Introduction

Prose fiction and early modern sexualities in England, 1570–1640

Constance C. Relihan

Göran V. Stanivukovic

pp. 1-12

in: Constance C. Relihan, Göran V. Stanivukovic (eds), Prose fiction and early modern sexualities in England, 1570–1640, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Abstract

Immoderation and indiscretion, Montaigne suggests in an essay central to early modern ideas about sexuality, characterize the viciousness and force of pleasure. They could also be said to capture the essence of the representation of sexuality—in all its various guises—in early modern English prose fiction. Although Montaigne's focus is not prose fiction explicitly, but literature more generally, his argument that "love" and its goddess, Venus, function to veil sexual desire provides a powerful foundation on which to construct an analysis of the narratival, linguistic, and symbolic implications of love in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century prose fiction, for beneath the narrative and rhetorical structures that seem to be grappling with notions of love and courtship, those amorous discourses, in fact, often serve as pretexts for more salacious arguments about the sexual practices and identities of men and women. Within the range of kinds of fictions produced during the period—popular, royal, and historical romances, novella, translations of Greek romances, and rogue literature—the protocols of normative and traditional discourse on love (and on courtship and marriage) contends with the persistent sexual incontinence of men and the transgressive sexual agency of women. The resulting ideological clash often manifests itself in actions and eloquent speech by male and female characters who excessively, and sometimes violently, pursue and consume desire in ways that defy traditional discourses on corporeal behavior.

Cited authors

De Montaigne Michel