Monsters and Borders in the Early Modern Imagination by Jana Byars & Hans Peter Broedel

Author:Jana Byars & Hans Peter Broedel [Byars, Jana & Broedel, Hans Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138610897
Goodreads: 39231486
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

6 Imagining the Amazon

Monstrous Discourses about Gynocracy in Elizabethan England

Jessica Oxendine

In early modern literature, male characters often condemn women who act like Amazons: for instance, Shakespeare’s Margaret of Anjou faces York’s derision for “triumph[ing] like an Amazonian trull”; his Joan la Pucelle evokes fear from Charles, the Dauphin of France, who squeals, “Stay, stay thy hands! Thou art an Amazon”; and Spenser’s Radigund, that “cruell Amazon,” causes “vile disgrace” as she transforms the Knights of Maidenhead into “thrall[s].”1 These texts accuse Margaret, Joan, and Radigund of debasing “wise Nature” in a way that is “inhuman” and “ill-beseeming” of their “sex.”2 They may “bear a woman’s face,” but inside, they are “Lionesse[s],” “tigers of Hyrcania,” and “Beare[s] … vppon the carkasse of some beaste too weake.”3 In their actions, these women are “halfe like a man,” half like something else.4 In their movement away from womanly nature and toward something more animalistic, more masculine, and more monstrous, these women embody the dangerous qualities associated with Amazonian society.

For all of their potentially negative connotations, Amazons became popular figures in England’s historical writings, literature, and travel narratives during the Elizabethan period, and the different attitudes these texts have toward these powerful, yet frightening, women often reflect their relative proximity to English society. Historical texts portraying Amazons of Ancient Greece, such as William Painter’s A Palace of Pleasure (1575) and Thomas Heywood’s The exemplary lives and memorable acts of nine the most worthy women in the world (1618), generally place these tribes of warrior women in Asia or Africa—distant locations outside the borders of the civilized world. Such tales mimic the handling of Amazons in Greek mythology: as the civilized world grows, the location of the Amazons shifts outward, always remaining just beyond what is known.5 Often, Greek histories and Renaissance works based on those histories present Amazons as alluring but cruel, as exotic possibilities in the ancient world but too distant and foreign for the more advanced civilization of early modern society. But these women appear not just in early modern history books—culturally, geographically, and chronologically separated from English society—but also in travel narratives to the New World. Similar to Greek travelers, the explorers of the New World located Amazons across the ocean. This geographical distance seems to matter. On the borderlands, they offer little direct threat to the cultural norms of English society and instead exist as what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls “pure culture”—that is, as a “construct … to be read.”6 As imaginative figures, the elusive and ambiguous Amazons, whose “narratives,” according to Kathryn Schwarz, “negotiate the gap between out there and in here,” allow readers of travel narratives to construe them as a site of difference through which they can compare English society’s relative civility. In such comparisons, the Amazons demonstrate the disorder that occurs when women blur not just geographical borders but also gendered categories separating the roles of men and women.

If on the borderlands they become sites of difference, on the English battlefield or, worse, the English throne, Amazons and Amazon-like figures threaten patriarchal society on a more visceral level.

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