Feminist Poetics in Isabella Whitney's "Lamentation": A Cultural Perspective

The English poetess Isabella Whitney composed her poetic elegy “Lamentation upon the Death of William Gruffith,” proving herself as a committed feminist spokesperson in a male-dominated society during the Renaissance age with regard to its overall cultural scene. Whitney’s vigorous poetic feminist discourse proves to be influential, and it draws readers’ attention to her poetic legacy. This paper tries to explore a number of cognitive and poetic allusions to her conscious challenges against the dominant traditions; political, social, gender, and cultural rules which control and organize male-female (man–woman) relationships in society. Also, it tries to trace how Whitney proves her expressive and rhetorical poetic capability to address a wide range of audience and to affect their attitudes. Whitney was considered a spokesperson of her gender in general, and of female writers in particular. She used to bear her gender’s concerns and interests in competition with male writers in public and private. She proved to be able to break the dominant barriers of female silence and silencing, a thing that makes her poetry be revisited and reviewed in our modern time, as people still look at women as weak-willed and inferior, with few qualities to compete with men in human societies. Accordingly, this paper also strives to shed lights on Whitney’s powerful feminist discourse in “Lamentation.”

Keywords: feminist discourse, gender conflict, societal traditions, cultural-gender rules, feminist poetics.