'A gloria del sesso feminile': Epistolary constructions of gender in early modern Italian letter collections.

摘要

Although much has been written about the letters of such canonical Renaissance figures as Bembo, Tasso, and Aretino, no major study exists of women writers and the vernacular epistolario in early modern Italy. This dissertation investigates the literary, social and cultural significance of women's epistolary production from 1548--1650. In chapters on Lucrezia Gonzaga's Lettere...a gloria del sesso feminile (1552), Veronica Franco's Lettere familiari (1580), Arcangela Tarabotti's Lettere familiars e di complimento (1650) and Ortensio Lando's anthology Lettere di molte valorose donne (1548), I examine the impact of the female voice on the epistolary genre, arguing that it served to expand the parameters of epistolary discourse. I contend that the vernacular letter-book functioned as a locus of self-construction, expression, and even dissent for women writers, allowing them to become the subjects of their narrative in a way that did not occur in other, more rigidly male-defined genres. In appropriating epistolary space to create themselves as public, literary personae, women writers validated the "private" realm of female experience by bringing it into that of published authorship. Because women writers had to negotiate significant cultural obstacles to publish at all, however, the act of making public what was ostensibly their private correspondence was a transgressive one. I maintain that by overtly identifying themselves with the experience described in their letters, women epistolarians rejected cultural conventions equating silence with chastity and subverted gendered divisions between public and private spheres. My discussion of the dynamic tension between public and private realms in women's letters draws on Habermas' conceptualization of the public sphere as a discursive space in which private persons debate matters of public import, as well as on feminist critiques of Habermas' theory as representative only of a dominant, male public. I argue that women's letter collections constitute a form of what some modern critics have termed "counterpublics," that is, alternative public spaces of discourse and debate that represent the concerns of marginalized groups. As women epistolarians appropriated a male-defined genre, I suggest, they reconstituted it, challenging it to function as a public forum for the female experience as well as the male.