Petrarchan Sonnet Tradition

Histories of Sexuality: Central Tenets

• The meanings of sex, gender, and eroticism are not fixed or eternal.
• These meanings are historical, malleable, and culturally contingent.
• According to Gowing, "the gender order is not fixed: it is historical and local".
• Meanings, acts, practices, and affects all take shape in different historical and cultural contexts.

Histories of Sexuality: Areas of Interest

• What "counts" (and doesn't count) as sex includes: Bodily acts or practices, Feelings, emotions, affects, and Fantasies, dreams, etc.
• Who can do what, when, and to whom is an area of interest.
• What sex "means" (and doesn't mean) is considered.
• Rules & Regulations include: Cultural Norms, and Institutions through which these are formulated, enforced, and contested.
• Terms & Categories possess their own histories.
• Erotic Scripts, Narratives, Metaphors are considered

Sexual Metaphors, Sexual Narratives

• A metaphor is a compressed analogy that draws a comparison between two things.
• Metaphors require mental work on behalf of the reader.
• A sex-as-baseball metaphor encourages "us" to think about specific bodily practices and their broader meanings.

Sonnet by Sir Philip Sidney

• Questions to consider: What insight is provided about the speaker?
• How is the speaker's body described/envisioned?
• What are the key features and personality traits of Stella?
• Who is in control of the relationship dynamics between the speaker and Stella?

Varying Schemes

• The poem follows a specific rhyme scheme.
• The first eight lines (octave) have an ABAB ABAB rhyme scheme.
• The next four lines (quatrain) follow a CDCD rhyme scheme.
• The final two lines (couplet) rhyme with an EE scheme.

Look Up Unknowns

• Whence: from what place, for what reason.
• Yelden: something yielded, surrendered.
• Ransacked: robbed, plundered.
• Whereto: since, because.
• Razed: utterly destroyed, erased, scraped clean.
• Withal: moreover.
• Stratagems: strategies, sophisticated military plans.
• 'Scape: Escape.

Significant Pattern, Metaphor, Image

• Key words and phrases reveal a significant pattern.
• Use of metaphor creates vivid imagery related to warfare and love.

Question, Claim, or Insight

• Paradox: Contradiction reveals truth.
• A seemingly contradictory element is the "Sweet/conquering" force.
• Imagery: Descriptive language makes a mental picture
• "Love" is portrayed as her "lieutenant," raising her banner within him.
• Important Questions to ask include who is in control here?
• Also asking about the final lines (“that not my soul... can escape from thee?")

II Canzoniere (Song Book) / Rime Sparse (Scattered Rhymes)

• It contains 366 poems of various kinds.
• Poems are written in vernacular Italian.
• There is one poem for every day of the calendar year, including leap years.
• The collection consists of: 317 sonnets, 29 canzoni, 9 sestini, 4 madrigals, and 7 ballate.
• It draws from a variety of Pagan (Ovid, Plato) and Christian sources.
• The vast majority of these poems are about the love for “Laura".

"Chaos in 14 lines"

• Italian/Petrarchan Sonnet: Generally 14 lines.
• Italian/Petrarchan Sonnet: Octave (two quatrains).
• Italian/Petrarchan Sonnet: Sestet (six lines) with a problem and resolution.
• Volta acts as the "turn".
• The typical rhyme scheme is ABBAABBA CDECDE.
• Poetic tour de force consists of ingenuity of form and vibrancy of language.
• Technical Virtuosity occurs
• Recurrent tropes & motifs

Sidney, AS 36

• This sonnet includes an octave, quatrain, and couplet.

Individual Poems / Larger Sequence

• Sonnet sequences: Separate pieces that together form a larger, profoundly influential collection.
• English “Sonnet Craze” includes Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Lodge, William Percy, Richard Barnfield, ---, Cynthia, Edmund Spenser, Bartholomew Griffin, Shakespeare, and Lady Mary Wroth

Key Attributes (Petrarchan Paradigm)

• It involves an ideal beloved/cruel mistress (female), utterly unique and unrequited.
• It involves a suffering speaker (male), who experiences endless love and fidelity.
• The speaker often loses sleep, health and self.
• The man is subjective to the woman, as her slave and prisoner which causes masochism and deriving pleasure from suffering.
• It causes psychological realism, the lover's mind, emotional turbulence and agony.
• The time involves progress and recurrence (stasis), involving recurring ideas, sensations, etc.

Power Dynamics

• This involves the question of who is in control here?
• The beloved acts as “empowered".
• The beloved is also absent and silent.
• The beloved act as an object vs. subject?
• Authoring as authority allows the poet to exert control over unruly desire, inaccessible love object
• Power Dynamic also create productive suffering involves poetry as wound and cure

Beauty in/and Suffering

• A tension exists between a "beautiful" structure (strict order, rhyme schemes, Italian language) and "disorderly" content (emotional turbulence, pleasure & pain, fraught relations, idealization & critique).
• It shows beauty in the speaker's suffering.

Animating Tensions

• A tension exists between a "beautiful” structure (strict order, rhyme schemes, Italian language) and "disorderly" content (emotional turbulence, pleasure and/vs. pain).
• It shows beauty in the speaker's suffering and idealization.
• This also involves individual poems or a sequenced poems.
• It shows the individual poet vs. traditional poets.

Relational Structures

• The relationship between the man and woman is important aspects.

Petrarchan Template Main Characteristics

• Male Speaker: Suffering, devoted, productive and access to his mind/psyche.
• Female Beloved: Ideal but cruel and "present" but absent.
• Heteroerotic: Male/Female, two central figures.
• Unrequited Love: Not reciprocated and Static.
• Productive Suffering: Poetry as wound/cure.

Critical Synthesis: Posing Questions for Analysis

• What connects the five poems in question?
• What is most interesting or compelling about these particular works individually or collectively?
• What things must we notice?
• What talking points should we prioritize and elaborate upon?

Renaissance Depictions of Ganymede

• Ovid, in Metamorphoses (Book X) mentions Ganymede, an ideal young man.
• Stellato's The Zodiac of Life (1561): Ganymede is the son of Tros, king of Phrygia, a boy of passing beauty; he was made Jove's butler.
• Blount, Glossographia (1656) states Ganymede is any boy loved for carnal abuse.

Sonnet X

• Love was my Ganymed, the world's wonder and joy.
• Ganymede has spotless mind and body.
• Ganymede loves to be loved but not to love.

Poetic Language

• What is considered poetry and what makes a poem a "poem?"
• Why would a writer express themselves in this manner, rather than get straight to the point?

A Modern Message

• Translate sonnet 6 into modern terminology, first rewriting each line and reintroducing the slash marks and punctuation.

Terminology

• Sex (n.): anatomical, or biological distinctions by which cultures differentiate between men and women; (v.): acts or practices associated with sexual intercourse

• Gender: prescribed roles, behaviors, and attributes available to— and seen as characteristic of—sexed human beings in particular cultural contexts.

Sexuality

• Sexuality: a mode of being disposed toward others, including but not limited to the direction and scope of erotic preferences, bisexual, or sexual orientation (OED 3, ca. 1897)
• Eroticism: less a fixed identity derived from the gender of one's desired object than a field of potential affects, attachments, and practices associated with pleasure, arousal, sexual acts, etc.
• Gender of object choice as one variable among many, including erotic identification, fantasy, and preference for specific activities, all of which intermingle and conflict in various ways.

Gender in History

• Historical frameworks of gender, include: gender as binary, one-sex model, gender ideals, gender as process, trans, and early modern trans

Shakespeare´s “Master Mistress”

• Key themes involve the duality of nature and beauty.

Between Women

• Review selected poems.
• Discuss your ideas.
• Provide a concise summary.
• Identify important details.
• Provide interpretive claims.
• Posing lingering thoughts and questions.

Body (in) Parts

• The body in parts involves the blazon, from Spenser, Barnfield, and Shakespeare.
• The main question becomes how to describe relationship

“To His Mistress Going to Bed"

• "to His Mistress" involves images and metaphors
• Note the verbs used in the poem, while identifying confusing words and phrases

The Erotic Appeal

• How does the speaker attempt to get the beloved into bed and is he convincing.

Tool Box

• Tool included blazon, topos, simile, extended metaphor and sensuality

The Body Emblazoned

• Blazon is a poetic device or topos in which the speaker details various parts of the a beloved's body
• Simile is a comparsion that links two thing via like or as

Metaphorical Bodies

• Why does the speaker characterize her as a garden here and revisit the previous themes to make a complete picture.

Framing the Senses: From the senses to the Sensual

• In OED 1, sensual refers to involving gratification of the senses, physically enjoyable or pleasurable.

Visual pleasure

• Can we take pleasure in looking at others bodies and who gets to view
• Voyeurism and Scopophilia are key to these concepts