Interpreting Nightingales: Gender, Class and HistoriesBloomsbury Academic, 1997 - 299 pages The poetic nightingale is so familiar it seems hardly to merit serious attention. Yet its ubiquity is significant, suggesting associations with erotic love, pathos and art that cross culture and history. This book examines the different nightingales of European literature, starting with the Greek myth of Philomela, the raped girl, silenced by having her tongue cut out, and then transformed into the bird whose name means poet, poetry and nightingale simultaneously. Moving from the classical to the Christian worlds, Jeni Williams discusses nightingales and nature in the early church and sees the emergence of the figure as an emotive emblem of the aristocracy in mediaeval vernacular debate poetry. Her final chapters use the nightingale and the myth to examine Elizabeth Barrett Browning's struggle for an active female voice in Victorian poetry. |
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... sexual exploits . Though the thrush's arguments are neither funny nor erotic , they rest on a perception of women's sexual infidelities and thus express the reductive meanness of spirit by which the nobility stigmatized those inferior ...
... sexual image that follows— of ' rosebuds reddening where the calyx split ' - indicates which part of the description is uppermost . The nightingale seems so rich and sensuous as to be almost a temptation . When prostitu- tion and rape ...
... sexual creativity'.62 In this case I think that the concern with female eroticism is positively misleading . Though Bianca's sexuality is certainly central , she is consumed with jeal- ousy , frustration and pain , a mental torture ...