Model failures: Lost women and the scene of writing, 1353--1603

While other scholars of early English literature have shown that the "lost woman writer" offers one useful nexus from which to assess the complex development of male authorship, this dissertation suggests that it is not the only way male writers of the period deployed gender to legitimize the category of authorship. Representations of women as writers appear regularly throughout the literary canon of these centuries, and this repetition deserves greater attention than it has received. Accordingly, I argue that, while such women writers remain figures of pathos and loss, in the hands of male authors they are also, and precisely as such figures of loss, repeatedly generative forces of authorship and literary activity. The persistent presence of writing women, alongside the deficiency and loss embodied by the woman writer, supported the formulation and exploration of male authorial identity during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when authorship of fictive poetry was fraught with ethical complications. Exploring the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Henryson, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, George Gascoigne, and Christopher Marlowe, I show that, for authors worried about the ethical ramifications of poetry as invention, repeated figuration of women writing offered an opportunity to justify their own literary production. Moreover, Criseyde's and Dido's letters, or Philomela's tapestry, offer their own account of literary history and become important texts that contribute to the narrative work of male authors. These texts also become a part of literary memory, as they and the narrators are acutely aware. Their persistent repetition ensures they will be remembered in their own right and affirms the powerful contributions of "the writing woman" to the literary. Thus, this project offers the possibility of re-construing literary history from a vantage less often considered: that of the woman as writer, even in literature authored by men.