“The Shame of All Her Kind”: A Genealogy of Female Monstrosity and Metamorphosis from the Middle Ages through Early Modernity (2008)
Frangos, Maria (Author)
University of California, Santa Cruz
Freccero, Carla
Edition Details: Advisor: Freccero, Carla
Physical Details: 278 pp.
Language: English
Bodily transformation was as much an obsession of the medieval and early modern periods as it is of the twenty-first century. Monstrous and metamorphosing creatures make frequent appearances in the literature of pre- and early modern Europe, and an extraordinary number of these creatures are female. This dissertation traces several kinds of female metamorphoses as they appear in French, English, and Italian literary works from the twelfth through the early seventeenth centuries. These include supernatural hybrid women such as Mélusine in Jean d'Arras's 1392 Roman de Mélusine and her predecessors in medieval stories and chronicles, the "witches" of early modern romance (Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser), and women who transform from female to male, as in Ovid's story of Iphis and lanthe and its early modern retellings in Lyly's Gallathea and Benserade's Iphis et lanthe. My primary theoretical concern in this project is the intersection of discourses--theological, scientific, epistemological--at the site of the mutable female body, particularly with regard to sexuality and reproduction, and how this intersection shifts and changes cross-temporally and cross-culturally. The topos of the enchantress-turned-hag, which Barbara Spackman argues is a figure for truth revealed, appears in many of these depictions; this puts the monstrous female body at the root of knowledge, and each of these texts engages with this epistemological problem. Mélusine, seemingly human but later revealed to be half serpent, is at first condemned by her husband as demonic and deceitful for having a monstrous body. By the end of the narrative, she emerges triumphant, not only forgiven but also praised by her husband, their household, and all the nobles of the court. However, as the romance epic evolves in early modernity, particularly in relation to Reformation and Counter-Reformation politics, such enchantresses seem to devolve into a suspect kind of monstrosity, often focused on their sexuality, that keeps them distinct from other "good witches." Stories that focus directly on the issue of sexual metamorphosis only hinted at with Mélusine and with witches--sex change stories--turn out to be even less about the sexed nature of the body than their narratives would lead one to believe, minimizing the importance of physical metamorphosis even as they try to argue for the significance of female (sexual) bodily morphology. It seems that a more positive imagining of female power and agency was conceivable in the Middle Ages, with a creature such as Mélusine; through the early modern period, this positive conception of the monstrous female became more and more difficult to represent, particularly in the genre of epic romance, which mobilized the "female monster" for more conservative ends. When female metamorphosis was imagined as a transformation from one sex (female) to the other (male), it was somewhat an exception to this rule, but not without a reification of gender binaries.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/05 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3317372.
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