Beating of wings: a novel; throwing 'other' voices: the paratextual ventriloquism of Esther Inglis (1571-1624)

The Beating of Wings is a polyphonic novel comprised of multiple interior \nmonologues, inspired by the historical development of the fairy tale as a literary genre. \nCharacters are based upon key writers within this movement: Charles Perrault, Rabbi \nNachman, Flora Annie Steel, and J M Barrie; as well as associated figures, including the \nFranco-Scottish miniaturist and calligrapher, Esther Inglis, the Duchess of Polignac, and \nEdwina Mountbatten. \n \nThe subject of this vocal fugue is an ostensibly authorless fairy tale, The Golden Tree \nand the Moth, handwritten in a seventeenth-century miniature manuscript. Within an \nomniscient frame modelled after the ancient Indian collection of fables, the Panchatantra (circa \n200 B.C.), a succession of first-person narrators chronicle the passage of the fairy tale through \ntime, via the ‘beating wings’ of its woven narrative threads, back to its source. As each narrator \nventriloquises the voice of a previous owner, the matryoshka doll narratives engage \nconcurrently with questions of adaptation and appropriation, narratology, paratext, the \nBarthesian concept of the ‘death of the author’, and literary ventriloquism. Ultimately, the \nnovel aspires to culminate in a fictional rebirth of a defining voice, founded upon gynocritical \ntheory and the silencing of women within the patriarchal canon during the early modern period. \nThis origin of the tale that was neither ‘already written’, nor ‘already read’, is borne of Esther \nInglis (1571-1624). \n \nMy critical essay considers specific theoretical influences of the novel: predominantly \nliterary ventriloquism, as well as Inglis’s corpus. A marginalised figure in the context of early \nmodern women’s writing, prior to recent academic enquiry Inglis was dismissed as a skilled \ncopyist, whose manuscripts were notable only for her virtuoso calligraphic replication of \nreligious verse in miniature. To this discussion, I introduce Gérard Genette’s concept of \nparatext as a viable means of interpretation. I argue that this strand of literary analysis is \nimperative to our understanding of how Inglis sought to materialise an authentic authorial voice \nthrough the paratextual space of her manuscripts, mobilising the trope of literary ventriloquism \nto facilitate her complex construction as a literary icon. By applying Genette’s taxonomy, I \nsuggest that Inglis emerges as an incisive, progressive, and ingenious publisher and author, \nwho successfully manifested Her word upon the patriarchal page during an era when women \nwriters were silenced or forced to write anonymously.

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