Failures of intimacy in English Renaissance literature

My dissertation argues that Renaissance texts offered their readers and audiences alternative models of intimate life that contested the increasing cultural importance granted to long-term monogamous coupling. Current reading practices, however, are frequently inattentive to the competing intimate economies in which texts situate alternative forms of affection. Insofar as they privilege closure in meaning-making, approaches to narrative often assume that a text endorses the forms of affection that are established at the end of its plot. Marriage, especially in comic texts, seems to garner textual endorsement because it precipitates narrative closure and implicitly promises the perpetuation or renewal of society. Meanwhile, the other, nonnormative types of affective bonds that the text imagines are ostensibly abandoned as "failures" of intimacy.; It is my contention that these alternative bonds are often invested with value in the texts that represent them. To recuperate these representations of nonstandard intimacies, I articulate a non-teleological reading practice that does not assume endorsement is coextensive with narrative closure. When applied to texts from the Renaissance and their representations of situational, temporary, nonmonogamous, and other nonstandard forms of affection, this reading practice reveals that a more heterogeneous intimate sphere existed in the period than has been previously recognized. I survey the pleasurable alternatives to long-term heterosexual monogamy imagined and even favorably represented in a generically diverse array of texts, including Christopher Marlowe's narrative poem Hero and Leander, William Shakespeare's so-called "problem comedies," Thomas Middleton's tragicomedy The Nice Valour, and Lady Mary Wroth's prose romance The Urania. These alternate forms of affection include situational nonmonogamy, male masochism and eroticized submission, communal life in convents, and cross-racial female homoeroticism. Often only briefly entertained, these possibilities are nevertheless made available through representation and function as potential scripts for the intimate lives of their readers and audiences. Thus, as these texts encoded resistance to the dominance of long-term monogamy over the intimate sphere, they also opened up pathways for such resistance to be put into practice in the culture at large.