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Browsing Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences by Author "Addison, C A"

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    The body as a prison in late medieval and renaissance literature: carceral metaphors of gender and other constructs
    (University of Zululand, 2023) Ringwood, Frances Mary; Addison, C A
    The following dissertation entitled The Idea of the Body as a Prison in Renaissance and Medieval Literature: Carceral Metaphors of Gender and Other Constructs uses close reading to explore the idea of the body as a prison for the soul in selected texts. Writers including Geoffrey Chaucer, John Donne, William Shakespeare, John Webster, and John Milton use the idea creatively to explore themes such as gender, misogyny, love, suicide, theodicy, disability and fame. In Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer uses the idea of the body as a prison to demonstrate how Criseyde’s body could feel like a prison because of the social strictures governing her life. Donne uses the idea of the body as a prison playfully in his erotic poetry to show how spiritual love can act as a form of release from the body’s prison. His sermons, on the other hand, adhere more strictly to religious prescriptions about the body being prisonlike because the faithful ought to want to escape its association with death and be reborn into everlasting life. Chaucer and Donne approached the idea of the body as a prison in a circumspect manner, but there were other writers who did not, and in misogynistic discourse the idea of the body as a prison was transformed into a woman-hating trope so that a female body is depicted as a snare for a man, often leading him into the trap of marriage. La Roman de la Rose and The Romaunt of the Rose contain many examples of these misogynist tropes. Ben Jonson’s Epicene, or The Silent Woman is a Renaissance play that rehearses the same misogynist ideas. Medieval feminist Christine de Pizan and female literary characters, such as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in the Canterbury Tales and Noah’s Wife in The Wakefield Noah challenge misogynistic pigeonholing of women by insisting on using their voices to quarrel with woman haters, travelling outside the home, and showing sympathy for other oppressed women. Marriage was not always seen as a trap for a man and in Chaucer’s ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ the wife provides and helps facilitate release for the husband. In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Claudio sees death as a prison because he would rather be alive with Juliet. Then, in The Winter’s Tale, Hermione withholds her presence from her misogynistic husband, Leontes, until he fully reforms himself and provides acceptable restitution. Hermione is a wife whose transformation from a supposed statue releases Leontes from his guilt. Webster’s Duchess of Malfi is a similar but more forthright example of a transcendent feminist (according to Iris Marion Young’s definition of “transcendence”) for she refuses to let her brothers turn her body into her prison. Milton’s preoccupation with the idea of the body as a prison is initially used to interrogate gender and sexuality in his Comus. However, after he lost his sight later in his career, he changed his approach so that the metaphor of the body as a prison revealed his own responses to theodicy and his blindness in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. C S Lewis has, in his analysis of romance allegory, shown that the metaphor of the body as a prison was used in that genre to paint the inner, psychological world of various romance writers. His ideas have not been applied to Milton’s work, or the writings of any of the other Renaissance authors discussed here. He does apply his analyses to Chaucer’s chivalric romances and the Roman, but with less focus on women than that of this research. Therefore, The Body as a Prison in Late Medieval and Renaissance Literature: Carceral Metaphors of Gender and Other Constructs represents a novel contribution to scholarship on the idea of the body as a prison for the soul because of its feminist underpinning.
University of Zululand