Gender Fluidity and Violence in Edward Herbert's 'Echo to a Rock'

In her discussion of Echo in drama, Susan L. Anderson asserts that Echo is, simultaneously, a woman speaking and a woman silenced and can stand in for both.4 The fictive conversation between Echo and the speaker is a version of the collaborative nature of most writing in the early modern period, a c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEarly modern literary studies Vol. 23; no. 2; pp. 1 - 13
Main Author Graham, Jean E
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Sheffield Matthew Steggle 01.01.2024
Matthew Steggle, Editor, EMLS
Subjects
Collaboration
Criticism and interpretation
Gender identity
Herbert, Edward
Medicine
Narcissism
Poetry
Poets
Portrayals
Verbal aggression
Women
United Kingdom
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Summary:In her discussion of Echo in drama, Susan L. Anderson asserts that Echo is, simultaneously, a woman speaking and a woman silenced and can stand in for both.4 The fictive conversation between Echo and the speaker is a version of the collaborative nature of most writing in the early modern period, a collaboration noted by Margaret Simon in her discussion of Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia.5 The pretense of collaboration in echo poems is especially appropriate considering Dorothy Stephens's argument that Echo expresses the speaker's 'potentially unfaithful' inner self, which is depicted as feminine, with implications of chaos.6 Stephens asserts that the masculine lover was often seen as effeminate, and thus his speaking through Echo underscores the gender fluidity of both. Sidney: Echo as an Accomplice in Verbal Abuse The single echo poem in Sidney's The Old Arcadia (1580) may serve as the most overt evidence of the artificiality of Echo and the narcissism of the speaker. According to Langley, the poem concerns the dangers of '[d]angerous isolationism' becoming melancholy, with the lover experiencing a divided self: 'Death is the poisonous medicine for the medicinal poison of love, and deadly suicide the apt cure for self-division'.12 As Langley notes, the text ultimately rejects 'the empassioned but self-destructive irrationality of erotic indulgence' and 'the trivial concerns of cheapened pastoralisin'.13 The rejection of self-violence, however, comes with a misogynistic shift, as the speaker manipulates Echo into placing all the blame on the source of that misery: Like 'toys', 'eels' is both dehumanizing and negative: women are trivial objects or serpentine animals, evocative of Satan and again of the original 'curse'.
ISSN:1201-2459
1201-2459