Between the Lines

With my dissertation well under way, I hope to use this blog to think through some of my ideas and share the direction of my writing. The overarching aim of my dissertation, titled Large and Spacious Will: Sex and Sexuality in Shakespeare's Sonnets , is to attempt to reclaim the 'dark lady' from a figure which functions merely as an example of misogynist discourse to a woman who is a rebel and a threat to patriarchy and social order. To achieve this aim, I am taking an intersection approach. The oppression of race, class, gender, sexuality and many other spheres of oppression are always interlinked and inseparable and so, in my analysis of the sonnets, I feel it is important to consider the role of race, class, gender and sexuality. In this blog I want to outline some of the ways in which the woman of sonnets 127-154, sometimes known as the 'dark lady', disrupts class structures. The first 18 of Shakespeare's sonnets urge a fair young man to procreate in ord...

I have decided to use this blog to track some of my research ideas and findings as I begin the process of writing my Masters dissertation. The following is the script of a presentation I delivered on the 25th of May 2017. The conference was a chance to explore our dissertation proposals, and I delivered my paper in a session chaired by Professor Phillip Schwyzer titled: Early Modern Discourses: Bodies, Politics, Performance. Shakespeare's 'Dark Lady': A Sexual Revolutionary? Hello, I am Antonio Hehir, and I have been conducting research into sex and sexuality in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Today, I want to talk a little bit about the Dark Lady of the sonnets and how we can seek to redefine her and to ask the question: Was the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets a sexual revolutionary? When it comes to the sonnets, there has been a tendency among Shakespeare scholars to focus on the ‘Fair Youth’ sonnets (1-126) and much of that focus has orbited around a biographical...

How now reader? With my Masters course entering that busy time of year, I have been inundated with work and the blog has been somewhat neglected (and will probably continue to be so). Having said that, I thought I would take a few minutes to share some thoughts on Romeo and Juliet 's infamous balcony scene and the importance of naming and denaming. In Romeo and Juliet names are an integral part of the character’s lives - particularly their family name. Whether they are Montague or Capulet will determine who they can associate with and where they can go in Verona. Shakespeare knew the importance of titles in early modern England first hand. In the same year he wrote this play, his father, John Shakespeare, was refused the right to a coat of arms, and the use of the title “gentleman” that came with it. In 1596, Shakespeare himself was successful in renewing the petition on the family's behalf. Shakespeare had also already written about perhaps the most famou...

The male and female signs that greet us at the toilet door offer us two very binary options, but in reality sex and gender is far more complicated than those signs suggest. Sex is never as simple as a binary choices, and it is this that queer theory wants you to understand; that all our pre-conceived ideas about gender roles and sexual identities are in fact unstable, and can be destabilized by simply picking them apart. Queer Theory is a relatively new cultural theory which emerged out of the 1990s, but very much has its origins in the work of Michel Foucault . It looked to establish sexual orientation as a fundamental category of analysis and understanding, and thus it has both a social and political aim. It is a criticism informed by a resistance to homophobia and heterosexism by exposing the ideological and institutional practices of heterosexual privilege. It was the feminist critics of the 70s that first began to explore and dissect gender, but the feminist outlook soon began ...

Nausea Jean-Paul Sartre Penguin Modern Classics (2000) ***(3/5) Written in 1938, Nausea (La Nausée in its original French) is the first novel of French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. This review is of the Penguin Modern Classics edition translated by Robert Baldrick. The novel is set in the town of Bouville, France (literally ‘mud town’) and is believed to be a fictional portrayal of Le Havre where Sartre was living at the time of writing. The novel takes the form of the diary entries of 30-year-old Antoine Roquetin as he suffers from strange and unexplained sensations of sickness that he refers to as ‘the Nausea’. I found Roquentin a difficult character to relate to as, on face value, he is man who seems to wallow through a comfortable, bourgeois life in which he has very little to worry about. For the last decade, Roquetin has been been researching the Marquis de Rollebon, a French aristocrat who lived during the French Revolution. Roquetin’s sickness begins...

Feminist theory first emerges as a literary theory during the women's movement of the 1960s, but it is important to remember that it followed a much older tradition of thought and action around women's equality, and is very much a renewal of those traditions. The foundations of this theory can be found in texts such as: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex to name a few, but it is not until the 60s that it began to take a theoretical form. The movement realised the significance of the images of women propagated by literature, and saw it vital to combat and question the authority and coherence of those representations. For this reason, feminist literary criticism should not be seen as an offshoot of the feminist movement, but rather, it is intrinsically linked to the movement as a practical tool in influencing attitudes towards women. This makes feminist litera...