Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction and Acknowledgements
- 1 The Labyrinthine Baroque
- 2 The Female Baroque
- 3 Catholic Female Baroque
- 4 Protestant Baroque
- 5 The Female Baroque in Court and Country
- 6 Lady Mary Wroth: The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
- 7 From Baroque to Enlightenment: Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn
- Postscript
- About the Author
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction and Acknowledgements
- 1 The Labyrinthine Baroque
- 2 The Female Baroque
- 3 Catholic Female Baroque
- 4 Protestant Baroque
- 5 The Female Baroque in Court and Country
- 6 Lady Mary Wroth: The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
- 7 From Baroque to Enlightenment: Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn
- Postscript
- About the Author
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The concept of the ‘Female’ Baroque, derives from Julia Kristeva; the chief objective of this study is to examine the distinctive contribution of women writers and artists, thus addressing a recurring omission in previous scholarship. This chapter discusses major models for women: the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen, and the ideal Petrarchan Mistress. Along with the historical realities of patriarchal exploitation of women in the early modern period, I explore the emergent energies of women's writings, examining whether there were distinctive ‘female’ experiences articulated through early modern discourse. Kristeva's emphasis on St Teresa of Avila provides a model of the Female Baroque; her concept of ‘intimate revolt’ and her important distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic also inform this discussion.
Key words: Julia Kristeva; women writers and artists; Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen, the Petrarchan/Courtly ideal; religious and erotic Hörigkeit
The secrets of Baroque civilization are female.
‒ Julia Kristeva1Julia Kristeva cryptically but provocatively personifies the Baroque in the hyperbolically energetic and charismatic (and often obsessively melancholic) Saint Teresa of Avila, the Spanish Counter-Reformation ‘mystic’ or ‘ecstatic’ nun. Elsewhere, Kristeva draws attention to the striking gap in most modern theories of the Baroque, the issue of gender, as in the quotation above. In his study of Baroque ‘self-invention’, Christopher Braider does acknowledge the importance of analysing gender in order to understand the dominant pictorial regime of Baroque Europe, within an important but limited focus. He points to Rembrandt's unusually sympathetic depictions of women victim figures like Susanna or Lucrece as ‘resisting the quasi-pornographic exposure that constitutes the Western norm’. His emphasis on the tradition of objectification and male dominance in Baroque art and culture is, however, broadly, if depressingly, accurate. Apollo's attempted rape of Daphne, for instance, an obsessively popular subject for Baroque artists, inevitably displays Apollo's disappointment and depicts Daphne's reaction to his assault at best as indifferent, or even content: ‘very seldom, if ever, in Italian Renaissance art is Daphne allowed to convey fully the physical and emotional pain that she may have suffered as a result of the metamorphosis’.
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- Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary CultureFrom Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, pp. 47 - 74Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020