Speaking women and speaking the woman in Marvell's lyric poetry

Abstract

Female characters play a central role in many of Andrew Marvell's lyric poems. They may speak a poem themselves, or they may be the pretext for a poem spoken by a man. The women in the poems play a range of roles: they can be destructive, sources of bewilderment, desirable objects or potential saviours. In all these roles their characters are constructed by a speaking voice, either their own, or that of a male speaker. This thesis investigates the ways in which the female characters are constructed by the speaking voice of the poem, focusing particularly on disjunctions in that voice. Through this investigation I intend to show the functions that female characters have in the poems, the nature of the relationship between the female characters and the speaking voices and the connections between female characters. I intend to focus on the ways in which female characters from different poems resemble each other. Part One of this thesis is a summary of the critical history of this subject. A few major female characters in Marvell's work have attracted the bulk of this critical attention, with more minor characters receiving very little. The critical focus and style has changed through time in the same ways that general Marvell criticism, and general literary criticism, have changed. Recent developments in literary criticism which focus attention on gender relations within a text have had little influence so far on Marvell criticism. Part Two is concerned with those poems in which the male speaker of the poem directly addresses a female character. In this chapter the complex relationship between the speaker and the woman that he is, essentially, creating is discussed. The female characters are shown to be repeatedly connected with fragmentation and division, and the interplay of similarity and difference between the genders is also shown. Part Three discusses those poems in which a woman speaks directly, either to another character or to the reading audience. It is shown that these women's method of speaking is connected with their gender and is noticeably different from the method of speaking used by male characters. Part Four concerns those poems in which a woman is described by a male speaker. The poems in this chapter range from the introspective world of the Mower to the relatively objective tone of "The Picture of Little TC in a Prospect of Flowers". The female characters of these poems are shown to be linked with natural and historical processes of change.