ABSTRACT
A significant contradiction exists between the real conditions for women’s speech in early modern England-conditions that worked to prohibit public vocalizations of any kind-and the verbal expressions of numerous female characters in early modern literature. While many scholars have turned attention to this issue in recent years, providing productive analyses of women’s speech acts in both literary and non-literary moments, few have explicitly examined the particular case of the fictional female storyteller.2 In the pages of romance especially-a genre conducive to female speech because of its frequent use of the embedded narrative device-a striking number of female characters devote extensive textual space to sharing tales, most often in the form of their own life stories. In some ways, this particular usage of female speakers may seem unremarkable, since storytelling scenes are not unlikely settings for female characters but in fact reinforce prevalent stereotypes about female garrulity and idleness (Warner; Hackett 12-16, 150-52). And yet, because such moments represent female orality in a literary space and as an authorial act, they become valuable sites of instruction, offering particular insight into the rhetorical maneuvering thought necessary for a woman to tell a successful tale or simply to represent herself in words.
