Hold Your Tongue: Female Speech And Male Anxieties In Early Modern England

Abstract

For early Modern England, containing female speech was essential to maintaining order. Through their speech, women could raise questions about and subvert patriarchal power. The frequency of this trope shows that there was a great apprehension about what speech and the tongue could accomplish. The female tongue was used as a metaphor for many problems and issues within the culture. This thesis analyzes two body politic metaphors in which the female tongue as a character wreaks havoc on the social body. Thomas Tomkis and William Averell utilize this metaphor in very different ways. Tomkis uses comedy to communicate with rhetorical discourses, while Averell's allegory is written as a serious dialogue communicating with both anti-Catholic and print discourses. I argue that male authors' utilization of the female tongue illustrates male anxieties not only about the place of women, but about their own places within the strict hierarchy of Early Modern English culture.