Figures of Speech that Speak: An analysis of the early modern cross-dressing discourse in 'Hic-Mulier' and 'Haec-Vir' from a rhetorical and gender perspective

In London in 1620, two controversial pamphlets entered the communication circuit: ‘Hic-Mulier; or, The Man-Woman’ and ‘Haec-Vir; or, The Womanish Man’. The first pamphlet addresses women who dress in masculine clothing and behave like men. The second pamphlet is written in the form of a dialogue, declared on the title page as an answer to ‘Hic-Mulier’, and argues that the only reason women have adopted this behaviour is in fact because men have become too feminine. ‘Haec-Vir’ has as a result of this been considered not only a defence of the cross-dressing woman, but as an account of female liberty. Modern scholarship regarding textual material considering women in a positive light, but pre-dates the modern feminist movement tends to treat these works as proto-feminist defences of the nature of women. While this is in a great number of cases a fair analysis, a rigid perspective of feminist theory may cause scholars to neglect other elements of these texts. This is also the case with ‘Haec-Vir’. First of all, the pamphlets ends by encouraging men and women to return to their traditional gender roles, which diminishes any previous alleged defence of women’s liberty to dress and act how they see fit. Second of all, the pamphlet is immersed in references to classical knowledge and the study of the liberal arts, more specifically trivium – rhetoric, logic, and grammar. These aspects have however been largely neglected by modern scholars, who have instead focused on the pamphlet’s role in the contemporary debates surrounding the role of women. This thesis brings light to the significant complexity of the two pamphlets, but especially ‘Haec-Vir’, showing how the figures of the Man-Woman and the Womanish-Man can function as rhetorical figures of speech. The material aspects of the pamphlet genre indicate that the readership of ‘Hic-Mulier’ and ‘Haec-Vir’ consisted of people from a variety of social and intellectual backgrounds, but the texts contain a number of elements that requires a certain level of education to be understood contextually