Speaking Chastity: Female Speech, Silence, and the Strategic Performance of Chaste Identity in Early Modern Drama and Women's Writing
Abstract
This dissertation explores the complex and contradictory relationship between female speech and chaste reputation in the early modern period. I draw on J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s understanding of homosociality to study the acts of speech and silence involved in the strategic construction of chaste identity in early modern drama and women’s writing and the role that female homosocial networks play in helping to support the public appearance of feminine virtue. This dissertation scrutinizes literary moments in which the chaste reputations of women writers and their theatrical counterparts are at risk, specifically in Rachel Speght’s A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617), William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1611, pub. 1623), Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), and Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters (1604-6, pub. 1608). I interrogate how these women construct the appearance of chastity through acts of speech and silence, paying particular attention to how and when these performances succeed and why they fail. In these texts, where one woman’s speech or silence produces unintended fissures in her performative production of chaste femininity, other women’s voices become a key element in the chaste reinterpretation of her voice. I argue that while strategic performances of chaste femininity allow for some personal agency over the public perception of feminine virtue, when faced with a threat to reputation, the female speaker is nevertheless placed in a double bind—her voice alone is not enough to ensure the perception of her chastity. In these instances, female homosocial bonds make all the difference. Together, as vocal collectives, other women’s voices stand witness to individual performances of chastity, speaking when and how others cannot if they are to be believed, to allow these questioned performances of chastity to seem to speak for themselves.