Workshops: Stories

Workshop 8: "Storied" Women:
Rereading and Reviewing Constructions of Identity in
Early Modern Portraits of Women

Conveners:

• Elizabeth Chew, Art, Architecture, History, UNC, Chapel Hill
• Susan Shifrin, Art History and Women's Studies, Swarthmore College
• Brandie Siegfried, Women's Studies and Literary History, Brigham Young U

Participants in this workshop explored how the reading and viewing of portraits of early modern European women were inflected and infused by the contexts of reputation, mythmaking, and storytelling. We used short excerpts from Linda Charnes' 1995 study Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare, in which she explores Shakespeare's reappropriation of the mythic/historical figure of Cleopatra, as comparative critical texts for the workshop's primary source readings. We asked that workshop participants submit prior to the workshop one or two questions responding to the readings, along with a page of quotations, images, or short primary source material that will bring the discussion home to each participant's own work in progress.

The discussion was divided into two segments. The first focused on the narration of women's reputation through story and myth, and will begin with the case of Grace O'Malley, 16th-century Irish queen and sea-pirate. The second considered story as context for visual and literary portraits, beginning with discussion of the Countess of Arundel, 17th-century English Catholic heiress and art patron, and the Duchess Mazarin, 17th-century Italo-French mythologized beauty, "errant lady" and muse. These cases enabled us to frame and explore such questions as the following: what do the stories told about these women suggest about the ways in which they were viewed (literally and figuratively)? Who are the generators and disseminators of these stories? How much do these stories and portraits tell us about their apparent subjects, and how much about the storytellers? How do reputations, substantiated by an accretion of storied layers, emerge in the imagery of visual and literary portraits of the women? How do story, reputation, and art intersect? To what degree do they serve as devices of generalizing among women, rather than of differentiation? How did reputation and myth supercede and displace "identity"? In what ways does the mythmaking and storytelling to which early modern women's identities fall subject (if we agree that they do) differentiate the construction of female and male identity?