Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.
Non-UMass Amherst users, please click the view more button below to purchase a copy of this dissertation from Proquest.
(Some titles may also be available free of charge in our Open Access Dissertation Collection, so please check there first.)
"Unsex Me Here": Female power in Shakespearean tragedy
Abstract
Recent new historicist accounts of the theatricality of power in early modern culture have often neglected issues of gender and sexuality despite the fact of four decades of female rule and the pervasiveness of images of female sexuality in cultural discourses on theatricality and power. This study of four early Jacobean Shakespearean tragedies--Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus--reveals intimate connections between early modern culture's conceptions of power and its notions of female sexuality. Specifically, early modern constructions of the state as a family together with the concept and practice of a theatrical monarchy aligns the women in these tragedies with contemporary definitions and practices of power. In addition, reading these plays against a variety of other cultural discourses on women reveals glaring contradictions between various discourses on women and the possibilities for female power signalled by those inconsistencies. Reversing current notions of discontinuous identity or postmodern subjectivity as disempowering in denying agency, this dissertation seeks to redefine female agency and asserts that the intrinsic contradictions in representations of women open up the possibilities for female power. By highlighting their constructedness as theatrical creations, the discontinuities inherent in female characters in these plays signals a subversive site for empowerment in a culture which saw inconsistency and theatricality as constitutive of power.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature|Womens studies
Recommended Citation
Ick, Judy Celine, ""Unsex Me Here": Female power in Shakespearean tragedy" (1994). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9510484.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9510484