Disordered Appetites: Female Flesh in the Works of Thomas Middleton.
Schnitzspahn, Gregory.
2017-04-20T13:59:50.857Z
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Abstract: This dissertation contends that Thomas Middleton's plays and poetry exploit an early modern psychocultural anxiety focused on the insubstantiality of symbolic or linguistic constructs. More specifically, Middleton's works consistently examine the manipulability and immateriality of patriarchally prescribed female social identities--such as maid, wife, and widow--that are based entirely u... read morepon a woman's sexual or marital relations with men. Employing principles drawn from psychoanalysis and ecofeminism, I argue that this Middletonian preoccupation bespeaks a more widespread uncertainty in the period about symbolic structures intended to control or contain female bodies and the natural world. My analysis of Thomas Middleton's work therefore points to conceptual technologies that were emergent in the early modern period and which continue to exert influence in the present day. In the introduction, I describe my guiding principles and theoretical apparatus by reading the typically Middletonian complications of marital and sexual identity in two plays, The Witch and The Phoenix. Chapter One moves to a discussion of female virginity in The Changeling, Middleton's famous collaboration with William Rowley, and argues that the play taps into cultural anxieties about the potential unreliability of symbolic technologies for controlling female bodies and appetites. Chapter Two examines Middleton's early work, The Ghost of Lucrece, and contends that this poem's plaintive ghost uses images of female corporeality as a rhetorical weapon, unleashing great floods of blood, milk, and tears that strain the written language of the poem itself. The third chapter considers how, in The Widow, Middleton's radical deployment of two early modern theatrical conventions, widow-hunting and cross-dressing, suggests the constructedness of gender, identity, and even human understanding of reality itself. The concluding chapter begins with a reading of remarriage in Women Beware Women before proceeding to a closing discussion of the profound ideological effects of literacy and print culture in early modern Europe.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2015.
Submitted to the Dept. of English.
Advisor: Judith Haber.
Committee: Kevin Dunn, John Fyler, and William Carroll.
Keyword: Literature.read less - ID:
- 47429n22t
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