The Function of the Rhetoric of Maternity in the Representation of Female Sexuality, Religion, Nationality, and Race in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

Abstract

This dissertation tracks the use of maternal rhetoric in the literature and culture of early modern England and reveals how maternity intervenes in complex cultural and political conversations throughout the period. It shows how maternity impacts (and is impacted by) English attitudes and understandings of gender, sexuality, race, nationality, religion, and the natural world across the seventeenth century. The title of the introduction, Defining Maternity, plays with the notion that maternity is both a concept that is defined by a host of historically contingent factors as well as a politically potent, malleable rhetoric that gives definition to readers’ values as they encounter a text. For example, in Salve Deus ex Judaeorum, Aemilia Lanyer invokes maternity – particularly the rhetoric of maternal pain and suffering – to buttress not only her authority as a female writer but also her unique intervention into the moment’s Protestant poetics. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the ambivalence that surrounds maternity in the early modern period structures readers’ ambivalent response to Egyptianness. Examining maternal rhetoric in Shakespeare’s play reveals the multiple strategies the early modern English deployed to elevate English nationalism by selectively incorporating and rejecting Egyptian culture. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko uses maternal rhetoric to describe not only the human body of Imoinda but also the nonhuman plant and animal bodies of Surinam. Portraying Imoinda in parallel with these nonhuman reproducing bodies opens a critique of English exploitation of enslaved subjects and the foreign ecologies that they colonize. Finally, Maternity plays a key role in shaping readers’ erotic experience of three canonical whore dialogues – The School of Venus, Venus in the Cloister, and A Dialogues between a Married Woman and a Maid – highlighting the sexual knowledge and experience that is frequently erased from representations of maternity. When maternal rhetoric appears in these texts, it invokes and manipulates readers’ expectations for women’s sexual behavior, adding nuance to the paradoxical assumption that “good” mothers are asexual.

Throughout the seventeenth century, maternity returns to the foreground again and again as a site within which early moderns explored a host of contemporary concerns and debates that extend beyond women’s reproductive function. Rather than attempting to ask what maternity is or what the early modern discourses of maternity are, this project examines what maternity does in the early modern cultural imagination. Because various references to maternity raise new and, at times, surprising questions about the historical and textual moments in which they appear, the dissertation follows maternity in a variety of early modern contexts, paying close attention to how it operates and allowing this operation to guide its assumptions about what maternity meant to the early modern English people. It examines how maternal rhetoric impacts our reading of certain texts and, in turn, how these texts use maternity to produce and shape the emerging cultural ideologies of the period – ideologies that continue to impact us today.