“Toward a Trans Petrarchism”
This paper leverages recent scholarship in trans studies toward a new understanding of Petrarchism’s construction of gender in early modern English poetry. Petrarchism might seem a fundamental forge of naturalized and strictly binary gender categories; the symbolic transformations endemic to its literary mode, however, open up possibilities for nonbinary or transitional readings of embodied gender in the Petrarchan. My primary evidence will be Henry King’s lyric “The Double Rock,” a poem which opens on the hoary Petrarchan conceit of the stone-hearted woman only to explode it by having the speaker follow in the lady’s rocky footsteps. Riffing on the Ovidian myths of Medusa, Pygmalion, Narcissus, and Diana and Actaeon, the poem flicks through a series of models for imagining gender outside of a naturalized and immutable sexual binary. By the end of the poem, the two lovers share not just a material quality but also a form, as each comes to resemble the other’s “monument.” This convergence in form, then, suggests a sort of gender transition in which the Petrarchan object transforms into the material and formal image of the male speaker. Drawing on (trans)gender theory by Jack Halberstam and Colby Gordon and rethinking some of the classic psychoanalytic criticism of Petrarch Scholars (Lynn Enterline, Nancy Vickers, Carla Freccero), I will contend that this willful overextension of the Petrarchan topos—one of so many we encounter in seventeenth-century English verse—may offer critics a new ground upon which to unsettle the strict gender binaries of early modern lyric. In doing so, I hope to reopen the question of Petrarch’s reception in England with a particular focus on how Petrarchism participated in the early modern construction of cisnormativity.
