Author Interview - Sidney L. Sondergard
Sharpening Her Pen

Q.  All of the subjects in your book-Anne Askew, Anne Dowriche, Lady Anne Southwell, Lady Mary Wroth, Aemilia Lanyer, and Elizabeth I-display "moral superiority" over their aggressors by their mastery of rhetorical violence. Is moral superiority inevitable, however, given each woman's position as victim?

A.  If we choose to see an individual's decision to exercise rhetorical violence in discourse generally as a strategy of argumentative enhancement, then it's important to acknowledge at the same time that the six writers in this study also use rhetorical violence specifically as a response to patriarchal values and conditioning-and to the male exercise of literal violence as well. What this creates in practice is a spectrum of authorial positions on the effects of male violence on women, individually and collectively. Anne Askew, for example, a literal target of male aggression, identifies her tormentors by name but resists labeling herself as "victim" in any sense, thereby denying her persecutors the symbolic triumph of their "moral superiority" and compromising their ethical credibility. At the other end of this spectrum, Queen Elizabeth regularly adopts the rhetorical position of "potential victim" in her public documents and addresses in order to prompt subject solidarity in protecting the welfare and interests of the monarch. Lady Mary Wroth is somewhere between these two extremes, variously employing rhetorical violence against male characters to present a reversal of perspectives by subjecting them to feminized/victimizing scenarios, or against female characters as cautionary tales.

Anne Dowriche, Aemilia Lanyer, and Lady Anne Southwell, however, situate themselves within their texts to exploit the "moral superiority" that they access through their condemnation of literal violence and subsequently amplify through their control of rhetorical violence. In this way, Anne Dowriche is able to recode the horrors in the history of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre as a call for tolerance in the face of escalating Elizabethan anti-Catholicism. Aemilia Lanyer is able to present a compelling logical argument that defensively refutes traditional portraits of Eve as the primary cause for the Fall while also taking the rhetorical offensive to accuse men of the more egregious archetypal crime-the execution of Jesus Christ. And Lady Anne Southwell channels years of anger and frustration into a philosophical attack on the foibles and cruelties of men, exorcising thereby the unhappy memories associated with her first marriage. While not explicitly adopting the positions of victims, all three of these writers do, indeed, exercise an authority empowered by "moral superiority" as they indict those who possess the literal power to victimize others.

Surely an individual who exercises her voice in resistance to the attempts of others to silence her cannot be considered a victim.

Q.  What was the cost to men for being "revealed as violent," as Anne Askew reveals them to be with her song of passive resistance?

A.  To those men most closely responsible for her suffering, the cost was almost nil. Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and one of Askew's most persistent inquisitors during the quest that interrogated her, fell out of favor upon the accession of Edward VI and was even committed to the Fleet briefly in 1547-though this apparently had nothing to do with his participation in the Askew case. However, one of the two men who applied the rack to Askew when the lieutenant of the Tower refused to do so, lord chancellor Thomas Wriothesley, was eventually relieved of the chancellorship for similar illegal exercises of his authority. Ironically, his position was subsequently filled by Richard Rich, the co-torturer of Askew (characterized by John Bale as being "in the hart anoynted with the sprete of Mammon, betraynge with Judas at the Byshoppes malycyouse callynge on"), in October 1547, after having been created Baron Rich in February of that same year. The immediate cost, then, was almost nil.

It is not Anne Askew's stated intention, however, in her Examinations or in "The Balade whych Anne Askewe made and sange whan she was in Newgate," to designate her life a sacrifice to be exchanged to secure tolerance in place of violence (although male popularizers like Bale and John Foxe do propose such an economic impact from what they present as her martyrdom). Her objective is both more simple and more profoundly generous: to assert that as a ship facing storms, "I am not she that lyst / My anker to lete fall" (and despite her metaphor, one may find it compelling to read "anchor" or "anger" here with equal resonance), despite the working of "Sathan in hys excesse"; for in what is a typically stunning refusal to seek retribution against her tormentors, she prays, "lord I the desyre / For that they do to me / Lete them not tast the hyre / Of their inyquyte." Exemplifying the tenets of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:3-10, Askew prays for mercy toward others rather than deliverance for self.

Q.  Your work proves that rhetorical violence is a powerful weapon, yet evidence of physical suffering inflicted by the enemy lends even more authority to the argument for non-violence. Does violence then hold the maximum power?

A.  Perhaps this is where I should reiterate that an exercise of "rhetorical violence" reflects a belief in the power of words to persuade, to provoke change, and to prompt action. Perhaps it can parry a sword or halt the trajectory of a slap if applied with skill and confidence-but it cannot stop that sword or slap if the agent of that sword or slap is deaf or blind to those words. Just as there were women writers who employed rhetorical violence instead of literal violence because they were unable to enact literal violence or chose not to do so, there were male writers who turned to it for similar reasons (I've written elsewhere about John Donne's fear of dying, for example, or John Milton's insecurity about his masculinity; they employ rhetorical violence to attack or to outface their own anxieties-not external enemies subject to sword or slap). Rhetorical violence is a tool that owes its persuasive power to the painful realities of literal violence, and that can be effectively used to reveal the inhumanity and the ramifications of its literal counterpart; but it cannot be guaranteed of neutralizing it.

For me, the most compelling discussion of the inevitable communicative efficacy of literal violence continues to be Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, and its extraordinarily insightful subtitle: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Her examination of torture, for example, as the ideological instrument for converting pain into "the fiction of power," reveals how the "unmaking" of the individual's world through suffering can become the "making" of another world predicated on the avoidance of such suffering, real or imagined. Whatever power rhetorical violence is able to assert is ultimately extrapolated from the potentiality for literal pain, and a reader's or listener's ability to empathize with-or desire to avoid-it. Lady Anne Southwell expresses this succinctly by lamenting that "whipps perswade vs more, then loue, or grace."

Q.  What prevents rhetorical violence from becoming actual violence? Does a buffer exist between the two?

A.  There isn't a buffer, as such, because the two exist in a mutually potential causality: provocative language can trigger physical violence, and physical violence can provoke linguistic responses. One of the few points on which the six writers in this study seem unified (the exception perhaps being some of Queen Elizabeth's motivational addresses during wartime) is that they are not trying to incite violence through their words, but are rather proposing alternatives to violence-and most particularly to violence against women. Thus they respond actively, though linguistically, to the literal and figurative trauma of misogyny and of physical violence used as persuasion. They are metaphorically fighting for control of their own bodies and their lives, for autonomy as intellectual beings, and for the authority that empowers them to achieve those objectives. If physical violence is not the end to which rhetorical violence is being employed, and if authorial control of the argumentative discourse makes its opposition to physical violence explicit, then any such violence that results must ultimately be extra-textually motivated and determined.

Q.  Could rhetorical violence have retained its strength in the examples you offer without the implication of God's jurisdiction?

A.  All of these writers work within the paradigm of a morality and a dynamic of human interaction that is extrapolated from the Christian value system and its fundamental belief in an omnipotent male deity. This essential association of spirituality with gender is cited to authorize the hierarchical social dominance by men of every sphere of experience, from the public and political to the private and domestic. These six authors simply make the insidious effects of this association on women a significant presence in their writings. In some cases the consequences of male manipulation of "God's jurisdiction" has very personal implications for the writers. If not for the empowerment of ecclesiastical authorities and the license of authority granted public officials by their pursuit of "heresy," Anne Askew would not have been executed. If not for the biblical tradition that assigns domestic authority and subjection to men, Lady Anne Southwell would not have been forced to live with her unfaithful husband as with an adversary she could neither leave or ignore. In yet other cases faith and polemic are mingled, as in the political writings of Queen Elizabeth or the Salve Deus Rex Judæorum of Aemilia Lanyer, in order to co-opt the power of biblical authority and then turn it to the service of individual feminist agendas.

But the efficacy of rhetorical violence is not dependent upon religious belief, as demonstrated by the application of it to secular arguments made by Lady Anne Southwell and Lady Mary Wroth. Despite the biblical references and language that appear in a number of Southwell's poems, their interests prove to be more broadly moral and philosophical than such allusions would initially seem to imply. I've argued in my chapter on Wroth that she recognizes and exploits the fact that women interpret violence-even figurative violence-differently than men, and as a result in her Urania exercises a gender-specific discourse of rhetorical violence that is designed to identify and to neutralize a variety of the sources and strategies of male power and control. "God's jurisdiction," then, is not the only source of authority invoked by these six writers and their exercise of rhetorical violence.

Q.  Which of your subjects' style do you consider was most effective in using rhetorical discourse to combat violence?

A.  I have tremendous admiration for the planning and exercise of rhetorical violence in Anne Dowriche's The French Historie, particularly as it serves an explicitly feminist semiotic of anti-violence that addresses the lingering social consequences of sectarian violence. She universalizes localized French history by emphasizing the human experience of loss and suffering caused by it until it becomes less a chronicle of specific religious conflict than an enactment (and its theatricality is quite self-conscious) of the consequences of exercising physical violence to suppress opposition. Did it succeed? While it's true that Queen Elizabeth was entering her final decade of active governance before the decline of her physical condition when the poem was published, it's encouraging to note that the kind of large-scale, cyclical sectarian reprisals against which it cautions its audience did not become a reality.