Narrating ravishment in early modern English literature

Abstract

In early modern English, “ravishment” was an ambiguous term that could mean sexual violation, or abduction. This thesis moves from the ambiguity inherent in the early modern application of “ravishment” to look at narratives of ravishment in early modern English literature, namely, The Faerie Queene (1590) by Edmund Spenser, Thomas Middleton’s 1611 play The Lady’s Tragedy, and Shakespeare’s long poem Venus and Adonis (1593). These texts offer narratives of ravishment that diverge from the normative early modern narrative of ravishment where a male aggressor attempts to seduce a female, resorting to violence when rhetoric falls short of persuading her. In these texts, a female is impregnated by the sun, a dead female body is exhumed, and a female pursues a male through a rhetoric of seduction that becomes a form of ravishment in itself, respectively. Through these marginal narratives of ravishment, this thesis argues that narratives of ravishment in early modern English literature reveal the ways in which ravishment works in non normative, implicit ways. This thesis attempts to show how the forms of ravishment in these texts become instrumental to an interrogation of the notions of subject, agency, and ravishment itself, in addition to leading to a destabilization, or construction, of subjectivities.