Reproducing Women: Female Bodily Narratives and English Patriarchies, 1600-1660

During the early Stuart period, England’s return to male monarchal rule resulted in the emergence of a political analogy that understood the authority of the monarch to be rooted in the “natural” authority of the father; consequently, the mother’s authoritative role within the family was repressed. As the literature of the period recognized, however, there would be no family unit for the father to lead without the words and bodies of women to make narratives of dynasty and legitimacy possible. Early modern discourse reveals that the reproductive roles of men and women, and the social hierarchies that grow out of them, are as much a matter of human design as of divine or natural law. Moreover, despite the attempts of James I and Charles I to strengthen royal patriarchal authority, the role of the monarch was repeatedly challenged on stage and in print even prior to the British Civil Wars and the 1649 beheading of Charles I. Texts produced at moments of political crisis reveal how women could uphold the legitimacy of familial and political hierarchies, but they also disclose patriarchy’s limits by representing “natural” male authority as depending in part on women’s discursive control over their bodies. Due to the epistemological instability of the female reproductive body, women play a privileged interpretive role in constructing patriarchal identities. The dearth of definitive knowledge about the female body during this period, and the consequent inability to fix or stabilize somatic meaning, led to the proliferation of differing, and frequently contradictory, depictions of women’s bodies. The female body became a site of contested meaning in early modern discourse, with men and women struggling for dominance, and competitors so diverse as to include kings, midwives, scholars of anatomy, and female religious sectarians. Essentially, this competition came down to a question of where to locate somatic meaning: In the opaque, uncertain bodies of women? In women’s equally uncertain and unreliable words? In the often contradictory claims of various male-authored medical treatises? In the whispered conversations that took place between women behind the closed doors of birthing rooms? My dissertation traces this representational instability through plays by William Shakespeare, John Ford, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, as well as in monstrous birth pamphlets, medical treatises, legal documents, histories, satires, and ballads. In these texts, the stories women tell about and through their bodies challenge and often supersede male epistemological control. These stories, which I term female bodily narratives, allow women to participate in defining patriarchal authority at the levels of both the family and the state. After laying out these controversies and instabilities surrounding early modern women’s bodies in my first chapter, my remaining chapters analyze the impact of women’s words on four distinct but overlapping reproductive issues: virginity, pregnancy, birthing room rituals, and paternity. In chapters 2 and 3, I reveal how women construct the inner, unseen “truths” of their reproductive bodies through speech and performance, and in doing so challenge the traditional forms of male authority that depend on these very constructions for coherence. Chapter 2 analyzes virginity in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s play The Changeling (1622) and in texts documenting the 1613 Essex divorce, during which Frances Howard, like Beatrice-Joanna in the play, was required to undergo a virginity test. These texts demonstrate that a woman’s ability to feign virginity could allow her to undermine patriarchal authority within the family and the state, even as they reveal how men relied on women to represent their reproductive bodies in socially stabilizing ways. During the British Civil Wars and Interregnum (1642-1660), Parliamentary writers used Howard as an example of how the unruly words and bodies of women could disrupt and transform state politics by influencing court faction; in doing so, they also revealed how female bodily narratives could help recast political historiography. In chapter 3, I investigate depictions of pregnancy in John Ford’s tragedy, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633) and in early modern medical treatises from 1604 to 1651. Although medical texts claim to convey definitive knowledge about the female reproductive body, in actuality male knowledge frequently hinged on the ways women chose to interpret the unstable physical indicators of pregnancy. In Ford’s play, Annabella and Putana take advantage of male ignorance in order to conceal Annabella’s incestuous, illegitimate pregnancy from her father and husband, thus raising fears about women’s ability to misrepresent their bodies. Since medical treatises often frame the conception of healthy, legitimate offspring as a matter of national importance, women’s ability to conceal or even terminate their pregnancies could weaken both the patriarchal family and the patriarchal state that the family helped found. Chapters 4 and 5 broaden the socio-political ramifications of women’s words and bodies by demonstrating how female bodily narratives are required to establish paternity and legitimacy, and thus help shape patriarchal authority at multiple social levels. In chapter 4, I study representations of birthing room gossip in Thomas Middleton’s play, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613), and in three Mistris Parliament pamphlets (1648) that satirize parliamentary power. Across these texts, women’s birthing room “gossip” comments on and critiques such issues as men’s behavior towards their wives and children, the proper use of household funds, the finer points of religious ritual, and even the limits of the authority of the monarch. The collective speech of the female-dominated birthing room thus proves central not only to attributing paternity to particular men, but also to the consequent definition and establishment of the political, socio-economic, and domestic roles of patriarchy. Chapter 5 examines anxieties about paternity in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1611) and in early modern monstrous birth pamphlets from 1600 to 1647, in which children born with congenital deformities are explained as God’s punishment for the sexual, religious, and/or political transgressions of their parents or communities. Both the play and the pamphlets explore the formative/deformative power of women’s words and bodies over their offspring, a power that could obscure a father’s connection to his children. However, although the pamphlets attempt to contain and discipline women’s unruly words and bodies with the force of male authority, the play reveals the dangers of male tyranny and the crucial role of maternal authority in reproducing and authenticating dynastic continuity and royal legitimacy. My emphasis on the socio-political impact of women’s self-representation distinguishes my work from that of scholars such as Mary Fissell and Julie Crawford, who claim that early modern beliefs about the female reproductive body influenced textual depictions of major religious and political events, but give little sustained attention to the role female speech plays in these representations. In contrast, my dissertation reveals that in such texts, patriarchal society relies precisely on the words women speak about their own and other women’s bodies. Ultimately, I argue that female bodily narratives were crucial in shaping early modern culture, and they are equally crucial to our critical understanding of sexual and state politics in the literature of the period.

Quichua-Spanish language contact in Salcedo, Ecuador: revisiting media lengua syncretic language practices

The purpose of the current thesis is to develop a better understanding of the interaction between Spanish and Quichua in the Salcedo region and provide more information for the processes that might have given rise to Media Lengua, a ‘mixed’ language comprised of a Quichua grammar and Spanish lexicon. Muysken attributes the formation of Media Lengua to relexification, ruling out any influence from other bilingual phenomena. I argue that the only characteristic that distinguishes Media Lengua from other language contact varieties in central Ecuador is the quantity of the overall Spanish borrowings and not the type of processes that might have been employed by Quichua speakers during the genesis of Media Lengua. The results from the Salcedo data that I have collected show how processes such as adlexification, code-mixing, and structural convergence produce Media Lengua-type sentences, evidence that supports an alternative analysis to Muysken’s relexification hypothesis. Overall, this dissertation is developed around four main objectives: (1) to describe the variation of Spanish loanwords within a bilingual community in Salcedo; (2) to analyze some of the prominent and recent structural changes in Quichua and Spanish; (3) to determine whether Spanish loanword use can be explained by the relationship consultants have with particular social categories; and (4) to analyze the consultants’ language ideologies toward syncretic uses of Spanish and Quichua. Overall, 58% of the content words, 39% of the basic vocabulary, and 50% of the subject pronouns in the Salcedo corpus were derived from Spanish. When compared to Muysken’s description of highlander Quichua in the 1970’s, Spanish loanwords have more than doubled in each category. The overall level of Spanish loanwords in Salcedo Quichua has grown to a level between highlander Quichua in the 1970’s and Media Lengua. Similar to Spanish’s lexical influence in Media Lengua, the increase of Spanish borrowings in today’s rural Quichua can be seen in non-basic and basic vocabularies as well as the subject pronoun system. Significantly, most of the growth has occurred through forms of adlexification i.e., doublets, well-established borrowings, and cultural borrowings, suggesting that ‘ordinary’ lexical borrowing is also capable of producing Media Lengua-type sentences. I approach the second objective by investigating two separate phenomena related to structural convergence. The first examines the complex verbal constructions that have developed in Quichua through Spanish loan translations while the second describes the type of Quichua particles that are attached to Spanish lexemes while speaking Spanish. The calquing of the complex verbal constructions from Spanish were employed when speaking standard Quichua. Since this standard form is typically used by language purists, I argue that their use of calques is a strategy of exploiting the full range of expression from Spanish without incorporating any of the Spanish lexemes which would give the appearance of ‘contamination’. The use of Quichua particles in local varieties of Spanish is a defining characteristic of Quichuacized Spanish, spoken most frequently by women and young children in the community. Although the use of Quichua particles was probably not the main catalyst engendering Media Lengua, I argue that its contribution as a source language to other ‘mixed’ varieties, such as Media Lengua, needs to be accounted for in descriptions of BML genesis. Contrary to Muysken’s representation of relatively ‘unmixed’ Spanish and Quichua as the two source languages of Media Lengua, I propose that local varieties of Spanish might have already been ‘mixed’ to a large degree before Media Lengua was created. The third objective attempts to draw a relationship between particular social variables and the use of Spanish loanwords. Whisker Boxplots and ANOVAs were used to determine which social group, if any, have been introducing new Spanish borrowings into the bilingual communities in Salcedo. Specifically, I controlled for age, education, native language, urban migration, and gender. The results indicate that none of the groups in each of the five social variables indicate higher or lower loanword use. The implication of these results are twofold: (a) when lexical borrowing occurs, it is immediately adopted as the community-wide norm and spoken by members from different backgrounds and generations, or (b) this level of Spanish borrowing (58%) is not a recent phenomenon. The fourth and final objective draws on my ethnographic research that addresses the attitudes of syncretic language use. I observed that Quichuacized Spanish and Hispanicized Quichua are highly stigmatized varieties spoken by the country’s most marginalized populations and families, yet within the community, syncretic ways of speaking are in fact the norm. It was shown that there exists a range of different linguistic definitions for ‘Chaupi Lengua’ and other syncretic language practices as well as many contrasting connotations, most of which were negative. One theme that emerged from the interviews was that speaking syncretic varieties of Quichua weakened the consultant’s claim to an indigenous identity. The linguistic and social data presented in this dissertation supports an alternative view to Muysken’s relexification hypothesis, one that has the advantage of operating with well-precedented linguistic processes and which is actually observable in the present-day Salcedo area. The results from the study on lexical borrowing are significant because they demonstrate how a dynamic bilingual speech community has gradually diversified their Quichua lexicon under intense pressure to shift toward Spanish. They also show that Hispanicized Quichua (Quichua with heavy lexical borrowing) clearly arose from adlexification and prolonged lexical borrowing, and is one of at least six identifiable speech styles found in Salcedo. These results challenge particular interpretations of language contact outcomes, such as, ones that depict sources languages as discrete and ‘unmixed.’ The bilingual continuum presented in this thesis shows on the one hand, the range of speech styles that are accessible to different speakers, and on the other hand, the overlapping, syncretic features that are shared among the different registers and language varieties. It was observed that syncretic speech styles in Salcedo are employed by different consultants in varied interactional contexts, and in turn, produce different evaluations by other fellow community members. In the current dissertation, I challenge the claim that relexification and Media Lengua-type sentences develop in isolation and without the influence of other bilingual phenomena. Based on Muysken's Media Lengua example sentences and the speech styles from the Salcedo corpus, I argue that Media Lengua may have arisen as an institutionalized variant of the highly mixed "middle ground" within the range of the Salcedo bilingual continuum discussed above. Such syncretic forms of Spanish and Quichua strongly resemble Media Lengua sentences in Muysken’s research, and therefore demonstrate how its development could have occurred through several different language contact processes and not only through relexification.