Open Collections

Hada, Alison

University of British Columbia

The erotic triangle, as conceived by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, has been a common critical focus in Early Modern Studies, including in conceptualizing the gendered relational dynamics at work in sonnet sequences. This thesis engages with this critical precedent through the lens of trans studies, using two comparable erotic triangles in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. Each work features a mythological parable that triangulates the dynamic between poet and beloved with an external actor – in Shakespeare, the figure of Nature, and in Sidney, the figure of Cupid – who contributes to the morphological shaping of the beloved. The slippage between desire and identification is a key feature of Petrarchan poetics, and these episodes offer demonstrations of how their conflation is made manifest in the body. This thesis draws from pre-existing scholarship on the literary production of Elizabethan sonnets as being centered on their circulation through male homosocial networks. This provides the precedent for the concept of the relational dynamics at work in the sonnet lyric extending beyond the poet-beloved dyad, which I place in dialogue with Early Modern scholarship on how gender in drama is figured interpersonally through triangular and broader societal relations. With this contextual backdrop, I use trans studies’ conception of embodiment as interpersonally and institutionally conceived to support my reading of how the relational networks in these poems produce and modify the gendered alignment of the bodies they portray. Chapter 1 focuses on Shakespeare’s sonnet 20 and its linguistic and narrativized representation of the body at its centre, and how this representation is mediated by the desires and artisanal workings of the poet and Nature. Chapter 2 examines several poems from Astrophil and Stella in which Stella and Cupid appear to inhabit the same body, blurring the lines between desired object and romantic rival; this demonstrates the trans potential that emerges from interactions between figures, rather than simply one individual body. These readings build to the conclusion that the gendered body is continually in flux and fundamentally relational.

Text

2024-08-29

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89092

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/