‘A dumme thynge’: The Posthumous Voice as Rhetoric in the Mothers’ Legacies of Dorothy Leigh and Elizabeth Joscelin

Abstract

The more widely known examples of early modern mothers in the proximity of death, on the very brink of absence, are theatrical constructions. Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, condemned, leaves final advice for the physical health of her son and spiritual health of her daughter, asserting her maternal voice beyond the grave. In the final scene of The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare’s Hermione becomes, almost literally, a dumb thing that speaks and, when she speaks, addresses only her daughter. The idea of the mother on the precipice of death – or, in Hermione, seeming to be both living and dead at once – provides a moment of liminality in which the maternal power can linger. For seventeenth-century mother’s legacy writers, this power can be preserved beyond the grave. Rejecting masculine narratives of ‘lateness’ as characteristic of genius when studying writing in the proximity of death, this chapter will instead explore the possibilities of a specifically belated, posthumous style, one that is deeply rhetorical. For Dorothy Leigh and Elizabeth Joscelin, like other mothers’ legacy writers, addressing their child-reader in the future tense posits their voices in a time in which their physical body will no longer exist. In order for the voice to survive, they fashion it into a prosopopoeia, and thus the ‘dumme thynge’ can speak: the dumb dead, the dumb woman.

She ended her prayers, speech, and life together, rendring her soule into the hand of her Redeemer, and leauing behind her unto the world a sweet perfume of good name, and to her onely childe … this Manuell, being a deputed Mother for instruction, and for solace a twinne-like sister, issuing from the same Parent, and seeing the light about the same time.

Thomas Goad, ‘The Approbation’ to Elizabeth Joscelin’s

The Mother’s Legacie to her Unborn Childe, 1624 (sig a6v).