A Literature of Their Own? Women Writing-Venice, London, Paris-1550-1700

Laura McGough (UMBC)
3409 Stanford Street
Hyattsville, MD 20783
(301) 422-6439 (home phone and fax)
mcgough@umbc.edu
mcgoughla@msn.com

This workshop builds on the experiences of the 2001 NEH Summer Institute, " 'A Literature of Their Own?' Women Writing: Paris, London, Venice, 1500-1700" (directed by Albert Rabil). Although the New World was quickly seized on as a "male genre" of epic, conquest, and female submission, the New World also provided female authors with a space for imagining a new, Utopian society, built on politics that rejected conquest and supported equitable gender relations. Examining how women from different countries envisioned the New World provides a focus of comparison that moves beyond national boundaries.

Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World, 10 page extract (from the Penguin edition of The Blazing world and Other Writings, 1992, pp. 183-192).

Françoise de Graffigny, Letters from a Peruvian Woman, 11 page extract (from the Modern Language Association of America, 1993 edition, pp. 17-29).

RECOMMENDED: Francesca Trivellato, "Out of Women's Hands: Notes on Venetian Glass Beads, Female Labour and International Trades," in Beads and Bead Makers: Gender, Material Culture and Meaning, edited by Lidia D. Sciama and Joanne B. Eicher (Oxford, New York: Berg, 1998), pp. 47-82. Copies will be brought to the workshop.
Note: A list of further reading will be supplied to workshop participants.

Format: Using no more than three slides (including Jan van der Straet's "America"), we will begin with visual representations of the myth of the New World as a land of male conquest and female submission. We will also briefly discuss how the excerpts from Cavendish's and Graffigny's work fit into their work as a whole and how they respond to other writers. This introductory session will last no more than 20 minutes. The remaining 70 minutes will be devoted to a group discussion of the texts and images. Because the reading list is by no means exhaustive, we will encourage workshop participants to share their knowledge of other texts and images and how they relate to the overall themes of the workshop. In the last 10 minutes, we hope to focus on future areas for research.

Comparative, Interdisciplinary Focus: This workshop builds on skills drawn from various disciplines, including literary theory, art history, and social and cultural history. The texts chosen encourage participants to think across national boundaries; an English writer and a French writer are included among the readings, as well as an article by an Italian historian about the experiences of Venetian women in the new Atlantic economy. Since Italian language writings by women of this period are still being recovered, we do not know if Italian women directly addressed the issue of the New World in their writings. One of the goals of this workshop is to facilitate communication between scholars about women's texts that deal with the New World. We hope that scholars familiar with women's literature in Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and so forth will also be able to contribute to the comparative discussion. The interdisciplinary, comparative focus of the workshop is reflected in the disciplinary affiliations of the four conveners: English literature (Andrea), French literature (Wolfgang), and Italian history (Horodowich and McGough).

Relevance to Conference Themes and Plenary One, Geographies and Polities: The workshop's primary focus is an exploration of how women imagined space during an era of expanding frontiers. Did the idea of the New World allow women to redefine their relationship to the state in which they lived? Did their writings challenge or reinforce the notion that men are the makers of polities, and women their subjects? Did women embrace, subvert, or ignore the idea of "empire?" What difference did nationality make in the way that women imagined the New World (a useful contrast to Cavendish and Graffigny is the Spanish writer Catalina de Erauso, whose New World experiences were not imagined but quite literal)? How were women's experiences shaped by the economic changes of the Atlantic economy? When women described the New World, did they primarily see it as a "market," a "polity," or something entirely different? The questions this workshop addresses are core issues defined for Plenary Session One, Geographies and Polities, as well as the overall conference theme, Structures and Subjectivities.

We should emphasize that we see this workshop as exploratory, the beginning of a conversation with workshop participants that we hope will extend beyond the three-day conference. As mentioned beforehand, the work of recovering female authors (and artists) is still going on in Italian literature, as it is in Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and German literature. We hope that the workshop will serve as an impetus for scholars to continue the process of recovering women's texts and works of art and to look for writings and images that may have addressed New World themes.

Originality: Workshop participants will explore the issue of space through the lens of the New World, which will enable participants to evaluate the relevance of polities, language, and cultural traditions in informing women's sense of space and their subjectivity. Although the New World is a recognized theme in epics, primarily written by men, less attention has been paid to how women responded to European overseas expansion.