The Literature And Culture Of The English Renaissance

The mother's body, the father's mind/spirit determined their prescriptive approaches to parenthood

. This essay insightfully maps out the ways in which Prospero verbally assumes maternal agency and in Links Of London Bracelets stark contrast to previous critical suggestions of the absence of motherhood, this essay declares that maternal agency, though appropriated 'reveals a reconciliation with the cultural discourse of motherhood by the romance's conclusion'.

The final two groupings of essays, 'The Performance of Maternal Suffering' and 'The Performance of Maternal Erasure' offer up essays that seek to demonstrate the ways in which experiences of motherhood are determined or shaped by fear, anguish, and extinction. Embodied responses to death, the essays claim, reveal the ways in which 'maternal identity' is expressed in spiritual terms. For example, Avra Kouffman's 'Maternity and Child Loss in Stuart Women's Diaries' describe how the 'fear of bereavement, and resignation towards it, are hallmarks of the maternal spiritual diary'. This section draws our attention to the intellectual as well as the emotional endeavour within these texts to reconcile the yearnings of motherhood with the pain of unnatural loss. Gloria Olchowy's contribution, 'Murder as Birth in Macbeth' locates the ideological and political erasure of maternal identity from the state in James Ps reign, arguing that 'James'elision of the uxorial and, therefore, maternal dimension and his increasingly rigorous paternal conception of state power, extends Links London the ideology of the new motherhood to such a degree that the mother is not merely diminished but eliminated altogether'. What is revelatory about this assertion is the way in which Olchowy reads King James's paternal politics into Macbeth, observing that these political structures imbue the text and by the end of the play/women's influence is diminished, and, before long, two of the literal women themselves are eliminated'.

Thus the erasure of motherhood is realized in this play through the examination of the gendered and shifting political structures at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This collection of essays is a vitally important and lucidly edited contribution to the subject of early modern studies. The collection's fascinating excavation of early modern maternal discourse reveals a culture not just preoccupied with maternity but steeped in its mystery, biology, performativity, and potent political symbolism. Performing Maternity in Early Modern England is therefore crucial reading for those interested in or studying the literature and culture of the English Renaissance.

by: George Bush

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