Constancy and punishment: Gender and the virtue of constancy in early modern prose romance

Nancy K Kerns, Purdue University

Abstract

I theorize that constancy is a fundamental element of the power relationships between men and women in the Renaissance. A man who is constant to one woman gives her a degree of power over his sexuality, which goes against the Early Modern idea that a man must own the woman's sexuality in order to fulfill his gender role. As a result, while women were expected to be constant, males were given more leeway in this arena. However, a male Early Modern writer interested in portraying virtue could not condone adultery; he was expected to elevate constancy in both the man and the woman. I argue that the conflict between the need to protect masculine power and the need to present a virtuous hero creates an underlying ambivalence about male constancy that peeks through in the male-authored prose romances of the period. While I use Philip Sidney’s Arcadia as my example of this, I see a pattern of it from the beginnings of the romance genre: the heroes, despite their constancy, suffer humiliations and feminization before obtaining the woman. I contrast this with two Early Modern prose romances written by women: Mary Wroth's Urania and Anna Weamys's Continuation . I argue that in these works, only the inconstant suffer such humiliations and punishments; there is no ambivalence. The women writers embrace constancy in both the male and the female; indeed, they make the virtue central to their definitions of masculinity and femininity.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Lein, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature|Gender studies

COinS