Lindsey Lanzisero - Hold your tongue Female Speech and Male Anxieties in Early Modern England(2).pdf - Gender in Translation - cli

HOLD YOUR TONGUE: FEMALE SPEECH AND MALE ANXIETIES

IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

LINDSEY LANZISERO

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON

December 2006

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Kevin Gustafson for the guidance and direction he

supplied throughout the thesis process and for his unending patience as we worked

through my ideas and multiple drafts and manifestations of this thesis. I would also like

to thank Dr. Jay Scott Chipman for encouraging me to continue my studies in graduate

school, Dr. Miranda Wilson for encouraging the development of the original idea for

this thesis, and Dr. Jacquline Stodnick for her help and insights on this thesis and

throughout my career at UTA.

November 20, 2006

iii

ABSTRACT

HOLD YOUR TONGUE: FEMALE SPEECH AND MALE ANXIETIES

IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Publication No. ______

Lindsey Lanzisero, MA

The University of Texas at Arlington, 2006

Supervising Professor: Kevin Gustafson

For early Modern England, containing female speech was essential to

maintaining order. Women’s speech was supposed to be non-existent, and excessive

verbosity indicated a woman who could not or would not submit to societal patriarchal

authority. Through their speech, women could raise questions of patriarchal power and

potentially subvert that power. The frequency of this trope in literature, educational

handbooks, dramatic works, and public documents shows that there indeed was a great

apprehension about what exactly speech and the tongue could accomplish. As a result

of this need to contain female speech, the female tongue became a common literary

trope and was used as a metaphor for many problems and issues within the culture.

This thesis analyzes two body politic metaphors in which the female tongue as a

character wreaks havoc on the social body. Thomas Tomkis and William Averell write

two very different body politic metaphors. Tomkis’s Lingua is a comedy that

communicates with rhetorical discourses, while Averell’s Mervailous Combat of

Contrarieties is written as a serious dialogue communicating with both anti-Catholic

and print discourses. I argue that male authors’ utilization of the female tongue

illustrates male anxieties not only about the place of women, but about their own places

within the strict hierarchy of Early Modern English culture.

Lindsey Lanzisero - Hold your tongue Female Speech and Male Anxieties in Early Modern England(2).pdf