Rewor(l)ding Rape: Poetry, Materiality, and the Body
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- Author:
- Gradzewicz, Audrey
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 29, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Xiaoye You, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Garrett Sullivan, Major Field Member
Erin Heidt-Forsythe, Outside Unit & Field Member
C. Libby, Special Member
Scott Smith, Major Field Member
Claire Bourne, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Shara McCallum, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor - Keywords:
- Body
Gender
Materiality
Speech
Silence
Time
Absence
Narrative
Community
Possibility
Poetry - Abstract:
- This dissertation emerges from the dead, raped body of Lucretia who, in classical myth, fatally stabbed herself following her rape by the son of the Roman king, and whose death catalyzed the founding of the Roman republic. By doing so, this dissertation attempts to start unraveling the Gordian knot between rape and suicide that exists into the present. This dissertation is divided into two parts: Poetics and Poetry. The first part consists of two critical chapters, focusing on avatars of Lucretia in the literature of early modern England. In Chapter One, I first situate Thomas Middleton’s poem, The Ghost of Lucrece (1600)—a continuation of William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594)—within a broad, sustained artistic engagement with the story of Lucretia extending from antiquity to the early modern poetic genres of complaint and continuation. Next, I attend to how the materiality and textuality of Folger STC 22341.8—in which the only early modern copy of The Ghost of Lucrece is known to survive—materializes Lucrece’s resistance to Middleton as author and makes her bodies—textual, fleshly, and spectral— legible. Finally, in treating Lucrece as poetry and as poet, I offer a reading of The Ghost of Lucrece that unloosens Lucrece from her rape and suicide and suggests what existences her ghost—returning again—may yet make possible. In Chapter Two, I examine how in her unfinished manuscript romance, The Unfortunate Florinda (c. 1650s), Hester Pulter purposefully diverges from her source text, The Life and Death of Mahomet (1637) to explicitly parallel Florinda to Lucretia (and perhaps to the Lucrece of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece). However, while like Lucretia, the Florinda of The Life and Death of Mahomet commits suicide, the fate of Pulter’s Florinda is unwritten. Certainly, because Florinda’s rape is at the heart of The Unfortunate Florinda, the specter of rape haunts the romance. However, I use the multiplicities, absences, and disorientedness of Pulter’s manuscript as a heuristic to read her romance. I argue that the materiality of Pulter’s manuscript opens to the possibility of a future in which Florinda does not inevitably commit suicide, but in which Florinda gives “a beeing to a nother World.” The second part of this dissertation, which consists of poems, parallels the first part insofar as issues of the body, gender, materiality, speech, silence, time, absence, narrative, possibility, and poetry are all likewise present. And the poems, like the critical chapters, suggest how poetry itself may open to life-sustaining, life-saving, and life-renewing possibilities following rape–and, by building community, create a better world. Access to this dissertation requires approval by both the Dean of the Graduate School and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. Access to this dissertation will be granted only if there is an appropriate scholarly need to view the dissertation. To request access to this dissertation, please forward your request to gradthesis@psu.edu. Your request should include: *Name *Professional Affiliation *Why access to this dissertation is needed Contact information for the Graduate School can also be found at https://gradschool.psu.edu
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