Date of Award

5-12-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

Advisor(s)

Stephanie Shirilan

Keywords

Affect Studies;Gender Studies;Premodern Critical Race Studies

Abstract

My first chapter, “‘Ugly Monstrous Shapes’: Reading Signs of Alterity,” looks at presentations of “othered” female bodies in Book I of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. This chapter draws our attention to various old, deformed, or otherwise dysfunctional bodies. In doing so, it not only emphasizes the necessity for reading but also listening to the “ugly monstrous shapes, that elsewhere no man may” find. Drawing attention to metaphor, rhyme, and non-verbal sounds produced by the disabled/disabling bodies in the poem, this chapter locates Spenser’s racialization of bodies in his careful cultivation of sympathy. By using sound as a disability structure, my reading depicts the importance of affect in the amplification of humoral, racial, and physiological difference—especially in the context of English and Irish bodies. This chapter argues that the poem not only offers a way for its idealized reader(s) to hear and to repent their own emotional shortcomings within a Protestant system, but in doing so, to regulate their own bodily and affective responses to alterity. The idea of bodily and affective responses to alterity is central to my reading of Titus Andronicus in the next chapter. In this second chapter, “‘Aaron will have his soul black like his face’: Annotating Disabled Masculinity in Titus Andronicus,” I argue that Shakespeare’s staging of pain, exclusion, and alterity draws on dominant emotional scripts. In my reading, emotions demonstrate the intersections between race, genre, and disability in Elizabethan revenge tragedy. I demonstrate how, in this play, the capacity/incapacity to hear and to repent becomes essential to the deployment of racial and disability markers. I argue that the play’s manipulation of suffering and sympathetic identification not only depicts processes of racial trauma, but it also allows that trauma—especially the trauma experienced or anticipated by the black body—to empower its audience. In other words, my work on Titus Andronicus hinges upon the racialization of compassion and pity through the “dysgraphia of anti-blackness,” to borrow Christina Sharpe’s terminology. The concern with emotional solidarities reappears in my third chapter in a slightly modified form in terms of the aesthetics of care. In this chapter entitled, “What Strange New Motions Do I Feel: Love’s Cure, the Ethics of Care, and the Performance of Normalcy”, I attempt a reading of transness through the play’s anxiety over gender dysphoria, appetitive desires, and the “cure” for non-normativity. My reading hinges on three main ideas: a reading of gender not with but as disability, the racialization of desire, and the notion of “strange”-ness (used in the play to describe heteronormative rather than transgressive desire). This is a relatively understudied play from the period, despite being attributed to major playwrights, and to my knowledge, critics have yet to engage with the play’s remarkable racial moments or its use of disability aesthetics. Yet, this play has so much to offer in its incredibly rich description of feminine care, masculine “ability”, and the dichotomy between “habits” and “customs”. My chapter, therefore, attempts to make visible the performances of “normalcy” while juxtaposing it with experiences of trans-maladjustment, suggesting that where the habitual body is the gender non-conforming one, to “cure” its symptoms can be just as unnatural.  The impulse to pathologize different bodyminds and mark them as “unnatural” remains an important tenet in Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, the subject of my final chapter. This chapter, “‘Black, Wicked, and Unnatural:’ Locating Monstrosity in Middleton’s Works,” demonstrates the confusion of identities that permeates Middleton’s play and England more generally in this time. Looking at presentations of deformed, speckled, and ethnically othered bodyminds, this chapter complicates notions of moral and physical deviation by interrogating its overreliance on infectious blackness. Exploring scripts of monstrosity, this chapter tries to isolate the race-making and disability rhetoric that informs Middleton’s works. It asks, with Middleton, what it means to be “black enough” in the premodern world by exploring the indelible markers of blood and ink in relation to the “monstrous” body. My reading thus explores the play’s investment in orienting the standardized body and depicting the audience’s complicity in constructions of a normative national identity that simultaneously co-opts Italian vengefulness, and at the same time, distinguishes it from more laudable English abilities.

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