Subject and gender: The Renaissance prose romances of Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge

L. Monique Pittman, Purdue University

Abstract

Students of the Renaissance find themselves mired in debate over the existence of the human subject in the early modern world of sixteenth-century England. While some contend that the subject, possessing interiority and agency, could not exist in a pre-capitalist world, others counter that the rhetoric of Protestantism assumed just such subjectivity. More recently, critics have compromised, accepting that a notion of the private subject did begin to take shape in the Renaissance. The prose fiction works of two Elizabethan writers, Robert Greene [The Carde of Fancie (1587) and Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588)] and Thomas Lodge [The Delectable History of Forbonius and Prisceria (1584), Rosalynde: Euphues Golden Legacie (1590), and A Margarite of America (1596)], participate in what Stephen Greenblatt has appropriately identified as a sixteenth-century intellectual phenomenon—the renewed interest in the nature of the individual and subjectivity. As the binary construct upon which the Renaissance concept of the subject is built, the public/private opposition has implications for the production and maintenance of patriarchal power. For, the public/private binary is inherently a gendered binary, one which labels as laudable and inherently powerful the public persona of masculinity and as subordinate the private and limited roles of femininity. Furthermore, it is upon this opposition of masculine and feminine, of acting subject and passive object, that patriarchal power is based. Patriarchy rests upon an acceptance of the a priori, biologically determined nature of gender difference and upon the rigidity of those categories. However, the strict preservation of that opposition of things masculine and feminine requires a vigilant guard so that it may be protected from the possibility of exposure as merely an artificial construct. Examined in light of a variety of literary theories—psychoanalytic, feminist, cultural materialist, and new historical—the prose fiction romances to be discussed illustrate that when that artificial construct suffers exposure, the real threat to patriarchal power is not to be found in the feminine “other” but within patriarchy's nihilistic competitive practices, behaviors that repeatedly pit father against son and brother against brother in disastrous bouts for primacy that simultaneously doom the possibility of intersubjective human relations.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Ross, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature

COinS