This paper was presented at the University of Michigan English Graduate Group's 1999 symposium on March 27th.

"The Reflection of the Mind": Spenser's Castle of Alma and the Early Modern Tongue
(Amanda Watson, University of Michigan)

ABSTRACT:

This essay will seek to revise recent discussions of the boundaries of the gendered and classed body in the early modern period. I would like to complicate some of the recent work on the mouth as a site of female silence and chastity by examining the early modern period's highly unstable discourse on the tongue, the "unruly member" alternately associated with male sexual aggression and dangerous female garrulity. The tongue problematizes both the early modern equation of female chastity with silence, and our own equation of the grotesque body with openness, penetrability, and femininity; it also problematizes our equation of the grotesque body with the lower classes. Referring primarily to Book 2, Canto 9 of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, I will discuss early modern representations of the aristocratic male mouth as a site of physical or moral openness, and of aristocratic male speech as a site of both bodily self-regulation and courtly dissimulation. In so doing, I will demonstrate how the early modern fascination with the tongue, persistently blurring the physical and the verbal through its power to conceal and reveal, troubles the Bakhtinian model of corporeality and suggests other possible ways of thinking about bodies in early modern England.

 

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