Sperrazza, Whitney (Author)
Anderson, Penelope (Advisor)
MacKay, Ellen (Advisor)
Indiana University
Anderson, Penelope
MacKay, Ellen
Physical Details: 317 pp.
Language: English
“Perverse Intimacies” explores the unexpected collisions among women writers, poetic form, and Renaissance anatomy in order to argue that early modern female poets offer alternatives to the sexually violent poetic conventions that structure early English lyric tradition. I consider how Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, Hester Pulter, and Margaret Cavendish confront conventional representations of violence to the female body and foreground how that violence becomes part of the period’s aesthetic project of knowing the female body. As they critique reading experiences constructed around such violence (reading experiences structured through what I define as “perverse intimacy”), these female poets explore alternative forms of intimate engagement among the text and its reading and writing bodies. This project responds to scholarship that largely studies early modern women’s poetry in relation to the male-dominated literary market, often drawing on biographical evidence to consider how women writers manipulate the gendered constraints of that market. Instead, I offer a feminist formalist analysis, and find aesthetic innovations within these poets’ representations of the female body and various forms of invasive and gendered violence. I consider their poetry alongside the period’s anatomical materials, which offer a rich paradigm for considering how violence against the female body is not just a thematic feature of these texts, but is also embedded and enacted within the poetry’s formal structures. Early modern anatomical discourse was centrally concerned with how to translate the fleshly body to the flat surface of the page. Each of my chapters looks at how female poets draw on these same concerns, appropriating anatomy’s tactile and material emphasis in order to foreground the extent to which poetry can be an invasive bodily experience. As an alternative, Lanyer, Wroth, Pulter, and Cavendish attend to the close encounters reading invites, and their work calls for tactile engagement with textual bodies and poetic material rather than relying on reading’s traditional visual and aural perceptual modes. In addition to offering an interdisciplinary approach that traces the entanglements between early modern aesthetic and scientific representational modes, this project also opens space for a reconsideration of the radical possibilities of early women’s texts.
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