ABSTRACT
Perhaps one of the most complex questions facing feminist literary criticism today is the knotty issue of how to ascribe gender to the Voice’ of a given text. The modern critic has to be aware of the problems that recent developments in critical theory have posed in relation to identifying such a voice: the logic of post-structuralism undermines a direct correlation between the author and the narrator of a text (in Foucault’s phrase, ‘what is an author?’); the insights of psychoanalysis and French feminism have highlighted the fact that the biological sex of the author may bear no relation to the gendered voice of the text (what does it mean to write ‘as a woman’ or ‘as a man’?); and reader-response theories demand that we be aware of our own preconceptions in approaching a literary text (do we read texts by men and women differently?). Informing all of these approaches is a critique of liberal humanism and individualism, which results in an emphasis upon the social construction of subjectivity and an awareness that our expression is not simply the result of individual agency but is at least partially determined by external factors. At the heart of these problems is a central question, first posed by Foucault and rephrased here by Elizabeth D. Harvey, ‘[w]hat difference does it make who is speaking and who fashions a literary voice?’ 1 This essay seeks to explore the difficulties involved in identifying a gendered voice in the work of a sixteenth-century writer, Nicholas Breton. More precisely, it will analyse why Breton appropriates an ostensibly female voice in many of his texts. Harvey has recently defined the practice of a male writer using a female voice ‘in a way that appears to efface originary marks of gender’ as ‘transvestite ventriloquism’. 2 Acutely aware of the problems I have outlined above, she is careful to avoid an essentialist approach to this issue; thus, rather than questioning whether a male author can represent a female voice, she focuses upon the ethics of such an appropriation and asks ‘[w]hat are the theoretical and political implications of male authors ventriloquising the female voice?’ 3 This 386essay will address this question by examining what kinds of texts Breton produced in which gendered voice, focusing upon the way in which his depiction of ‘the Countesse of Penbrooke’ as a model of female penitence exposes anxieties about the limitations of gendered roles during the sixteenth century. 4
