Most of the stuff in parenthesis is my opinion or reaction. I've tried to use quotation marks where I took Brown's words directly, but since these were just handwritten notes for my own use, I can't guarantee that I did that accurately or consistently.
Material Girls: the 17th Century Woman Debate by Diane Purkiss
Critics understand feminism as a political and literary category. However, texts that we today see as “feminist,” could, in context, actually be a whole awkward combination of stuff.
We might be seeing the processing of woman as theatrical role. They aren’t necessarily metaphor OR authentic – maybe the gender metaphors used in early modern England are “both assaulted and upheld.”
She’s focusing on responses to Swetnam, and is going to argue that these responses “pose a series of challenges to feminist reading practices” that haven’t really been addressed.
They present “female self-consciousness about gender.” This visible female agency gets us all excited to call it feminism. However, because what’s in them is SO recognizable to us reading from our perspective, we might overlook the aspects of them that belong so specifically to their time. We see them in the context of gender politics but not necessarily in the context of the early modern period.
(So it seems like she’s criticizing the way that we tend to look at older texts through a very modern lens; she’s concerned that we might be missing important and authentic aspects of the text and how it might have functioned in the context of its own time). We tend to try to find a unified “protofeminist agency “ – we try to see them as representative of all women of the period. (So we’re really eager, in a revisionist way, to see the seeds of early feminism, even though that might not have been how they were seeing it at all. Also, I’m not sure we would really try to see them as representative of all women in the period – it would be tempting to make generalizations, but I think that there’s enough awareness that the women who were writing were the privileged ones that we would know better than to try to overgeneralize).
Readers of these texts have used words like “anger” or “outrage” to describe the tone of the writings; they have used words associated with today’s radical feminism. (I think she’s implying that we’re totally projecting that). She kind of criticizes the Kelly article for looking too hard for continuity and connection (and implies that there may be none).
According to Purkiss, we REALLY want to believe that the authors of these texts signed by women were actually women. (This is an insanely interesting point in my opinion. My gut reaction to it was very defensive, like “oh my god of course they were.” Why would a man sign his writing as a woman in a time when being a woman was less respected?)
“The voice is prized less for itself than as a sign pointing towards such an authorial presence.” (So we’re all like “woohoo, woman writer” instead of actually looking at the writing?). The female signature leads us to see female consciousness, which manifests the presence of a female author. (I’m not sure whether she’s actually implying that these may have been written by men, or if she’s speaking more theoretically).
The texts are pseudonymous; assuming they’re women will overlook textual and literary aspects. It might reinforce essentialist ideas. It reinforces that the female is “immediately visible or identifiable.”
Swetnam: people assume that his view are indicative of the larger patriarchy. But… maybe we have confused patriarchy with misogyny. We have installed “an ahistorical patriarchy as a staple of women’s history.” (So she’s saying that yes, there was misogyny, but maybe we’re using the two ideas too interchangeably?)
How do discourses OF woman-hatred act upon other discursive practices that subordinate women?
Misogynistic discourses like to use “a rhetoric of citation.” They like the predictable. Why? Citation authenticates, and makes the writer not the “author of misogyny.” We can’t find an originating author.
She says that Swetnam’s work depends on contradiction, and that his misogyny is often opposed to the patriarchy.
She claims that his jokes aren’t just about women, but about the “morally earnest discourse” of the time. Swetnam is obsessed with money and social hierarchy. Women spend money, are commodities, etc.
She says that Swetnam is satirizing the moral discourses of the time.
For instance, he refers to his writing as bearbaiting, which was often seen as an idle pastime by moralists. He even admits that he is idle. He sees his pamphlet as entertainment.
He talks about an economy of pleaseure where class isn’t an issue.
For Swetnam, value is in pleasure; therefore, all women are the same. Females as a threat to men’s economic power. Marriage ends the pleasure of bachelorhood. If, in a pleasure economy, power is in the exchange of women, then marriage is emasculating.
The pleasure offered by women is their only value, but it also pollutes.
His pamphlet is similar to other male-only spaces of the time – like fencing clubs – and the fact that he knows that women will read it too is perhaps offering them voyeuristic pleasure in the form of access to a male-only space.
In the text, an actual woman is not exchanged, but stories about women are.
He follows a tradition of writing about women – almost a literary ritual.
There’s a tradition of ballads about unruly women, nasty wives who threaten the man’s power to pursue pleasure. A reply to one of these explains that the wife was unruly because the man was impotent.
Ballads are like the women they depict, in that they are public, noisy, and improper.
They serve almost as ritual punishments, which often had a public component.
The unruly wife is often symbolic of the government and allows the author to satirize.
Often the “signifiers of domestic disorder” were used to legitimate riot and/or rebellion.
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