| My dissertation studies the complaint as the central and motivating feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century, male-authored narratives. Complaints are extended dramatizations of discourse that may be formal or spontaneous and may resemble songs, pleas, exhortations, or even simple autobiographies. Because the complaint does not adhere to any fixed form, I refer to it as a "mode"--an expressive form whose function remains relatively consistent throughout the period. Complaints are often embedded in more conventional narrative kinds where they question or complicate the rules of genre and, consequently, the rules of life, action, and speech to which genre rules refer. Renaissance authors used the complaint to criticize social and verbal forms from a culturally constrained position.;The complaint enabled Renaissance authors to represent a situated narrative subject who, nevertheless, has a particular point of view and feels compelled to speak out about his or her personal experience. Complaints are spoken by constrained subjects, usually women or other socially marginal figures, who are neither autonomous nor self-determining. Renaissance complaint narratives show how social and economic facts of existence effect the processes by which subjects understand and shape their lives in meaningful ways. They also show that self-determination for a constrained subject depends upon developing historical consciousness (understanding the self as a story that unfolds in time). Uttering a complaint, the speaker symbolically re-enacts her movement through a sequence of temporal actions and discovers her character through and within the medium of narrative. Her ability to act freely and meaningfully, depends on her ability to speak freely and meaningfully. Complaint narratives propose a model of identity in which the subject is related to and dependent on others within and across time. |
