Ventriloquized Voices; Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts by Elizabeth D. Harvey

Abstract

Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices; Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). x, 173. $59.95 (U.S.). An examination of the representation of the female voice by Renaissance au­ thors, this excitingly complex study links male ventriloquism with women’s marginality. Spare and compact, its four chapters consider the ways Spenser, Erasmus, and Donne, among others, cross-dressed, hystericized, conceived, and lesbianized woman’s voice. Counterpointing early modern practice and postmodern theories of the voice with avowed “transgressive abandon” (6), Harvey supplies a lot of carefully crafted details that illumine a range of strategies for silencing women. With Tina Krontiris’s Oppositional Voices appearing at the same time, 1992 was evidently a good year for Renaissance voices. But the difference between these two studies is instructive. Contrasting Isabella Whitney and Margaret Tyler, Mary Herbert and Elizabeth Cary, and Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Wroth, Krontiris explores women writers’ responses to repressive paradigms; entrapment, impasses, and combative stances are her fare. Har­ vey, by contrast, is interested both in the context in which these women wrote, how male appropriation of the female voice reinforced women’s si­ lence, and in the current discursive climate where French feminists, in par­ ticular, reappropriate ventriloquism to dismantle “a cultural lexicon that has confined women to a marginal and metaphoric status” (142). I find her work the subtler and richer of the two, with the theoretical parentheses and codas ironically commenting on and, at times, subverting the close readings of Renaissance texts. Harvey has superb skills as a reader of Renaissance texts; her precision is elegant and her unlayering, astute. I wonder, however, if the addition of women writers themselves, or of women’s supplications or torments as transcribed by partisan men, might not have provided a textured density. Harvey’s treatment of the Radigund episode, for example, and its intimations of Spenser’s unease with gynocracy could trigger a discussion of other con­ trastive doubles, like Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam and Salome and Margaret Cavendish’s Empress and scribe. While Harvey’s exploration of the way Stultitia functions as Erasmus’s shield, allowing him to speak with impunity, recognizes the ironic features of double-voicing, comparable claims could be investigated for John Bale’s editing of the Protestant martyr, Anne Askew, and John Mush’s biography of the Catholic martyr, Margaret Clitherow. The trial of Elizabeth Jackson for having bewitched a girl left speechless and partially paralyzed might be related to Henry Jesse’s Exceeding Riches of Grace, an account of sixteen-year-old Sarah Wight, who was struck lame, mute, and blind by her own sense of sinfulness. When Harvey turns to 370 Cixous’s idea of écriture feminine, the scattering of language and dispersal of voice, I was reminded of the prominence of metaphors of the seed and in­ ner light in the writings of such Quakers as Margaret Fell, Rebekah Travers, Katherine Evans, Sarah Cheevers, and Dorothy White. Harvey’s strongest chapter, “Matrix as Metaphor: Midwifery and the conception of voice,” is remarkable for the detail it assembles about the annexing of the midwife’s voice into a system of written, masculine, rationalized education. Yet al­ though the coverage of the Chamberlen family is extensive, the treatment of “the earliest English textbook for midwives,” Eucharius Roesslin’s The byrth of mankynde (German 1513; English 1540) is cursory. Surely some comment about the text’s primitive understanding of sperm count is called for; in the fourth chapter of Book III Roesslin discusses “howe to know whether lacke of conception be of the woman or of the man.” The “farfet experiment” involves the man and the woman urinating into separate pots containing wheat, barley, and beans, and then watching if germina­ tion occurs. Harvey’s examination of the use of the trope of childbirth by Donne and others, who gave birth in print and thereby bypassed the way­ ward uterus, might have benefited both from more observations on Donne’s misogyny and from inclusion of the advice books of real mothers-in-waiting like Elizabeth Grymeston and Elizabeth Joceline. To be fair, though, Harvey’s study is about Renaissance women not as writers, but as subjects for male...