The concept of an early modern resilience has never been discussed at MLA, yet the great interest—nearly 20 abstract submissions—in this panel suggests that it is becoming increasingly explored and theorized, particularly by young scholars who are making it a focus of their research. Beyond a single session in 2014 on the veil as a garment “between vulnerability and resilience” (session 709) and a presentation in 2016 on “resilient multilingualism” (Session 412, paper 2), the concept of resilience in any period has been largely absent. Current scholarship is also scarce; an article by Elizabeth Chapman Hoult in Psychosocial Imaginaries (2015) on vulnerability and resilience in Shakespeare is one of the few pieces of scholarship written on the topic. Yet, building from the #metoo movement, the resilience of minority groups within corrupt sociopolitical situations has become a defining factor of our world. Taking a comparative approach, we begin to see the way resilience has also been broadly explored in literature of the period. It is the goal of this panel to bring critical engagement on a new topic to the larger scholarly community, creating a space for it to be discussed and considered.
The panel highlights three different interpretations of early modern resilience in an effort to explore the topic across national borders. Taking a comparative approach, the panel has papers on the early modern English poet Katherine Philips, the autobiography of the Mughal princess Gulbadan Begum, and a comparative analysis of Shakespeare’s Queen Margaret through the work of Euripides and 20th-century Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, in an effort to present the early modern depictions of—and interest in—the resilience of women and ethnic minorities. To encourage discussion between the participants and audience on the new interpretations of an increasingly studied issue, the three panelists will be strictly limited to 15 to 16-minute papers, while the respondent will speak for five minutes, leaving at least 20 minutes for questions and conversation. Since the papers are from a range of disciplines, shorter papers will guarantee that multiple viewpoints can be presented and discussed, while the respondent will help link the papers together for an audience from multiple fields.
The session will begin with Modje Taavon’s comparative and trans-historical analysis of the resilience of Margaret in Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays as exemplified through rage: “Any Sane Man: Female Rage in the Works of Euripides, Shakespeare, and Forough Farrokhzad.” Taavon focuses on Margaret through the 20th-century work of Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad and Euripides’s Medea to analyze how female rage, usually portrayed as monstrous, is actually a manifestation of resilience in the face of marginalization. Taavon argues that it is marginalization (of foreignness, of gender, of lower-class status), not anger, that is used to dehumanize Margaret into a “monster,” and that her resilience is expressed through rage at a world that has taken everything from her.
Moving from British drama to the early modern Mughal empire, Amanda Caterina Leong discusses the resilience of Princess Gulbadan Begum through her autobiography, the Humayunnama. Building on Michel Foucault’s theory of counter-memory, Leong argues that Gulbadan, by combining memory narratives and historical facts in the Humayunnama, conveys how elite Mughal women embodied characteristics of kingship, suggesting a woman’s place in the political realm—a type of “mirror for Princesses” that precedes the “mirror for princes” genre. Through the Humayunnama, Gulbadan presents what is overlooked by dominant Mughal historical narratives: the methods Mughal women covertly and overtly used to participate in various political activities, an integrated matriarchy that significantly contributed to the fabric of Mughal imperial world making. In doing so, Leong argues for the connection between a Mughal woman’s resilience in her place is society and her resistance to it, allowing us to reconsider how resilience and resistance often go hand-in-hand.
The panel closes with a look at a real-world tragedy that early modern women faced: infant mortality. Amanda Zoch, building on the work of Linda Pollack, Patricia Phillippy, Lucinda M. Becker and others, examines the poet Katherine Philips’s poems about the death of her infant son, Hector, in an attempt to conquer her grief and contain her pain within the poem. In doing so, Philips offers her writing as an act of resilience in the face of physical and existential vulnerability, as well as the refusal to have her grief mediated by male voices. Zoch’s paper also offers a counter example both to Margaret’s rage and Gulbadan’s covert political participation, as Philips’s resilience is solitary and generative, allowing for a look at the multiple ways resilience was executed by the marginalized in the period.
By presenting some of the ways “resilience” was understood in early modern England and the Middle East—as well as in ancient Greece and the contemporary Arab world—these three papers, all by young scholars, wish to introduce a critical line of thought on resilience in the period, as well to expand resilience from its associations with #metoo and sexual violence to the broader experiences of the early modern world: high infant mortality rates, losing all through the ignorance of powerful men, and attempts to resist and overcome marginalized positions. It is the hope that, by the end of this session, the audience and panelists will leave with a broader understanding of how actively writers in the period engaged with the resilience—and in many ways the resistance—of those who need to learn how to survive in a world that treats them, and sees them, as less than human.