Introduction

Abstract

Feminist literary criticism is a practice whose apparent familiarity tends to obscure its contested applications (Baym 154); the word “feminism” means different things to different people. That there are many different kinds of “feminism” became clear by 1991 with the publication of Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl’s substantial anthology, Feminisms, properly pluralized; now, the movement that gave its (singular) name to these varied critical and theoretical praxes is historicized into “first-wave,” “second-wave,” and “third-wave” feminism. Profound differences among critics who ride one or another of these “waves” have made its discourses a theoretical battlefield. It has long seemed to me that the debates of feminism too often produced radically polarized readings of female representations in early modern tragedy as either oppressed and marginalized victims or demonic (and again marginalized) bitches,² a binary option that left little room for alternatives. As the historian Gerda Lerner noted in the introduction to The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), “it is a fundamental error to try to conceptualize women primarily as victims. To do so at once obscures what must be assumed as a given of women’s historical situation: Women … are and always have been actors and agents in history” (5). What has been missing from feminist criticism of tragedy, especially, is a reading of women as such actors and agents, as tragic heroes, protagonists positioned in their plays in precisely (or nearly so) the same ways as Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Dr. Faustus, and Macbeth. This volume aims to supply that reading by exploring the dimensions of a feminist tragic heroic discourse. In studying the possibilities for such a discourse, I have learned a great deal from colleagues within and outside literary and specifically Shakespearean criticism—art historians, linguists, and philosophers among them; by drawing upon their work, much of which has long been engaged with the same kinds of questions we are now asking, this introduction aims to set out some theoretical parameters within which to contextualize those dimensions as well as some questions whose answers remain beyond the scope of this volume.

Where is the Antique glory now become,

That whilome wont in women to appeare?

Where be the braue atchieuements doen by some?

Where be the battels, where the shield and speare,

And all the conquests, which them high did reare?

That matter made for famous Poets verse,

And boastful men so oft abasht to heare?

Bene they all dead, and laid in dolefull herse?

Or doen they onely sleepe, and shall againe reuerse?

—Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 3.4.1

May that man die derided and accurs’d

That will not follow where a woman leads.

—Thomas Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Part 1 (4.4.17–18)

“I think I can—I think I can—I think I can—I think I can—I think I can—I think I can—I think I can—I think I can—I think I can.” Up, up, up. Faster and faster and faster and faster the little engine climbed until at last they reached the top of the mountain. Down in the valley lay the city. “Hurray, hurray,” cried the funny little clown and all the dolls and toys. “The good little boys and girls in the city will be happy because you helped us, kind, Little Blue Engine.” And the Little Blue Engine smiled and seemed to say as she puffed steadily down the mountain, “I thought I could. I thought I could. I thought I could. I thought I could. I thought I could.”

—Watty Piper, The Little Engine That Could (emphasis added)¹