think and read and write like men.  The "resisting reader" of her book's title fights that transformation and detects the ways in which the text's constructions of its world reflect assumptions about gender, itself, as well as reproduction, marriage, careers, and many other things in a culture which may be identified by the gender of their participants.  Reading women writers offers us a chance to experiment with this thesis.  Can you see ways in which Mary Herbert, Elizabeth I, and Lady Mary Wroth are aware of their genders and the audience's assumptions about what this means for their authority as writers?  Does their awareness of gender affect their approach to their subjects?  Especially, what is the effect of their "performance of their femaleness" for their readers, including their apologies for their gender?  Can you detect any moments in which these female writers presume that their readers are female?  If you are not finding it yet in their works, you will not be able to miss it in the literature of Amelia Lanyer and Mary Astell, where the author's address to "my readers" means "women readers."  Lest this seem "unfair" to the men, reread Wyatt's "Whoso list to hunt," "Stand whoso list," or "Who list his wealth and ease retain," or most of the poems in Astrophil and Stella, and notice how often the person addressed by the poem is "he."       

T. S. Eliot, the modernist critic and author of "The Wasteland" and "Four Quartets,” argues that authors whose work really matters to a culture, authors who want to be remembered, must find a way to connect their work to the great tradition of previous authors' work (“Tradition and the Individual Talent”).  If they can do that, in future eras their work will be carried along in human memory by the combined force of all those great predecessor works as a system of poetic understanding.  The connections can be formal, by borrowing genres and styles of writing from the past, or they can be content-based, returning to famous subjects--but in all cases, mere borrowing would be fatal to the author's chances of being remembered as an "original." 

         The "originality" problem was addressed specifically by the American critic, Harold Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence, where he argued that great poets always engage in a psychological struggle with the influence exerted by their greatest predecessor poets, a struggle he describes as "Oedipal."  According to Bloom, the younger poet resolves this critical struggle by writing a new work which in some way creatively "misreads" the predecessor poet's work, and thereby breaks its psychological hold upon the younger poet's creative imagination.  The new work can take its cultural energy and tradition-linkage from the older work in the very act of misreading and recreating it.

         Eliot specialized in authors of the Elizabethan era and Seventeenth Century like Marlowe, Herrick, Jonson and Herbert.  His thesis of tradition-linkage works nicely with their highly allusive work because they seem more comfortable acknowledging their poetic "ancestry," as when Herrick writes his homage-poem to "St. Ben" Jonson, and when both men silently evoke the work of Catullus, the Roman lyric poet from whom they both learned some of their craft.  Traditional poets are, as Sarah pointed out re: "Corinna," inherently conservative in their values because they hark back to older times and customs.  Even in Herrick's poem celebrating his return to London for a brief visit describes himself as a "Roman" returning to his "Rome," seeking something enduring in art that he cannot find in his own time, overcome as it is with accellerating change and disorder.

         Bloom, by contrast, was particularly interested in Romantic poets like Blake and Wordsworth, who wrote during the late Eighteenth Century, the time of the French Revolution and the optimistic hope for social or moral change as a result of the "Enlightenment" philosophers' beliefs in the powers of reason and science to transform human society for the better by ridding ourselves of outmoded traditions.  Blake was Bloom's best example of the kind of poet who, seeking greatness in his own work, looked back to the previous era and saw poetic fame dominated by the work of John Milton, specifically Paradise Lost.  According to Bloom, Blake's prophetic books arose from an unconscious struggle with Milton's vision of human existence and his poetry strove to rewrite the Miltonic world view.  For Bloom, a poet like Herrick would fail the "Oedipal struggle" test because he did not rebel against Jonson and Catullus, but rather remained loyal to them.

         So how does all this affect our reading for Friday?  If you are an Early Modern woman writer with literary ambitions, to whom do you look back in the past as a poetic model?  At the time, apart from a few names (especially Sappho and Christine de Pizan), little women's literature was known.  Writing as if you were a man would be one avenue, but until you have tried to write in a gender to which you do not belong, you have no idea how hard that can be.  Although you can easily ignore gender from moment to moment as you live, it influences countless aspects of your experience of life, how life "feels" and "looks," especially in matters of sexuality, family, aging and death.  Think, for instance, what the "hunt of the Beloved" theme in Wyatt, Sidney and Spenser, looks like from the Beloved's point of view, when you are "the hunted."  Though all three of the authors we are reading are noblewomen, they grew up in a society that still accepted the general convention of women's inferiority to men, women's inherent weakness and susceptibility to passions, and even their responsibility, through Eve, for humanity's Fall from grace in Eden.  Each time an Early Modern woman writer picks up the pen, she must invent her own literary tradition, and pick her own literary fights, against her audience's probable belief that she is not worthy of the right to write.

         If I were pressed to name a single "theme" that tied together all the works we have read up to this point in 211, it might be the struggle of English vernacular authors to invent an English literary tradition, with rules for writing and reading that made it possible for later writers, male writers, to confidently sit down and attempt to write narrative poetry like "Canterbury Tales," lyrics like sonnets and less formal verse forms, dramatic tragedies and comedies, travel narratives and philosophical essays.  The struggle of women writers to invent their place in the literary tradition, and to reinvent English literary genres to suit their creative energies, will be one of the major themes in the remainder of the course.  The men keep writing, of course, but gradually they become aware of the new arrivals and of the women readers in their audiences.  Perhaps that, as much as the Parliamentary overthrow of the monarchy or the invention of scientific thinking, also marks the beginning of the "Modern" period in English literature.  If so, Mary Sidney Herbert, Elizabeth Tudor, Lady Mary Wroth, and Amelia Lanyer are very early "moderns" writing in pre-modern contexts.