Hollow women: Rape and sodomitical desire in early modern drama.
Item
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Title
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Hollow women: Rape and sodomitical desire in early modern drama.
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Identifier
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AAI3325434
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identifier
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3325434
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Creator
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Mohler, Christina M.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Mario DiGangi
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Date
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2008
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English | Gender Studies
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Abstract
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My dissertation explores the limits of the terms "homoerotic desire" and "heteroerotic desire" as they are used to describe erotic relations in early modern drama. In particular, I focus on sodomitical desire, a variety of male homoerotic desire understood in relation to sodomy, and therefore associated with a frightening level of social disorder. Sodomitical desire appeared in drama through rape, a crime virtually always conceived in relation to women. Rape functioned as a discursive mechanism that made sodomitical desire thinkable. In appearing through the staging of unambiguously female characters, sodomitical desire complicates critical taxonomies of desire that depend solely on the apparent sex of the subjects and objects involved.;Close readings of a variety of early modern texts show how different discursively constructed identities enable, defuse or deny sodomitical desire. In Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, the Goths' motiveless malignity leads equally to a subversion of the state and the rape of Lavinia. The latter appears as a cathartic spectacle enabling an exploration of sodomitical desire. In Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the prescriptive ideals of early modern friendship are defined against sodomitical desire, manifested in the drama through the attempted rape of Silvia. Sodomitical desire is defused when rape is averted and friendship restored. In Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, idealized patronage relations are threatened by a discourse capable of "recognizing" those relations in terms of disorderly sexuality. The threat is dispelled through a denial of transgressive desire, staged through the erasure of the possibility of rape. Together, these texts outline a historical trajectory in which the fractured discourses of homoerotic desire are gradually consolidated around the notion of sodomy, pointing towards modern homophobia.;Tracing out sodomitical desire through female characters has implications for the construction of early modern sexed subjects. If desire is not directed to female characters but instead passes through them, can they be imagined to orchestrate the same dense fiction of interiority that the drama at times bestows on their male counterparts? Might they instead stage femininity itself as a kind of hollowness? How might that hollowness impact those who would identify with female characters?
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
