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AS SHE FLED:
WOMEN AND MOVEMENT
IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH POETRY AND DRAMA
by
Amy Margaret Braden
________________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
May 2010
Copyright 2010 Amy Margaret Braden
Object Description
| Title | As she fled: women and movement in early modern English poetry and drama |
| Author | Braden, Amy Margaret |
| Author email | abraden@usc.edu; abraden76@hotmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | English |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2010-11-10 |
| Date submitted | 2010 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2010-01-20 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | James, Heather |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Smith, Bruce R. Lemon, Rebecca Habinek, Thomas |
| Abstract | The argument of this dissertation stimulates the intersections of early modern performance, gender studies, and poetics as it investigates sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature that appropriates the figure of the chaste, fleeing woman. I argue that despite the insistence of early modern texts that female movement indicates sexual incontinence and that chaste women ought to stay at home, many early modern fictions betray a fascination with the idea of women in motion and, most specifically, with the figure of Daphne, who famously flees from Apollo, the god of poetry. In these texts, the fleeing woman becomes a complicated source of poetic inspiration with both historical and literary roots.; Edmund Spenser’s Florimell, the best-known image of the fleeing woman in early English poetry, is all the more compelling because she follows the literary footsteps of both the Ovidian nymph and her Elizabethan counterparts in the court entertainments of John Lyly. Shakespeare’s Helena likewise revitalizes and redefines the story of Daphne as she flies through the forests of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in pursuit of her own love object. While sixteenth-century writers made a virtual project of setting literary women in flight, seventeenth-century poets such as Thomas Carew and Philo-Philippa take the figure one step further by asserting a stronger identification with the fleeing woman than with her pursuer, the god of poetry. In short, while literary scholarship tends to emphasize the way that poets and dramatists aim to control the fleeing woman in order to claim poetic authority, my work attends instead to the way that the subjectivity of the fleeing woman thwarts such poetic efforts. Her independent movement compels poets to engage with a form of female subjectivity that challenges gender norms and assumptions about passive female virtues. I argue that as early modern poets expand the imaginative boundaries of the fleeing female for their own poetic purposes, they unintentionally open up space for feminist writers to re-examine and reclaim female agency in early modern texts. |
| Keyword | women; poetry; drama; flight; female agency; movement; Spenser; Shakespeare; Carew; Elizabeth I; Philo-Philippa; Katherine Philips; Florimell; Daphne; Helena; Sudeley |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m2803 |
| Rights | Braden, Amy Margaret |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | http://www.usc.edu/isd/libraries/services/ask_a_librarian/email/ |
| Filename | etd-Braden-3425 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume44/etd-Braden-3425.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Full text | AS SHE FLED: WOMEN AND MOVEMENT IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH POETRY AND DRAMA by Amy Margaret Braden ________________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) May 2010 Copyright 2010 Amy Margaret Braden |
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