ABSTRACT
The kind of attention paid collectively to the texts of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean ‘woman debate’ signed with female names suggests that many critics understand feminism to be a relatively recognizable political and literary category which, though historically variable, is also visible across historical boundaries.1 This chapter explores the possibility that the identification of oppositional resistance as expressed by a single author may be a difficult matter historically; texts we recognize as feminist in our present circumstances might in their historical context represent not feminist univocality, but an awkward combination of contradictory speaking-positions such as the assumption of a negotiating stance on the terrain of politics, a subversive play with the question of gender in terms unfamiliar to modern feminism, and the production of femininity as a saleable commodity in the literary market. What we recognize in these texts may be the processing of woman as a theatrical role or masquerade which can never be equated with an essential woman or audible authorial voice but which, rather, troubles the very existence of such a self-identical figure. These are texts which cannot be put easily into categories of metaphor alone or categories of authentic voicing; instead, they are texts where the metaphors used to naturalize the gender systems of early modern England are both assaulted and upheld. I shall explore these speculations, and the anxieties that attend them, through a reading of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean texts signed by women. These include Jane Anger her Protection for Women (1589), A Mouzell for Melastomus, by Rachel Speght (1617), Ester hath Hang’d Haman, by Ester Sowernam (1617), The Worming of A Mad Dogge, by Constantia Munda (1617), and The Women’s Sharp Revenge, by Mary Tattle-well and Joan Hit-Him-Home (1640), but I shall be focusing particularly on the responses to Joseph Swetnam’s The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Woman (1615), which include Speght,
‘Sowernam’ and ‘Munda’.2 These texts, I shall argue, pose a series of challenges to feminist reading practices which have never been fully addressed. Because they purport to be by women, they seem to offer a visible female self-consciousness about gender, a site upon which female agency is fully and openly displayed in a manner recognizable or nameable as feminism. In other words, they excite the desire to recognize the present in the past, to name what we can term our own history. But because what is at stake in these texts seems at first glance so familiar and understandable, it is possible that their estranging or culturally autonomous aspects may not be fully noticed; moreover, because they can so readily be situated in the context of gender politics, they are never fully situated in the political and discursive specificities of the early modern period.
