CONSIDER the two sonnets
by the Renaissance poet, Edmund Spenser, that appear in the right-hand
frame of your browser window (from the sonnet sequence, Amoretti).
Ask yourself what gender issues are at work here. Can you pinpoint any
of the concepts discussed under terms
or across the various modules
on individual theorists? Some of the questions you might consider
when analyzing a work by way of theories of gender and sex include the
following:
How is gender represented/ constructed in this text?
What are the text's assumptions regarding gender?
What are the images of women/ men in the text (especially images
of women in texts by men)?
How and why is woman identified as "Other" (merely
the negative object) to man, who is then seen as the defining and
dominating "Subject"?
What are the covert ways in which power is manipulated in the text
so as to establish and perpetuate the dominance of men and subordination
of women?
What are the female points of view, concerns, and values presented
in the text? And if absent, how so and why?
Here are a few more questions modified from Eve Sedgwick's own web-based
"Heuristics
for Reading Nineteenth-Century Fiction" (remember that these
were designed for the nineteenth-century novel but can easily be reworked
for most any literary text):
Do the images of women and men in the text seem to function as stereotypes,
warnings, models, exceptions?
In what systems of evaluation do they seem to be embedded? In your
thinking about gender, remember to include characters who may not
be invested in the novel's heterosexual plots. Remember that class,
gender, sexuality, nationality, race can each be used to offer allegorical
representation of arguments about the others. And vice versa.
What are the thematics associated with women/men; with characters
of different ages, classes, nationalities, regions, races? Look for
distinctive places, distinctive words, distinctive images, objects,
grammars. What are their implications? Do they change? Are they differentiated
along more than one of these axes?
What gender and sexual values are implied in the focus and coverage
of the work? What/who is included, excluded?
What audience is implied for the work?
What reader expectations and assumptions about each of these dimensions
seem to be embodied in it? What possibilities of different reading
relations does the work suggest for differently positioned readers?
Is it an easy or a hard book to read "against the grain"?
How does it invite, repel, coopt, amplify, or otherwise deal with
obliquely positioned readings?
What expectations about gender and sexuality/ about age/ about class/
about nation, race, region are already embodied in the work's genre(s)
or subgenre(s)? What is the relation of the work to its genre(s)/subgenre(s),
and to the expectations so entailed?
What is the usefulness of the text for analyzing and describing
gender and sexual/ class/ national/ racial, etc. ideology? What are
the relations of this text to the ideologies sketched?
What relationships between/among women are presented? Between/among
men? What are the bases of these relationships? What are their dynamics
and rules of circulation? Are they differentiated along other axes
(class, age, etc.?) How do they support, and how are they in tension
with, any heterosexual presumptions that may be structuring the novel?
Where is one to look for the historical specificity of the treatment
of gender and sexuality in the work?
What models of same-sex and other-sex attachment and desire are
in play? What is their history?
Does the novel present an implicit or explicit definition of "the
sexual"? How and what? What seems to be at stake in the answer
to this question? To what is "the sexual" opposed, definitionally?
How stable are the oppositions? How, and how fully, is "the sexual"
defined in terms of gender? In terms of procreation or its absence?
In terms of class? In terms of age or generation? In terms of nationality?
Of race?
Does it make sense to talk about homophobia as having a distinct
function in the text? Think about this in relation to histories of
homophobia, as well as in relation to histories of same-sex desire.
How does the term "family" play out in this text? What
families are in evidence? What counts as a family-- and to whom? When
several characters reside together, what links them? Blood relations
(and if so, what)? Legal relations? Economic relations? How many different
kinds of household can you find; how are they organized, and how related
to each other? To what is "family" opposed, definitionally?
How stable are the oppositions? How, how fully, and how stably is
"family" defined in terms of gender and sexuality?
What are the novel's explicit or implicit claims to present ahistorical
truths of gender and/or sexuality? How do they function?
What relations between narrator and characters are generated? Between
reader and characters? Between narrator and reader? What sexual and
gender dimensions characterize these relations? Do they change?
What are the sex/ gender/ power implications of the novel's stylistic
and formal choices?
It's always worth trying to look at a given novel asnot just
an example of a single genrebut a kind of anthology of generic
choices, often in dialogue or even at war with one another. Think
about how the terms "novel," "romance," "history,"
for example, might intertwine and intersect as generic markers for
a given text. It's also worth putting such descriptions back into
the historical context, eg. with the "rise of the novel":
What is consolidated, what subsumed, what marginalized, with the "rise
of the novel"? How may such narratives also be treated (in the
novels themselves) as allegories of other relations (e.g. of gender,
sexuality, class)?
What images of the human body are presented? How concrete or abstract
are they? To what senses do they appeal? What are their presumptions?
How much and what kinds of narrative energy are attached to them?
How are these bodies--as bodies--gendered, sexed, classed, and raced?
Proper Citation of this Page:
Felluga, Dino. "Applications of
Marxism: Spenser's Amoretti: Questions." Introductory Guide
to Critical Theory.[date of last update, which you can find on the
home page].
Purdue U. [date you accessed the site]. <http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/marxism/applications//marxapplicationspenser.html>.