.png)
READ
Wanting Friendship
How did you make your best friendship? Not “how did you meet your best friend,” but what went into that friendship that helped make it so close and lasting? — or perhaps there isn’t a specific person you think of as your “best” friend. In fact, if you feel that you lack close friendship altogether, you’re not alone. Despite social media and its technologies of connection, studies show that loneliness in our society is rising steadily. The 2016 census indicated that a record 28% of Canadian adults live alone, while a survey of Canadian colleges and universities found that 66% of students felt “very lonely” during the previous year. Loneliness has been called a “modern-day epidemic” and a “public health crisis.” Now more than ever, it seems, we feel a lack of deep personal connection. In turning back to the sixteenth century, my work speaks to our society’s need to recapture what friendship at its best can be, and to recall how we can make that kind of friend.
​
My research investigates representations of friendship in Renaissance English literature. Specifically, I work to understand the figures of thought and speech that women used to pursue the highest forms of friendship. The Renaissance was a golden age for friendship, as scholars rediscovered and celebrated the Greco-Roman ideal. Ancient authors like Aristotle and Cicero held that friendship is the noblest human relationship, a connection based on virtue and commitment through which perfect friends share everything. However, the ancients imagine friendship as exclusively masculine, so that the Renaissance women I study found themselves written out of the founding myths of friendship. To claim this discourse for themselves, they needed their own stories and their own ways of performing the best kind of friendship. My research shows that Renaissance women adapted the masculine discourse of friendship through creative uses of memory and imagination to develop their own practice of making friends. For example, Isabella Whitney uses the trope of book as garden to create her own space for seeking friendship, and Mary Wroth plays with the figure of Echo to imagine what a female friend’s voice could be. In doing so, they articulate a more hopeful, open, and flexible model of friendship for themselves and their readers.
​
One of my favourite Renaissance authors writes that stories about perfect friends aren’t ”histories,” but “fictions of what should be.” Through my work I argue that we can approach Renaissance women writers as fellow lonely people, because in their works we read a fiction of what should be: we must relearn what the height of friendship can be, adapt their dynamic practice of friendship to our own time, and rediscover the art of making friends.