The Affects of Critique: Women and Satire in Early Modern England

Abstract

“The Affects of Critique: Women and Satire in Early Modern England” analyzes how early modern dramatic satire contributed to the theater’s production of social knowledge by articulating social difference through ironic ridicule. Examining how London’s satiric theatrical tradition sought to manage fears about changing gender and sexual norms, I argue that dramatic satire assigns meaning to epistemologically ambiguous performances of gender by staging critical orientations toward them. These orientations are affective in nature: through ironized ridicule, satirical texts enact attitudes and hyperbolic affects toward characters who do not conform with expectations of their gender-based roles. I examine these satiric figurations of gender to identify how they reify widespread cultural beliefs about women’s speech and embodiment, as well as how satire’s self-critical mechanisms trouble the ideologies that uphold gendered categories in the first place. Using a rhetorical-affective framework to examine satire’s meaning-making mechanisms, I develop a model for discerning implicit meaning by attending to the tensions that satire constructs between what is said (rhetoric) and how it is said or performed (affect). This model involves theorizing satire’s diegetic and metacritical levels of meaning. I also bring a historicist-feminist framework to my analyses: while attending to historical structures of social inequality in satirical texts, I analyze how social categories are formed, how individuals become associated with particular categories, and how those categories are differently empowered within their staged hierarchies. My historicist-feminist framework acknowledges, in particular, the centrality of misogynistic rhetoric to early modern discourses of urbanization, knowledge, and status formation. By combining feminist methods with theories of rhetoric and affect, I identify how misogyny functions as a feature, rather than a byproduct, of satirical texts.

“The Affects of Critique” identifies four primary mechanisms through which dramatic satire produces affective orientations toward the objects of its critiques: ironic distance, or the tonal quality that flags a text as mocking; abstraction; categories of identity (stereotypes); and the text’s metacritical awareness, which enables it to comment on its own form and content. Chapter 1 examines how ironic distance and abstraction produce satiric meaning, and argues for a reconsideration of Ado and Shrew as satiric comedies. In its first section, this chapter examines how Ado’s Beatrice and Shrew’s Katherine undermine their associations with gendered stereotypes by ironically deploying their conventions; in its second section, the chapter examines how the plays undermine their associations with generic type by parodying the central conventions of romantic comedy, especially marriage. Chapter 2 examines categorization as a satiric meaning-making mechanism in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, or, The Silent Woman. By analyzing how Jonson employs intersecting beliefs about gender and status to produce three, hierarchized categories of urban identity, I argue that Epicoene presents social mobility – which involves a crossing of status categories – as an epistemological issue related to characters’ knowledge and enactment of gender norms. Chapter 3 more closely examines the mechanisms that construct urbane, “witty” masculinity, the social category that tops the social hierarchy in the previous chapter. Chapter 3 identifies epistemological strategies – including suspicion and stereotyping – that witty figures use to access the metacritical awareness that enables them to articulate Epicoene’s satire and claim privileged, masculine status within their milieu.