| This study considers how five women from the Sidney and Cavendish families use written conversational interaction, what I call textual conversation, to mediate relationships within and through their texts. Attention to the interactive dimensions of the writings of Mary Sidney Herbert, Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, Jane Cavendish, and Elizabeth Brackley sheds important insight into the question of how these writers were negotiating the complex interrelationship among language, architectural and physiological space, and political and sexual agency. Conversation, both written and oral, was a vital political tool for male courtiers in the early modern period. I argue not only that Pembroke, Wroth, Cavendish, and her stepdaughters were attuned to the strategic potential of conversational interchange but that they redeployed the tenets of decorous oral and epistolary conversation in their writings to construct authoritative speaking positions for themselves and their female protagonists. The conditions for such agency are paradoxically fostered through the construction of fictional conversational spaces. Chapter One considers the conflated spaces of the closet, cave, and heart within which Pembroke's psalmist converses with God. Chapter Two explores the ludic spaces that pervade Mary Wroth's closet drama Love's Victory (c. 1620) and sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621). Chapter Three focuses on the space of the salon in relation to Jane Cavendish's occasional poems and collaborative household drama The Concealed Fancies (c. 1645), co-authored with her sister Elizabeth Brackley, while Chapter Four delves into the fantasy social space of Margaret Cavendish's epistolary paratext. In each case, the delimitation of conversational boundaries, coupled with the development of alternative conversational codes, sanctions considerably more authority within an interchange than would be possible in oral contexts. Like the exclusive closets and courts characteristic of humanist dialogues, these spaces create the possibility for simultaneously pointed and civil critique and train female speakers in the powerful potential of language use. My readings of textual conversation demonstrate its significance as a form of rhetorical practice and situate it as an alternative site of social interaction that facilitates political alliance and self-authorization even as it problematizes the boundaries between public and private, speaker and addressee. |
