ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Cary’s play describes the differend status of women under men’s law, offering a detailed account of the jurisprudential gap that result from a founding inequity or differend within the constitution of the social order. Cary focuses on “Moses’ Law,” which allows husbands an absolute right of divorce, while allowing no such right to wives. Criticism on Mariam, however, has tended to work from assumptions about the relationship of Cary’s heroic biography to the text. In “Valuing Mariam: Genre Study and Feminist Analysis,” Nancy Gutierrez undertakes a textual analysis of the drama not in biographical terms, but from an equally extra-textual starting point: Elizabeth Cary’s sex. For Mariam is “clearly based on the aristocratic Pembroke model. Nancy Gutierrez addresses Mariam from a view of genre and/or literary texts as envelopes of the author’s self or sex, of personal expression, of individual, gendered voice.
