Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England 2002074544, 9780754630432, 0754630439

Citation preview

PRIVACY, DOMESTICITY, AND WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

For Table 13, where it all began, and Scott, for everything else.

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

Edited by CORINNE S. ABATE

Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2003 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Corinne S. Abate 2003 The editor has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Privacy, domesticity, and women in early modern England 1. English literature - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism 2. Women in literature 3. Domestic relations in literature 4. Privacy in literature I. Abate, Corinne S. 820.9'352042'09031 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Privacy, domesticity, and women in early modern England / edited by Corinne S. Abate. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and criticism. 2. Privacy in literature. 3. Women and literature-England-History-16th century. 4. Women and literature-England-History-17th century. 5. Domestic relations in literature. 6. Personal space in literature. 7. Sex role in literature. 8. Family in literature. 9. Women in literature. 10. Home in literature. I. Abate, Corinne S., 1969PR428.P68 P75 2002 820.9'352042'0903~dc21

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-3043-2 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-138-25791-7 (pbk)

2002074544

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Notes on Contributors

viii

1

Introduction: "indistinguished space" Elizabeth Mazzola and Corinne S. Abate

1

PART I

"Concealing Continents" : SETTINGS FOR INTIMACY AND RESISTANCE

2

With the Skin Side Inside: The Interiors of The Duchess of Malfi Lisa Hopkins

21

Neither a Tamer Nor a Shrew Be: A Defense of Petruchio and Katherine Corinne S. Abate

31

"Wounds still curelesse": Estates of Loss in Mary Wroth's Urania Kathryn Pratt

45

3

4

PART II "Hospitable Favors": RITUALS OF THE HOUSEHOLD 5 6

7

Trafficking in John Ford's The Broken Heart Nancy A. Gutierrez

65

Good Enough to Eat: The Domestic Economy of Woman-Woman Eroticism in Margaret Cavendish and Andrew Marvell Theodora A. Jankowski

83

"Thy weaker Novice to perform thy will": Female Dominion over Male Identity in The Faerie Queene Catherine G. Canino

V

111

vi

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

PART III "Scanted Courtesies": FAMILY DYNAMICS AND DISPOSITIONS 8

"Natural" Boys and "Hard" Stepmothers: Sidney and Elizabeth Elizabeth Mazzola

131

9

Mystical Sororities: The Power of Supernatural Female Narratives in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania Sheila T. Cavanagh

151

Looking for Goneril and Regan Cristina León Alfar

167

10

Index

199

Acknowledgments I am grateful for the efforts of so many who stood by me and helped me complete this arduous journey. My thanks must begin with my beloved parents, Norma and Joe Abate, as well as my brother Jay, his wife Karen, and their gift to us all, my goddaughter Megan, who have buoyed me through this and many other projects in my career. I am also indebted to Linda Woodbridge for putting this project and my role as its editor in perspective; to John Maynard and Barbara Traister, who graciously agreed to read earlier drafts of the introduction; to Carolyn Dever and Kathryn Schwarz, for their unswerving support; and most especially to Naomi Liebler, whose friendship and careful critique of the introduction are most appreciated. Ernie Oilman remains, as he has been throughout my academic career, a treasured voice of wisdom. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Liz Mazzola, whose critical intervention and constant cheerleading helped to keep this project afloat. She, along with the contributors to this collection, are to be commended for their patience, and I thank them for their confidence that this project would (no, really) get published one day. I am further indebted to Meg Abbott, Josh Gaylord, Celest Woo and Lisa G. Weinman for being such attentive and sympathetic listeners. There are many people at Ashgate Publishing, on both sides of the pond, to thank, including Amanda Richardson, Anne Keirby, Kirsten Weissenberg, Ann Newell, and especially Jacqui Cornish. But my most heartfelt appreciation is reserved for Erika Gaffhey. I thank her for always making time for me, for answering each and every one of my unceasing questions, and for approaching me to do this project in the first place. Of course I must give thanks to the proud and select members of Table 13, to whom this book is dedicated. I would not have survived graduate school without them and their individual words of wisdom (as well as mutual love and reverence for The Simpsons). So my greatest appreciation goes to Laurie Marcus-Wade for her unflagging friendship, Kathleen Fitzpatrick for her steadfast support, Steve Brauer for his caring conversations, Aaron Rosenfeld for his invaluable insights, Mike Matto for his advice with all things academic, and Lahney Preston-Matto for being both the progenitor of my dissertation project, from which my fascination with female privacy and domesticity originated, and my very own Pensieve: all of them are en famille in The Classical Sense. I am honored to call them my friends still. And finally, to my long-suffering husband Scott, I give the greatest thanks of all. I am a better person because of him, and I am blessed to have him with which to share my privacy.

vu

Notes on Contributors Corinne S. Abate has published articles on Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Paradise Lost, and Perkin Warbeck. She holds a doctorate from New York University and teaches English at Morristown-Beard School in New Jersey. Cristina León Alfar is Assistant Professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY where she teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, and Women's Studies. She is the author of several articles, and her book, Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy, is forthcoming from the University of Delaware Press (2003). Catherine G. Canino is Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina, Spartanburg, teaching courses in Shakespeare, film, and the Renaissance. She has had articles published in Milton Quarterly and Sixteenth Century Journal. Currently, she is working on a book on topical issues in Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy, as well as an article on Shakespeare and film. Sheila T. Cavanagh is Associate Professor of English and Associated Faculty in Women's Studies and Violence Studies at Emory University. She is the author of Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth1 s Urania (Duquesne University Press, 2001) and Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in the Faerie Queene (Indiana University Press, 1994). She is currently working on a cultural history of the Amy Robsart legend. Nancy A. Gutierrez is Professor of English at Arizona State University. She is coeditor of Major Women Writers of Seventeenth-Century England (1997), and author of "Shall She Famish Then?": Female Food Refusal in Early Modern England (Ashgate, forthcoming). Lisa Hopkins is a Reader in English at Sheffield Hallam University. Her publications include John Ford's Political Theatre (Manchester, 1994), The Shakespearean Marriage: Merry Wives and Heavy Husbands (Macmillan, 1998), and Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life (Macmillan, 2000). She also edits Early Modern Literary Studies. Theodora A. Jankowski is the author of numerous articles on William Shakespeare, John Lyly, John Webster, Thomas Heywood, and Margaret Cavendish, which have appeared in such journals as Shakespeare Studies, Studies in Philology, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, and Renaissance viii

Notes on Contributors

ix

Drama. She is also the author of Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama (University of Illinois Press, 1992) and Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Her most recent work is "Hymeneal Blood, Interchangeable Women, and the Early Modern Marriage Economy in Measure for Measure and AW s Well That Ends Weir in The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare: The Poems, Problem Comedies, and Late Plays, edited by Jean E. Howard and Richard Button (Blackwell, 2002). Elizabeth Mazzola is Associate Professor of English at The City College of New York and is the author of essays on Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Milton, and Mary Stuart, as well as a book on Reformation poetics entitled The Pathology of the English Renaissance: Sacred Remains and Holy Ghosts (Brill, 1998). She is currently working on a study of the poetry and poetics of the Sidney family. Kathryn Pratt is Assistant Professor of English at Auburn University. Her articles on literature and culture of the long eighteenth century have appeared in Studies in Romanticism, SEL, and The Wordsworth Circle.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

Introduction: "indistinguished space" Elizabeth Mazzola and Corinne S. Abate

1. "Indistinguished space": Goneril's Fantasy, Oswald's Pockets, Edgar's Lament In Shakespeare's King Lear, the household is attacked from within and without: a king banishes a daughter, a bastard betrays his father's legitimate heir, and royal sisters turn on each other. But what seems most horrifying, most inexplicable, at least to the male characters in the play, is the reach of female interests and their fierce opposition to both the home and the state. We see this when Edgar goes through the dead servant Oswald's pockets in Act IV and finds a note from Goneril to her lover Edmund. The note exposes the secret of an adulterous love affair, but it also reveals a harder truth - one that Lear had angrily uncovered at the opening of the play - that women's affections and perceptions are never adequate to patriarchal demands, lacking both rational discernment and real feeling. "Let our reciprocal vows be remembered," Goneril has written Edmund. "You have many opportunities to cut him off. If your will want not, time and place will be fruitfully offered. There is nothing done, if he return the conqueror. Then am I the prisoner, and his bed my jail; from the loathed warmth whereof deliver me, and supply the place for your labor. Your (wife, so I would say) affectionate servant. Goneril" (IV.vi.262-69).1 In a way, Goneril's instructions resemble those of Lady Macbeth to Macbeth where husband and wife jointly plan the murder of Duncan; here, though, Goneril petitions her lover for her husband's death. Lady Macbeth's directions, however ruthless, uphold her marriage vow and invite her husband's affection; Goneril's planning, in contrast, repels warmth and voids her pledge to her spouse: indeed, she figures husbands as conquerors and brides as prisoners. "O indistinguished space of woman's will," Edgar exclaims to his father upon reading her note, appalled as much by Goneril's cruel logic as he is by her disloyalty and lust (1.270).2 Edgar's charge is a serious one, but it is a confusing one as well, and scholarly interpretations often muddy already murky waters. In the Arden edition of King Lear, for instance, Kenneth Muir proposes that Edgar is complaining about the chaotic and fearfully unknowable extent of female desire.3 More recently, the editors of the Norton Shakespeare suggest that Edgar's disgust is better understood as a more basic misogyny, the terror inspired by the shadowy regions of the vagina

1

2

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

dentata.4 Yet there is another possibility implied by Edgar's anguished picture of female space, a possibility explored by each of the nine essays collected here. His charge suggests that Goneril's cognitive defect is as grave as her erotic crime for she fails both to see Edmund for the base monster he is and to reckon Albany's virtue correctly. These are obvious distinctions which even the blinded Gloucester can still make. "To distinguish" in Shakespeare's day meant to differentiate or to classify, even to properly punctuate a sentence (OED l.B and C); it was thus an act of faithfully acknowledging or recognizing something and giving reason, in other words, its due. Edgar is not merely lamenting the unnaturalness of female desire or its incoherent expression, then, but also pointing to a clouded region where patriarchal codes and values - the reality of fathers and sons alike - is obscured, a place of unregulated desire as well as anomie.5 The readings supplied by the Arden and Norton editors maintain that women's passions and their bodies are startlingly boundless, yet Edgar may also be suggesting that women simply have no feeling at all. Such a devastating privation of patriarchal reason and sentiment seems obvious in the alleged activities of early-modern widows, witches, female recusants and criminals - in the obstinate, obdurate subculture of femaleness which scholars like Joy Wiltenberg and Frances Dolan have analyzed in two recent historical studies.6 But the contributors to this collection propose that the early-modern subculture of femaleness is more expansive and formative than is typically understood, and that the "indistinguished space" Edgar bemoans is actually a crucial feature of Renaissance culture, terrifying and necessary all at once. The "indistinguished space" Edgar describes is, upon closer inspection, a place where the established order of things has become inconspicuous, a place that is, as a result, unfettered by patriarchal constraints and unschooled by its syntax. In the early modern period, this place is frequently located in domestic settings with their own set of material practices and material goods. It includes segregated, sometimes secluded, places for primarily female activities like nursing, sewing, cooking, and caring for children and the sick.7 These are settings where mother tongues are spoken or sung and where "white" magic and common sense maintain order, often in the absence of patriarchal figures, sometimes without their knowledge. Edgar's lament implies that women - even queens - are unable to discern or to judge as reason dictates, to make the "real" world's ontological commitments, to see and feel things the way men do.8 Clearly, Goneril and Regan threaten Lear's universe, along with the lives of nearly everyone else in Shakespeare's play. Although women's worlds are not always subversive or spiteful, dangerous or disorderly, they are no less threatening for that. The "indistinguished space" Edgar apprehends has its own codes and sentiments, and what Virginia Woolf calls its own "little language unknown to men."9 And if such a space is situated in the sewing room or the nursery, it might also be described as a private or hidden psychological realm, organized by personal habits, around intimate friendships or kinship, and behind "institutional powerlessness."10 Ultimately, though, this space describes a female world inaccessible to male reason, and not entirely interested in it.

Introduction: "indistinguishedspace"

3

2. Privacy, Domesticity, Women's Worlds and Second Worlds Privacy and domesticity comprise overlapping spaces and habits which make up the nearly invisible background of patriarchal reality,11 and scholars have only recently felt confident about approaching those spaces and habits, much less able to make out their hazy outlines.12 But any study of early modern women requires a consideration of privacy and domesticity. The two terms are related but not interchangeable. According to Lawrence Stone, privacy, for instance, is really a development of the eighteenth century, afforded by elite architecture and enlightened thinking.13 In contrast, the aristocratic household of the Renaissance was characterized, he says, "by its lack of well-defined boundaries."14 We want to challenge Stone's influential model and his conclusions, in part because he appears to rely more on concrete structures, be they buildings or printed texts, than on the unstructured and fluid quality of much everyday, female experience.15 Stone describes the eighteenth century country house, for example, as increasingly "closed off from prying neighbors," "with rooms themselves more specialized in function and more numerous, with more bedrooms, studies, closets, and withdrawing chambers... where members of the family could get away from each other."16 But early modern developments of humanism, capitalism, and Protestantism encouraged a more dramatic segregation at an earlier stage by codifying patriarchy17 and thereby confining women more and more to separate spheres. Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker offer yet another reason for middle class women's increasing confinement. "It was only with the social and economic changes beginning in the Elizabethan era that women's relationship to embroidery altered. The Reformation brought the large-scale production of ecclesiastical embroidery to an end, while greater national prosperity led to enormously increased demand for domestic embroidery."18 Parker and Pollock's account reminds us too that social status and class affect both the uses and gendering of the early modern phenomenon of privacy, whereby women's worlds became segregated social settings. Sheila Rowbotham concludes that "[a]s crafts became more intensely capitalisedf,] the wives of larger tradesmen no longer worked in the business... . The external world of work became the sphere of men exclusively, and the internal world of the family and the household was the proper business of the woman."19 There were still other factors which divided the home from the rest of the world and women from men at this time. Alice T. Friedman argues that "while the creation of the country house helped to place domestic work and family life directly under women's control, it also opened up the possibility for an identification of women with the home and for the virtual exclusion of women from public life."20 One consequence of this exclusion, paradoxically, was the increased scrutiny upon women of all classes: more important than anything they did was the male perception of women's inactivity, silence, chastity, and obedience. David Cressy claims that "[e]ven within the recesses of domestic routine, every action, every opinion, was susceptible to external interest, monitoring, or control."21 Well before

4

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

the material apparatus Stone deems necessary for privacy there exist ideological as well as economic supports for a division of labor and a split between cultural spheres. The result was that across class lines, marriage and family became the primary contexts for and rewards of most women's lives.22 With developments like these in mind, Joan Kelly-Gadol once raised the question of whether women even had a Renaissance.23 Scholars have been wrestling with the answer ever since. Despite the fact that the early modern period witnessed a number of powerful women on European thrones, despite the imaginative and religious liberties Protestantism and the printing press afforded women by loosening clerical ties and encouraging the reading of vernacular texts, Renaissance women often found themselves forced into closed quarters as courtly bureaucracy and Protestant theology pitted the outside world against the home. Other divisions of experience were afforded by humanist thinking. Harry Berger has described the efflorescence of imaginative second worlds which offered alternative venues for humanist abstraction and experimentation, like the ones supplied by Hamlet's dumb show or by More's utopia.24 In contrast, some readers have emphasized the narrowness or inadequacy of women's "second" or "green" worlds.25 The essays collected here challenge this assumption by outlining how private and domestic and predominantly female spaces were imagined and employed in the early-modern period so as to produce and reproduce culture.26 That privacy and domesticity could ever provide sites for authority or agency has been nevertheless debated by other critics. More's utopia, for instance, is rational and orderly exactly because it outlaws privacy. But early modern women who found themselves increasingly isolated in the home encountered privacy as both a deprivation and a luxury; and, as the authors explore here, upper class women in particular often transformed their confinement into something useful and necessary, creating protected and even sacred spaces with their own symbols and aesthetic. Shakespeare suggests this himself in his description of Paulina's magical "chapel" in The Winter's Tale, a secret space which houses and preserves the abused Hermione for sixteen years, shielding her from the king's wrath and finally restoring her to her daughter.27 At the same time, however, the early-modern home and family were in many ways microcosmic versions of the state and church, arenas of surveillance where women may have been hidden but never entirely abandoned. Often of course domestic space provided a more intense and more immediate form of patriarchal pressure, serving as a region where women (and children) were most vulnerable to men.28 As Louis Montrose explains, the domestic is "not a place apart from the public sphere so much as it is the nucleus of the social order, the primary site of subjectification."29 This means that the domestic world was not merely an element but often an arm of the patriarchal state even when it was presided over by women, as was the case in many aristocratic households where patriarchs were abroad or at court. Perhaps this helps us understand why Robert Sidney (Philip's younger brother) repeatedly made use of the codes and politics of the domestic sphere when he turned to his wife and his sister for help in obtaining access to Queen

Introduction: "indistinguishedspace"

5

Elizabeth.30 Elizabeth's privy chamber was itself a place of politic concealment, where being private was an "inescapably public gesture."31 Occupied by her female kin as well as by an array of male advisors, Elizabeth's privy chamber should therefore be seen as an intricate center of patronage and gift-giving, influence and envy; as such, it provides a model of privacy which replicates rather than opposes the official public world,32 and a forceful reminder that the private sphere is also created and ordered by a "logic of power."33 The domestic sphere should be viewed through such a logic as well. At the same time, if the ideology surrounding domestic culture and its products was a means to marginalize women, out of the reach or watch of men, women might also find in such space authority to wield alongside opportunity to do so. Recent work, for instance, on manuscript circulation in the early modern period suggests that this was a common practice among upper class women.34 This kind of "indistinguished space" supplied a forum for revising and experimenting and for "fierce marginality"35 - room for women to be subjects, to be "able to think, to desire, to produce meanings in their [own] minds and bodies."36 Moreover, such space often allows women to share this experience, to possess a world in common. Nonetheless, this could be a shadowy region for both women and men. In the domestic sphere women were men's partners or "helpmeets" as well as their subordinates. As Frances Dolan notes, such ambiguity may have spared women beatings even as it allowed them to discipline servants or to endure the abuse of men silently.37 If this ambiguity proved instrumental, it also provoked anxiety as Edgar's exclamation underscores. It is to allay such anxiety that Elizabeth's use of royal power was cloaked at times with the rhetoric of female weakness or conveyed through the harsh demands of a mother.38 An examination of women's private and domestic space also reminds us that these spaces were rarely occupied by a single person; more often they were inhabited by a husband and wife, or by the larger extended family.39 In addition, there are significant class dimensions to keep in mind when establishing the lineaments and values of these spaces. If the poor were rarely alone, with five or six people sometimes sharing a bed, the rich were rarely alone either, with a household of servants in constant view. Moreover, early modern privacy was construed in multiple ways: it might describe what happens in a bedroom or what happens between two lovers; it could also be a site or what Sasha Roberts calls a "controlling act."40 Only rarely was privacy understood or possible as a state of solitude,41 and in these infrequent cases it was typically condemned as something dangerous. We see this suspicion in Georgianna Ziegler's collection of early modern connotations of privacy, including a "closet of villainous secrets," a "brewing place of poisons," a protected place of withdrawal, and a "Priuate Theatre."42 For the wealthy, however, privacy might serve as a luxury or important tool. Margaret Cavendish confesses, for instance, that "though I desire to appear at the best advantage whilst I live in the view of the public world, yet I could most willingly exclude myself"[our emphasis] so as never to see the face of any creature but my lord, as long as I live, enclosing myself like an anchorite."43 What is

6

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

especially striking is the way Cavendish relates the bliss of married life to a hermit's existence and the conditions of exile to those of intense communion. Cavendish's picture of privacy and domesticity is suggestive in other ways. While aristocratic houses were primarily designed for elaborate social and material display, early modern homes in general should be perceived as rich sites of sentiment and tradition, settings as crucial as the physical and cultural settings of court and church and market. The early modern home was at once a margin and a center.44 Paulina's "poor house" (V.iii.6), for instance, is a rival court (with a hidden queen), a chapel, and an art gallery; if it also functions as a hospital for the convalescing Hermione, Leontes sees it as a kind of kitchen too where enchantments are "as lawful as eating" (V.iii.85 ff). No wonder that at the end of The Winter's Tale he instructs Paulina to "[l]ead us from hence" (V.iii.152). The king's commandment is an odd one, instructing Paulina now to rule over him. Leontes suggests not only that Paulina is most familiar with this unfamiliar terrain but that she is also the most accomplished member of the king's circle because of it. 3. "Houshold Gods": The Mastery of the Mistress Unlike Shakespeare's Paulina, the mistress of a Renaissance household might merely be an object among many other domestic objects, a being with power but little real influence, "rational," as Aristotle claimed, but without "authority."45 Katherine Philips describes the Renaissance mistress as a "petty Houshold God" in "An Answer to another perswading a Lady to Marriage": Forbear bold Youth, all's Heaven here, And what you do aver, To other Courtship may appear, Tis Sacriledge to her.46 Yet early modern women's activities often constitute the very worlds which sustain men's activities: early modern women cook, sew, nurse, heal, feed, clean, discipline, sing, and sometimes read and write. The home, in turn, could be a crowded site of subversion, argument, familiarity, contempt, authority and violence, local meanings and unofficial knowledge, improvisation and ritual. As Philips announces in "Friendship's Mystery": "We court our own Captivity" because "'[tjwere banishment to be set free."47 Philips's contradictory picture of "Captivity" is explained, we think, by the difference between what "bold" youths (or less youthful men) might behold in the domestic realm and what women, in private, could make of it. But the contradiction also suggests that, in the course of managing the household, challenging patriarchy could sometimes be a crucial task or merely a by-product of other ones, or it might rarely occur at all. In a recent collection entitled Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, Patricia Fumerton describes a "new" New Historicism which concerns itself with the

Introduction: "indistinguished space "

1

ongoing activities and struggles of daily life.48 We share this concern. We are more interested in quotidian practices than in hierarchical power structures because we see more at stake in the dimensions, symbols, and the ever-changing politics and culture of the household. In addition, we view women's "indistinguished space" as the primary setting where early-modern individuals first learn about and identify themselves and their needs, collude together or reject each other. Furthermore, this space is an important if not the most important setting for (and often origin of) material culture - a repository for recipes, linens, textiles for the home and person, jewels and miniatures - a locus which other scholars, even when they work closely with material culture, do not always emphasize. At the same time, we want to keep in mind that the room of one's own, which Virginia Woolf deemed so necessary to women's writing and thinking, could be in the early modern period both a privilege and something of a cul de sac. If the fictional Judith Shakespeare craved time and space to read and write, Amelia Lanyer and Mary Wroth praise the company of women and celebrate a larger female community of sentiment and values, Lanyer in her 1611 poem "The Description of Cookham," and Wroth in her 1621 prose romance The Countess of Montgomery's Urania.49 All three examples indicate, though, that privacy is the special province of women. Lena Cowen Orlin argues that in the early modern period men of repute "won" invisibility as a badge of virtue and used it to escape scrutiny, whereas women experienced invisibility as a natural condition, something which fostered their obedience and chastity.50 Along the same lines, James Knowles maintains that the early modern closet "was a gendered space": "whereas the female closet tends to retain its fonction as a site of private devotion, and as a storage place for household goods or valuables, for men, the closet functions as an office, muniment room and library."51 As we mention above, women - regardless of class - were rarely alone; more often mistress and servant kept strict company, as did mother and child, or prisoner and jailer, as in the case of Mary Stuart and Bess of Hardwick, who shared privacy in the way that they shared time and pastimes under the supervision of Bess's husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury.52 The prevalence of shared female privacy accounts for the recent emphasis on women's alliances found in a collection entitled Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens, edited by Susan Frye and Karen Robertson. We want to add to their work by observing that women's alliances were accidental and unofficial in comparison with the alliances afforded to men by guilds, parliament, the church and the military.53 The importance and subtlety of female alliances is implied by another one of Margaret Cavendish's reminiscences, where she describes her female relatives at home in the world, solely with each other: As for the pastimes of my sisters when they were in the country, it was to read, work, walk, and discourse with each other... . These harmless recreations they would pass their time away with, for I observed they did seldom make visits, nor never went abroad with strangers in their

8

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England company, but only themselves in a flock together, agreeing so well that there seemed but one mind amongst them.54

Women are not hostages to "indistinguished space" in Cavendish's account, and confinement is anything but oppressive because it permits women the liberty to express themselves and the fellowship to enjoy it. The "indistinguished space" of women often provides intellectual stimulation and common ground, a profound sense of unity and coherent female identity. There are, however, readers who see such female spaces as "unsanctioned" and contrast their fragile pleasures with the sacred privacy once sponsored under Catholicism by monasteries and convents.55 One scholar concludes, for example, that after the Protestant dissolution of monasteries and convents in 1538, remaining sites for female privacy were "small" and "ultimately ineffectual green worlds."56 This seems to us too literal and pessimistic a reading. Women exercised power through kinship, gift-giving, gossip, letters, friendships, and advice. Moreover, as Sasha Roberts claims, "Not only did many women move beyond the 'private sphere' of the home in their lives, but the 'private sphere' itself is a complex domain that we should resist essentialising."57 "A World may be no bigger then two-pence" and yet, as Margaret Cavendish exclaims, "So in this World, may many Worlds more be."58 So many of these worlds of women are traversed in the diary of Lady Margaret Hoby (1599-1605). A typical entry recounts how: After priuat prairs I went about the house and read of the bible and wrought tell dinner time: and, after dinner, it pleased, for a lust punishment to corricte my sinnes, to send me febelnis of stomak and paine of my head, that kept me vpon my bed tell 5:a clock: at which time I arose, haveinge release of my sickness, according to the wonted kindnes of the Lord, who, after he had Let me see how I had offended, that so I might take better heed to my body and soule hereeafter, with a gentle corriction let me feele he was reconsiled To me: at which time I went to priuat praier, and praises, examenation, and so to work tell supper time: which done I hard the Lector and, after I had walked an Hower with Mr Hoby, I wente to bed.59 Lady Hoby's diary painstakingly details her interactions with her body, her God, and the "Hower" with her husband, in a day spent reading, working, praying, resting, eating, aching, walking, listening, repenting, praising, and examining. She recounts no discussions nor any writing, yet in the course of this day and others more or less like it she produces a text that seamlessly weaves inner and outer experience together and brings her domestic world in perfect alignment with her spiritual world. We are interested in all of the activities Lady Hoby describes: not only in women's writings (or in how male authors imagined women's worlds) but in the complex habits of female settings - in the verbal, spatial, and affective

Introduction: "indistinguishedspace"

9

strategies of early-modern women's culture, including private rituals, domestic practices, and erotic attachments peculiar to women's "indistinguished space." Another example which hints at the kind of knowledge and skill valued in these worlds is offered in a 1590 letter which Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, wrote to her sister-in-law Barbara Gamage, Lady Sidney (mother of Lady Mary Wroth), offering Barbara the use of her midwife. "[H]ow yow are guided of a Midwife," Mary writes, "I know not butt I hope well and dowt not... yow shall find," she confides, "her most queit and most carefull, of so young a woman so littell experienced more then woold be thought and as much as yow woold wisshe and shall be nesesary."60 Mary's letter combines sisterly confession with respectful distance, and praises a midwife for a combination of silence, expertise, and limited experience in the world at large. As the excerpts from Margaret Hoby's diary and Mary Herbert's letter also demonstrate, not all women's writing in the early modern period is openly subversive.61 Suzanne Trill has argued that scholars run the risk of distorting the picture of women's literary history and of marginalizing other significant women's texts by concentrating on subversive female writings. We want to heed her warning. The essays gathered here attempt to offer a broader picture of female culture and of female authority in seeking to explore the confines of women's private and domestic space. They offer studies of wives and sisters, mothers and witches, queens and nursemaids, authors and icons, engaged in a variety of cultural practices including, but not limited to, writing, all of which testify to the manifold opportunities privacy and domesticity afforded women. In addition, the voices represented in this collection employ a range of critical approaches, including feminist, historical, and psychoanalytic, because women's "indistinguished space" is at once so rich and perplexing, so elusive and far-reaching.

* **

The essays are grouped into three categories, each of which borrows its title from Shakespeare's Lear, a locus classicus of sorts for our readings of early modern privacy, domesticity, and women's "indistinguished space." The first section, '"Concealing Continents': Settings for Intimacy and Resistance," explores Lear's phrase (III.ii.58) in terms of physical or philosophical settings typically assigned to women, the intimate spaces of bedchambers or marriages or the dark interiors of the body. Lisa Hopkins's essay analyzes the haunting interiors of the woman's body in The Duchess ofMalfi. Represented in alabaster at her husband's tomb, fetishized by Ferdinand, concealed by elaborate fashions, the Duchess's body ultimately resists patriarchal classification when her voice and spirit prove to have survived independently of it. Corinne S. Abate's account of The Taming of the Shrew takes up another realm for female agency, suggesting that the private and domestic spaces offered by marriage are privileged settings where husband and wife alike can escape patriarchal restriction, discover mutuality, and educate each other.

10

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

Kathryn Pratt's essay on Mary Wroth's Urania seeks to bridge a female private sphere with the larger public world which it repudiates and, at the same time, also mirrors. Pratt explores how trees signify the "domain of desire" in Wroth's romance because passion is bound up with possession, specifically in ownership of land. According to Pratt, Wroth represents the precariousness of self-ownership in the Jacobean society which deprived its female members of legal rights to self and property. The second section, "'Hospitable Favors': Rituals of the Household," focuses on the customary practices and habits of the household or family to which Gloucester alludes (III.vii.40) as well as on the opportunities for resistance or negotiation which such practices allowed women. Nancy A. Gutierrez's analysis of John Ford's The Broken Heart considers how the patriarchal custom of arranged marriage cloaks a set of conflicts which eventually divide households, tear apart the state, and nearly threaten to divide women's minds from their bodies. Theodora A. Jankowski looks at another household practice which has the potential for erotic transfer between women. Analyzing the poetry of Andrew Marvell and Margaret Cavendish, Jankowski explores the near-invisibility of female homoeroticism and suggests that both poets regard cooking as a highly erotic activity which challenges patriarchy. There were still other ways in which women threatened both the state and the family, as Catherine G. Canino proposes in her essay on The Faerie Queene. Considering female sovereignty over the existence and mutability of male identity in Book One of Spenser's poem, Canino investigates how this phenomenon is related to English anxiety over Elizabeth's choice of heir. To be sure, female practices sometimes more subtly interfered with patriarchal designs. The third section, '"Scanted Courtesies': Family Dynamics and Dispositions" explores what can happen between individuals in the predominantly female worlds of privacy and domesticity, taking up Kent's phrase (III.ii.67) to examine the relations and affections which flourish or languish in so-called "second" worlds, shadowy regions or "indistinguished spaces" of women's will and wit. Elizabeth Mazzola investigates the delicate balance of power in Elizabeth's dealings with her courtiers. Her essay on Sidney and Elizabeth analyzes how many of the Queen's admirers advanced their careers through the juvenilia of tournaments, cautious innovations of love poetry and youthful pastoral songs, and claims that Sidney sought to rewrite the rules of this relation by reinventing infantile power, aiming to win the Queen's maternal love without remaining her child. Sheila T. Cavanagh's study of Wroth's Urania analyzes how female characters frequently alter the course of their male cohorts' lives through otherworldly interventions, thereby establishing a mystical arena wherein they exert considerable influence over men. Cristina León Alfar's account of Lear provides a link to Mazzola's treatment of Renaissance fictions of the nursery. She rereads the brutality of Goneril and Regan's actions as symptomatic of the patrilineal structures of power to which they must accommodate themselves. Rather than viewing them as spoiled or ungrateful daughters, Alfar claims the sisters should be seen as actively rejecting feminine "morality" in order to adapt to their father's harsh model.

Introduction: "indistinguished space "

11

As is clear, these essays build upon the work of many earlier studies of earlymodern women and practices. Yet by suggesting the outlines of the obscure region Edgar fearfully points to - the "indistinguished space" of privacy and domesticity, of women's wit and will - this volume also opens up a new area of inquiry, one that we hope prompts further study and debate. NOTES 1. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Penguin, 1999). 2. In the quarto Edgar instead faults woman's "indistinguished wit," a complaint which seems to blame female expression or exertion more than women's psychological makeup or internal desires. 3. See King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1982), 175. 4. Stephen Greenblatt suggests that "will," like "hell," "might also refer to a woman's genitals." The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997), 2540. 5. For a description of the "freedom from constraints of the patriarchal conceptual system" supplied by women's conditions of "exile" (a "freedom" men instead construe as a "fall" into incoherence), see Marilyn Frye, "To Be and Be Seen: The Politics of Reality," in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1983), 152-74, 152, 154. Josephine Donovan summarizes the post-medieval world view in terms of "a division between the rational and the non-rational according to which rational calculation governs the public world... . On the other hand is the nonrational sphere, the world of women." Quoted by Madeline H. Caviness, "Patron or Matron?: A Capetian Bridge and a Vade Mecum for Her Marriage Bed," in Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism, ed. Nancy F. Partner (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1993), 31-60, 39 n38. 6. Joy Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women and female power in the street literature of early modern England and Germany (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992); and Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550-1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). See also Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, eds. Carole Levin and Patricia A. Sullivan (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995); Susan D. Amussen, "Gender, Family, and the Social Order, 15601725," in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, eds. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 196-217; Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-century print culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). For examinations of the particular economic and ideological threats posed by widows, see Theodora A. Jankowski, Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 35-36; and Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 165. 7. An account of early-modern maternal practices is offered by the recent Maternal Measures: Figuring caregiving in the early modern period, eds. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 8. Frye, "To Be and Be Seen: The Politics of Reality," 161. 9. Virginia Woolf, quoted by Jane Marcus, "Still Practice, A/Wrested Alphabet: Toward a Feminist Aesthetic," in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari

12

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 78-97, 80. As Gary F. Waller puts it, "[hjowever marginalized and trivialized (and therefore permitted to women)," the relative autonomy of the domestic sphere "opens a space for struggle and opposition." See "Struggling into Discourse: The Emergence of Renaissance Women's Writing," in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985), 238-56, 251. 10. We take this phrase from Elizabeth A. Brown's discussion in '"Companion Me with My Mistress': Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, and Their Waiting Women," in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England, eds. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131-45, 133. 11. Frye, "To Be and Be Seen: The Politics of Reality," 167. 12. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1989), Jürgen Habermas maintains that the modern division between public and private takes shape only in the eighteenth century. Renaissance scholars have tended to argue for an earlier split; see, for instance, Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 16-78, 184-89; and Orest Ranum, "The Refuges of Intimacy," in Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, vol. 3 of A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Ariès, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 207-63. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, the editors of Gloriana's Face: Women, Public and Private in the English Renaissance (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), argue for a dichotomy between the "private" Elizabethan woman and her more "public" Caroline successor. 13. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977). Sasha Roberts would seem to uphold Stone's insistence on the material requirements for privacy, although she claims they are already to be found in Renaissance culture in "the creation of withdrawn, hidden, personal, or secure spaces." See her "Shakespeare 'creepes into the womens closets about bedtime': women reading in a room of their own," in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580—1690, ed. Gordon McMullan (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 30-63, 33. In proposing that "The Elizabethan aristocracy... never really arrived at an inner, private center in passing through the long corridor of outer, public 'rooms,'" Patricia Fumerton, too, might seem to agree with Stone, but only because she defines privacy as affording "self-revelation" rather than, more simply, withdrawal. See her "'Secret' Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets," Representations 15 (1996): 57-97, 65. 14. Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 6. John Bold pushes back Stone's starting date, stating that "the seventeenth century was one of the most crucial periods of innovation and evolution in English domestic architecture and an understanding of the development of the concept of privacy, and the ways in which architecture sought to accommodate it, is fundamental to its assessment and to the charting of its development over the next two hundred years." See "Privacy and the Plan," in English Architecture Public and Private, eds. John Bold and Edward Chaney (London: The Hambledon Press, 1993), 107-19, 108. Additional readings of Renaissance architecture, often with a greater concern for female spaces, are supplied by Georgianna Ziegler, "My lady's chamber: female space, female chastity in Shakespeare," Textual Practice 4, no. 1 (1990): 73-100, 74; Fumerton, "'Secret' Arts," 60-62; and Roberts, "Shakespeare 'creepes'," 31-32. 15. Other accounts of this space are offered by Aries in Passions of the Renaissance, 111; and by Orlin, Elizabethan Households: An Anthology (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995), 3-5. See also Orlin's more recent Material London, ca. 1600

Introduction: "indistinguishedspace"

13

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), especially the essay by Alice T. Friedman, "Inside/Out: Women, Domesticity, and the Pleasures of the City," 232-50. Other useful accounts are supplied by Viviana Comensoli, "HouseholdBusiness": Domestic Plays of Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); and Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997), 26-29. 16. Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 8. 17. For a discussion of how Renaissance "husbandry" was similarly codified, see Lorna Hutson, The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth Century England (London: Routledge, 1994). 18. Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 60. See also Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1984); Susan Cahn, Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women's Work in England 1500—1660 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 19. Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses, 60. They quote Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution: a history of women and revolution in the modern world (London: Allen Lane, 1972), 26. See also Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories (New York: Routledge, 1999). To be sure, though, this development can be interpreted in a number of ways; Retha Warnicke comments, for instance, that "the word private did not mean simply that [women] were confined to their households," because women were given "considerable authority" running and organizing that space. "Private and Public: The Boundaries of Women's Lives in Early Stuart England," in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, ed. Jean R. Brink (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Inc., 1993), 123^0, 134. 20. Roberts, "Shakespeare 'creepes'," 56, quotes from Alice T. Friedman, House and Household in Elizabethan England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 21. David Cressy, "Response: Private Lives, Public Performance, and Rites of Passage," in Attending to Women in Early Modern England, eds. Betty S. Travitsky and Adèle F. Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 187-97, 187. Perhaps the "wifehood" which Chaucer had earlier "established]... as an indispensable part of his social totality" would become an indispensable feature of the early-modern world in general: "Even when practiced behind closed doors, wifehood remains an art that is public and political, rather than private and individual." See David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 82. 22. See Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 28; and Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992), 290-99. 23. Joan Kelly-Gadol, "Did Women have a Renaissance?" in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, eds. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Stuard, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 175-201. 24. Harry Berger, Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance FictionMaking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 25. See Maureen Connolly McFeely, "This day my sister should the cloister enter': The Convent as Refuge in Measure for Measure," in Subjects on the World's Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, eds. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 200-16. 26. In the worlds of women, claims Marcus in "Still Practice, A/Wrested Alphabet," art and work are often synonymous because a woman's "model of art" is "rooted in the material

14

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

base of female experience" "with repetition and dailiness at the heart of it, with the teaching of other women, the patient craft of one's cultural heritage as the object of it." This is a "female poetic," according to Marcus, "which women live and accept. Penelope's art is work, as women cook food that is eaten, weave cloth that is worn, clean houses that are dirtied. Transformation, rather than permanence, is at the heart of this aesthetic" (84—85). More extensive focus on the work of Renaissance women in particular is provided by Merry Wiesner, "Women and the creation of culture," in Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Merry E. Wiesner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 146-75; Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); and Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century. 27. See McFeely, "The Convent as Refuge," 201; and Elizabeth Mazzola, '"Slippery Wives' and Other Missing Persons: Disappearing Acts in The Winter's Tale" Women's Studies 24 (1995): 219-27. McFeely interestingly reminds us that "monasteries such as Greyfriars, Whitefriars, and Blackfriars, had been appropriated as playhouses as early as 1576" (201). The imperative to expose these places of withdrawal - on a regular basis must have been a powerful one. 28. Catharine MacKinnon offers an impassioned warning about the dangers of private space as a region where "male force is invisible": "The world without state intervention, the world of state inaction, is the free world," she argues, "[f]or those who use and abuse women and children." See her Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 191, 187. The deprivations of the private sphere often work two ways in Shakespeare's plays. Men's power over women, Coppélia Kahn argues, "also makes them vulnerable to women." While patriarchy "gives men control over women," Kahn writes, "it also makes them dependent on women indirectly and overtly for the validation of their manhood"; see Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 17. 29. Louis Montrose, "Spenser's domestic domain: poetry, property, and the Early Modern Subject," in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, eds. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 83-130, 96. 30. For a fuller account, see Millicent V. Hay, The Life of Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, 1563-1626 (Washington, DC: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1984). 31. See James Knowles, '"Infinite Riches in a Little Room': Marlowe and the Aesthetics of the Closet," in Renaissance Configurations, 3-29, 10. 32. See Brown, "Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, and Their Waiting Women," for the exploration of the dimensions of Elizabeth's privy chamber; for the nuances of and calculations behind Elizabethan gift-giving, see Lisa Klein, "Your Humble Handmaid: Elizabethan Gifts of Needlework," Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997): 459-93. 33. Stuart Hall's phrase is quoted by Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe 1540-1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 4. 34. See Margaret Ezell, "Women Writers: Patterns of Manuscript Circulation and Publication," in The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). Similarly, Cécile M. Jagodzinski contends that as more members of the middle class had access to books, more of them were awakened to the possibility of constructing themselves as private individuals; indeed, the woman reader becomes for Jagodzinski "the private person par excellence." Privacy and

Introduction: "indistinguishedspace"

15

Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 18. 35. Waller, "Struggling," 255. 36. Roberts, "Shakespeare 'creepes'," quotes Mary Ellen Lamb's definition, 47. 37. Frances E. Dolan, "Household Chastisements: Gender, Authority, and 'Domestic' Violence," in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, eds. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 204-25. See also Lorna Hutson, "The Housewife and the Humanists," in Feminism and Renaissance Studies, ed. Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 82-105. 38. See Carole Levin, "The heart and stomach of a king": Elizabeth I and the politics of sex and power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); and Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The competition for representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 39. See Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in England', Mazzola, "Marrying Medusa: Spenser's Epithalamion and Renaissance Reconstructions of Female Privacy," Genre 25 (1992): 193-210; Knowles, "Aesthetics of the Closet"; and Ziegler, "My lady's chamber," 73. Stone's reading of privacy and the affections it fostered (or denied) is controversial, however; other scholars challenge Stone's claim that the early-modern family was typically large and devoid of close feeling, as Peter Laslett and Richard Wall argue in Household and family in past time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). The debate over the sentiments and kin structures of the Renaissance family grows even more complex and rich with more recent scholarship on women. See, for instance, Gary F. Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993). 40. Roberts, "Shakespeare 'creepes'," 33. 4L Anne Ferry points out in fact that in sixteenth-century living arrangements, "interludes of solitude were exceptional, occasional, usually brief, and subject to interruption unless elaborately protected" in The "Inward" Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 48. 42. Ziegler, "My lady's chamber," 85, 86. 43. Excerpt from Margaret Lucas Cavendish, A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life (1656), originally appended to her Life of William Cavendish, and rpt. in Female and Male Voices in Early Modern England, eds. Betty S. Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 10. 44. In "Spenser's domestic domain," Montrose emphasizes the home's imaginative separation from the centers provided by court, church, patron or lord's house, 97. 45. Quoted by Marilyn Frye, "To Be and Be Seen: The Politics of Reality," 165. For additional background on classical notions about private and public spheres, see Susan Miller Okin, "Philosopher Queens and Private Wives: Plato on Women and the Family," in Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, eds. Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1991), 11-31. 46. Katherine Philips, "An Answer." The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 15091659, éd. H.R. Woudhuysen (New York: Penguin, 1993), 378. 47. Philips, "Friendship's Mystery, To My Dearest Lucasia" The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, 517-18. 48. Fumerton, "Introduction: A New New Historicism," 1-17. 49. "[T]he muses gave their full consent" at Margaret Clifford's country house where, Lanyer tells us, "many a learned book was read and scanned." The Countess of Montgomery's Urania is replete with similar testimony; Pamphilia, for example, confesses

16

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

to the departing Antissia: "For you gone, who shall I have the blessing to converse withall? With whom, or to whom may I freely say my minde? To whom speake my paine? To whom waile my misfortunes?" The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (New York: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995), 145. Hero Chalmers explores royalist reformulations of female communities in "The Politics of Feminine Retreat in Margaret Cavendish's The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure" Women's Writing: the Elizabethan to Victorian period 6, no. 1 (1999): 81-94. 50. Orlin, "Three Ways to be Invisible in the Renaissance: Sex, Reputation, and Stitchery," in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, 183-203. 51. Knowles, "Aesthetics of the Closet," 9; see also Ronald Huebert's discussions of early modern closets in "The Gendering of Privacy," The Seventeenth Century 16, no. 1 (2001): 37-67, 41. Such a gendering of privacy can sometimes, however, lead to reductive conclusions: Huebert deduces, for example, that in the early modern period "privacy is a cage for the woman, a refuge for the man" (37). 52. See also Huebert, "The Gendering of Privacy," 41. For details on Mary and Bess's pastimes, see Margaret Swain, The Needlework of Mary, Queen of Scots (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1971). Even these activities are not always innocent: as Carole McKewin claims, "[p]rivate conversations between women in Shakespeare's plays provide opportunities for self-expression, adjustment to social codes, release, relief, rebellion, and transformation." See her "Counsels of Gall and Grace: Intimate Conversations between Women in Shakespeare's Plays," in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carole Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 117-32, 129. See also Corinne S. Abate, '"Nerissa teaches me what to believe': Portia's Wifely Empowerment in The Merchant of Venice" in The Merchant of Venice: Critical Essays, eds. John Mahon and Ellen Mahon (New York: Routledge, 2002), 283304. Mihoko Suzuki similarly reminds us of the possibility for revolt in such settings. Examining how the raped and mutilated Philomela tells her sister about her attacker in a tapestry and, then, how sisters feed the rapist his son's body, Suzuki writes: "Silence, through apparently successfully enforced on women, does not prevent them from striking back by means of seemingly innocuous (and feminine) arts - embroidery and cooking." See her "Royalist Women's Embroidery: Subjectivity, History, Ideology," presented at the 1999 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America at UCLA. Jane Marcus also discusses the eloquence of Philomela's silence in "Still Practice, A/Wrested Alphabet," 79-81. 53. See Frye and Robertson, "Introduction," Maids and Mistresses, 3-17. 54. Rpt. in Travitsky and Prescott, Female and Male Voices in Early Modern England, 6-7. 55. As Antonio Perez-Romero claims, "convents gave women freedom by allowing them to participate in areas they were not allowed to enter in the outside world. ...women could exercise authority over others... use their administrative talents. They could teach others. They could undertake small economic operations and exploit entrepreneurial skills. '"Get Thee to a Nunnery': Women's Empowerment in Golden Age Spain," Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 75, no. 3 (1998): 293-316, 294. 56. See McFeely, "The Convent as Refuge," 201. McFeely includes Paulina's chapel in her discussion, but emphasizes its limited usefulness. For a related discussion, see Heather Dubrow, who explores how early modern conceptions of the home were affected by religious and political persecution of recusants in Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Introduction: "indistinguished space "

17

57. Roberts, "Shakespeare 'creepes'," 56. A recent collection of essays entitled Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture, ed. Mary E. Burke, et al. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000) examines the way women's writings challenge exactly such "essentialising." 58. Cavendish, "Of many Worlds in this World.11 The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509-1659, 479. For a discussion of Cavendish's belief that "fancy is not merely contemplation's disposable by-product but, instead... one of its essential components," see Rosemary Kegl, "The world I have made': Margaret Cavendish, feminism, and the BlazingWorld" in Feminist readings of early modern culture: Emerging Subjects, eds. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 119-41, 127. 59. The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady. The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599— 1605, ed. Joanna Moody (Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, Ltd., 1998), 7. 60. The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, vol. 1, eds. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 286. 61. Juliet Fleming cautions against too narrow a focus on an "elusive critical chimera," the "oppositional voice;" women's writings do not always contain critiques of patriarchy, Fleming reminds us, and the ones we find are not always serious critiques (203). See her review of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski's Writing Women in Jacobean England (1993) in The Huntington Library Quarterly 57 (1994): 199-204, 200-1. Suzanne Trill likewise comments on the strained emphasis on "resistance" in recent readings of Mary Sidney in "Spectres and Sisters: Mary Sidney and the 'Perennial Puzzle' of Renaissance Women's Writing," in Renaissance Configurations, 191-211, 198.

This page intentionally left blank

PARTI "Concealing Continents": SETTINGS FOR INTIMACY AND RESISTANCE

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 2

With the Skin Side Inside: The Interiors of The Duchess ofMalfi Lisa Hopkins

The Duchess ofMalfi is a play rich in images of interiors. In his first exchange with Delio, Antonio insistently speaks about the insides of things. He says of Bosola, this foul melancholy Will poison all his goodness, for - I'll tell you If too immoderate sleep be truly said To be an inward rust unto the soul, It then doth follow want of action Breeds all black malcontents, and their close rearing, Like moths in cloth, do hurt for want of wearing.1 Antonio's language here centers on inner qualities like goodness, that quintessence of interiority, the soul, the word "inward," and an image of clothes folded away in a drawer or cupboard. Not only is he immediately established as a man whose vision can penetrate past superficial outsides and probe what lies deeper, as when he later says directly to Bosola "I do understand your inside" (II.i.82), but also we are firmly encouraged to subscribe to a belief in the existence of interiority and to regard it as relevant to this play. This is further underlined when Delio says, "you promis'd me/ To make me the partaker of the natures/ Of some of your great courtiers" (I.i.83-85), and the motif of interiority surfaces again in Antonio's assertion that "as out of the Grecian horse issued many famous princes, so out of brave horsemanship, arise the first sparks of growing resolution, that raise the mind to noble action" (Li. 143-46). We continue to hear of interiors, as in Delio's bizarre description of Count Malateste, "He has worn gunpowder in's hollow tooth/ For the toothache" (III.ii. 13-14). Offered a ring, Antonio probes within it: "There is a saucy, and ambitious devil/ Is dancing in this circle" (I.i.412-13). The Duchess herself becomes, in Antonio's formulation, a sort of paradigmatic interior in which the absolute consonance between inside and outside means that her body functions not only as a window to her soul but also as a mirror:2 "Let all sweet ladies break their flatt'ring glasses,/ And dress themselves in her" (I.i.204-5). The Duchess certainly 21

22

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

shows herself acutely aware of interiors, saying to Carióla "Leave me: but place thyself behind the arras" (I.i.357) and telling Antonio:

Sir, This goodly roof of yours is too low built, I cannot stand upright in't, nor discourse, Without I raise it higher: raise yourself, Or if you please, my hand to help you: so. (I.i.415-19) She also advises him, If you will know where breathes a complete man I speak it without flattery - turn your eyes And progress through yourself. (I.i.435-37) To the Duchess, interiors represent safety: "All discord, without this circumference,/ Is only to be pitied, and not fear'd" (I.i.469-70). Indeed she ceases to look outside at all, saying "I now am blind" (I.i.494) and "O, let me shroud my blushes in your bosom" (I.i.502). In danger, she flies to Loreto, where the supposed House of the Virgin Mary, having apparently been carried there by angels, holds out hope of a reassuring domesticity. It is therefore completely characteristic of the family formed by the Duchess both that danger should be imaged in terms of the outside, as when Antonio says of his wife in labor that "She's expos'd/ Unto the worst of torture, pain, and fear" (II.ii.66-67), with its telling image of ejcposure, and that safety should be sought in a retreat to interiors: Ant. Gentlemen, We have lost much plate you know; and but this evening Jewels, to the value of four thousand ducats Are missing in the duchess' cabinet Are the gates shut? Off. Yes. Ant. Tis the duchess* pleasure Each officer be lock'd into his chamber Till the sun-rising; and to send the keys Of all their chests, and of their outward doors, Into her bedchamber - she is very sick. (II.ii.50-59) Gates, doors and chests must all be shut and locked before either Antonio or the Duchess can begin to feel secure. Even Carióla expresses her belief in the sacred inviolability of interiority when she responds to Antonio's threat to stab her in the

The Interiors o/The Duchess of Malfi

23

mistaken belief that she has betrayed them to Ferdinand, "Pray sir, do: and when/ That you have cleft my heart, you shall read there/ Mine innocence" (IILii. 144^6). Even towards the end of the play, Antonio still retains a touching faith in what can be achieved by an appeal to interiority, saying to Delio of the Cardinal: I have got Private access to his chamber, and intend To visit him, about the mid of night, As once his brother did our noble duchess. It may be that the sudden apprehension Of danger - for I'll go in mine own shape When he shall see it fraught with love and duty, May draw the poison out of him, and work A friendly reconcilement. (V.ii.64-72) Bosola also speaks much of interiors; indeed Celia Daileader speaks of him as governed by a violent "fantasy of visual penetration."3 He talks of "th' inside of my heart" (III.ii.302), of graves and cabinets (III.ii.291-96), and mice in cat's ears (IV.ii.137-39), and often images interiority with a characteristic quirkiness: There was a lady in France, that having had the smallpox, flayed the skin off her face to make it more level; and whereas before she looked like a nutmeg-grater, after she resembled an abortive hedgehog. (II.i.26-29) Here, what Bosola wants to probe are specifically female mysteries, and indeed the Old Lady concedes, "It seems you are well acquainted with my closet" (II.i.34). A similar impulse drives his efforts to probe the secrets of the Duchess's most protected interior space, her womb: I observe our duchess Is sick o'days, she pukes, her stomach seethes, The fins of her eyelids look most teeming blue, She wanes i'th'cheek, and waxes fat i'th'flank; And (contrary to our Italian fashion) Wears a loose-body'd gown - there's somewhat in't! I have a trick may chance discover it. (II.i.63-69) There's "somewhat in't," but what it is defies discovery. The image of seeing into the womb is even more strongly stated shortly afterwards: A whirlwind strike off these bawd farthingales, For, but for that, and the loose-body'd gown, I should have discover'd apparently The young springal cutting a caper in her belly. (II.i.148-51)

24

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

And the idea of the sexualized nature of interiority is continued with the tale of the Switzer alleged to have been found in the duchess's chamber with the "pistol in his cod-piece" (II.ii.36-41), as again with the obvious sexual symbolism of Ferdinand's Would I could be one, That I might toss her palace 'bout her ears, Root up her goodly forests, blast her meads, And lay her general territory as waste As she hath done her honours. (Il.iv. 17-21) It is richly appropriate, moreover, that it is the lustful Julia's secreting of Bosola in her cabinet (V.ii.217) which leads directly to her death. Bosola also, however, remembers that men have interiors too. He returns the compliment of character analysis paid him by Antonio when he assures the Duchess that the latter was a soldier that thought it As beastly to know his own value too little As devilish to acknowledge it too much: Both his virtue and form deserv'd a far better fortune. His discourse rather delighted to judge itself, than show itself. His breast was fill'd with all perfection, And yet it seem'd a private whisp'ring-room, It made so little noise oft. (III.ii.251-58) He asks "What thing is in this outward form of man/ To be belov'd?" (II.i.45^6), to which the implicit answer is that any cause for such love can therefore only lie in internal qualities, and shortly afterwards he broadens the terms of his references to transcend gender altogether: all our fear Nay, all our terror - is lest our physician Should put us in the ground, to be made sweet. (II.i.58-60) Here, too, the image of interiority functions ultimately as a recuperative one, in which that is inside will make us "sweet." Most importantly, there is a continuing emphasis on the interior make-up of the Duchess's two brothers, and both Antonio and Bosola pronounce on the subject. Delio wishes particularly to be informed of the internal qualities of the Cardinal. Delio. Now, sir, your promise: what's that cardinal? I mean his temper? they say he's a brave fellow, Will play his five thousand crowns at tennis, dance,

The Interiors of The Duchess of Malfí

25

Court ladies, and one that hath fought single combats. Ant. Some such flashes superficially hang on him, for form; but observe his inward character: - he is a melancholy churchman; the spring in his face is nothing but the engendering of toads. (Li. 152-59) Delio is careful to qualify his initial query "what's that cardinal?" with "I mean his temper," specifically asserting his belief in the possibility of a lack of congruity between inside and outside, and Antonio replies that this is indeed so, both in the Cardinal's case and in that of his brother, Ferdinand, since "What appears in him mirth, is merely outside" (Li. 170), whereupon Delio offers another striking image of what lies beneath surfaces: Then the law to him Is like a foul black cobweb to a spider He makes it his dwelling, and a prison To entangle those shall feed him. (Li. 177-80) Moreover, Bosola too discusses what lurks behind the façades of the Cardinal and his brother: I have known many travel far for it, and yet return as arrant knaves as they went forth, because they carried themselves always along with them; - Are you gone? Some fellows, they say, are possessed with the devil, but this great fellow were able to possess the greatest devil, and make him worse. (I.i.42-47) Bosola too speaks of interiors here, of the self that is within, but his language also has the effect of leaving Ferdinand's own interior oddly opaque; what we hear is not of how any devil is inside him, but how he is inside a devil. Bosola's further elaboration of the Aragonian brothers' character equally fails to illuminate what in fact lies within: He, and his brother, are like plum-trees, that grow crooked over standing pools; they are rich, and o'erladen with fruit, but none but crows, pies, and caterpillars feed on them. (I.i.49-52) We see them only from outside; we can only guess at what is emblematized by that crooked growth. It is in fact richly appropriate that Bosola should fail to convey any real sense of the Aragonian brethren's interiority, for they themselves do not believe that they have any, and cultivate that which they also think lacks it.4 Ferdinand exclaims,

26

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

Damn her! that body of hers, While that my blood ran pure in't, was more worth Than that which thou wouldst comfort, call'd a soul (IV.i.121-23) Earlier, he has told his sister, For they whose faces do belie their hearts Are witches, ere they arrive at twenty years Ay: and give the devil suck. Duch. This is terrible good counsel: Ferd. Hypocrisy is woven of a fine small thread, Subtler than Vulcan's engine: yet, believ't, Your darkest actions - nay, your privat'st thoughts Will come to light. (I.i.309-16) He fiercely resents any idea that the face might not faithfully mirror the heart, but is sure that such a state of affairs could never continue: things cannot be kept hidden. His belief that all interiors can be made transparent is also illustrated in his injunction to Bosola that "I give you that/ To live i'th'court, here; and observe the duchess" (I.i.251-52) because "this will gain/ Access to private lodgings" (I.i.28081). The Cardinal, by contrast, does believe that some secrets can be kept, telling his brother "Be sure you entertain that Bosola/ For your intelligence: I would not be seen in't" (I.i.224-25), and he is also able to parrot the language of interiority, as Julia reveals when she reminds him that You told me of a piteous wound i'th'heart, And a sick liver, when you woo'd me first, And spake like one in physic. (II.iv.37-39) But he too believes, like Ferdinand, that he can penetrate the secrets of hearts, and women's hearts in particular. He tells Julia, "You fear/ My constancy, because you have approv'd/ Those giddy and wild turnings in yourself (Il.iv. 10-12). He also believes that his own interior qualities can be effectively rendered exterior: "There is a kind of pity in mine eye,/ I'll give it to my handkercher" (II.v.27-28). As the play progresses, however, it is interiority which returns to haunt both the Aragonian brethren. Ferdinand finds his rage turned strangely inwards when he tells the Cardinal, "I could kill her now,/ In you, or in myself (II.v.63-64), and his hell is notably characterized in terms of enclosure when he rants, I would have their bodies Burnt in a coal-pit, with the ventage stopp'd. That their curs'd smoke might not ascend to heaven:

The Interiors o/The Duchess of Malfí

27

Or dip the sheets they lie in, in pitch or sulphur, Wrap them in't, and then light them like a match; Or else to boil their bastard to a cullis, And give't his lecherous father, to renew The sin of his back. (II.v.66-73) Onto images of the enclosed pit crowd those of a Thyestean banquet, with the parent monstrously reincorporating the child into the bodily interior from which they originated. Ferdinand continues to think in terms of immuring and imprisoning his sister and her husband: And for thee, vile woman, If thou do wish thy lecher may grow old In thy embracements, I would have thee build Such a room for him as our anchorites To holier use inhabit: let not the sun Shine on him, till he's dead; let dogs and monkeys Only converse with him, and such dumb things To whom nature denies use to sound his name; Do not keep a parquito, lest she learn it. If thou do love him, cut out thine own tongue Lest it bewray him. (III.ii.99-109) Ferdinand not only wishes to condemn Antonio to the inside of a hellish prison, he believes that the Duchess could not sufficiently control her own interior knowledge to prevent herself giving an external signal of it. (Notably, the interior offered by Ferdinand is the only one which the Duchess ever resists, protesting "Why should only I/ ...Be cas'd up, like a holy relic?" [Ill.ii. 137-39]). What Ferdinand actually finds, however, is not only that the horror cannot be thus rendered external and distinct from him, but also that it has taken possession of his own inside, of the interiority which his resolute denial of conscience has led him not even to know that he possessed. Robert Rentoul Reed argues that "[t]he study of Ferdinand appears to be inconsistent primarily because there is no obvious external cause for his obstinate determination that his widowed sister, the duchess, shall never marry again,"5 but it is surely the main point that the cause lies not in the any exterior source, but inside Ferdinand himself. Earlier, the Duchess has warned him, "You violate a sacrament o'th'church/ Shall make you howl in hell for't" (IV.i.39-40), and howl he does indeed, in the private hell of his own interiority: In those that are possess'd with't there o'erflows Such melancholy humour, they imagine Themselves to be transformed into wolves, Steal forth to churchyards in the dead of night,

28

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

And dig dead bodies up: as two nights since One met the duke, 'bout midnight in a lane Behind Saint Mark's church, with the leg of a man Upon his shoulder; and he howl'd fearfully; Said he was a wolf, only the difference Was, a wolfs skin was hairy on the outside, His on the inside; bade them take their swords, Rip up his flesh, and try (V.ii.8-19) Hairy on the inside, Ferdinand pays the price for having ignored his conscience, and for never having thought in terms of the spiritual values expressed by Bosola when he urges his employer to "Send her a penitential garment to put on/ Next to her delicate skin" (IV.i.l 19-20), which is remembered and inverted here just as the Duchess's prophecy about howling is.6 And the Cardinal, who has equally neglected his interior, is horrified, in a gloriously pre-Gothic moment of reflective dualism, to find himself staring into it: I am puzzled in a question about hell: He says, in hell there's one material fire, And yet it shall not burn all men alike. Lay him by: - how tedious is a guilty conscience! When I look into the fish-ponds, in my garden, Methinks I see a thing, arm'd with a rake That seems to strike at me (V.v.1-7) The Cardinal may wish that he could "Be laid by, and never thought of (V.v.90), but the balance of the play's evidence does seem to suggest that there actually is an afterlife, because however much the Duchess may lament that the stars do not seem to hear her curses, we are perhaps invited to believe that she has successfully penetrated to the ultimate interior, heaven. When she stirs from her apparent death, she says "Antonio!," to which Bosola replies, "Yes, madam, he is living" (IV.ii.350). The "yes" seems almost to imply that he is answering a question, and if so, the question apparently concerns Antonio. Perhaps one possible reading of this is that the Duchess has discovered that Antonio's spirit is not waiting for her beyond the grave, and has come back to enquire about it?7 Perhaps, then, there is an afterlife, and if so, neither the Cardinal nor Ferdinand can be expected to prosper in it. Both men have paid the price for ignoring the simple truth expressed by Bosola, that "I would not change my peace of conscience/ For all the wealth of Europe" (IV.ii.350-51), because, as he tells the Duchess: Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o'er our heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison. (IV.iii. 128-33)

The Interiors o/The Duchess of Malfi

29

Bosola by the end has indeed finally plucked out the heart of both brothers: "You have a pair of hearts are hollow graves,/ Rotten, and rotting others" (IV.ii.319-20), and renounces exterior shows altogether - "off my painted honour" (IV.ii.36) -just as the Duchess has earlier told him that it is futile to "wrap thy poison'd pills/ In gold and sugar" (IV.i. 19-20) because, in the end, it is only the insides that matter. If this is so, it may, perhaps, help to explain a mystery about the play which has often puzzled scholars. The fact that the play is named after the Duchess leaves us in no doubt that she is its central focus, and yet, uniquely for a tragic protagonist, she dies in the fourth act. Webster, a painstaking dramatist who is always careful to display his learning and his familiarity with classical culture, must surely have been well aware of the magnitude of his departure from tradition here. The fact that the entire last act unfolds without her has been seen as effectively relegating the Duchess to the status of lesser player, an incidental hero rather than someone whose consciousness, as with Hamlet, is the center and fundamental condition of the drama which bears her name. And yet of course the Duchess's consciousness does not disappear from the play; it merely ceases to possess any form of external wrapping. Her much-fetishized and objectified body may have gone, but her voice and thoughts have not. Throughout the play, men - even Antonio - have sought to classify, describe, box and penetrate her; but she has already hinted at the potential for a radical divorce between external body and internal mind when she tellingly reminds Antonio that she is not "the figure cut in alabaster/ Kneels at my husband's tomb" (I.ii.387-88), any more than the wax figures represent the true being of Antonio and her children. When she kneels down to enter the small, enclosed space which she imagines heaven as being, she escapes for ever from the world of exteriors; and the fact that she dies in Act IV rather than Act V thus serves not to marginalize her, but to confirm her status as encapsulation of the ethos of interiority which the play has so energetically propounded. NOTES 1. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfl, ed. John Russell Brown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), I.i.76-82. All further quotations from the play will be taken from this edition and reference will be given in the text. 2. On the importance of bodies and mirrors in the play, see also Martha Ronk, "Embodied Morality," in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, eds. Carole Levin and Karen Robertson (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 237-54, 240. Michael Neill calls it a play "haunted by images of grotesque anatomical disclosure" in Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 137; and Sheryl Craig points to how Ferdinand "is fascinated by severed body parts throughout the play; he gives his sister a detached human hand...and carries a cadaver's leg about the graveyard" in "'She and I were twins': Double Identity in The Duchess ofMalfi" Publications of the Missouri Philological Association 19 (1994): 21-27, 23.

30

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

3. Celia R. Daileader, Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8. See also 84-85. 4. Karin S. Coddon argues that madness, which Ferdinand chooses as an important feature of his persecution of his sister, is in this play "emphatically identified with outwardness" in "The Duchess of Malfr. tyranny and spectacle in Jacobean drama," in Madness in Drama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1-18, 1; and Kay Stockholder observes that "[t]he utter secrecy of the Duchess' marriage renders its intimate domesticity the polar opposite of the corrupt public world of her brothers" in "The Aristocratic Woman as Scapegoat: Romantic Love and Class Antagonism in The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi and The Changeling" in The Elizabethan Theatre XIV, eds. A. L. Magnusson and C. E. McGee (Toronto: P. D. Meany, 1996), 12751, 141. Mariangela Tempera comments on "Ferdinand's 'scientific' approach" to issues of interiority in "The rhetoric of poison in John Webster's Italianate plays," in Shakespeare's Italy: Functions of Italian locations in Renaissance drama, eds. Michèle Marrapodi, A. J. Hoenselaars, Marcello Cappuzzo and L. Falzon Santucci (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 229-50, 239. 5. Robert Rentoul Reed, jr., Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage (New York: Octagon Books, 1970), 85. 6. On Ferdinand's illness as symbolically linked with the Duchess's own interiors since it was one which sometimes affected pregnant women, see Molly Smith, Breaking Boundaries: Politics and play in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 85. (Indeed in its very control by the moon it mimics the menstrual cycle.) For commentary on this passage and on how it may relate to the Galenic theory of men's bodies turned inward as being equivalent to women's, see also Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 256, 275. 7. I am indebted for this suggestion to my former student Stephen Collins. Craig, however, who sees the twinship of the Duchess and Ferdinand as of paramount importance, suggests that "perhaps her other self, Ferdinand, keeps her tied to this life." '"Double Identity,'" 24.

Chapter 3

Neither a Tamer Nor a Shrew Be: A Defense of Petruchio and Katherine Corinne S. Abate

Despite their dubious beginnings, Katherine and Petruchio from The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1594) create a compatible marriage for themselves that contains what I describe as a gaming element because the characters learn to privilege the private sphere, and in so doing, share an exclusive "in-joke" with one another. This essay analyzes the deliberate separation of space and the various personae that must be fashioned during the process for the marriage to survive and benefit its members, and employs Jürgen Habermas's theory of spherical construction in conjunction with Philippe Aries's work on the emergence of a private life in England to do so.1 Further, I will argue that Petruchio's tactics of positive reinforcement in his unconventional wooing of Katherine allow her in turn to create a private space for herself within her marriage, as she eventually deems the public sphere to be immaterial or inessential, literally without essence; such a revelation provides her the means whereby she can escape both her damaged public reputation, as well as her self-serving, adversarial father Baptista. This leads me to read her problematized final speech as not to be taken literally nor dismissed as merely ironic, but instead to be viewed as an inessential public speech act, which reveals how Katherine privileges a marital interiority. Even though some scholars have already discussed this notion of separate spaces in Shrew,2 Habermas's theories have not been employed despite the existence of recognizable, demarcated areas in the sex/gender system in which Shakespeare was writing that point to private matters that have no place in the public arena. In his seminal book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas details the evolution of these separate spaces and traces their origins from Greek and Roman civilizations through modern times.3 The High Middle Ages and Renaissance employed similar distinctions, which Habermas summarizes: "The reproduction of life, the labor of the slaves, and the service of the women went on under the aegis of the master's domination; birth and death took place in its shadow; and the realm of necessity and transitoriness remained immersed in the obscurity of the private sphere. In contrast to it stood, in Greek self-interpretation, the public sphere as a realm of freedom and permanence" (4). The system modulated by the middle of the sixteenth century so that when 31

32

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

Shakespeare was writing to accommodate the inception of court life and town life that became aligned with the public sphere, the privatus sphere was a distinct and separate space that "designated the exclusion from the sphere of the state apparatus" (11). While it is true that, according to Habermas, this system of spheres does not take on a modern sense of concrete demarcation until the 18th Century, Retha Warnicke correctly notes that early-modern people "used the words public and private frequently, [so] it is unlikely that they had a blurred understanding of these two concepts" (124). As Lena Cowen Orlin adduces, "public and private did not sort themselves for early moderns in precisely the same way they do for us, but this is not to deny that a sorting process was engaged in the period" (89).4 Therefore the notion of discrete yet interrelated spaces exists in some recognizable and applicable form in the English Renaissance, and this notion also means that women are bound up with privacy. This further helps to explain why Katherine does not appear alone, because the point of the game is for her to develop an interiority that, as a person participating in a marriage, is for her benefit, but not for her sole enjoyment. When the play begins Katherine's shrewish reputation with the townsmen is always already established. However, it seems to me that Katherine is forced into such public posturing by her uncouth father and his quest to sell both of his daughters to the highest bidder. Because Baptista sets this tone of commodifícation from the moment he appears in Li,5 no one takes issue with Gremio's misogynistic quibble about carting Katherine through town like a prostitute, nor is an eyebrow raised when Hortensio criticizes her for not having a more gentle temperament. And when Tranio describes her to Lucentio as being either "stark mad or wonderful froward" (1.69), he is not contradicted.6 Indeed, the only person bothered by this shrewish, negative, and damaging public construct of Katherine is Katherine, but her objections go unnoticed because to these men, she is merely an obstacle to their greater goal of acquiring Bianca.7 Baptista does not even directly speak to Katherine in this scene (nor to her coveted sister for that matter) until he directs Bianca to go inside and Katherine to remain outdoors. These harsh, familial circumstances, to use Karen Newman's apt description, show that "Kate is motherless, and virtually fatherless as well, for Baptista consistently rejects her and favors her obedient sister";8 Katherine is only directly addressed by men who criticize her and never give her the chance to defend nor explain her side of the circumstances. Yet Katherine speaks to them respectfully, despite that her shrewishness is accepted as fact and presented to Petruchio as an immovable concretized essence.9 It is no wonder, then, that when Petruchio arrives in Lii, he shrewdly perceives her poor reputation in the public sphere and, when speaking to her, purposefully invokes its opposite. When the couple meet for the first time, Petruchio immediately effects the plan he outlined: he pays only positive, affirming, and supportive compliments to Katherine. Yet he is not killing her with kindness. Rather, he is introducing her to a new vocabulary, for she has not before heard a man speak so uncritically to her and about her. Perhaps expecting him to behave like every other man, Katherine does

A Defense ofPetruchio and Katherine

33

not mince words and stands her ground, bracing for a verbal attack. None ever comes because Petruchio turns around every negative description Katherine has heard about herself, and deems the world "sland'rous" (1.255) because he had been told she would be "rough and coy and sullen," (1.245). Instead, says Petruchio, she is "pleasant, gamesome, passing courteous/ But slow in speech" (11.247-48). I read this last description as being totally ironic because Katherine has been anything but lagging in her ripostes. This, though, is the level of banter Petruchio has been seeking all along. It could be said that he is trying to help Katherine restore the sense of humor surely inherent in her lively disposition. It seems that he wants her to laugh at the world and begin to care less about what the public sphere believes and focus more on making her private existence, albeit as his wife, a happier one in which they are the only two in on the joke. Yet this mental reconfiguration will take some time because, for Katherine, the old expectations of male insults will be hard to break. While Il.i is revelatory in that it shows how well suited the two are for one another, each of them circling around the other, never giving in, neither one wanting to lose, both verbally sparring and parrying, this scene is also important because it does not provide any support for Katherine's reputation in the public sphere. She may be quick-tongued and even physically combative when she strikes the exasperatingly unflappable Petruchio, but he never counters with an insult or a blow. Though in this scene some of his speech acts contain sexual innuendoes, Petruchio still succeeds in remaining separate from the gaggle of misogynistic men already introduced in Li. To be sure, there is no denying the bawdy nature of Petruchio's comment about putting "my tongue in your tail" (1.220), yet I do not read it as inscribed with the same savage notions of public carting and scolding so boisterously espoused earlier by Gremio, Hortensio and Tranio. Indeed, this verbal exchange with Katherine opposes that of the aforementioned troika - who, behind her back, fantasize about humiliating her - and is put into relief in IV.i when Petruchio is finally presented with the opportunity to act out his sexual swagger. Instead, he uses that time to launch another verbal, not physical, assault when, instead of making love, he makes "a sermon of continency" (1.169) to his new bride. In Il.i, as later, Petruchio effects his plan of positive reinforcement and views Katherine's every affront as the gamesome, lively spirit he was hoping to find. This is why he can say with utmost certainty that "thou must be married to no man but me" (1.277). Further, Petruchio remains a unique male character because he has never once wished that she behave more like the coveted Bianca. Yet this playful tone abruptly disappears in the middle of Petruchio's speech when, in some of the most quoted lines of the play, he announces: For I am he am born to tame you, Kate, And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate Conformable as other household Kates. (11.278-80)

34

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

This domineering threat, though, is spoken only after Baptista and Bianca's suitors return, which is made clear by the stage direction that immediately precedes these lines. That stage direction announces Baptista, Gremio and Tranio's re-entrance, and it is where the stage direction appears in the 1623 First Folio and in several recent authoritative editions of Shrew as well.101 maintain that Petruchio is putting on airs both to appease the father reluctant to approve the marriage, and to keep up appearances in front of the other men who have already voiced their support for inflicting taming tactics upon Katherine. Moreover, in enacting the difference between public spectacle and private behavior for Katherine's benefit, Petruchio is also creating a model upon which she can construct her own public persona at the play's end, when she appears at her father's house as an apparently tamed woman. Prior to the lines quoted above Petruchio never mentions taming as an aspect of their marriage because he has never wanted to tame her nor felt there was even a need to address the practice, as it is her exuberant comportment that he has admired and coveted. In Passions of the Renaissance, Philippe Aries argues that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, "what mattered was no longer what an individual was but what he appeared to be, or, rather, what he could successfully pass himself off as being" (3).11 This is why I read these arguably problematic lines as Petruchio offering Katherine examples of the different roles people perform in their lives public or private, essential or inessential - depending upon the audience; she must acquire for herself the skills to recognize and distinguish among such roles. When Katherine's wedding finally takes place in Ill.ii, it provides the first heavily populated venue at which Petruchio can showcase his disregard for public opinion and, using himself as an example, continue to promote this disregard in Katherine. He arrives late, is ridiculously and inappropriately attired, and is, as always, unconcerned by the commotion he has caused. But Katherine does not yet share his ideology and is visibly upset. From her viewpoint, her father has not only hastily married her off to a madman, but now that "frantic fool" (1.12) is publicly humiliating her too. Yet Petruchio is concurrently embarrassing himself as well; the only difference between them is that Katherine has not yet constructed an inessential public persona, and is thus understandably humiliated by Petruchio's public spectacle. And his irreverent attitude continues throughout the wedding ceremony as well: Gremio recounts that Petruchio swore during the service, threw wine at the sexton, and undecorously kissed Katherine in front of the congregation. Petruchio's antics in Padua are not yet over, and he shocks the already stunned crowd by insisting that he and Katherine leave before the celebratory dinner begins. Petruchio does not explain his reasons for such haste, saying only that "If you knew my business/ You would entreat me rather go than stay" (11.187-88). I suggest that his "business" is to remove Katherine immediately from this hostile environment, and begin (re)creating a happier life for her as an appreciated and respected wife. She retaliates by refusing to leave, believing that Petruchio means to make a fool of her. Katherine's reluctance suggests that she has not yet embraced the role of wife, and also that she has not yet worked out that Petruchio is making a game of custom, not her. Indeed Petruchio, whose manners are as ill-suited for the occasion as his

A Defense ofPetruchio and Katherine

35

clothes, has Thomas Moisan questioning "whether any play can be taken unqualifiably to affirm a patriarchalist view of experience and marital relations that presents Petruchio as the preeminent embodiment of patriarchy" (119).12 And though Padua's inhabitants, unlike Petruchio, do not have Katherine's best interests in mind, they are at the very least a known quantity, so it is understandable that she would want to celebrate this rare victory in her life - after all, it is not inconsequential that the curst eldest daughter of Baptista Minóla finally found a man willing to marry her - before leaving with a stranger who, by what she believes him to be, is as hurtful as every other man. Petruchio himself seems to provide support for this interpretation because he announces that, as his wife, She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house My household stuff, my field, my barn, My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything. (11.226-28) This shift into commodifying Katherine is one of Petruchio's more problematic speeches, and some scholars, like Coppélia Kahn, point to it as proof of his misogynistic attitude towards Katherine.13 However, it is important to recall that these lines, like the taming ones in Il.i, are spoken in public, in front of a biased crowd of townspeople whose opinion of the couple, their marriage, and anything intimate is of no consequence to Petruchio. I suggest this is why he ends the speech by adopting yet another non-essential public persona in his elaborate game, as he pretends to be a domineering husband who needs to defend Katherine against hostile forces. The irony is that part of what he says is true: Katherine really is surrounded by people who, at best, do not understand her and, at worst, wish her ill, and that it is he, the seemingly tyrannical husband, who continues to act as Katherine's only advocate. In essence, Petruchio is as misunderstood by his wife as she has been by her own family. Katherine cannot be expected to understand all of Petruchio's machinations because she does not yet own a complete and empowered stance whereby she would be able to join with Petruchio in play-acting. While she will eventually master the game in IV.v when she and Petruchio return to Padua, the events leading up to that moment showcase Petruchio's unorthodox yet consistent positive techniques to help Katherine join him in making a game of custom while fashioning for themselves a privileged marital space. In IV.i Katherine has been an unwilling witness to Petruchio's less than admirable treatment of his servants, domestic scenes worth mentioning for two reasons.14 One is that throughout Petruchio's temper tantrum, in which the servants have not greeted him to his satisfaction, the meat is burnt, and no one seems to be able to take off his boots properly, Katherine is the only person with whom Petruchio is not displeased. All of the male servants are variously described as rogues, villains, rascals and knaves, while Katherine remains "sweet Kate." Yet perhaps more importantly, while Petruchio will not allow Katherine to sit down and eat, he denies himself a meal as well, thus

36

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

continuing to subject them both to the same conditions, an act of denial which by extension continues his work of constructing a private space of their own, while it simultaneously functions to keep up curst appearances for the benefit of the servants.15 Such behavior accords with Habermas's theory because privatized individuals lived with an audience of servants, so "the line between private and public sphere extended right through the house" (45). Even domestic space, then, at the time Shakespeare was writing, has an audience.16 Interestingly, domestic architecture was concurrently changing to accommodate this shift in the sex/gender system. Viviana Comensoli notes that "during the late sixteenth century, the new emphasis on subdivided homes represented a significant move towards the concept of individuality and privacy, including sexual privacy" (74).17 "Family" rooms and other distinct spaces for the husband and wife to enjoy begin to take shape. As Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin point out, by the late sixteenth century, family life gradually separates itself from the public space of great halls and other grand, formal rooms, once architectural staples of any aristocratic country estate design, and instead "begin[s] to reflect the desire for more private spaces: private dining chambers, studies, and bedrooms" (27-28). John Bold concurs, stating "the seventeenth century was one of the most crucial periods of innovation and evolution in English domestic architecture and an understanding of the development of the concept of privacy, and the ways in which architecture sought to accommodate it, is fundamental to its assessment and to the charting of its development over the next two hundred years" (108).18 Marianne L. Novy discusses this alteration as well, and explains that "from 1570 on, many English people rebuilt their houses to produce more rooms - most notably, a private bedroom for the married couple. Perhaps the spread of the ideal of privacy was related to changing beliefs about the relations between husband and wife among Shakespeare's contemporaries" (278).19 It would appear, then, that an internal space away from servants, what Habermas calls "the privatization of life" (44), was becoming a privileged arena, both in the architecture of the day and in literary marital relations as well. Is Petruchio manipulative? Yes. Does Katherine experience treatment unbecoming a gentleman's daughter? Certainly. But Petruchio is still behaving better, by comparison, than his male counterparts in the wooing subplot, who consistently lie and misrepresent themselves to Bianca in an attempt to buy her hand. I am not suggesting, therefore, that Petruchio is an unblemished character, but rather that his unconventional behavior is designed to assist Katherine in breaking free from her father's house and Padua in general, so that she may enter a marriage of mutual respect and equality. Such a reading may seem unpersuasive at first considering that Petruchio's behavior toward Katherine can be characterized as cruel and unusual. However, I would point out that anything Petruchio asks of Katherine, any sacrifice or any perceived maltreatment she may experience, he subjects himself to as well. By using himself as a model, Petruchio is trying to assist Katherine in caring less about the external opinions and unfair assessments to which she has been subjected, and instead in creating a private understanding with him and him

A Defense ofPetruchio and Katherine

37

alone. Joseph Candido contends that while "Petruchio's country house is no idyllic Shakespearean green world [,] it is nonetheless a heightened world of altered perceptions where one discovers, through an abrupt psychological suspension of normal expectations, new possibilities for locating the other and real self (104).20 To be sure, Petruchio employs unquestionably problematic strategies - seen especially in IV.iii when, after keeping Katherine up all night, he withholds a new gown from her -21 yet he does so to expose Katherine to an alternate lifestyle in which she can behave as outrageously as she pleases, provided she understands that it is all a game. To win, she must attain for and by herself a constructed artifice and the knowledge that in creating an artifice, she is ironically achieving a more essential ontology in private. For it is only Katherine who can regain her agency that was so wrongly appropriated by her father and in the resulting, unjustified shrewish reputation she has had to bear. And Petruchio's hard work is about to pay off. On the road to Padua in IV.v Katherine who, like Petruchio, is meanly dressed for a reunion with Baptista and the other sneering Paduans, begins this famous sun/moon scene by continuing to stand at odds with Petruchio. Frustrated and again annoyed with Katherine's disagreements, he vents "Evermore crossed and crossed, nothing but crossed" (1.10). Here I suggest that Petruchio's exasperation finally registers with Katherine, who knows personally what it means to be crossed and to have everyone against her; she finally understands that it is the act of agreeing with Petruchio that is deemed important, not the circumstances nor the ridiculous claim he is making to which she agrees. John C. Bean points to this scene as pivotal in Katherine's transformation, "for when she learns to recognize the sun for the moon and the moon for the dazzling sun she is discovering the liberating power of laughter and play" (72).221 concur, and argue that Katherine is therefore referring to more than just the miles they have travelled when she says Forward, I pray, since we have come so far, And be it moon or sun or what you please. An if you please to call it a rush-candle, Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me. (11.12-15) As Novy explains, Katherine "replaces a language determined by the external world as she sees it alone with another determined by her relationship with Petruchio" (271); Katherine seems now to understand that nothing else but their private bond to one another is what matters. In looking beyond herself and recognizing that Petruchio is not demeaning her publicly nor asking anything from her but some understanding, she sees, perhaps for the first time, that her disheveled husband - badly attired, famished, running on little sleep and making an ass of himself, as he has been since they married - is behaving this way for her. He has been putting on a show starring himself as the mad curst husband, and though it can and has been argued that Petruchio's problematic behavior is orchestrated to

38

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

demonstrate his absolute authority over Katherine, the "self-degradation emblematized in Petruchio's garb and behavior" (Moisan 120) cannot be disputed. My point, then, is that Petruchio willingly makes himself a public spectacle to demonstrate for Katherine that he does not posit his own public reputation as important, and neither should she with hers. Armed with this understanding of the game, Katherine happily joins Petruchio for the rest of the scene in having a little fun at Vincentio's expense.23 Vincentio's opinion of her, like Hortensio's (who has been witness to this transformation, though he does not quite grasp its liberating capacity for Katherine), is nonessential because he is not in on the private joke, and secrecy is a salient element to beginning a relationship privileged within the private sphere because it can only flower if it is done away from the wagging tongues of those who disapprove or misjudge.24 Indeed, Orest Ranum suggests that in the early modern era, the word "privacy" still meant "primarily 'secrecy' and pertained to the realm of thought" (212), which to me is what this scene demonstrates.25 What matters, then, is that Katherine and Petruchio are in agreement. Thus allied they, like another Shakespearean couple who together create a concord, are "the makers of manners" and "the liberty that follows [their] places/ stops the mouths of all fmdfaults" (HV V.ii.262-64). I would add that this Katherine, as opposed to Katharine Valois, owns the knowledge and thus the power not to care should those nay-sayers find fault with her comportment. Though Katherine does falter briefly in V.i when she hesitates to kiss Petruchio in public, she quickly recovers, kisses her husband because again it is in the act and not in the circumstances where meaning is made and lays to rest any lingering doubts that she cares more about the public sphere and her reputation in it than the private consideration and esteem between themselves. After this moment, Katherine Minóla possesses agency and can do or say whatever she wants to an outside audience because the consequences of such behavior are meaningless. It is no wonder, then, that she can unhesitatingly and happily address a disbelieving crowd in V.ii with words of wifely obedience and submission. Katherine's final speech has long been the subject of debate, with many spirited and useful contributions to the discussion.26 Throughout this essay I have been arguing for a more sympathetic reading of Katherine's unappreciated lively spirit and recognition of the unfair treatment by those closest to her, and while I acknowledge Lawrence Danson's caution that "if there is such a thing as personal transformation it will always occur invisibly; only its effects will be seen" (231),27 nevertheless I interpret her lengthy monologue not merely as ironic, as several critics have asserted,28 but more importantly as an empowering final act that showcases the deft gaming abilities she has acquired through Petruchio's positive compliments. That is why when Petruchio charges her to "tell these headstrong women/ What duty they do owe their lords and husbands" (11.135-36), Katherine acquiesces.29 Less than what she says, the fact that she is speaking at all is significant, as it shows that she has not been tamed, but rather has achieved a smoothness around her bristled edges. Not submissive, but tempered. Further, her

A Defense ofPetruchio and Katherine

39

speech which, according to Wayne A. Rebhorn, is "the only true formal speech in the play" (324),30 is not only the longest one spoken by any character in this play, but is arguably the longest one uttered by a female character in all of Shakespeare, and is, to me, a crowning achievement in her metamorphosis.31 Consider where Katherine is standing (presumably she is standing), in a public space in Lucentio's house in Padua; also consider to whom she is speaking, an audience that includes her unsympathetic father and a host of misogynistic men who made their feelings towards Katherine quite clear in Li. It makes sense, then, that she would utter such a problematic and denigrating mandate because the words and the consequences that may arise from them are meaningless. Katherine has constructed a public persona that holds no essence, which means she is therefore free to say what men want to hear because her public speech acts have nothing to do with her personal interiority. Thus I consider her address to be a non-essential public speech act which embodies Katherine's success in creating a niche for herself in an unconventional marriage to an unconventional and wholly appreciative man, whose final hurrah in support of his wife is in the form of a kiss that not only literally seals their joint victory, but also acts as what Marion D. Perret calls "a breaking of decorum that is an outwardly improper sign of delight in their relationship's inward propriety" (234).32 They have won on their own terms what Novy describes as the "game that excludes all but the two of them" (277), and so they depart, knowing that the final step of their marital happiness, sexual consummation, will soon be achieved, and that it is located in a private space they share away from public view, away from the judgments of an uncomprehending audience, outside the city limits of Padua.33 Critics like Nancy Fraser have recently criticized Habermas (and with good reason) for not focusing more on women and conjugal responsibilities in his study.34 In some ways his exclusion enacts their marginalization by the male members of the public sphere, seen especially in Shrew. According to Howard and Rackin, by the late sixteenth century "public and private spheres were gradually demarcated and separated from one another, and as productive work ceased to occur mainly in the household, gender roles and ideologies were further transformed. Valued work - work that produced money or brought public recognition - was increasingly gendered masculine, and the public world of government, business, and citizenship came to belong to men" (28). This makes a female constructed private space all the more necessary if the public sphere - to employ gender terms - is deemed to belong to men and is at the same time a domain in which, according to Comensoli, women in early modern England "were discouraged from actively participating" (22). This perhaps explains why there is an undeniable "genderfication" in Habermas's omission. Once established and concretized, a female sphere can accommodate the male counterpart who may be included in it provided he understand, as Petruchio always does, that he enters into a space where he shares in a privileged private sphere that is for the mutual pleasure and play of the couple alone.

40

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England M

[P]rivate and public matters were organized somewhat differently than now but with distinctions that were just as obvious and definitive" (Warnicke 140), which is why Habermas's theories on public and private spheres are useful to employ when discussing the English Renaissance. Indeed, Aries refers to England as "the birthplace of privacy" (5) as more and more people kept private diaries beginning in the late 1500s. Therefore, it makes sense to acknowledge as Comensoli does that "private life was not conceived as an autonomous domain disengaged from public institutions; rather, it existed in dialectical relation to the public sphere, and in particular to public authority" (22-23). There did exist a separation between a social or external space and a domestic or internal realm, but those two spaces were also interrelated, with wives tied inextricably to privacy. Thus, empowered female characters like Katherine had to negotiate a newly fashioned non-public existence that allowed for the creation of a happy marriage regardless of, and perhaps despite, inessential public expectations.

NOTES I am extremely grateful to the following people for taking the time to read and comment on earlier versions of this essay: Mary Carruthers and Ernest Oilman; Jan Fergus; and Loreen L. Giese, Nancy Gutierrez, Goran V. Stanivukovic, and the other members of the "Literary and Social Practices of Courtship and Marriage in Early Modern England" seminar at the 2000 SAA in Montreal. 1. My discussion will use the terms "sphere" and "space" interchangeably, which is my acknowledgment of the debate over whether or not such discrete domains can be applied to English Renaissance dramas. Therefore, this notion of "space" relates to locality in the sex/gender system, as opposed to the space of the stage and the theoretical concept of locus and platea. 2. See, among others, Laurie E. Maguire, "'Household Kates': Chez Petruchio, Percy and Plantagenet," in Gloriana's Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, eds. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 129-66; and Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982). 3. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). 4. Retha Warnicke importantly notes that "when women were referred to as private people, then, the word private did not mean simply that they were confined to their households" because "wives were given considerable authority" running that space. Rarely, if ever, did husbands interfere. See "Private and Public: The Boundaries of Women's Lives in Early Stuart England," in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, éd. Jean R. Brink (Kirksville: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Inc., 1993), 123-40, 134; and Lena Co wen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Frances Dolan, however, cautions that "the play itself blurs the distinction between public and private" because the spheres were not so conveniently and clearly defined, and she goes on to question how such conclusions can be reached when

A Defense ofPetruchio and Katherine

41

"we never see Katharine by herself," in The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts (Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1996), 25. 5. Like Coppélia Kahn, I liken Baptista's relationship to Katherine as a merchant needing to clear his merchandise in order to make way for the desired goods, i.e. Bianca. See 105—6 in her book Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), as well as Irene Dash, Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 41-43; Natasha Korda, "Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew," Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 2 (1996): 109-31, 116-20; and Ann Jennalie Cook, "Wooing and Wedding: Shakespeare's Dramatic Distortion of the Customs of His Time," PCLS 12 (1981): 83-100, 91-92. Richard A. Burt discusses the tension present not only between Katherine and her father, but Bianca and Baptista as well, in "Charisma, Coercion, and Comic Form in The Taming of the Shrew," Criticism 26, no. 4 (1984): 295-311, 301-3. 6. The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Richard Hosley (New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1977), 88. All quotations of the play will refer to this edition. 7. As Velvet D. Pearson concludes, "no wonder Kate is shrewish; she is surrounded by men who want to buy and sell her." See "In Search of a Liberated Kate in Taming of the Shrew" Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 44, no. 4 (1990): 229—42, 232. 8. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 42-43. 9. Carolyn E. Brown notes that "Shakespeare shows us a woman treated deplorably by everyone, a woman whose patience is certainly put to the test. And yet she responds with great aplomb" in "Katherine of The Taming of the Shrew: 'A Second Grissel'," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 37, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 285-313, 291. 10. Brian Morris's Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1981) and Anne Barton's edition in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) place the stage direction after the taming lines and before "Here comes your father." Such a location invests the lines with a sinister meaning that I do not think is called for. Instead, Frances Dolan (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), Jean E. Howard's edition for The Norton Shakespeare (New York: Norton & Co., 1997), H. J. Oliver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), and Hosley's Penguin edition follow the First Folio's placement. This location makes more sense because it signals the break between Petruchio's private, complimentary language with Katherine, and his public, insincere swagger spoken solely for the men. Even Morris concedes that the First Folio's placement might "be explained by the need for Baptista to overhear what Petruchio is saying" (4), which is precisely my point. 11. Philippe Aries, Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, vol. 3 of A History of Private Life, éd. Ariès et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 1-11. 12. '"What's that to you?' or, Facing Facts: Anti-Paternalistic Chords and Social Discords in The Taming of the Shrew," Renaissance Drama 26 (1995): 105-29. For a discussion of Petruchio's affront to tradition and expected ceremonial behavior, see Carol F. Heffernan, "The Taming of the Shrew: The Bourgeoisie in Love," Essays in Literature 12, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 3-14. Lynda E. Boose also discusses issues of class and persuasively bounds them up with gender displacement in "The Taming of the Shrew, Good Husbandry, and Enclosure," in Shakespeare Reread, ed. Russ McDonald (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 193-225. 13. In her essay "The Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare's Mirror of Marriage," Modern Language Studies 5, no. 1 (1975): 88-102, Kahn maintains that "it is impossible that

42

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

Shakespeare meant us to accept Petruchio's speech uncritically: it is the most shamelessly blunt statement of the relationship between men, women, and property to be found in the literature of this period," (94-95). Korda also calls for a literal reading of this speech in "Household Kates," 122-23. 14. Marion D. Perret reads the domestic scenes as Petruchio showing Katherine how to do women's work, using himself as a model in "Petruchio: The Model Wife," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 23, no. 2 (1983): 223-35. For disagreement, see Emily Detmer, who employs the term "domestic violence to name Petruchio's civilized domination" of Katherine in "Civilizing Subordination: Domestic Violence and The Taming of the Shrew," Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1997): 273-94, 274. 15. It is for such situations that Lena Cowen Orlin reminds in Private Matters that "private is a relative term" because "the presence of a servant's pallet meant that the highest degree of somnolent and sexual seclusion in the early modern household expressed itself solely and by our lights inefficiently through the drawing of bedcurtains" (185). Anne Ferry also discusses this lack of privacy (in our modern sense of the word), and in The "Inward" Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), she points out that in sixteenth century living arrangements, "interludes of solitude were exceptional, occasional, usually brief, and subject to interruption unless elaborately protected" (48). 16. It is due to the constant presence of servants and other household dependents that a private space is thought not to exist because, as David Cressy argues, there was "no place where public activity did not intrude. Even within the recesses of domestic routine, every action, every opinion, was susceptible to external interest, monitoring, or control." See "Response: Private Lives, Public Performance, and Rites of Passage," in Attending to Women in Early Modern England, eds. Betty S. Travitsky and Adèle F. Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 187-97, 187. However, in the late sixteenth century, the term "family" included the servants; thus, it may have been a crowded space and not constructed by our modern standards, but nevertheless it was separate and considered - at least to them - private. For agreement, see Orlin, Private Matters, 16-78, 184-89. 17. "Household Business": Domestic Plays of Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 18. Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997); and John Bold, "Privacy and the Plan," in English Architecture Public and Private, eds. John Bold and Edward Chaney (London: The Hambledon Press, 1993), 107-19. See also Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage In England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 123-29, in which he argues that the decline of kinship systems by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries "was characterized by the withdrawal of the family from the great hall to the private dining-room and by the increasing habit of residing for long periods in London to enjoy the 'season'" (125). 19. "Patriarchy and Play in The Taming of the Shrew," ELR 9, no. 2 (1979): 264-80. This starting date of 1570 comes from W. G. Hoskins, who first proposed the concept of "The Great Rebuilding" that he believes took place between 1570 and 1640. For a brief overview, see Lena Cowen Orlin, Elizabethan Households: An Anthology (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995), 3-5, as well as Philippe Aries, Passions of the Renaissance, I—II. 20. "The Starving of the Shrew," Colby Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1990): 96-111. 21. For a connection between apparel and social identity, see Margaret Rose Jaster, "Controlling Clothes, Manipulating Mates: Petruchio's Griselda," Shakespeare Studies 29

A Defense ofPetruchio and Katherine

43

(2001): 93-108. For Jaster, this scene recalls "Griselda's ritual sartorial submission" (105) to her husband Walter, and anticipates "Katherina's complete sartorial submission" (106) at this play's end. 22. "Comic Structure and the Humanizing of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew," in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 65-78. 23. In "Shrew-taming and Other Rituals of Aggression," Women's Studies 9, no. 2 (1982): 121-43, Martha Andresen-Thom argues that the ironic tone Katherine achieves in her final speech has its origin in this scene, where "she overplays female acquiescence in order to under-cut it" (136). 24. Moments of Hortensio's hostility toward Katherine occur throughout the play. In II.i, Katherine beats Hortensio with a lute. Although this incident does not speak well for Katherine, it is important to recall that only Hortensio's version of events is presented; given his misogynistic predilection towards Katherine, it is highly doubtful she was unprovoked in her attack. For an astute discussion of the association between women and stringed instruments, especially the lute, see Laurie E. Maguire, "Cultural Control in The Taming of the Shrew," Renaissance Drama 26 (1995): 83-104. 25. "The Refuges of Intimacy," in Passions of the Renaissance, 207-63. See also 399445 in same, in which Philippe Aries outlines the emergence of a private life in England between 1500-1800, when an incipient boundary was drawn "between the function of public representation and the private sphere of intimate retreat" (399). 26. The list of such scholars is long and thus is only partially represented here. For those who read Katherine as tamed by her bullying husband see, among others, Lynda E. Boose, "Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member," Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 2 (1991): 179-213 and "The Taming of the Shrew, Good Husbandry, and Enclosure," 193-96; Mary Free, "Shakespeare Comedie Heroines: Protofeminist or Conformers to Patriarchy?" Shakespeare Bulletin 4, no. 5 (1986): 23-25; Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience (New York: Summit Books, 1981), 82-85; Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men, 34; and Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity, 48. 27. "Continuity and Character in Shakespeare and Marlowe," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 26, no. 2 (1986): 217-34. Lisa Jardine also points to this dilemma of interpretation, and on 59-60 of her book, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983), says that an absence of cultural evidence precludes a definitive reading of Katherine's final speech, ironic or submissive. 28. For scholars who read her speech as an ironic speech act see, among others, Diane Elizabeth Dreher, Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 114; Margie Burns, "The Ending of The Shrew," Shakespeare Studies 18 (1986): 41-64, 46-49; and Richard Hosley, The Taming of the Shrew, 80. For a comprehensive list of critics and their various readings of Katherine and Petruchio, see n.1-3 in Carolyn E. Brown's extremely useful essay, "Katherine of The Taming of the Shrew: 'A Second Grissel'," 310-11. 29. In his Introduction for the Arden edition of the play, Morris notes that by asking Katherine to tell Bianca and the Widow what duty they owe to their husbands, rather than detail her own relationship, Petruchio "offers her the opportunity publicly to instruct her cunning little sister and the Widow who has been insulting her in their marital duties. He offers her a position of superiority from which to lecture" (148^9). Irene Dash also concludes in Wooing, Wedding, and Power "how delicious to reprimand her sister for unseemly behavior and jostle the smug self-complacency of both women" (61).

44

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

30. "Petruchio's 'Rope Tricks': The Taming of the Shrew and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric," Modern Philology 92, no. 3 (1995): 294-327. 31. See David Daniell, "The Good Marriage of Katherine and Petruchio," Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 23-31, in which he cogently observes, "whatever Petruchio has done, he has given her his full attention in action" (30). Further, Barry Weller importantly notes how much Petruchio has riding on Katherine's behavior during this scene, because "it is not merely a hundred crowns but his pride and reputation which Petruchio stakes in his wager against Lucentio and Hortensio" in "Induction and Inference: Theater, Transformation, and the Construction of Identity in The Taming of the Shrew" in Creative Imitation, eds. David Quint et al. (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 297-329, 315. 32. Several scholars have persuasively argued that there is nothing unconventional about their marriage, and that in fact it follows the vision of marriage practiced in society and condoned in the Protestant marriage pamphlets of the day. See, for example, Margaret Mikesell, '"Love Wrought These Miracles': Marriage and Genre in The Taming of the Shrew" Renaissance Drama 20 (1989): 141-67; and Randall Martin, "Kates for the Table and Kates for the Mind: A Social Metaphor in The Taming of the Shrew" English Studies in Canada 17, no. 1 (1991): 1-20. For disagreement, see Margaret Loftus Ranald, who asserts that "Shakespeare has skillfully remolded his material to portray an atypical Elizabethan attitude towards marriage through the development of a matrimonial relationship in which mutuality, trust, and love are guiding forces" (149). She concludes "The Manning of the Haggard; or Taming of the Shrew" Essays in Literature 1, no. 2 (1974): 149-165 by cogently pointing out that "whatever else one may say of this marriage, it will surely never be dull" (162). 33. In "Refashioning the Shrew," Shakespeare Studies 17 (1985): 159-87, Valerie Wayne suggests that the couple can now "consummate their marriage, for they can have sex without using it as a weapon or a power play" (173). 34. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 113-43.

Chapter 4

"Wounds still curelesse": Estates of Loss in Mary Wroth's Urania Kathryn Pratt

In The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (1621), Lady Mary Wroth uses the word "estate" to signify both "property" and "condition or state of being." As one's material possessions, "estate" seems to conflict with the "estate" that denotes a subject's mental, moral, or agentive status. Yet Wroth presents in the intersection of these two notions a trope that reveals the subject's failure to achieve a unified identity. For Wroth, female characters are the paradigmatic subjects: as both possession and, synecdochically, possessor through her shared legal identity with her husband or father, a woman's "materialization" as bodied subject exposes the misfiring of subjective identification.1 In Lacanian terms, this misfiring signals a projection toward an ideal of unified identity which, doomed to failure, propels the subject into the symbolic order. For Wroth, however, the specific legal and subjective condition of women requires that in the process of materialization by which the subject realizes (in failing to realize) itself, the body becomes the perceived collision-point between material and ideal identity. The subject experiences itself as lacking because of a persistent misidentification of body as matter that serves in Wroth's text both quite literally to "embody" the subject, and to reveal the difficulty of distinguishing from "mere" matter the subject as materialized autonomous body. While much recent work on early modern and modern theories of "the body" focuses on the body as matter that either intrudes upon or subverts the symbolic order, I intend to explore the disjunctions between the body and the material world.2 Wroth's "materializations" of her women characters show that matter is not disruptive of the symbolic economy; rather, the symbolic economy that forms subjects circulates both matter and ideas, the "body" being crucial to the economy as the idea of the subject's matter. I use the term "symbolic economy" to describe the world that creates the subject and through which the subject creates itself. Lacanian theorists would describe this economy as the intersections of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real registers. But in place of an absent and therefore traumatic Lacanian Real, my formulation of the "symbolic economy" substitutes the material world that the subject encounters, even though the material is enmeshed in symbolic and imaginary representation. The symbolic economy's 45

46

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

circulation of bodies as objects continually generates and disrupts symbolic "order." This symbolic ordering depends on the separation between form and matter, effected through the dominance of form over matter in the delineated object. In the symbolic economy, however, the subject, necessarily delineating itself by the body, experiences the loss of matter to its ideal representation, and the loss of ideal form to the excesses and deficiencies of matter. At once ideally and materially embodied, the subject acquires what Wroth describes as an "estate of loss": the symbolic economy bestows matter upon the subject, but the subject pays for its materialization by a painful loss of symbolically ordered identity. By representing subjectivity as generated from the conflict between body and matter, from the interplay between the subject in a condition (the fantasized body) and the subject as a possession (the materialized body), Wroth reveals the subjective losses traditionally elided by the patriarchal fantasies of possession that structure the prose romance. When Uranids Lady Antissia realizes that she has been forsaken by her lover Amphilanthus, she expresses her dissatisfaction by writing angry verses on a piece of paper and then burning it. Having thrust her verses in the fire, Antissia laments: "Alas Antissia how doe I pitty thee? how doe I still lament thy hap, as if a stranger? for I am not she, but meere disdaine."3 Antissia reveals herself to be estranged from her own unsatisfied desire, and thus from herself as subject. The metamorphosis of Antissia's self-portrait from conditional estrangement ("as if a stranger") to a statement of alienated being that is both metaphorical and unconditional ("I am"... "meere disdaine") reveals the materialization of subjectivity that accompanies the materialization of Antissia's body that follows. In her subsequent mourning Antissia frequents a willow tree. Wroth writes of Antissia's actions: Then carved she in the trunke of that tree, till she had imbroiderd it all over with characters of her sorrow: in the crown of this tree she made a seat big enough for her selfe to sit in, the armes, and branches incompassing her, as if shee were the hat to weare the Crowne of Willow, or they were but the flowers of it, and her selfe the forsaken compassé, out of which so large and flourishing a crowne of despised love proceeded, so as take it either way, shee was either crownd, or did crowne that wretched estate of losse, a pitifull honor, and griefefull government: but this was the reward for her affection, and which most poore loving women purchase.4 Antissia's inscription on the material world of her wounded desire and her assumption of a position as part of the inscribed tree reveal that this female subject both is and is in a materialized estate of loss: "shee was either crownd, or did crowne that wretched estate of losse." "Most poore loving women" in Urania, however, must purchase the desire for the complete subjectivity represented by the possession of the beloved object, which in its status as embodied object, as formed matter, reconciles with the material world the subject's ideal of completeness. The

Estates of Loss in Urania

47

subject's state of unfulfilled desire is an estate of loss that the men inherit, as it were, "for free." Desire is for men and women an "estate," a condition of subjectivity bound up with concepts of material possession, because of the inextricability of self-possession from legal and social possession. I read the language of "state" in the above passage as the language of "estate." Antissia's "estate of loss" crowns or is crowned by her because the history of property ownership in early modern England was the history of the state. In accordance with this historical circumstance, Elizabethan writers were influenced by the legacy of monarch-centered feudal property laws.5 Elizabeth's reign over, Jacobean writers often waxed nostalgic for the age of great "Gloriana" as a period of benign and awe-inspiring state power. Under James I, the laws of material and marital possession were continuing to metamorphose from feudal to modern forms, detaching possession of land from the ordered feudal state and rendering uncertain the regulation of the power and prestige of land possession. Mary Murray presents the seventeenth century as the transitional period between monarch centered-feudal property rights and modern property ownership, writing: feudal property was transformed into modern individualistic ownership. Property became a right in or to material things, i.e. objects or commodities. Property becomes an absolute right, and this sort of property is exactly the sort required to facilitate the development of a capitalist market economy. Property as the right of legal individuals involves the right to exclude others.6 The connection between possession of property and possession of legal identity as autonomous individual becomes for the modern subject a question of matter. Yet the body of the subject, and even the estate as material possession, are not so easily reduced to their representation as inert matter, available for possession and serving to "materialize" the subject's representation of its own completeness. Judith Butler observes that in modern formulations of the subject, the autonomous and complete subject is always a "property holder," "a figure of disembodiment, but one which is nevertheless a figure of a body, a bodying forth of a masculinized rationality, the figure of a male body which is not a body."7 Like the subject, the "estate" is dematerialized and rematerialized as possession through the transition to individual ownership. In capitalist society, "property becomes an object, seemingly divorced from social relations. It is only in capitalist society that property is deemed to connote a disembodied characteristic inherent in the object."8 The "disembodiment" of the object in the early modern period is a function of the symbolic economy: the symbolic order demands a wholeness that uncontained matter cannot provide, a completeness that representation offers but cannot give to the subject without a materialization to give the representation power in "real" society. Yet materialization of the fantasized subject (through possession of the body or the estate) results in a disruption of the symbolic order in which the material identity of the possessing subject conflicts with the symbolic identity that depends for its

48

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

integrity on the containment of the imagined subject within the closed system of representation. Antissia's sovereignty epitomizes the contradictions of the early modern subject's struggle for and dependence on matter. Her loss becomes her being crowned or becoming a crown, as her body, identified with the materiality of nature, nevertheless retains potential to signify either the subject's possession of its "estate of loss," or the subject's materialization as an object, a crown, that confers ownership upon another. This signifying uncertainty, marking Antissia's subjectivity as incomplete, confirms the dangers posed for the subject by the emerging modern symbolic system of representation of matter as inherently possessible and objectifiable - dangers epitomized in the early modern woman's function as bodily guarantor of possession for a male line. When she consents to marry the formerly misogynistic Dolorindus: "she discreetly loving him, but he doting of her,"9 Antissia becomes the paradigmatic example of the steep price paid by a woman who dares to claim the status of subject through her desire. Because of Antissia's relinquishment of a formerly desired completeness resulting from possession of an ideal material object, her marriage shadows the real-life restrictions on women's ownership of property in early modern England. In Jacobean England the laws of primogeniture and coverture effectively prevented women from owning or managing most property, real or personal. Primogeniture and coverture were principles of the common law: due to primogeniture a father's land passed to the oldest son, while coverture meant that a woman acquired the status of a feme covert upon marriage, losing any ability to choose the place she lived or to own property. Real property (land) passed to the husband's management for the duration of the marriage, remaining the property of the wife's family and descendants, but in reality passing from man to man in the time-honored tradition of the feudal dynasty.10 Antissia's materialization in her willow tree positions her as more property than propertied, not only because she becomes part of the land, but also because she does not state a claim to her estate of loss. Instead, the narrator reveals Antissia's costly "purchase" of her estate, after she has burned her own literary attempts to claim herself as desiring subject. Antissia demonstrates no awareness of the relationship to material possession that undermines her attempts at subjective autonomy. Antissia's idiosyncratic performance of the generic romantic carving of declarations of love upon trees symptomizes the desiring subject's claim to (or lamentation for lack of) possession of the beloved object. Not only were titles and written legal documents of prime importance to the ownership of land, but possession of land was crucial to the legal status of desire itself, to the attainment of an attractive marriage partner. Wroth's characters continually re-encounter and redraw the boundaries between legally and erotically possessing and being possessed. The dangers o/and to the "estate of loss" reflect the threat of the early modern "trespass": both a wrongful entry upon another's lands and, in legal discourse, injuries to the person including beating and wounding.11 The wounding of another's body and the intrusion upon another's material possession converge as the transition to individual ownership of lands is mirrored in the legal construction

Estates of Loss in Urania

49

of the body as individually owned and enclosed.12 The man wounded by love of the absent or unavailable woman is a stock figure of Petrarchan rhetoric, the language of courtly love and the romance. Near the beginning of Urania, we are reading with the shepherdess Urania the poem of the prince Perissus, unfortunately parted from his beloved Limeña. Perissus has written: "Drops of my dearest blood shall let Love know/ Such teares for her I shed, yet still do burne."13 Perissus represents his loss or lack of Limeña as a state of woundedness. The incompleteness of the subject, bound up in his or her inability to "materialize" the ideal self he or she fantasizes, becomes in the symbolic economy a desire for the "possession" of a materialized completeness, represented by the object of desire. For Perissus this object is Limeña, and he experiences the loss of Limeña as a lack in his own being, a wound. The lover's recognition of his own wounded state initiates the action of Uranids precursor, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, a prose romance written in the 1580s by Wroth's uncle Sir Philip Sidney. The complaint that opens Urania, however, is of a seemingly different kind of loss. Urania has discovered that she is not the biological child of her shepherd "father," and laments: "of any miserie that can befall woman, is this not the most and greatest which thou art falne into? Can there be any neare the unhappinesse of being ignorant, and that in the highest kind, not being certaine of mine owne estate or birth?"14 I propose that Urania's question is the founding gesture of Wroth's revision of the romantic genre. Urania ponders her place in society, and specifies that her lack of knowledge as to her estate (social condition linked to rights of material possession) is the greatest misery (emotional condition) that can befall women. Urania's anguish over her material estate initiates her into the full consciousness of wounded subjectivity figured as erotic desire, for she wanders from her flock into the cave of lovelorn Perissus, and when meeting the noble Parselius shortly thereafter, Urania "had with the sight of Perissus, given leave for love to make a breach into her heart, the more easily after to come in and conquer."15 Wroth's depiction of erotic desire as a wound that arises from and is linked with the desire for material possession reveals the encounter of the subject with the violent mandates of the symbolic order - mandates that generate the symbolic economy even while they remain unactable or "unmaterializable." For Wroth's lovers, the desire for possession of the beloved object is ultimately unsatisfiable, as the serial attachments of the romance prove. But the sustainment of that desire - the wounded state, the "estate of loss" - defines the subject in Urania. The women in Wroth's text spend most of their time questioning their own status as desiring subjects and objects: wondering if they are desired in return, or wondering if their lovers continue to be constant to them. In the efforts of Uranids women to sustain their love for and faith in their absent lovers, Mary Ellen Lamb in her contribution to Miller and Waller's edition on Wroth writes of a "heroics of constancy," and describes Antissia's failure to perform these heroics. But the men of Wroth's prose romance do not struggle with their awareness of the difficulties in sustaining the desire for an unpossessed and therefore still-immaterial ideal object. The men either unselfconsciously sustain their desire for their beloved object or effortlessly lose it: Amphilanthus and other male characters are quite fickle in their

50

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

pursuit of serial objects of affection. At the point when the prince Steriamus develops an unrequited passion for the princess Pamphilia, his representation of his condition contrasts with that of Antissia in the way Steriamus presents his own materialization as bodied subject. He avoids Antissia's materialization of herself as object, as forever-failed and incomplete subject. Steriamus's account of his courtship of Pamphilia shows how men take possession of the estate of loss, of the incomplete subjectivity that does not yet possess. When Steriamus vexes her by his love-struck silence, Pamphilia bids him to speak. Steriamus recounts their exchange: "Alas Divine Princesse," said I, "what discourse can proceed from a dead man?" "I never heard till now," said shee, "that dead men walk'd, and spake." "Yes Madame," cry'd I, "as you have seene trees continue greene in their branches, though the heart be quite dead, and consum'd away, hollownesse only remayning: And so is nothing left in me but empty hope, and flourishing despaire."16 Like Antissia, who at the center of the willow tree becomes the "forsaken compassé" of the crown of loss, Steriamus is a tree with a lack at its heart, "hollowness only remayning." Steriamus's "estate of loss" is named by him as "flourishing despaire." Steriamus's representation of his emotional condition differs from Antissia's performance of her loss in that Steriamus "empties out" the material container that represents his bodied subjectivity. Steriamus performs a disembodiment of himself as subject that becomes an interesting counterexample to Antissia's alienation from her wounded subjectivity. After becoming the "disdain" external to the suffering subject "Antissia," Antissia materializes her own failure to possess her desired object by installing her own bodied subjectivity as a materialized signifier of the loss that occurs through the materialization represented by the tree. But Steriamus incorporates loss itself as a productive emptiness that can be contained through its deceptive materialization in the flourishing outside of a tree. Steriamus uses the aftereffects of materialization, the tree's husk as the leftover matter that in a "previous" time gave substance to the "complete" subject, to show the discrepancy between the materialization of the complete subject and the idealization of the complete subject that cannot be materialized due to the subject's positioning in the symbolic economy. Steriamus describes his sad case to his beloved object herself. Unlike Antissia, Steriamus is manifestly aware of his "estate of loss," and he is also capable of asserting it, of boldly claiming title to this estate to the face of the person responsible for his acquisition of the estate. Like the dowry of a bride, the "estate of loss" may be conveyed by a woman who cannot control her lover's use of it. Pamphilia asks the prince if there is a cure for his despair... and he turns a looking-glass to her face. Her displeasure is well-founded: Steriamus uses his "estate of loss" to demand possession of Pamphilia herself as

Estates of Loss in Urania

51

material object. Pamphilia rejects Steriamus's suit by turning the glass away and thus rejecting the ideal image of herself that he wants to materialize as his possession and hence to destroy as a subject in the symbolic economy. Steriamus, though, is not punished in the course of the romance for the temerity of his assertions of desire, so much brasher than any of Antissia's or the other women's stealthy investigations. Instead, Steriamus ends up joyfully married to virtuous Urania. Steriamus does not purchase his "estate of loss": unlike Antissia he is not ultimately doomed to humiliating and unsuccessful desire. What Steriamus attempts is an alignment of the symbolic order with the symbolic economy, and this alignment is much easier for a male subject to propose since the symbolic order demands sexual difference and the "materialization" of the male principle through the possession of the materialized female body. But Wroth's romance does not imply that all women purchase their "estate of loss." Just as women like Pamphilia and Antissia can become the subject in romance by engaging in the generically masculine contest over the loved object (instead of simply being the loved object), women in Urania can also avoid the crippling "purchase" of desire to which Antissia and "most women" are forced. In Urania, women's materializations as acts of possession in the symbolic economy disrupt the modern symbolic ordering of women as material objects necessary to complete the male subject. Queen of land inherited from her uncle, but presently residing in her father's court in Morea, Pamphilia reveals her consciousness of the problems of the subject's self-possession in her rejection of her suitor Leandrus. Pamphilia tells Leandrus that she can venture into the garden without a guard because "my greatnesse, and these walls are sufficient warrants, and guardians for my safety."17 Leandrus urges Pamphilia to take a husband, and claims that the world of matter, her father's castle walls that "incompasse" her greatness, will prove inadequate to the assaults of traitors. Elevating her right to choose love over her need for male power, Pamphilia rejects his unsubtle insinuation that identifies the female body with inert matter incapable of active resistance. Leandrus then argues that discretion should advise her to choose a husband. He says, "since you were not onely fram'd the most incomparable Lady of the world, but also a woman, and so to be matched with one fit for your estate, in birth and greatness, and so judgement will continue affection between you."18 The double meaning of the word "estate" is here unavoidable: Pamphilia is a woman, and thus must be matched with a man "fit" for her estate. The qualification of the words "your estate" by the phrase "in birth and greatness" generates the meaning of Pamphilia's "condition of being." But Leandrus's argument from gender supports the equally plausible reading of the words to modify "fit," as in the phrase "one fit in birth and greatness for your estate." Upon Pamphilia's rejection of the discretion that mandates that a woman must find a man fit for her estate, Leandrus offers her sovereign possession of more estates (himself and his kingdom) to add to her possessions of virtue and of land. But Pamphilia cites her necessary obedience to her father's and her people's consent regarding the number of crowns she will possess, or the limits of her possession of estates. Amazed, Leandrus asks, "are you

52

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

not... soveraigne of your self by Judgement, yeares, and authoritie, unlimited by fortunes, by government, and the love of your Parents, which will goe with you in my choice." Pamphilia replies, "These still are but the threads that tie my duty."19 In this exchange Pamphilia acknowledges that she is not sovereign of herself in the sense that Leandrus implies. Her possession of estates is determined by the social order epitomized by her subjects and the rule of her father. Yet through denying her autonomous identity within the symbolic order, Pamphilia establishes her identity within the symbolic economy. Crudely equated by Leandrus with the male-owned female body in his description of the walls of Pamphilia's father's Morean court, the world of matter becomes the locus of Pamphilia's assertion of self-possession against Leandrus's conquest. Morea's walls are not identical with Pamphilia's body: Pamphilia identifies them with the symbolic economy's formations of possession, of circulation between matter and the ideal subject, the shifting boundaries between which categories afford protection to women against the sexual advances of individual men. Pamphilia's rejection of Leandrus shows her continuing insistence on maintaining her status as subject in the symbolic economy. While Pamphilia is not yet a queen, she carves into a tree a poem expressing her desire for the absent prince Amphilanthus. The inert material of the tree becomes a site of struggle for self-possession where Pamphilia acknowledges the female body's identification with matter, as well as a place where Pamphilia differentiates her body from inert matter in order to assert her autonomous subjective identity. By acknowledging through her act of inscription that the subject of desire is necessarily its object, Pamphilia unleashes the power of the symbolic economy against the symbolic order's structure of patriarchal possession. Pamphilia writes on the bark the following sonnet followed by the rhyming four-line "footnote" on the root of the tree: Beare part with me most straight and pleasant Tree, And imitate the Torments of my smart Which cruell Love doth send into my heart, Keepe in thy skin this testament of me: Which Love ingraven hath with miserie, Cutting with griefe the unresisting part, Which would with pleasure soone have learnd loves art But wounds still curelesse, must my rulers bee. Thy sap doth weepingly bewray thy paine, My heart-blood drops with stormes it doth sustaine, Love sencelesse, neither good nor mercy knowes, Pitiles I doe wound thee, while that I Unpitied, and unthought on, wounded crie: Then out-live me, and testifie my woes. [on root] My thoughts thou hast supported without rest, My tyred body here hath laine opprest

Estates of Loss in Urania

53

With love, and feare: yet be thou ever blest; Spring, prosper, last; I am alone unblest.20 The reflexive nature of Pamphilia's inscription and the context in which she produces it belie this traditional model of social possession by inscription of inert natural matter. Pamphilia destabilizes the passive materiality of the tree by figuring it as human in body and sentiment: she carves in the tree's "skin" and it weeps with pain. The tree is not just any human body but a projection of Pamphilia's own body, as she describes it, saying: Keepe in thy skin this testament of me: Which Love ingraven hath with miserie, Cutting with grief the unresisting part... (92,11.4-6) In these lines the vague referent "which" allows us to read desire as inscribing either Pamphilia's body or the tree-body.21 Because Pamphilia as subject assumes the role of Love by wounding the body, and because the passive material onto which Pamphilia projects her body reacts with subjective pain, the reflexive act of Pamphilia's inscription disobeys the symbolic mandate to possess the material by objectifying it with the representational power of the subject. This inscription is not a forming of matter but a return to a previous attempt at materialization of representation: the tree bears Pamphilia's previous inscription in its bark, for in this scene of writing "shee finished a Sonnet, which at other times she had begunne to ingrave in the barke of one of those fayre and straight Ashes."22 Just so does her body bear the previous inscription of desire: in her engraved poem she writes of her body "Which Love ingraven hath with miserie," figuring it as previously inscribed; however, by inscribing the tree-body, which is a projection of her own body, she effects a réinscription of her own body. Acknowledging the status of her body as already inscribed, already materialized in the symbolic economy, and simultaneously dislocating her body from cultural fictions of "natural" malleable matter by dislocating the natural object itself from such notions of inert malleability, Pamphilia textually performs what Judith Butler calls the "identificatory projection": As a projected phenomenon, the body is not merely the source from which projection issues, but is also always a phenomenon in the world, an estrangement from the very "I" who claims it. Indeed, the assumption of "sex," the assumption of a certain contoured materiality, is itself a giving form to that body, a morphogenesis that takes place through a set of identificatory projections.23 Through this projection of her body onto the tree, Pamphilia affirms the materiality of her body by identifying it as a "natural object." Pamphilia "materializes" her body through its projection onto the tree. Yet in continuing to claim subjectivity

54

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

despite acknowledging her body's status as materialized object, Pamphilia rewrites the binarizing heterosexual hegemonic discourse of possession. Pamphilia acts as symbolic subject when she performs the act of erotic claimstaking which, as she demonstrates, "wounds" her body. But her roles as wounding subject and wounded object are not antithetical; in fact, Pamphilia writes the subject as wounding as much as wounded. In her injunction to the tree we see that not only is Pamphilia's body the site of the wound, but that she also describes herself as all wound - the "me" itself is identified as "ingraven," as a wound. The mandate of sexuality informs subjectivity, as Pamphilia acknowledges: "wounds still curelesse, must my rulers bee" (1.8). Slavoj Zizek describes subjective desire in his description of the constitutive wound of the subject. What Zizek calls the "wound of subjectivity" he describes as "an abyss, a gap, which 'is' the subject."24 Just as the "Thing-jouissance must be lost in order to be regained on the ladder of desire," so must the subject itself be wounded in order to perform its subjectivization (to assume its imposed symbolic mandate as a defense mechanism). But Pamphilia assumes the symbolic mandate in such a way that she exposes herself as wounder through her performance oi7in symbolic discourse. The subject "wounds" the object by differentiating it from the subject, by establishing the object as such. Zizek gives the example of a man who deforms his beautiful lover in order to love her despite the loss of her beauty: thus the relation of desire depends on the wounding of the subject through the acknowledgment of the loss of the object. When the man wounds the body of the woman, marking it as a foreverincomplete materialization of subjective completeness, he acknowledges the impossibility of materializing the complete bodied subject, except through the acquisition of a materially incomplete object, the woman's body, that serves as the object to the man's disembodied complete subject. When Pamphilia inscribes herself into the tree's body, she wounds the object in order to relate her desire, not to its object Amphilanthus, since the poem is not intended for his eyes, but as its object. Unlike the male lover in Zizek's example, Pamphilia does not acquire an object the trauma to which can be distanced from the subject's own ideal materialization imagined through contrast with the wounded object. Instead, Pamphilia objectifies her desire in order to gain possession of it. Her wounding of the object acknowledges the subject's self-wounding action, concealed in the symbolic order through the wounding of the objectified Other. Pamphilia's action leads me to the story of trauma's possession, or of trauma as property, because through Pamphilia's poetry Wroth shows how figurative language, taken to an extreme in the Petrarchan erotic tropes and figures that order the traditional prose romance, revolts against the system that structures it. Cathy Caruth differentiates the wounded "other within the self from "the way in which one's own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another."25 Wroth's text asks of its reader: In whose territory does the subject carve out a place for itself? Providing answers that reflect and reflect upon early modern property law, Urania suggests that the female subject's contested grounding of her subjectivity reveals the struggle

Estates of Loss in Urania

55

of every subject to claim for itself a place to materialize its ideals. Pamphilia's scene of literary production reveals one way for the female subject to claim selfpossession despite the hegemonic heterosexual law of the symbolic order. Through its troping of words like estate — through the turn of words toward multiple and conflicting signifieds and away from ordered signifying systems that point toward the signified phallus, literary language creates a domain in which the representational claims of the symbolic order can be countered. Figurative language is representational, but allows representation to fail again and again, without pointing to a necessary "completeness" whose lack is the source of all meaning.26 Wroth connects this literary incompleteness to materialization through her insistence on tropes that, without privileging one over the other, turn between the idea of the subject and the material world. By emphasizing the gaps between the subjectivity and symbolic subjectivity, Urania creates the possibility that while the subject may wound another in claiming ground, that wound may not objectify the other, may not establish the first subject on the condition of the denial of the other's subjective position. While Antissia finds herself paying a high price for her "estate of loss" due to her inability to produce successful literary performances, Pamphilia uses literary language to assert her rights to that estate (and hence to the fantasy sustained by male romance heroes of the ultimate possession of the beloved object) and to defend herself from paying the price for it that most women pay. Her solution to the problem of being both woman and subject is to create a literary figure that negotiates the materialization of the female subject - the figure of the tree as "living will." Although married women had few legal rights regarding property or selfpossession, common law allowed single women and widows to write wills disposing of their property.27 Land bestowed in this way could actually pass from woman to woman rather than being swallowed up like cash or goods by the coverture of an inheritor's marriage.28 Pamphilia tells the tree she inscribes to keep her "testament," to outlive her, and "testifie her woes." She thus asserts her desire in a socially acceptable manner rather than by speaking out "immodestly" - and in addition establishes that she has an "estate of loss" under her control. Because she inscribes the testament of the tree as physically a part of herself rather than as a detached legal entity, however, from the assertion of desire she retains the power that she would have given to a document if she had made a conventional will. Jeffrey Masten argues of Wroth's sonnets: "To withdraw from 'the traffic in women' is to imagine the possibility of female subjectivity; likewise, to withdraw from the traffic in manuscripts - to exercise control over one's words - is to imagine the possibility of a voice of one's own, a speaking female subject."29 Masten's argument is doubly true when the controlled document in question has simultaneously both legal and literary force. Unlike the admittedly poor specimen of poetry that Antissia burns before she assumes her "estate of loss," Pamphilia's testament is a durable material possession (the tree is technically part of the estate of her parents the King and Queen of Morea). The tree has now become a domain ruled by Pamphilia who has inscribed the tree with wounds: the tree's bark testifies "wounds still curelesse,

56

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

must my rulers bee" (1.8). Finally, the tree is Pamphilia herself, a "living will" constituted by her own self-wounding, yet avoiding the price of her "estate of loss" by her control of the space of desire: after establishing her sovereignty she went, and sitting downe under a Willow, there anew began her complaints; pulling off those branches, sometimes putting them on her head: but remembering her selfe, she quickly threw them off, vowing how ever her chance was, not to carry the tokens of her losse openly on her browes, but rather weare them privately in her heart.30 Yet Pamphilia's management of her estate requires more than self-control. Antissia, jealously suspecting Pamphilia of loving Amphilanthus, follows her into the grove and reads her inscription on the tree. The solipsistic testament refers its reader Antissia to Pamphilia to ask for an interpretation. Pamphilia repositions the subject in the symbolic economy through her dislocation of the state of passion from the materialized body. Unlike Steriamus, who attempts to present the materialized body as container for the ideal immaterial desire that constitutes him as subject; or Antissia, who allows materialization of her body to remove her identity as subject in the symbolic economy; Pamphilia presents the desiring subject's "estate of loss" as a "material possession," the materiality and possessibility of which are constantly reformed by the subject in the symbolic economy. In Pamphilia's materializations, the subject does not accept the mandate of the symbolic order or even (which amounts to the same thing) hotly engage with it, except through the medium of the symbolic economy. Antissia claims that Pamphilia has exposed her forbidden desire for Amphilanthus through her inscription: "You cannot thus dissemble," replied Antissia, "your owne hand in yonder faire Ash will witnes against you." "Not so," said Pamphilia, "for many Poets write aswell by imitation, as by sence of passion; therefore this is no proof against me."31 After Antissia cites Pamphilia's vocal lamentation as proof of her forbidden desire for Amphilanthus, Pamphilia admits that she desires, but not that she desires illegally. Her voice proves no more stable a referent for symbolically ordered desire than her writing. Her claim that the testament does not necessarily "witnes" or testify to her passion establishes her interpretive authority over the text, as she takes possession of the text as materialized discourse, while distancing the material "body" of her passion from her identity as bodied subject. Immediately afterward, however, Pamphilia uses the materialization of her own physical body much in the same way that she has used the discursive materialization of her surrogate treebody. Pamphilia claims of Amphilanthus, "I love him as he merits, long conversation as from our youthes; besides, our bloud claiming an extraordinary respect."32 She does not lie to Antissia, but when Antissia says, "You will not deny

Estates of Loss in Urania

57

you are in love with him then?," replies, "Why should I not?" avoiding a falsehood. She continues, "I'm sure I know my owne heart best: and truly so farre is it from suffring in this passion, as it grieves mee you mistake me so much."33 Pamphilia reads her heart completely differently from the way she read it previously in the text of her poem. She distances her body from the "estate" of passion that is now located in the suffering tree. She thus gives her own materialized body, in the phenomena of her heart and her voiced complaints, a troping or destabilizing signifying potential through multiple materializations of her body that serve in turn as evidence for the subject who retains her claim to the "estate of loss" by refusing another's possession of her own materializations. While she admits her prohibited desire to Antissia, she can speak so that Antissia reads a denial where there is none. Thus Pamphilia enacts a subversion of the signifying stability that she has "conceded" to Antissia in admitting desire - in admitting her "estate of loss." Even though it is inscribed with a "stabilizing" confession of loss, the tree-body as body originating Pamphilia's speech "becomes a sign of unknowingness precisely because its actions are never fully consciously directed or volitional... . The act is redoubled in the moment of speech: there is what is said, and then there is a kind of saying that the bodily 'instrument' of the utterance performs."34 Butler's interpretation of Shoshana Felman's speech-act theory is useful for the conceptualization of how materialization eludes the symbolic order. I would like to extend Felman's and Butler's arguments on the materialization of the body: excess of utterance may be linked to its materialization as discourse and as object, but the two are not divided. The ideal body and the material body are inseparable. Pamphilia de-instrumentalizes the body, making it not the inert vehicle for materialization of discourse but the intersection of representation and materialization. Because Pamphilia has converted her potentially possessible body into a multiplicity of discursive entities that both claim as lawful and conceal the terms of Pamphilia's will, Antissia fails to understand the trespass, the trauma, that Pamphilia will later be seen to have inflicted upon Antissia's own estate of loss (by loving and winning Amphilanthus). The other striking feature of Pamphilia's denial of her love for Amphilanthus is the comment she makes on the nature of literary production: "many Poets write aswell by imitation, as by sence of passion." While Pamphilia understands the power conferred by mastery of literary convention, her "citations" of literary authority are subversive echoings of patriarchal discourse. Pamphilia uses the amorous language of the traditionally male Petrarchan lover; similarly, Wroth writes in the language of the previous generation, using the general style and form of her uncle Sidney's prose romance Arcadia from her title onward. In her use of poetry as representational language that intrudes into the prose romance and insists upon the status of that generic language as one which "nothing affirms," Wroth plays with Sidney's argument that the poet cannot be a liar since he affirms nothing.35 Pamphilia's tree-writing is a citation of the traditional romance discourse and its symbolically ordered heterosexual hegemony. As Maureen Quilligan points out, Wroth models Pamphilia's tree-writing on the scene of writing in Sidney's

58

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

Arcadia in which Pamela and her suitor Musidorus write on trees. While Pamela's sonnet seems to anticipate the projection of the wounded body enacted by Pamphilia, Pamela's sonnet reifies the absolute difference between her body and the body of the tree. Pamela "graves" her thoughts in her inscription of the tree rather than crying out through the tree as Pamphilia does. Her body is "deeper engraved" than the body of the tree, and the wound is given to her heart by her own "forewounded ey'n,"36 unlike Pamphilia's wounding by Love, to master which she "pitiles" inscribes the tree's wound in an assertion of power. Pamela employs the tree as witness, but in the objective sense emphasized by her separation of her own agency in wounding herself from the witnessing of the tree. She tells it: "long witness my chosen smart,/ Which barred desires (barred by myself) impart."37 The telling conclusion of Pamela's poem reveals her submission to the heterosexual order of possession that structures prose romance, as following her self-internment (in-grave-ing) in her verses on the tree, she performs the required resignation of possession: "My heart my word, my word hath giv'n my heart./ The giver giv'n from gift shall never part."38 Pamela's collapse of her word and heart signifies that unlike Pamphilia she cannot claim an authorial detachment from her text, and thus she imbeds her body, her self, in the will that she gives to her male beloved. Musidorus takes possession of his literary and artistic gift with his written rejoinder, a bold trespass on the physical property of Pamela's tree: "Nay higher thoughts (though thralled thoughts) I call/ My thoughts than hers, who first your riñe did rent."39 Pamela shows no discomfort with the "predicament" in which she is "most inappropriately both giver and gift" in love, as Quilligan observes.40 Pamela celebrates the symbolic order and renders Pamphilia's citation of her necessary in order to create an alternative to the female subject's too-dear "estate of loss" in traditional romance. That Pamphilia's and Wroth's strategies of citation differ from imitation becomes apparent in the imitative Antissia's failure to claim herself as subject in romance. Antissia becomes convinced that Amphilanthus has returned to Morea in disguise in order to woo Pamphilia, and in her jealousy she revisits the scene of Pamphilia's literary production. Antissia composes a sonnet "either by her owne passion, or the imitation" of Pamphilia, but does not inscribe it on the tree. Antissia tries to contain her losses, "to put her thoughts in some kind of measure,"41 rather than acknowledging and "cutting" them. Antissia is imitating Pamphilia's poetic production, but she fails to learn from Pamphilia's discursive practices. Instead, her sonnet reveals a fear of desire and loss that disempowers her as subject: Obedience, feare, and love doe all conspire A worth-lesse conquest gain'd to ruine me, Who did but feele the height of blest desire When danger, doubt, and losse, I straight did see. Restlesse I live, consulting what to doe, And more I study, more I still undoe.42

Estates of Loss in Urania

59

Unlike Pamphilia, Antissia cannot manage the "estate of loss" of the desiring subject, and thus desire undoes her.43 That Pamphilia's management of herself as possessor and possession effectively steals Antissia's self-possession by destroying any chance for Antissia to materialize her possession of the beloved object Amphilanthus, serves only to underscore the continuing effect of the symbolic order in the symbolic economy. The subject, female or male, still comes to selfpossession by denying the self-possession of the other, even if that denial is acknowledged as a self-wounding action. For the woman writer in and of romance, the "estate of loss" or wound of desire can become a site of power within that genre in which men have traditionally held that estate, or felt that wound, and fought over the rights to possession of the woman as material possession who confers upon the subject the control or "cure" of the estate or wound. The woman in romance, characteristically trespassed upon as a possessible object, can trespass against the patriarchal economy of romance by inscribing the wounds of desire upon herself in such a way as to render herself not the conveyor the "estate of loss" to be acquired, but rather the subject equally entitled to that burdensome estate. Wroth's inscription of the genre of prose romance with the character of Pamphilia deals the genre a wound which flays the romance narrative of the Urania, opening it to authorial presence. Seen as a textual creation, Pamphilia in her less-than-complete subjectivity mirrors the incomplete, materialized subjectivity of the tree-body. Wroth writes Pamphilia as a projection of the female romance author just as Pamphilia writes the tree as a projection of her body, and consequently Wroth redefines female authorship through the relationship between the textual character and her author. Pamphilia's assertion that she is the desired object that she wounds implies her identification with and intervention in the genre itself: she fashions her identity through identifying herself as the land of Arcadia as much as the romantic desiring subject. In taking possession of her own body, Pamphilia takes possession of the realm of romance. Wroth as the real author of romance thus asserts her right to literary estate through her textual double. In managing the matter of romance Wroth reformulates her relationship with those who actually possess the Sidney estate, an entity that fits quite nicely into the topos of the "estate of loss." Robert Sidney, Wroth's father, had to borrow from his nephew (Wroth's lover Pembroke) and rely on a subscription by his subordinates in a garrison in Holland to furnish for his daughter a 1000-pound dowry.44 The reallife Amphilanthus's estate was the origin of the funds with which the real-life Pamphilia purchased her own estate of loss - a troubled marriage with the notoriously oafish Robert Wroth. Yet her marriage in 1604 ultimately led to the precarious independence of estate that Wroth had achieved by the time of the writing of Urania (1619-20). When Robert Wroth died in 1614, he forgave Mary Wroth the failure to make good on the payment of her dowry, and left the estate to her and his infant heir, in trust of three Wroth men. This new inheritance of an "estate of loss" left Mary Wroth with an estate 23,000 pounds in debt. When his heir died, the portion of land allowed to her as widow's dower right failed to provide enough money to satisfy her needs. For the rest of her life she fought legal

60

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

battles to preserve her financial freedom, trying to improve her income from her lands. She was many times granted the royal warrant of protection from her creditors.45 Such a warrant of protection, like Pamphilia's arboreal testament, protects the physical person of the debtor from being punished, or held in the place of her lost estate. Wroth's adept maneuverings kept her independent, but the plights of her fictional characters show that in the domain of letters, the problem of subjectivity is that there is no profitable "estate" for the subject to inherit. Increasingly, landowners were being forced to sell lands due to inflation and the increasing expenses attendant upon the rising standards for consumption.46 As well as commoners, many seventeenth-century aristocrats and members of the gentry both male and female found themselves inheriting an "estate of loss." Wroth's generic trespass against a patriarchal genre is a cultural transgression both inside and outside of the narrative. Quilligan observes of tabooed female desire in Urania, "a great part of Pamphilia's problem is that 'publishing' her poetry, even to circulate it to friends, is a borderline transgression."47 Pamphilia, though, "publishes" her poetry by carefully managing its inscription and interpretation, and hence overcomes the accusation of transgression levelled at Antissia's public creations. Later in Urania, Nona Fienberg argues, Amphilanthus performs a somatic intrusion into Pamphilia's cabinet: "Pamphilia adopts Amphilanthus's evaluation of her verses in her blushes and in her shame. She has become the work, the artifact he now claims as an object for his pleasure."48 The always looming threat of masculine disempowerment of the female writer through possession of her body is the cultural force which Pamphilia overcomes in the scene of her inscription on the tree. But Amphilanthus trespasses upon the territory of female literary production and masters it with his own interpretation. Wroth, too, was to lose her independence as an author: six months after its publication she was forced to withdraw Urania from sale due to male courtiers' objections to its apparent satirizing of their private lives.49 Wroth's citational practices could not protect her literary independence in the seventeenth-century literary world, in which the "feminized" author was not legally empowered to defend his or her writing from its most powerful interpreters.50 It is perhaps for this reason that the literary ground claimed and reclaimed by authoring characters in the genre of prose romance is found by Mary Wroth to be such friendly terrain.

NOTES 1. Shoshana Felman argues for the establishment of the object by subjective misfiring in The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 82-83. 2. I have in mind Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), Shoshana Felman's The Literary Speech Act, and Julia Kristeva's The Powers of Horror (New York: Routledge, 1993), among others. 3. Lady Mary Wroth, The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (Tempe: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995), 327-28.

Estates of Loss in Urania

61

4. Wroth, 328. 5. For work that examines this influence, see Paul Alpers, "Pastoral and the Domain of Lyric in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender" Representations 12 (1985): 83-100. 6. Mary Murray, The Law of the Father? Patriarchy in the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 1995), 71. 7. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 48^9. 8. Murray, The Law of the Father?, 119. 9. Wroth, 397. 10. Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22-23. 11. For a description of the trespass against persons, see John Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law: Law and Society in England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta (New York: Longman, 1996), 164. 12. For essays on the relation between enclosure of land and the enclosure of the body, see Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, eds. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 13. Wroth, 3. 14. Wroth, 1. 15. Wroth, 21. 16. Wroth, 69. 17. Wroth, 213. 18. Wroth, 213. 19. Wroth, 214. 20. Wroth, 92-93. 21. See Maureen Quilligan, "The Constant Subject: Instability and Female Authority in Wroth's Urania Poems," in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and SeventeenthCentury English Poetry, eds. Katharine Eisaman Maus and Elizabeth Harvey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 307-35. Quilligan notes the ambiguity of these lines, but proposes that the ambiguity is resolved by a location of the wound in Pamphilia's body. According to my reading, her argument does not sufficiently account for the existence of the ambiguity. 22. Wroth, 92. 23. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 17. 24. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 171. 25. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 8. 26. I owe this observation to Julia Kristeva's work and to Paul de Man's analysis of literary texts and rhetoric, particularly "The Rhetoric of Blindness" and "The Rhetoric of Temporality" in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 27. Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England, 31. 28. Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1993), 209-10. 29. Jeffrey Masten, '"Shall I turne blabb?' Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth's Sonnets," in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, eds. Naomi Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 67-87, 85. Masten is referring to Gayle Rubin's observations on the patriarchal circulation of women in her essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy'

62

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

of Sex," in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210. 30. Wroth, 93. 31. Wroth, 94. 32. Wroth, 95. 33. Wroth, 95. 34. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech (New York: Routledge, 1997), 10-11. 35. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: T. Nelson, 1965), 123-24. 36. Sidney, 198,1.6. 37. Sidney, 198,11.10-11. 38. Sidney, 198,11.13-14. 39. Sidney, 199,11.13-14. 40. Quilligan, "The Constant Subject," 317. 41. Wroth, 114. 42. Wroth, 114,11.9-14. 43. Note Wroth's insertion of the word "worth-lesse" (as "Wroth-less," punning on her own name) to disclaim any responsibility for Antissia's bad art. 44. Gary Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 114. 45. Wroth's marriage and financial life are extensively documented by Waller, 114-22. 46. C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500—1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 146. 47. Quilligan, "The Constant Subject," 333. 48. Nona Fienberg, "Mary Wroth and the Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity," in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, eds. Naomi Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 175-90, 180. 49. Naomi Miller and Gary Waller, "Introduction," in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, 1-12, 6. 50. See Wendy Wall, "Introduction," in The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

PART II "Hospitable Favors": RITUALS OF THE HOUSEHOLD

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 5

Trafficking in John Ford's The Broken Heart Nancy A. Gutierrez

Anne Barton has eloquently termed the character of Penthea in John Ford's The Broken Heart, "the irresolvable dilemma at the heart of the tragedy"1: this fated character is first brokered into a marriage by her father, and then taken out of this match and put into another by her brother; having fallen in love with her first betrothed, she nevertheless submits to her brother's wishes, sadly endures her fate, slowly pines away, goes mad, and dies. It is easy to see Penthea as a victim of a repressive sex-gender system, an object of exchange unable to help herself.2 And yet, in 1994, in a Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Michael Boyd, Emma Fielding portrayed Penthea in a way distinctively at odds with the above assessment: What was interesting about the production was the decision to play Penthea as a very, very angry woman. Dressed in a tightly laced white dress, she seemed always about to explode with rage. Emma Fielding looked extremely young, but her alto voice sounded older than she looked, and the lower end of her vocal range was particularly used to express anger. This Penthea raged at Ithocles, hit him, really enjoyed the fact that he was in distress in love; in addition her comment that she might have been too "rough" with Orgilus was almost comic because she had just given him such a thorough ear bashing. The decision to play Penthea this way was brave; it did not play for easy sympathy from the audience, as a more sentimental, feeble Penthea would; and while at first it seemed impossible that this angry young woman could ever have been coerced into an unwanted marriage, on reflection the fact that even a strong woman like Penthea was caught in this way stressed how impossible it was to escape the appalling predicament of forced marriage. Penthea's starvation of herself was also presented as a gesture of anger and aggression; she did not fade away, getting weaker and weaker, but was vigorous in her madness, enthusiastically hugging and kissing Orgilus but confronting her oppressors unflinchingly and often violently.3 65

66

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

It is sometimes the case that an actress can embody a role so persuasively that she can challenge theatre history's traditional interpretation of a famous character: Peggy Gay has charted examples of such performances of Shakespearean actresses in As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women, and it appears that Emma Fielding transformed Penthea on stage in a similar fashion.4 If Penthea in the past has been interpreted as a helpless victim by literary and theatre scholars as well as actresses because such an interpretation seems called for by her situation in the play, it is also the case that the text of The Broken Heart offers an alternative and equally credible reading of Penthea as an agent actively responding to her social and political world. This is the reading so effectively dramatized by Emma Fielding in 1994. The practice of trafficking women as it is represented in the play is the key to this untraditional reading of Penthea's character.5

* **

First printed in 1633, A Broken Heart was probably written and performed in or before 1630.6 The title page indicates that it was first performed in the Blackfriars Theatre, the private theatre owned by the King's Men. While The Broken Heart was not targeted for performance at the royal court, the play's classical - and classicized - setting of Sparta would have appealed to the highest ranks of English playgoers, for in its prioritization of state need over individual desire, it is analogous to the court of Charles I.7 However, the plot of the play clashes with this disciplined setting, for the emotionality of the characters challenges the surface calm. The Broken Heart dramatizes the story of Penthea, given in marriage by her brother (Ithocles) to a man she does not love (Bassanes), and the repercussions of this act upon her former lover (Orgilus), her brother, and her brother's future wife (Calantha): Penthea starves herself to death; Orgilus kills Ithocles and then kills himself through a ritual bloodletting, and Calantha wills herself dead of a broken heart. These deaths not only destroy the youth of three families, but they also put an end to the Spartan royal family, since Calantha has just become queen at her father's death. The play dramatizes the tension between self-control and emotional excess, and ultimately demonstrates the sterility of the former and its devastating consequences upon both individual and society. Ford's Sparta maintains its public stability through the paradigmatic exchange of women and the suppression of women's initiatives toward autonomy. However, this order is only a permeable veneer. Glenn H. Blayney was the first critic to argue that The Broken Heart was a play about the dangers of enforced marriages.8 Through the differing situations of the three couples - Orgilus and Penthea, Ithocles and Calantha, and Prophilus and Euphrania - Ford anatomizes the individual and social tragedy of excessive familial intervention and the fortunate consequence of social approbation of individual desire. For Blayney, the "miseries of an enforced marriage" - that of Penthea and Bassanes - are put into relief by the happy conjunction of individual desire and familial acceptance in the cases of

Trafficking in John Ford's The Broken Heart

67

Euphrania and Prophilus and of Calantha and Ithocles. As each of these alliances is examined, however, it is apparent that Blayney's analysis does not go far enough. The demands of the state and the private needs of the individual are put into tension through the representation of this social practice in the play, but resolution of this tension is problematic at best. While Spartan values are maintained in the public arena, the play's story of unfulfilled love demonstrates the cost to the private realm that adherence to such sterile guidelines demands. The social practice of the arranged marriage thus provides both the instigation and the complication of the plot of the play. In such a "trafficking of women," men, as active subjects, exchange a woman, who is a passive object: what results is a bonding between two men over a woman's body. However, with perhaps a single exception (that of Euphrania and Prophilus's marriage), the arranged marriages in The Broken Heart controvert this schema. Women are trafficked through arranged marriages, but subjectivity and objectivity within this social practice are not fixed by the gender of the participant. In fact, it is within the context of this institutional practice that Penthea asserts her individuality. Karen Newman has observed that the trafficking of women as a dynamic interrelational practice has not been fully examined by feminist literary scholars, and that too often this "syntax of exchange" has been left unchallenged: "the dichotomy subject/object persists untroubled, and woman's status as object is hypostasized - she is goods, chattel, property, the basis of social relations."9 Newman, calling upon Theodor Adorno's formulation of contemporary culture, critiques the static nature of the subject/object dichotomy, especially as it is played out in the trafficking paradigm: active subject (man) exchanges passive object (woman) with a second active subject (man). As a matter of fact, neither subject nor object remains locked in place, nor are the interrelationships ever and always separate and distinct. The terms shift and are variable: "subject and object are 'mutually mediated' - the object by the subject, and even more, in different ways the subject by the object": The category of woman as object, crudely opposed to men as subjects and partners in exchange, is revealed as naïve realism. Men are not always active subjects: sometimes they are objects of exchange themselves, and similarly, women participate as partners as well as objects in kinship systems. Woman is not simply an object, inert, passive, bearer of meaning as she is often represented in feminist cultural analysis. Woman-as-object is only one dimension of the force field that figures a sex/gender system.10 This mediational interpretation of the trafficking paradigm provides a filter by which we may understand the representation of women on the early modern English stage. Kathleen McLuskie persuasively charts dramatists' negotiation between their culture's urge to essentialize women and plays' demands that these

68

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

characters be individualized.11 Mary Beth Rose, approaching the problem from another perspective, argues that "the heroics of marriage breaks down" because of inherent contradictions between ideal and real representations of women, made obvious when an individual's private life, including love and sexuality, becomes the primary subject of the drama.12 In The Broken Heart, even while the patriarchal practice of the arranged marriage is overtly represented as part of the status quo within the Spartan world of the play, its various levels of success assert how problematic is its centrality to both societal order and individual well-being: in other words, the external frame of societal stability hides an internal turmoil of diverse response. The character of Penthea best epitomizes the inherent flaw within the Spartan constitution, for in her enforced marriage to Bassanes is concentrated the drama's principal conflict - that between individual desire and a larger social necessity. I would like to examine three different aspects of Penthea's role in the play in order to demonstrate how Ford problematizes the social practice of the arranged marriage: first, Penthea's own situation as a foil to the other marriages in the play; second, Penthea's role as marriage broker in Ithocles's courtship of Calantha, and finally, her active presence as an avenging corpse, witnessing Orgilus's murder of Ithocles. Of the four alliances represented in the play (Euphrania and Prophilus, Calantha and Ithocles, Penthea and Orgilus, and Penthea and Bassanes), the marriage between Prophilus and Euphrania is the most harmonious. In this case, Euphrania and Prophilus are first attracted to each other and then seek the permission of their families. While it is initially unclear whether or not Orgilus will accede to their wishes, ultimately he gives them his blessing. Consequently, Euphrania and Prophilus's marriage appears to be an ideal example of how women are trafficked in marriage: Euphrania is a gift from one man to another, in which the bonds between the two men are strengthened by the alliance. This arranged marriage is much like the aborted union between Orgilus and Penthea, which I discuss below: although a political as well as a personal alliance, these espousals have the active assent of both parties and are not simply the product of exchange between two patriarchs. The marriage between Ithocles and Calantha, at first glance, seems to mirror that of Euphrania and Prophilus, for Ithocles and Calantha choose each other and this choice is then approved by Calantha's father. However, this harmonious combining of patriarchal and companionate marriage practices is actually a result of female agency, of both Calantha's and Penthea's self-assertion. First, while it is clear that both Ithocles and Calantha are attracted to one another, their difference in class prevents easy access of one to the other. Calantha takes the initiative in two particular scenes: in Act IH.iii, she takes Ithocles's arm instead of Nearchus's, and in Act IV.i, she pointedly throws a ring at Ithocles. In so doing, she recalls the character of the Duchess of Malfi who, because of class difference, also initiates the wooing and courtship of her self-selected husband, resulting in tragic consequences. Calantha's actions violate the conventions of the arranged marriage,

Trafficking in John Ford's The Broken Heart

69

demonstrably the norm in the play, as she refuses to accept the role of woman as the object exchanged between two men, and instead directly asserts her wishes. Second, even as Calantha's overt actions demonstrate her preference for Ithocles, it is Penthea's explicit assumption of the role of family scion that actually challenges and subverts Sparta's normative trafficking paradigm. Penthea approaches Calantha as a typical marriage broker, displacing Calantha's father as the active promoter of the alliance.13 In negotiating her brother's marriage, Penthea overcomes several obstacles. First, as Ithocles's sister, she has no authority to speak for him; in fact, before her marriage, as a fatherless young woman she was subordinate to her brother. Second, as the sister who has been abused by her brother, she is an unlikely advocate. Finally, as the subject of Calantha, the next queen of Sparta, Penthea is politically and socially Calantha's inferior. Penthea finds a voice, in spite of these obstacles, by appropriating the literary genre of "legacy." This genre, long a literary convention, was arrogated in the early modern period as a space for authorship and publication by women who were mothers. "Making a will was at all times the act of an individual, and for the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wife, it was an extraordinary one," most specifically because a wife's identity was absorbed into that of her husband and her property was his property.14 However, while the law precluded women from being able to own or bequeath material goods, women could not be constrained from bequeathing moral and spiritual riches.15 Thus, women writers posited their future absence because of the possibility that they might die in childbirth. If in fact they were to die in childbirth, they would not be able to nurture their children appropriately. From this perspective, the written legacy was not a subversive act, but a culturally approved obligation.16 Penthea appropriates this genre in order to overcome the social, affective, and class obstacles to her speaking for her brother. She opens her case by depicting herself as a dying woman, justifying her audience with Calantha: "My glass of life, sweet princess, hath few minutes/ Remaining to run down. The sands are spent./ For by an inward messenger I feel/ The summons of departure short and certain" (III.v.9-12). Because she is near to death, she sues Calantha, her princess "to dispose/ Such legacies as I bequeath impartially" (11.37-38). Her first "jewel" is that of her youth, which she leaves to "virgin wives" and "married maids" (11.49, 52, 56). This bequest puts in relief her own position as one who is unable to be chaste to her husband, having been forced to leave her lawful betrothed, and as one who will never have children as a result of her untimely and forthcoming death. It emphasizes how she is already disconnected from her community and her appropriate calling, as a result of her brother's arrogant action. Her second "jewel" likewise challenges the arranged marriage practice, as she leaves her "fame" to Memory and Truth, ensuring that her sadness and misuse will not be forgotten, an eternal stigma against the practice of coerced marriages. Finally, she gives to Calantha her "dearly precious" jewel of Ithocles (11.69, 79). When Calantha (apparently) angrily questions her audacity in such a suit, Penthea again returns to the conventions of the literary legacy as practiced by

70

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

women, justifying her actions with these words: "I must leave the world/ To revel in Elysium, and 'tis just/ To wish my brother some advantage here" (11.95-97). And further, when Calantha says, "You have forgot.../ How still I have a father," explicitly asserting her father's patriarchal rights in choosing her marriage partner, Penthea assumes the role of the loving sister, in spite of all: "But remember/1 am a sister, though to me this brother/ Hath been, you know, unkind; O most unkind" (11.103-6). By drawing attention to her aggrieved situation and rising above it to show her undiminished love for her brother, she establishes her voice and her authority. The last of the three alliances in the play, that of Penthea and Orgilus, is the most poignant and disquieting, for although it was originally a marriage arranged by their fathers, it had apparently taken the form of a pre-contract or an espousal, which Ithocles ignored when forcing Penthea to marry Bassanes. In his conversation with his father at the beginning of the play, Orgilus describes his espousal to Penthea as a means for securing civil order, a revision of the action initiating Romeo and Juliet's tragedy: After so many quarrels as dissension, Fury, and rage had broached in blood, and sometimes With death to such confederates as sided With now dead Thrasus and yourself, my lord, Our present king, Amyclas, reconciled Your eager swords and sealed a gentle peace. Friends you professed yourselves; which to confirm, A resolution for a lasting league Betwixt your families was entertained, By joining in a Hymenean bond Me and the fair Penthea, only daughter to Thrasus. (Li. 17-28) Penthea is the object of exchange in this political alliance, reconciling Thrasus and Crotolon whose enmity had created a kind of civil war within Sparta. Orgilus goes on to say that this political strategy for allying the two families was internalized by himself and Penthea as "a freedom of converse, an interchange/ Of holy and chaste love," and that it "so fixed our souls/ In a firm growth of union, that no time/ [Could] eat into the pledge" (I.i.29-32). While in fact it was not necessary that Penthea and Orgilus wholly embrace their fathers' and the king's plan, their assent nevertheless followed, and the use of the word "pledge" suggests that they were espoused, that they made a promise to each other that they were married or that they would be married publicly sometime in the future. Like the marriage of Euphrania and Prophilus, this is the idealized model of an arranged marriage: fathers determine an alliance of families in order to cement political stability, both the daughter and the son agree to the union, and the alliance is translated into a happy marriage.

Trafficking in John Ford's The Broken Heart

71

However, after the death of Thrasus, Ithocles disrupts this harmonious plan by arranging a new marriage for his sister and forcing her compliance. Thus, her "enforced" marriage to Bassanes is simply an extreme version of an "arranged" marriage. Ithocles has violated Orgilus and Penthea's marriage espousal, a precontract generally considered legally and morally binding. Both Penthea and Orgilus believe that the breaking of this espousal has separated husband and wife: Orgilus, for example, calls their union "a Hymenean bond" and mentions "a pledge" and "vows" made by both himself and Penthea (I.i.26, 32, 33). He repeatedly calls Penthea his "wife," who has been contracted to him (II.iii.71). Penthea believes that her marriage to Bassanes is "a rape done on my truth" (II.iii.79). She calls herself a "ravaged wife/ Widowed by a lawless marriage" (IV.ii. 146-47) and complains that "she that's wife to Orgilus and lives/ In known adultery with Bassanes,/ Is at best a whore" (III.ii.73-75). If spousal contracts were indeed considered binding, Blayney's argument effectively corrects those critics who believe Penthea either too sensitive or too scrupulous in her feeling that her marriage to Bassanes was a sexual betrayal of Orgilus.17 The status of spousal contracts in the first half of the seventeenth century was not as unambiguous as Blayney depicts in his 1958 article, however. Social and legal historians have recently documented a decline in spousal litigations during the Elizabethan and early Stuart reigns, inferring that there was a like decline in spousal contracts. Martin Ingram argues that the primary reason for this is the acceptance, both on the popular and the religious and state levels, that public solemnization in a church was actually the only satisfactory and legitimate entry into a marriage. Given the economic and social repercussions resulting from marriage, especially for women, such a public ceremony would certainly provide legal security for both parties from morally unscrupulous men and from fortune hunters. Further, while a pre-contract was indeed legally binding, its validity was also difficult to prove. Ingram notes a growing tendency by the church courts to favor the more public church ceremony in ameliorating spousal disputes, suggesting "that ecclesiastical lawyers were, in practice, gradually turning their backs on the ancient law of spousals and coming to regard unsolemnized contracts as well-nigh unenforceable."18 Consequently, Blayney's description of a Caroline audience who would have unambiguously recognized Penthea's dilemma as "neither maid, nor widow or wife," may not be quite so incontestable. In fact, it may be that, for the elite private theatre audience of The Broken Heart, the family right exercised by Ithocles in choosing his sister's husband could have appeared, if not sympathetic, at least justifiable. Likewise, Penthea's and Orgilus's reactions, while understandable, might be construed as a violation of children's duty to their parents and a questioning of the hierarchical order. In any case, given the transitional status of spousal contracts in both church and popular opinion during this time, it is probable that audience reaction to Penthea's plight would have been divided, rather than collective. Penthea's situation is ambiguous in yet a third way that may have divided the contemporary audience. In her conversation with Orgilus in the garden, Penthea

72

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

admits that she is no longer a virgin: "The virgin dowry which my birth bestowed/ Is ravished by another. My true love/ Abhors to think that Orgilus deserved/ No better favours than a second bed" (II.ii.99-102). For this reason, because she cannot come unviolated to Orgilus, there exists no possibility, present or future, in which she might be able to marry him. Is this an extreme response to her change in sexual innocence, or is Penthea simply a product of Ford's Stuart culture? Once again, discursive evidence from the period suggests that remarriage for women was a contested concept to which a uniform audience response would have been unlikely. It seems that the Christian ideal, espoused by the established church (whether Roman Catholic, Henrician or Elizabethan) for both men and women, is not to marry at all. Beginning with Vives, writers with this point of view would recall St. Paul's injunction: "I say to unmarried women and widows, it were good for them if they kept themselves as I am: but yet if they cannot suffer, let them marry. For it is better to marry than burn" (1 Corinthians 7:9).19 The author of The Law's Resolutions of Women's Rights (1632) pragmatically throws up his hands: "The widow married again to her own great liking, though not with applause of most friends and acquaintance. But, alas, what would they have her to have done?"20 With the advent of the Protestant Reformation, however, and the consequent revaluing of marriage as a calling for both men and women, this conservative point of view was challenged by others, for marriage, as William Perkins asserts in his Of Christian Economy or Household Government, "[is] a stage in itself far more excellent than the condition of a single life."21 Further, because a widow inherited at least one-third of her husband's property at his death, widows were very actively sought in the marriage market. Consequently, for both religious and economic reasons, women frequently remarried after being widowed, rather than remaining chastely loyal to their dead husbands. Penthea's prudish attitude toward her sexually experienced body thus would not necessarily have been the attitude held in the main by the audience of The Broken Heart. In this play, the concepts of espousal and widowhood explicate the difficulties inherent in the trafficking of women. Specifically, they demonstrate the clash between the political and economic usage of marriage and its moral consequence, the slippage between the culture's ability to objectify and commodify a woman's body and its inability to manipulate her mind and heart. Penthea's agreement to marriage with Orgilus and her subsequent love for him indicates that she is not a passive exchange item in that political alliance, which thus stands in contrast to the coercive marriage to Bassanes forced on her by Ithocles. Although her brother is able to place Penthea in an enforced marriage, he is unable to enforce her emotional acquiescence, and she maintains a constant melancholy throughout the play, which is ultimately transformed into a kind of madness. Nor are other characters able to transform her "wearied mortality."22 Bassanes's conventional efforts to enclose her body as the means for enforcing her chastity, analogous to the enforced marriage itself, obviously does nothing more than make Penthea more miserable, for he is unable to "chase [the] clouds/ From the pure firmament of [her] fair looks" (II.i.87-88). Likewise, while Orgilus is able to draw from her an

Trafficking in John Ford's The Broken Heart

73

admission that she still considers herself his wife, she nevertheless says that she is committed to living as Bassanes's chaste wife: "I have not given admittance to one thought/ Of female change, since cruelty enforced/ Divorce betwixt my body and my heart" (II.iii.55-57). Even Calantha, remarking to Penthea that she flfeed[s] too much [her] melancholy" (III.v. 13), is unable to effect a change in her emotional state. Penthea's persistence in her sadness gradually reveals her to the audience as an autonomous subject. What initially appears to be conformity to her brother's wishes comes to be seen as passive resistance to her prescribed role as Bassanes's wife. While she does not overtly challenge her brother's decision, neither does she embrace her new role, and this failure to do so marks her as an unruly wife, according to cultural prescriptions. Plutarch's description of spousal obedience, for example, a text popular with humanist and Puritan commentators alike, clearly prescribes the wife's voluntary compliance and subordination of her will to her husband's desires: Like as a mirrour or looking glasse garnished with golde and precious stones, serveth to no purpose, if it doe not represent to the life the face of him or her that looketh into it; no more is a woman worth ought (be she otherwise never so rich) unless she conforme and frame her self, her life, her maners and conditions sutable in all respects to her husband... even so a wife should have no proper passion or peculiar affection of her owne, but be a partaker of the sports, serious affaires, sad countenance, deepe thoughts and smiling looks of her husband.23 This text, recalled in the title of Philip Stubbes's A Crystal Glass for Christian Women, is restated more directly in the 1563 "Homily of the State of Matrimony": "Ye wives, be y e in subjection to obey your own husband To obey is another thing then to control or command... . For this surely doth nourish concord very much when the wife is ready at hand at her husband's commandment, when she will apply herself to his will, when she endeavoreth herself to seek his contentation and to do him pleasure, when she will eschew all things that might offend him."24 A good wife is categorized as such, not only for making herself unavailable to other men, but also for her complete assent to her role in the marriage unit. However, in spite of Bassanes's entreaty to Penthea to "put on a more cheerful mirth" (ILL 118), Penthea insists that "my attires/ Shall suit the inward fashion of my mind" (II.i.99-100). Although Penthea declares that her interior can be known by her exterior, her failure to mirror her husband's will calls into question her outward obedience not only to him, but also to her brother's authority and to the sex/gender system holding sway over the Spartan state, and thus discredits the effectiveness of the arranged marriage as a viable social practice. It is not necessary that we see Penthea's despondency as a calculated strategy to understand the discontinuity between Penthea's duty as a wife to be subject to her husband's will and her emotional inability to assent to this role. The fact is that her brother's

74

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

coercion can change her outward social position but cannot necessarily affect her internal feelings. Ithocles has forced Penthea to marry Bassanes, as is his right. In doing so, she breaks her spousal contract, consequently enacting a sexual betrayal of her betrothed. In her outward compliance, Penthea thus is forced to enact two "rights" which are simultaneously impossible: the necessity for women to be used as bartering collateral in marriage, and the necessity for women to remain chaste to their betrothed. In her oxymoronic position as "chaste widow," Penthea demonstrates her adherence to these irreconcilable rights, with such adherence leading to her death. Her resulting schizophrenia and the disintegration of her wits, represented in the play as the disease of melancholy, is incurable, and Penthea descends into the selfnegation of food refusal and ultimate self-destruction. Her stage appearance and language are the conventional attributes of the madwoman, as depicted in the Elizabethan theatre: her hair is "about her ears" and her speech seems distracted, although it obsessively focuses on her own and others' sexual circumstances.25 Pierre de La Primaudaye's gloss on melancholy (although specifically descriptive of the disease in men) usefully contextualizes Penthea as a sufferer of this aristocratic malady:26 Now when griefe is in great measure, it bringeth withall a kinde of loathing & tediouosnes, which causeth a man to hate & to be weary of all things, euen of the light & of a mans selfe so that he shal take pleasure in nothing but in his melancholy... refusing all ioy & consolation. To conclude, some grow so far as to hate themselues, & so fall to despaire, yea many kil and destroy themselues.27 Penthea's path to self-slaughter is self-starvation, which is particularly apt for a number of reasons. If we view Penthea's marriage as she does, as a kind of adultery, her fleshly asceticism in food refusal can be seen as a corrective for her sin of sexual excess. Such an interpretation is congruent with the age's cultural values. This loss of her sexual honor is a public shame that she is able to rectify through her abdication of eating - an activity normally considered a communal and social activity. As Ithocles exclaims, "Nature/ Will call her daughter, monster. What? Not eat?/ Refuse the only ordinary means/ Which are ordained for life?" (IV.ii. 155-58). He considers this a "monstrous" decision because it takes her out of the human realm. But the human realm, as he defines it, is characterized by values and practices that serve the authority and prerogatives of men. On another level, Penthea's decision to deny herself food is neither inhuman nor monstrous, but merely a communicative activity that is uniquely female. Contrary to Ithocles's perception, food refusal is very much in the human realm, but in a gendered human realm that includes women and not men. Such self-induced starvation has long been used as a tool of resistance by women against repressive social practices.28 While it may seem that Penthea's action is easily described as compliant and accommodating, in reality it challenges the established order.

Trafficking in John Ford's The Broken Heart

75

Jonathan Dollimore succinctly describes how apparent docility undermines the status quo: If [a] subculture imitates the dominant from below, it also employs a strategy whereby it undermines the dominant. ... Inversion becomes a kind of transgressive mimesis: the subculture, even as it imitates, reproducing itself in terms of its exclusion, also demystifies, producing a knowledge of the dominant which excludes it, this being a knowledge which the dominant has to suppress in order to dominate.29 Penthea's obedience is rather a "kind of transgressive mimesis,"30 and in her selfstarvation, she writes on her body the fatal consequences of such values. Orgilus says that her "beauty [is] withered by the flames/ Of an insulting Phaethon, her brother" (IV.iv.25-26), and by analogy, Sparta is revealed as a ravaged and life-threatening realm. Further, Penthea's self-slaughter is not a private decision enacted in a void, nor does it isolate her from her community. On the contrary, because it is the immediate cause of the deaths of the other three main characters and the change in Spartan leadership, her death has public and communal implications and is neither private nor solipsistic. While her actual death occurs offstage in the play, its first consequences are dramatized immediately in one of the most singular and absorbing scenes written for the early modern stage the murder of Ithocles by Orgilus. In this scene, Penthea's corpse is a silent witness, an emblem of the play's major conflicts: between masculine domination and female resistance, between public demonstration and personal interiority, between state necessity and individual desire. Penthea's corpse is a vital cog in the "trafficking" between Orgilus and Ithocles, for in this scene of Ithocles's murder, Ford perversely enacts the marriage game as it is played out in Sparta, explicitly problematizing the critical role played by a compliant female body in the bonding of two men. He does so by suggestively creating the template of an anatomy theatre as a foundation for the action. The theatre of anatomy, as depicted in the paradigmatic frontispiece of Andreas Vesalius's 1543 De Humani Corporis Fabrica and later texts, generally had several common characteristics: the open cadaver (which is generally assumed to be that of a criminal), the anatomist, and the group of onlookers.31 The anatomist is ostensibly the powerful figure in the picture, for he wields the knife that opens the body and reveals knowledge of this body as he displays it to the onlooking audience of students and doctors, which normally is placed in a gallery behind the corpse and the anatomist. The cadaver - lying on its back, slightly raised, with the middle part of its torso cut open - is the passive object of the audience's gaze, and thus has a feminized position within the scene, as it is subjected to the controlling and curious gaze of the spectators. However, the locus of power is not so neatly assigned, for the dissected body, in drawing the gaze of the audience from the anatomist to itself, mitigates his authority. Further, the gaze of the reader of the text also is drawn to the open body from the anatomist, thus joining the textual audience in dislocating

76

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

the power within the frame. Consequently, the anatomy lesson pictured in this scientific arena contains several conflicting messages: the victory of human reason over ignorance and the demonstration of institutional power over the criminal body are compromised by the implicit need that the dissector has for the dissected, and the apparent acquiescence of the body itself in its own anatomization. This blurring of meaning calls into question both the authority of the physician in the depiction and the knowledge he is able to gain from his skill. In Ford's play, Orgilus is the physician, Penthea and Ithocles share the role of the waiting cadaver, and the play's audience members simulate the students in the gallery. And just like the dynamics in the anatomy theatre, agency is split between the apparent authority and the object of his control. Act IV.iv of The Broken Heart opens with the following stage direction: Enter Chrystalla and Philema, bringing in Penthea in a chair, veiled; two other Servants placing two chairs, one on the one side, and the other with an engine on the other. When Penthea's body is brought onto the stage, one of the servants says to Orgilus, "Tis done; that on her right hand" (1.1), apparently nodding to the chair at Penthea's right and suggesting that Orgilus had taken charge of the staging prior to the scene's opening. By this aside, and also by his statement to Ithocles in the previous scene ("A horrid stillness/ Succeeds this deathful air. Let's know the reason" [IV.iii.15455]), the audience is cued to identifying Orgilus as the "stage manager" or the "director," and further realizes that the chair to the right of Penthea's body will have some dramatic significance.32 The actions of Orgilus corroborate the audience's perceptions, as he immediately assumes a position of power in the scene, questioning Penthea's attendants and eliciting the story of their mistress's last moments. However, even as the audience watches Orgilus, the body of Penthea silently demands their attention as well. Penthea's face is veiled, and we discover that she herself drew the veil when she was ready to die, after calling for a song from Chrystalla and Philema. Thus her veiled body, like the corpse in the anatomy theatre, both draws the audience's gaze and, as the agent of Penthea's will, witnesses the events of the scene as they unfold. Seating himself in the chair to Penthea's left, Orgilus instructs Ithocles to sit to his sister's right, so that "some few tears/ We [can] part among us... [and] perhaps ... mix/ One lamentable story to prepare 'em" (IV.iv. 18-20). But instead of participating in a disquisition of grief and consolation with a fellow griever, conventional activities of consolation for family members at the death of a loved one, Ithocles is bound fast in a mechanical chair and ultimately murdered. Orgilus, the anatomist, finally has control over his beloved and over his perceived enemy. But this control is equivocal. By unveiling Penthea, he "opens" her so that Ithocles might "survey a beauty withered by the flames/ Of an insulting Phaethon, her brother" (11.25-26), the result of his coercive actions upon her life. In seeming to allow Ithocles to invade her body, however, Orgilus likewise allows the blind gaze

Trafficking in John Ford's The Broken Heart

77

of Penthea to testify to his revenge upon her brother. Given Penthea's orchestration of her own death and the highly charged presence of her body in this scene, it is difficult not to interpret her participation in this trafficking activity that results in the murder of her brother as active intervention. Also, even though Ithocles is trapped by the mechanical chair, Orgilus's control over the course of the "execution" is taken away by Ithocles, who wrests linguistic control of the scene away from his murderer. Before Orgilus is able to reveal his intent toward Ithocles, Ithocles takes the initiative by asking, "Thou meanest to kill me basely?" (1.27). Orgilus attempts to recoup control by responding that he "foreknew/ The last act of [Penthea's] life" and so "trained [Ithocles] hither" (11.2728). But Ithocles commands him to "strike home" and "faint not" (11.39, 41). Further, instructs Ithocles, if the wound should close, "Tent it with double force, and search it deeply" (1.41). He informs Orgilus that he will not beg for his life, as Orgilus expects, but will meet his death bravely. So, he continues, "On to the execution, and inherit/ A conflict with thy horrors" (11.50-51). In all, six imperatives are contained within his speech to Orgilus. This language effectively wrests control and interpretation of Ithocles's death away from his murderer and unmistakably undermines that murderer's power in the scene. Orgilus's response that he will "for requital/ ... report thee to thy mistress richly" (11.57-58) is an unconvincing attempt to regain control of his vengeful intent and action, especially when Ithocles, after receiving multiple stab wounds, forgives his murderer. Orgilus's surrogate dissection of Ithocles through multiple stab wounds only confirms his dependence upon that body for any authority he possesses in this scene. And Ithocles joins his twin, Penthea, as the corpse in the anatomy theatre, complicit in the anatomist's effort to reveal knowledge. Just as the dynamics of the anatomy theatre complicate the issue of authority in this scene, so too does Ford's transmutation of the trafficking-in-woman paradigm. Previously the means by which Thrasus and Crotolon/Orgilus were to be bound together, then the means for the alliance between Bassanes and Ithocles, in this scene Penthea reconciles her warring brother and lover. Orgilus and Ithocles forge bonds by means of Penthea's corpse. Orgilus's intent to murder the brother of his beloved likewise shows this trafficking case in point as a deviation and subversion of the social practice that underpins Spartan society. The few moments that Orgilus and Ithocles sit together, with Penthea between them, calls attention to the similarity in their situations: executioner and his victim are similarly "catch'd" in the same fatal engine.33 Although Penthea is not literally a means of exchange in this scene, she nevertheless is the conduit by which Ithocles and Orgilus finally become connected: both fated to death, both bound fast to Penthea. Penthea's role is that of "a pseudo-center, a center latent or manifest that is blatantly exposed or modestly hidden... in which man seeks man and finds him."34 Poised between the two men, she is the vital agency by which Orgilus and Ithocles can come together. Her tangible presence empowers Orgilus to murder Ithocles, an act that will forever bind him to his victim. He imagines that he and Ithocles will be continually "[tugging] for mastery" in Elysium, when he follows Ithocles in death,

78

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

and even there, "Penthea's sacred eyes shall lend new courage" (IV.iv.56, 57). Thus, in the transformation of the Blackfriars to an anatomy theatre, we can see the coming together of several key questions about authority, gender, and agency with which the play has been concerned. If Penthea's character is in fact the mystery at the heart of the play, as Anne Barton asserts, her fate points us to the resolution - or lack of resolution - that the play affords. McLuskie notes that in his plays Ford "demonstrates the fundamental instability which results from opening up the gap between what is shown on the stage and the narrative or ideological truth of any situation."35 Penthea has often been seen as a female victim of a male-dominated society, and indeed, her life is broken by her brother's unthinking and cruel actions. However, she exercises considerable autonomy in the play. First, she persists, in spite of numerous entreaties from family and community, to show herself an unwilling wife to Bassanes. Second, she usurps the conventionally masculine activity of trafficking people in marriage, taking charge of her brother's alliance with Calantha. She then removes herself from her community through a deliberate refusal to eat, and finally, her corpse initiates and brokers the never-ending conflict between Orgilus and Ithocles. In these acts of resistance, she operates within a well-circumscribed and gender-specific context. In her oft-cited essay "Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France," Natalie Zemon Davis has argued that "embeddedness [within a community] does not preclude self-discovery, but rather prompt[s] it."36 Davis provides examples of historical individuals who assert a strong sense of self because of their position and responsibilities within a social community, often that of the family. Penthea's character is drawn with just such a confident sense of identity. She understands that her identity as Orgilus's wife has been taken away from her by her brother. At no time in the play does she believe that she is Bassanes's wife, although according to Spartan law, that is exactly who she is. Instead, she speaks of herself as Orgilus's ravished wife, as an adulteress. When her situation becomes emotionally untenable, her recourse is a well-established form of female resistance - food refusal: she violates common custom by choosing to withdraw from her responsibilities as caregiver and nurturer. Penthea is not a passive victim of an oppressive society, but a self-conscious subject, aware of her identity and her appropriate place within the world she inhabits. Her self-slaughter by means of food refusal is her willed response to the coercive social system of Sparta, which allows the self-destruction of its subjects in order to maintain an illusory social harmony. Emma Fielding's "angry" portrayal of the character of Penthea, which I described at the beginning of this paper, can thus serve as a corrective to a history of stage and scholarly interpretation that sees this character as mere victim. In her very victimization, Penthea carves a space within this playworld that establishes her agency and selfhood.

Trafficking in John Ford's The Broken Heart

79

NOTES This essay is a shortened version of Chapter 4, '"Starved; starved': anatomy and food refusal in John Ford's The Broken Heart" of my book, 'Shall She Famish Then?" Female Food Refusal in Early Modern England, Ashgate, forthcoming. 1. Anne Barton, "Oxymoron and Structure of Ford's The Broken Heart" Essays and Studies n.s. 33 (1980): 70-94, 78. 2. Sharon Hamilton points out that "many critics see [Penthea] as thoroughly admirable, a pure and ethereal being whose life 'reaffirms the essential humanity of ethical ideals,' ... while 'others [argue] that her stringent virtue is narrow and cruel, its essence really a morbid sort of "self-pity"'." See "The Broken Heart: Language Suited to a Divided Mind," in "Concord in Discord": The Plays of John Ford, 1586-1986, ed. Donald K. Anderson, Jr. (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 171-93, 173-74. In both cases, critics afford Penthea neither power of choice, nor subjectivity, nor sense of self. (The internal quotes are taken from Robert Ornstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960], 216; and Irving Ribner, Jacobean Tragedy: The Quest for Moral Order [London: Barnes and Noble, 1962], 158.) 3. Elizabeth Shafer, "Census of Renaissance Drama Productions," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 34 (1995): 130-32, 131. A contrast to Emma Fielding's portrayal is this description of a 1988 Penthea: "Veronica Smart does a trial run for Ophelia, trundling on in a wheelchair, alternately fay, tearful, bitter and simply dotty, with a slightly self-conscious vocal range to match" (Martin Hoyle, Review of The Broken Heart, Haymarket Studio, Leicester, 11 October 1988, in the London Financial Times, 15 October 1988). 4. Peggy Gay, As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women (London: Routledge, 1994). 5. Gayle Rubin focused feminist attention on this paradigmatic social practice in "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of Women, éd. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210. 6. Andrew Gurr, "Singing Through the Chatter: Ford and Contemporary Theatrical Fashion," in John Ford: Critical Re-Visions, ed. Michael Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 81-96, 90-91. 7. For discussions of the early modern conception of Sparta, see Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969); T. J. B. Spenser, éd., The Broken Heart (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 21-25; and Verna Ann Foster and Stephen Foster, "Structure and History in The Broken Heart: Sparta, England, and the Truth'," English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 305-28. 8. Glenn H. Blayney, "Convention, Plot, and Structure in The Broken Heart," Modern Philology 56 (1958-59): 1-9; see also Glenn H. Blayney, "Enforcement of Marriage in English Drama (1600-1650)," Philological Quarterly 38 (1959): 459-72. 9. Karen Newman, "Directing Traffic: Subjects, Objects and the Politics of Exchange," Differences 2 (1990): 41-54, 44. 10. Quoted in Newman, "Directing Traffic," 49. 11. Kathleen McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 123-57. 12. Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 177.

80

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

13. For a discussion of marriage brokers in the practice of courtship in early modern England, see Diana O'Hara, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 99-121. 14. Mary Prior, "Wives and Wills 1558-1700," in English Rural Society, 1500-1800: Essays in Honour of Joan Thirsk, eds. John Chartres and David Hay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 201-25, 225. 15. "Ovr lawes disable those, that are vnder couert-baren, from disposing by Will and Testament any temporall estate. But no law prohibiteth any possessor of morall and spirituall riches, to impart them vnto others, either in life by communicating, or in death by bequeathing" (Thomas Goad, "Approbation," in The Mothers Legacie, to Her Vnborne Childe, by Elizabeth Jocelin, London, 1624, sig. A3). 16. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 283-96; Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modem England 1550-1720 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 3842; and Valerie Wayne, "Advice for Women from Mothers and Patriarchs," in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 56-79, 70-1. See Sylvia Brown, "'Over Her Dead Body': Feminism, Poststructuralism, and the Mother's Legacy," in Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism, eds. Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 3-26, for a counterargument to Wall. 17. Blayney, "Convention, Plot, and Structure," 2-4; and Peter Ure, "Marriage and the Domestic Drama in Heywood and Ford," English Studies 32 (1952): 200-16, 213-15. 18. Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See also Barbara J. Harris, "Power, Profit, and Passion: Mary Tudor, Charles Brandon, and the Arranged Marriage in Early Tudor England," Feminist Studies 15 (1989): 59-88; Richard Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 142^8; David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 267-81; and O'Hara, Courtship and Constraint, 37-39. 19. Joannes Ludovico Vives, A Very Fruitful and Pleasant Book Callyd the Instruction of a Christian Woman, trans. Richard Hyrde, London, 1523, quoted in Joan Larsen Klein, éd., Daughters, Wives, and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England 1500-1640 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 121. 20. Klein, Daughters, Wives, and Widows, 54. 21. Quoted in Renu Juneja, "Widowhood and Sexuality in Chapman's The Widow's Tears:' Philological Quarterly 67 (1988): 157-75, 158. 22. Rick Bowers, "John Ford and the Sleep of Death," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 28 (1986): 353-87, 372. 23. Quoted in Wayne, "Advice for Women," 69. 24. Quoted in Klein, Daughters, Wives and Widows, 17 (italics in original). 25. For a discussion about the representation of mad women on the English stage, see Maurice Charney and Hanna Charney, "The Language of Madwomen in Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists," Signs 3 (1977): 451-60. See also Carol Thomas Neely's two essays: '"Documents in Madness': Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Early Modern Culture," Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 315-38; and "Recent Work in Renaissance Studies: Did Madness Have a Renaissance?" Renaissance Quarterly 44 (1991): 776-91.

Trafficking in John Ford's The Broken Heart

81

26. For a useful discussion regarding how the issue of class differentiates the apparently similar diseases of "melancholy" and "mopishness" and their treatments, see Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 150-60. 27. Quoted in Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State College Press, 1951), 105; see also MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, 159. Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (ed. Holbrook Jackson [New York: Vintage, 1977]) rehearses the same material in the Third Partition, 404-8. 28. See especially Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory, 2nd edn. (London: Sage, 1996), 175-214; Carole M. Counihan, The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power (New York: Routledge, 1999), 93—112; Susan R. Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Vintage, 1989); Vincenzo F. DiNicola, "Anorexia Multiforme: Self-starvation in Historical and Cultural Context, Part I: Self-Starvation as a Historical Chameleon," Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review 27 (1990): 165-90, 166; and Walter Vandereycken and Ron van Deth, From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation (London: Athlone, 1994). 29. Jonathan Dollimore, "Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression: The Jacobean Connection," Renaissance Drama 17 (1986): 53—81, 61. 30. Dollimore, "Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression," 61. 31. Two useful discussions of Jan Calkar's woodcut for Vesalius's Fabrica can be found in Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 104^0; and Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 6678. 32. Julie Sanders calls this scene a "play-within-a-play" in Caroline Drama: The Plays ofMassinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999), 25. 33. Michael Neill, "Ford's Unbroken Art: The Moral Design of The Broken Heart" Modern Language Review 75 (1980): 249-68, 252. 34. Karen Newman, "Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice" Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 19-33, 21. 35. McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists, 154. 36. Natalie Zemon Davis, "Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France," in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, eds. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 53-63, 63.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 6

Good Enough to Eat: The Domestic Economy of Woman-Woman Eroticism in Margaret Cavendish and Andrew Marvell Theodora A. Jankowski

Most early modern English love poetry is based upon a male speaker/(poet) describing a female love object. The focus of the description is the woman's body as site of erotic pleasure. However, erotic pleasure usually cannot result unless the woman is a culturally-acknowledged object of desire; that is, she must be conventionally "beautiful." Thus the descriptions of the woman's body or face in love poetry usually focus on how the woman is "beautiful" and, in doing so, acknowledge the male lover's luck or skill in securing a prize that has a culturally-determined aesthetic "value." In focusing on the aesthetic value of the woman's body, such poetry erases the material circumstances of dynastic or arranged marriages which were the means by which most upper class men in patriarchal society obtained the "prize" implicit in a woman's body. While much love poetry does try to detach itself from marriage, to suggest that love somehow transcends marriage, the only way a man could claim permanent control of a woman was through marriage. (Otherwise he was only transitorily "using" or "renting" a woman's body as he would that of a whore or a courtesan.) And what the man gained through marriage was in fact control of a sizeable chunk of the bride's father's property - the dowry - which is what truly determined the woman's value as a "love object."1 This power differential between men and women in the early modern sex/gender system is obvious in the laws regulating marriage and betrothal as well as in the various binaries constructed to explain the relationship between genders, especially in the oft cited "Self/Other" and "Subject/Object" binaries.2 These relationships are implicit in the circumstances of male-authored love poetry addressed to a female love-object in which the woman's body is the object/other of the male subject/self s descriptive and erotic fantasies, especially those that contain the poetic figure of the blazon. Nancy Vickers describes this figure as:

83

84

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

first, a conventional heraldic description of a shield, and, second, a conventional poetic description of an object praised or blamed by a rhetorician-poet. The most celebrated examples of French poetic blazon were the Blasons anatomiques du corps femenin (1543), a collective work in which each poem praised a separate part of the female body, each poet literally spoke either "of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye," or "of brow." Within the English tradition, poetic blazon typically consisted of a catalogue listing each of these particular beauties, their sum constituting an exquisite, if none the less troubling, totality; their rhetoric inscribing them in a Petrarchan world of "ideal types, beautiful monsters composed of every individual perfection."3 This figure was used primarily by male authors/speakers, such as Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Marvell, to celebrate the beauty - as a signifier of potential sexual pleasure - of a female love object. Edmund Spenser's "Epithalamion" presents a fairly typical praising blazon of a virgin bride of excessive, though predictable, beauty: Loe where she comes along with portly pace, Lyke Phoebe from her chamber of the East,... Her long loose yellow locks lyke golden wyre,... Her goodly eyes lyke Saphyres shining bright, Her forehead yvory white, Her cheekes lyke apples which the sun hath rudded, Her lips lyke cherryes charming men to byte, Her brest like to a bowle of créame uncrudded, Her paps lyke lyllies budded, Her snowie necke lyke to a marble towre, And all her body like a pallace fayre,... 4 The poem indicates that the virginal beauty celebrated in the blazon has been a "cause" of (love and) marriage and will lead ultimately to the deflowering that is clearly alluded to, though never clearly described, in the poem. Thus the praising blazon which describes the woman's beauty - whether part of an epithalamion or a plea for indulgence (like Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress") - does have as its (perhaps not overtly acknowledged) end male penetration/domination of the female body. Thus the trumpeting forth of female beauty becomes a means for effecting male access to the female body, legitimately or illegitimately.5 In contrast, I would like to consider a blazon of a woman's body that is part of a woman-authored poem, "Nature's Landskip" by Margaret Cavendish: Then I a Garden did of Beauty view, Where sweet Complexion's Rose and Lilly grew; And on the Banks of Breasts most perfect there

The Domestic Economy of Woman—Woman Eroticism

85

Did violets of Azure-Veins appear; Lips of fresh Gilly-flowers grew up high, Which oft the Sun did Kiss as he pass'd by; Hands of Narcissus shew'd most perfect white, Whose Palms fine Tulips were streak'd with Delight. Close by this Gard'n a lovely Orchard stood, Wherein was Fruit of Pleasure rare and good; All Colour'd Eyes grew there, as Bullice gray, And Damsons black, which do Taste best, some say; Others there were of the pure blewest Grape, And Pear-plum Faces of an Oval shape; And Cheeks of Apricotes made Red with heat, And Cherry-lips, which most delight to Eat: But having View'd this Landskip round about, And left this Fancy's Hill, Wit's Sight went out.6 This blazon is similar to Spenser's quoted earlier in that it uses fruits and flowers to describe a female body. But there are two main differences between this poem and the previous one. While Spenser uses nature to describe a woman, Cavendish uses a woman to describe nature. This is not an unusual move, as Ralegh makes a similar one in his well-known personification of Guiana as "a Countrey that hath yet her Mayden head, never sackt, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not beene torne, conquered and possessed by any Christian Prince."7 But the major difference between Spenser and Ralegh's and Cavendish's descriptions lies in the disposition of the woman/land described. Spenser's bride, whose body is also "like a pallace fayre," is deflowered/broached, possibly even "sacked" as a forced town would be. Ralegh's Guiana, as untouched and potentially rapable as Spenser's bride, is "raped'Vconquered/colonized. Cavendish's landscape, in contrast, is simply "viewed." While all woman/pieces of land are objects of the poet's gaze, only Cavendish's garden and orchard escape penetration/domination; once the speaker views the landscape, she leaves. For the male speakers in Spenser's and Ralegh's works, viewing is simply a precursor to conquest or control. I am suggesting here that the gender of the author/speaker of Cavendish's poems radically changes the relationship between the speaker and the object/female body described. The identicality of gender of speaker and object renders the Same/Other Subject/Object binaries invalid and lessens or removes the power differential. Penelope Englebrecht is aware of the problems inherent in using the terms "Subject/Object" to refer to desire between members of the same gender, specifically lesbians. She sees an intrinsic contradiction inherent in a lesbian's occupation of either the Subject or Object position, so she coins the term "Other/self to explain more easily how desire can be mapped within the same gender/lesbian couple, which she identifies as "Subject-Other/self."8 This phrasing can be helpful in considering how Cavendish indicates the power relationship(s) present within women-women eroticism in her poems.

86

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

But I simultaneously want to argue that, even when using a figure like the blazon that purportedly focuses upon the beauty of the woman's body - and the erotic pleasure implicit in that beautiful object - the male-authored blazon cannot escape replicating the relations of domination and submission men and women are forced into as a result of the patriarchal sexual economy. Early modern society has constructed women as rapable, dominatable, conquerable, and men as rapists, dominators, and conquerors. Such a deployment can easily be seen in a number of blazons that use geographical imagery to describe the female body. William Shakespeare's description of Lucrèce (in The Rape of Lucrèce) not only pictures her as a piece of land, but as a piece of land already ruled (by Collatine) that is lusted after by a new conqueror/colonizer: Her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, A pair of maiden worlds unconquered, Save of their lord no bearing yoke they knew;... These worlds in Tarquin new ambition bred, Who like a foul usurper went about From this fair throne to heave her owner out.9 Lucrèce may not be the virginal Guiana, but she is a desired prize, having only had one owner. Donne similarly uses the geographical blazon of woman as land, as in "Elégie XVIII-Love's Progress." Here the woman's nose is "the first Meridian," her cheeks hemispheres, her lips islands - "not faynt Canaries, but Ambrosiall" (1.52)10 - her mouth is a creek, her chin a promontory, and her breasts "Sestos and Abydos" with the Hellespont between. "Elégie XIX-Going to Bed," however, more specifically exposes the connection between geography and ownership/control of the female body: O my America! my new-found-land, My Kingdome, safeliest when with one man man'd, My Myne of precious stones, My Empire, How blest am I in this discovering thee! To enter in these bonds, is to be free; Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.11 Here the male speaker is not only observer of the "natural scene" of the woman's body, but he is discoverer, ruler, explorer, miner/excavator, and emperor. The bonds he enters into paradoxically make him free (of the woman's body), though these same bonds continue to enslave the woman/kingdom owned and controlled by the penetrating man. I have been considering aspects of the praising blazon in which the author ostensibly describes good or desirable qualities of the woman's body. But Vickers has indicated in her definition that the object described could be "praised or blamed."121 would now like to look at two male-authored blazons that portray the

The Domestic Economy of Woman—Woman Eroticism

87

female body itself as excessively ugly and almost pathologically disgusting. The first is Shakespeare's extended blazon of Nell/Luce in The Comedy of Errors (III.ii.90-144). Unlike the blazons of woman as land that I examined earlier which do not explain why such an identification is made, Shakespeare's provides justification for his geographical imagery in Nell/Luce's globular size: S. Dromio. ... But her name and three-quarters - that's an ell and three-quarters - will not measure her from hip to hip. S. Antipholus. Then she bears some breadth? S. Dromio. No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip. She is spherical, like a globe. I could find out countries in her.13 But Nell/Luce's physical size - clearly intended as a source of the "humor" of this blazon - is not the only "funny" thing about her. Dromio's description of her "complexion" as "swart" - "dark" - seems to refer to the fact that Nell/Luce is not clean, her sweat and grime producing a mud-like condition that requires overshoes to pass through (11.100-3). This lack of cleanliness is not an unusual situation though the hyperbole certainly may be - for a lower class woman whose job requires her to cook foods that spit grease over an open cooking hearth. Yet when Antipholus of Syracuse rationally points out that this is "a fault that water will mend" (Í.104), Dromio replies that the "dirt" is "in grain. Noah's flood could not do it" (11.105-6). This response suggests that Nell/Luce might very well be "black" in the sense of being an African or woman of color.14 Thus, before we arrive at the blazon proper, we are confronted with misogynist humor based upon sexism, racism, classism, sizeism, and "cleanism," a humor that assumes the play's audience will find the description of a large, non-white, lower class woman whose job inevitably dirties her funny. Worse, the production of this humor - the siting of Nell/Luce as a figure of fun - is necessary for the political humor of the blazon to "work." Ireland can now become the anal location of shit, Spain a dry, hot region whose wealth is akin to pustules, carbuncles, or skin diseases, and the Netherlands "so low" (1.137) that they are beyond (or beneath) the buttocks of Ireland. (Are they in her vagina, perhaps?) Yet lest we think the misogyny of this blazon particularly unpleasant, I want to consider the blazon Donne produces in "Elégie VIII-The Comparison" which focuses upon a male perception (and fear of) another "disgusting" aspect of a woman's body, that most female of parts, her genitals: Then like the Chymicks masculine equal fire,... Such cherishing heat her best lov'd part doth hold. [Thy Mistress's is] like the dread mouth of a fired gunne, Or like hot liquid metalls newly runne Into clay moulds, or like to that AEtna Where round about the grasse is burnt away.

88

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

Are not your kisses then as filthy, and more, As a worme sucking an invenom'd sore? Doth not thy fearfull hand in feeling quake, As one which gath'ring flowers, still feares a snake?15 Here the woman's vulva is likened to a fired gun or the mouth of a volcano therefore hot, smoking, ill-smelling, and capable of destruction - or an "invenom'd sore" (1.44). Oral-genital activity thus renders the man's kisses "filthy" (1.43) and his activity - or, perhaps, his tongue - is likened to a sucking worm. The phallic image switches, though, in the last two lines. Here the man's hand touching the vulva or reaching into the vagina now does so cautiously, as in fear of a snake. Some sort of phallic power - or is it simply that all power is perceived as phallic? seems to live in the cave - or snake pit - of the vagina where it is as capable of destroying men as a gun, volcano, or infected sore. The mistress's genitals here become as completely threatening as the archetypal vagina dentata. The blazons of Nell/Luce, Guiana, Lucrèce, and Donne's anonymous mistress(es) differ greatly from the blazons of Spenser and Cavendish examined above. The geographical metaphor that has become incorporated in the blazon points out the vexed relationship/connection between the "pleasure" of malefemale sexual intercourse, rape, and territorial conquest. It thus becomes very difficult to demarcate the borders between these terms and the resulting extreme objedification of women that results from their individual and collective use. Also, this objectification is carried so far that it results in a pathological fear and disgust of the female body itself, whether or not it can be considered aesthetically pleasing. But while the female body in Cavendish's "Nature's Landskip" is also the "object" of a "subject's" description, the location of that description within a womanauthored poem serves to detach the figure from the subservient position women occupy in the Donne and Ralegh texts. That is, in the Cavendish poem, the object is never completely "other" than the speaker. As I indicated earlier, the vast gulf between subject and object positions in male-female sexual relationships as represented in the male-authored poems I have considered, is absent in Cavendish's poems. The blazons I have examined tend to reinforce the objectification of women mainly because the woman objects are so inanimate. None of the women described by the male authors I have considered above obviously responds to the description of herself presented, and none of them actually does anything in the course of the poem except "be there" to be described, vilified, controlled, or penetrated by her male "viewer." The women erotic objects are, by comparison, much more active in Cavendish's poems. "A Bisk for Nature's Table" begins as an ordinary praising blazon: A large great Eye, that's black and very quick;... Two Cherry Lips, whereon the Dew lies wet,... A sharp and quick, and ready pleasing Tongue;

The Domestic Economy of Woman-Woman Eroticism

89

A Breath of Musk and Amber, Breasts which Silk In softness do resembl', in whiteness Milk; A Body plump, white, of an even growth, That's active, lively, quick, and void of Sloth;... A Hand, that's fat and smooth, and very white, Whose Inside moist and red, like Rubies bright; And Fingers long,... 16 Yet despite these typical images, Cavendish's blazon differs in making the object of the description as "active" as the subject who is doing the looking. The woman's eye may be black, but it is also "very quick." "Dew lies wet" on the lips, the tongue is "sharp and quick, and ready pleasing," and the whole body is "active, lively, quick, and void of sloth." The entire picture is of a moving and active woman very different from the passive women who are the objects of the male-authored poems. It is not until near the end of this blazon that we discover that it is also a recipe: All these [ingredients; body parts] when mixt with Pleasure and Delight, And strew'd upon with Eyes most quick of Sight, Are put into a Dish of Admiration And so Serv'd up with praises of a Nation.17 Cooking involves active participation, as does love-making. Just as it is no fun making love to a "dead" or unresponsive body, it is no fun cooking with inert ingredients. Yeast must bubble as it proofs; sponges need to expand and dough to rise. Fruit must be ripe enough for juices to run. Vegetables and fish must be resilient to the touch, moist, and glowing. All ingredients should smell good and fresh. If this is so, the cook takes pleasure and delight in her enterprise, casts lively (and loving) looks upon her product, and displays it to admiration and praise. Similarly, the quick eyes of the lover can look upon her beloved's body with pleasure and delight as it is displayed to admiration before her. It is interesting and, I think, significant, that Cavendish chooses to present this blazon as part of a poem that is also a recipe. Nothing so strongly demonstrates the (almost) equality of women's relationships with each other within patriarchal society - especially in contrast to their relationships with men - than sharing a recipe. In her article "Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie," Susan J. Leonardi talks about the sharing of recipes as "an act of trust between women."18 Further, she implies that the "social context of recipe sharing" can comprise "a loose community of women that crosses the social barriers of class, race, and generation" while participating "in this almost prototypical feminine activity."19 Leonardi contrasts the "typical" context of recipe sharing and its atmosphere of trust with an atypical situation of recipe withholding and one of "untrustworthy" recipe acceptance. In the first, Lucia (in E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucid) refuses to give Mapp a recipe in order to maintain and reinforce

90

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

her position of social superiority; in the second, Thelma (in Nora Ephron's Heartburn) accepts a recipe from the wife of the man with whom she is having an affair. Ideally, women should exchange recipes in an atmosphere of egalitarianism and trust, despite the fact that the social circumstances of the women exchanging may not be exactly equal. The situation of the exchange renders the women "equal" just as the asking for and the giving of the recipe implies a gender-based trust. Leonardi's astute analysis of the place recipes - and by extension food and its preparation - hold in women's lives provides an important context for considering Cavendish's poems. "A Bisk [Bisque] for Nature's Table" and "A Tart" are both blazons - in the praising sense of creating a picture of a woman's body described in terms of food and natural imagery - and recipes. They are written by a woman for a woman speaker and describe the deliciously erotic possibilities of the female body. Thus each poem participates in, though subtly changes, a male-developed genre that is usually employed by male authors/speakers to describe and control female bodies. I want to argue that Cavendish's use of the blazon in conjunction with the recipe serves to create an egalitarian context for the presentation of woman—woman desire. The exchanging of recipes between women presupposes that the women will use them - that they will cook. And cooking occurs within a primarily woman-only, private domestic space. Thus, within most households, despite what may be going on in the male poet's study, in the kitchen the female cooks are intimately and tactilely engaged with the "ingredients" that most male poets use to describe their ladies.20 Women have most occasion to handle, clean, prepare, and taste those cherries (lips), apples (cheeks), strawberries (nipples, clitorises), and pots of cream (breasts) that go into the male poet's blazon. Not surprisingly, then, Cavendish uses the short poem "A Tart" to show how Life creates a woman as she bakes a tart. The recipe begins with flour of white complexion which, with the "Nourishment" of butter, is kneaded and rolled into a pie shell. To this shell are added "Lips like Cherries Red, ... And Strawb'ry Teats from th' Banks of each white Breast,/ And Fingers ends like Juice from Raspes prest."21 The resulting tart is then baked "Within a Heart" which is "Hot." Here the hot heart is the oven which bakes, or completes, the tart, thus implying that the heat of love/passion is necessary to complete the woman's creation. Similarly, in "A Posset for Natures Breakfast," Life combines "the Cream of Beauty," "the Claret Wine of Blushes," and "the Egges of Faire, and Bashfull Eyes" to make a wise countenance. To this is added "a Lemmon... of sharpest Wit," a "handfull of Chast Thoughts," "Six Spoonfuls of a Noble, and Gentle Mind," and a "Graine of Mirth."22 This posset is thickened with the "Bread of Truth," warmed and cooked "on the Fire of Life" - aided by the "Bellowes of Health" - and finally served in "a Bason of Rich Wealth." Even though the posset seems to be prepared by a male-gendered "Life," the last line "And in this Meat doth Nature please her selfe" - seems to disregard whatever power "maleness" might seem to have in this poem. The reflexive "please her selfe" seems to suggest that Nature - herself a Creator, after all - has as much to do with the making of the posset as Life, having herself created the individual

The Domestic Economy of Woman—Woman Eroticism

91

ingredients it contains. And even if Life is male-gendered, Cavendish's creation is an unusual male persona who grants wit, mirth, and a noble and gentle mind to the female body/object implicit in this blazon/recipe. Unlike Marvell's blazon ("To His Coy Mistress") which dismembers the woman as it enumerates her parts, these blazons put the women's parts together to create a whole that is animated, not destroyed, by passion.23 Cavendish's poetic blazons also differ from male-authored ones in not registering disgust for any part of the female body, though they do imply erotic engagements that male authors might find "disgusting." The tongue in "A Bisk" is described as "sharp and quick, and ready pleasing." This line could, of course, refer to verbal dexterity, but it could also refer to the tongue's ability to be erotically pleasing. This oral focus is not surprising in poems that are so completely concerned with (mostly luscious) edible objects. Woman-woman eroticism here is clearly shown to be caught up in taste and the pleasures of eating where the woman love object's body becomes a source of sustenance as well as pleasure. In addition to the tongue, the hand is a major focus of woman-woman lovemaking and it is, not surprisingly, described in this poem as "fat and smooth, and very white." Curiously, though, this only seems to be what the top looks like, for the palm is described as "moist and red, like Rubies bright." More curiously, the finger tips in "A Tart" are described as being "like juice from Raspes prest," and the narcissus white hands in "Nature's Landskip" had palms that "were streak't with Delight" like Tulips.24 Cavendish's ideal woman has a pale hand that contains a very red palm, or a red and white streaked palm, or red fingertips. While the red fingertips might allude to nailpolish, there is no cosmetic that western women use on the palms of their hands or the tips of their fingers.25 One obvious explanation is that the ideal white hand is streaked with menstrual blood - the woman's own, or, much more likely, her lover's. I suggest that Cavendish may be displacing upward a female bodily function that men often find "disgusting" and claiming it as a mark of beauty. It is certainly a mark of womanliness. But so also are the metaphors of cooking and the use of the recipe as blazon. Cavendish uses female society, female domestic space, and female occupations in connection with a male poetic figure to describe woman-woman desire and pleasure within a context of egalitarianism and female community. Yet there is one Cavendish poem that suggests the demeaning images of women common to most male-authored blazons. "A Hodge-Podge for Natures Table" is somewhat difficult to analyze since the "speaker" is not identified and the use of pronouns confusing. Since the speaker or cook is consistently gendered female in Cavendish's poetry, I think we can assume that she is also so gendered in this poem. And we might similarly assume that the "dish" produced by this recipe consists of ingredients of the female body. The poem begins with "A wanton Eye, that seekes for to allure;/ Dissembling Countenance, that lookes demure," lines that certainly allude to the erotically charged blazons I examined earlier. However, the next line tells of "A griping hand that holds what's none of his." Line 9 provides the only other pronoun, "he," to identify Cavendish's unusually male, blazoned object.26

92

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

Despite what can be called the playful eroticism of the first two lines, the rest of the poem proceeds to describe a very unpleasant male object. He has A Jealous Mind, which thinks all is amisse. A Purple face, where Mattery Pimples stood, A Slandering Tongue that still dispraises Good. A frowning Brow, with Rage, and Anger bent: A Good that comes out from an ill Intent.27 The blazon goes on to describe the male object's behavior, which is nasty, his physical characteristics, which are ugly, and his talents, which are non-existent. Yet despite this clearly unpleasant picture, Cavendish is never as disgusting in this male blazon as are Donne or Shakespeare in the blazons I examined earlier. The worst part of the blazon occurs at the end of the poem: All in the Pot of dislike boileth fast, Then stirs it with a Ladle of Distast. The Fat of Gluttons in the Pot did flow, And Roots of severall Vices in did throw; And severall Hearbes, as aged Time that's dry, Heart-burning Parsley, Buriall Rosemary. Then powers it out into Repentant Dishes, And sends it up by Shadows of vaine Wishes.28 While I agree that likening a man to a boiling stew of roots and bitter herbs that oozes fat is unpleasant, I would also maintain that said scummy stew is less unpleasant than Shakespeare's description of the dirty, globe-like Nell/Luce, or Donne's of his mistress's cannon-like vagina. But why is Cavendish's blazon less offensive? Is it because she does not, personally, dislike men? Possibly. I would suggest, however, that her blazon of the unfortunately pimply male is less offensive because it is couched in the rhetoric of the recipe, not that of rape or conquest. While I can conceive of few who would want to eat Cavendish's hodge-podge, descriptions of awful dishes tend to veer toward the comic rather than the disgusting. Truly bad cooks or inventors of distressing recipes tend to elicit pity for them and their creations - rather than our despite. Thus by restricting her blazons to the recipe formulation, Cavendish not only limits the extent of vilification possible within the form, but demonstrates that women's anti-male disgust is sufficiently less than the disgust men might feel for women. While the blazon has the potential to dismember or demean the woman('s body) it is ostensibly praising, it simultaneously reveals a threat the male poet sees as contained in that same body. As Donne has demonstrated in "Elégie VIII-The Comparison," the male poet may have the social and cultural (as well as "actual") power to dominate women, yet women themselves can manifest a threat of their own sexual power that has the potential either to render men impotent or to wrest

The Domestic Economy of Woman—Woman Eroticism

93

their phallic power from them. Not surprisingly, the blazon can be viewed as a "public" genre, one that allows men - the dominant gender in the public world verbally to control women once they "leave" their private realm to come into the public world of male poetry as bits of nature, pieces of real estate, new lands to be colonized, or realms of old enemies to be conquered. Setting the blazon in the private/domestic female space has allowed Cavendish to use a figure potentially destructive to women to construct loving erotic relationships. Yet it seems that while Cavendish can domesticate the public blazon by moving it "indoors," certain male use of private domestic space for erotic purposes can become highly problematic. For the remainder of this essay I want to consider how public and private spaces overlap and interact, how they often become so intertwined that it is impossible to separate the purely public from the purely private. I see this overlap as occurring most often in terms of the family, which has a public aspect within culture/society as that institution in which patriarchal lineage is reproduced, as well as a private aspect that reflects the purely domestic actions of (usually) female members. In addition, more intimate sexual/erotic interactions of both genders can be said (usually) to inhabit the private space of the family, though writing of these experiences can become highly public. This interconnectedness of public and private was also obtained within pre-Reformation convents in England, which can be said to be organized along "family" lines. The abbess or prioress usually represented the public "face" of the convent and dealt with external affairs. However, as "Mother Superior," she also oversaw the private/intimate aspects of nuns' lives - eating, sleeping, praying, etc. While the Act of Dissolution (of Monasteries) (1537) actually put an end to English convents, it did not put an end to speculation about just what exactly happened between nuns within their private spaces. Andrew Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" (c. 1650-53) resurrects not only the institution of the Roman Catholic convent, but the contested public/private space(s) of that "familial" institution and considers them in terms of how the secular aristocratic family of the Reformation was to be reconstructed against Catholic norms. Central to accomplishing this aim is Marvell's creation of an "official" narrative of the Fairfax family which both validates their postReformation (1542) acquisition of Nun Appleton, yet distinctly separates them from its Catholic connections. While certainly a material gain of real estate for the family, the seemingly private acquisition of the abbey is represented as being essentially public, since it allows for a Reformed re-definition of the Fairfax family which is accomplished through the control of the (private)/deviant sexualities and female autonomy embodied in the nuns of this Catholic "family." Stanzas xi-xxxv narrate the acquisition of the abbey, and describe Nun Appleton in terms of a (private)/family household, yet one in which the performance of traditionally subservient, domestic duties is accomplished by "Virgin Amazons"29 and resonates with a specifically anti-patriarchal power. Since most immediately pre-Reformation monasteries were enclosed especially Cistercian ones like Nun Appleton - prevailing Catholic discourse

94

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

constructed these spaces as intensely "private" and consequently domestic. The use of familial metaphors to indicate relationships and hierarchies among the members - the "Mother Abbess," the "daughters," and their "sisters" - reinforced the perception of the monastery as a private/family space where the individual bodies (including their mouths and vaginas) of the nuns were as enclosed as the house and its garden/lands.30 Yet while monasteries were private spaces, they also, like the family, had a public aspect. The self-sufficiency of the monastic unit often depended upon trade/barter of commodities/food with the outside as well as selling important products: elaborately embroidered altar cloths or ecclesiastical vestments, fine copies of manuscript books, music, instruction, etc. — possibly even fine foods and herbal remedies. And monasteries were "publicly" connected to the life of the church and often needed to participate in ecclesiastical functions. Generally, a small percentage of nuns from enclosed orders actually engaged in extra-monastery activities; usually the abbess - who had the ecclesiastical rank of bishop and the secular rank of baron - represented the public face of the order in all secular and religious transactions. Engaging in what were essentially "male" activities in the male-controlled public domain, it is not surprising that such women became identified in Marvell's poem with the threatening figure of the Amazon, the woman who refuses to live by patriarchal norms.31 Such an identification of Catholic nuns was especially prevalent within Protestant cultures. If monasteries are thought of as exclusively private spaces, it is easy to accept the residents as truly enclosed; their mouths, eyes, and vaginas are closed as surely as their monastery gates are. Their total virginity grants them a saintly quality. But once the "public" aspect of the monastic family is acknowledged, the previously totally private space takes on the perplexing juxtaposition of the public and private aspects of the secular family. "Outside" seeps into "inside" and the previously virginal, private, interior space of the monastery becomes contaminated by that uneasy reading of public vs. private sexuality I discussed earlier in terms of the secular family. The "open" priory gates necessarily both imply and tend to "symbolize" a sexual openness within the entire monastic community. The sexuality that is "normal" within the patriarchal family now becomes "deviant" when engaged in by Amazons, especially "saintly" or religious ones. That no sexual activity may actually be occurring is not the point; once the discourse of the monastery is modified/acknowledged to include the "public," sexual activity must enter, since the only sexuality possible for unmarried women is illicit/deviant. So by the time Marvell came to write "Upon Appleton House," the only extant discourse of nuns he had to draw upon was that of deviant Amazons. It is upon the demonized bodies of such tainted women that he constructs the pure myth of the Fairfax family.32 Marvell's Protestant vision of a Catholic Abbey situates the innocent Isabel Thwaites (spelled "Thwates" in the poem) in a milieu which threatens her on at least two levels, the sexual and the cultural. She becomes the object of erotic interest of at least one nun and she is taught the "advantages" of living in a world that views men as "wild Creatures" (1.102). Thwaites is apparently not a nun,

The Domestic Economy of Woman-Woman Eroticism

95

though she resides at Nun Appleton. She may have been simply a boarder or scholar at the abbey, though H. M. Margoliouth suggests that she was shut up there by her guardian - the Lady Anna Langton, who was the Prioress - in order to prevent her marriage to William Fairfax of Steeton.33 The poem gives no overt reason why the marriage to Fairfax was not promoted, but does state that the "Fair beyond Measure" (1.91) Thwaites was enough of an heir to make "Deformity... fair" (1.92). Perhaps this Fairfax was perceived to be a fortune hunter. Whether or not the Prioress wished to prevent Thwaites from any contact with any man is unclear, though the text states that Isabel spent "Summer Suns" (1.93) - plural - at the abbey engaged in conversation with the "Suttle Nunns" (1.94). In the midst of one of these sessions, one nun - who is most likely the Prioress - presents Thwaites with a vision of what her life would be like were she to accept the veil. The nun's description is lodged within both the uneasy public/private discourse I described earlier and the Protestant discourse of the deviant nature of life in a Catholic convent. Life in the abbey is described as innocent (1.98), for the walls ensure privacy by keeping the "World" outside (1.99). The walls/bars may "hedge [the] Liberty" (1.100) of the nuns, but they simultaneously "inclose" (1.101) the "wild Creatures, called Men" (1.102) outside, thus suggesting it is their liberty, rather than the nuns', that is restricted. Once the men are denned up away from them confined in their own "private" world? - the nuns are free to live their own life, "privately" removed from patriarchal society, but perhaps within a sheltered world containing a matriarchal "public" quality. I use the terms "public" and "private" very judiciously here, because they are consistently slipping. Stanza xiv identifies the nuns as "Virgin Amazons" (1.106) who fight in "shining Armour white" (1.105) - an allusion both to their virginity/purity and the (lack of) color of Cistercian habits - but also simultaneously as spouses waiting for the "great Bridegroom" (1.108). The image of the dutiful, "private" wife is wildly at odds with that of the battle-ready "public" Amazon warrior. Where does the private realm end and the public begin? How are we successfully to read a location that is so consistently shifting? With difficulty. Especially when the notion of "pleasure" is added to the equation in stanza xv. The nun claims that tears resulting from the pleasure(s) of their life contribute to their beauty by clearing their complexions (11.111-16). These tears cannot come about as the result of grief, for who can grieve being both a queen and a spouse (of Christ) (11.118-20)? Again, the text sets public (queen) and private (spouse) figures in opposition. The next four stanzas (xvi-xix) describe the specifically female occupations of most of the nuns - reading saints' lives and embroidering altar cloths - yet the beauty of Thwaites is seen as having the power to inspire the embroiderers to create "a thousand Saints" (1.136) based upon her image. While this particular line may be taken as simply an elaborate compliment, an earlier pair is blasphemous by suggesting both that the Blessed Virgin Mary "resembles" Isabel and that the nuns would come to some closer apprehension of the mother of Christ by being able physically to touch their lovely guest (11.13132). The blasphemy continues as the nun identifies Thwaites as something "more

96

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

than humane" (1.144) - e.g., saintly - consecrated as a result of her beauty (11.14546) and already surrounded by a halo of angels who shower her with lilies. Her voice has the power to "draw Heav'n nearer" (1.162), to raise the nuns higher to perfection by her example (11.163-64). Further, the nun suggests "Twere Sacriledge a Man t'admit/ To holy things, for Heaven fit" (11.139-40). While these lines can be read simply to explain why a lay man cannot be permitted to enter a religious house, I suggest that we are meant to read them sexually: it would be a sacrilege to allow any man to penetrate Isabel Thwaites1 (saintly) body. This reading is borne out by the development of a domestically religious rhetoric of pleasure in stanzas xxii-xxv. The nun tells Isabel that, if she feels the Rule of the order is too strict, it will "bend" to her (11.155-56). In fact, their order does not consider delight a vice to be banished (1.170): 1

Here Pleasure Piety doth meet; ' One perfecting the other Sweet. 1 So through the mortal fruit we boyl 1 The Sugars uncorrupting Oyl: 1 And that which perisht while we pull, 1 Is thus preserved clear and full. (11.171-76) I have reproduced most of stanza xxii because the language is so slippery, especially in lines 171-172. Are the lines to be read as describing Piety as "one perfecting" quality and Pleasure as "the other Sweet" one? Or are they meant to suggest that one quality (Piety or Pleasure) is capable of perfecting the other, Sweet one (Piety or Pleasure)? In this reading, the ability of the one quality to "perfect" the other is similar to the way "the Sugars uncorrupting Oyl" can "clear[ly] and full[y]" preserve mortal fruit, which died once it was picked. In this stanza Piety, a quality nuns certainly should have, can be seen as somehow "mortal" unless it is preserved by the sweet nature of Pleasure. Using the metaphor of making candied fruit - a domestic quality, but also a highly-skilled and costly one that preserves each fruit clear, intact, and gem-like - recalls the private/domestic, subservient space of wives. Marvell's poem invests this domestic space with the power to contain, exploit, or intensify pleasure within the context of demonstrating a marketable and highly remunerative skill. The next stanza continues the image of costly domesticity by presenting the nuns as creators of flower-bedecked altars, ambergris-scented altar cloths, and healing balms and pastes made not for ordinary folk, but "as baits" for those with "curious tasts" (1.182). "Curious" may simply refer to unique or unusual preferences, but its conjunction with "Baits" does hint at eccentricity and deviance, perhaps in sexual tastes. Stanza xxiii concludes with the lines "what need is here of Man? unless/ These as sweet Sins we should confess" (11.183-84). The lines suggest that either the prior delicious occupations should be confessed (to a male priest?) as sinful, or the ones to be detailed in the next stanza (xxiv), the joys contingent upon Thwaites being able to choose each night from among the nuns "a

The Domestic Economy of Woman—Woman Eroticism

97

fresh and Virgin Bride" (1.186). While the adjectival "Virgin" and the description of the pair's activities as "embracing Arm in Arm" and "lye[ing] as chaste in Bed,/ As Pearls together billeted" (11.191, 190) leave open the possibility of non-sexual, though erotic, congress, the line "the Nuns smooth Tongue has suckt her in" (1.200) suggests that the pleasures the nuns enjoy with each other are hardly innocent but highly sexual. In fact, stanza xxxii, which describes a metaphorical war between Fairfax and the abbey, presents an even more deviant gloss to this line. In that stanza, the Abbess uses her rosary as "gingling Chain-shot" against Fairfax, while the nuns use their lungs as cannons (11.254, 255). However, the "sharpest Weapons were their Tongues" (1.256). By thus coupling the smooth, sucking tongue (1.200) with the sharp, weapon-like tongue (1.256), Marvell's text, like Donne's "Elégie VIII," suggests sexual situations that are "deviant" not simply in their orality, but in their sado-masochistic nature. Thus it is not surprising that William Fairfax should refer to the nuns as "Hypocrite Witches" (1.205) who have "inchant[ed]" (1.206) Thwaites to remain with them. Once clear of the Abbey, Isabel Thwaites is able to marry and mother the man who would be the ancestor of Marvell's Lord General, thus returning her to licit domestic sexuality, even if it has a "public" aspect - the production of a lineage that will result in the renowned general. The act of removing Thwaites from the Abbey allows a later series of historical developments, the seizure of Nun Appleton and its lands by the Crown and the granting of them to sons of that same Fairfax who liberated the imperilled virgin. Saved from one sort of private life as a spiritual Amazon and (homo-)sexualized virgin, Thwaites can embrace the Protestantapproved private life of the (hetero-)sexually active wife which, in its public aspect, paradoxically produces a family that perpetually challenges the private, womancentered space of Catholic Abbey life on its way to creating a militantly Protestant regime which will more completely privatize and domesticate family life.34 Ralegh, Shakespeare, and Donne used the blazon of the female body to liken it to pieces of real estate to be dominated, conquered, or colonized. While the actual or metaphorical "raping" of this land was the primary means of control, the language used in these poems often reveals a sometimes pathological disgust with the female body, its biology, and perhaps even male desire of it. Blazoning or dismembering the body makes it easier to control in many ways, especially if the male speaker in any given poem is tempted or threatened by the power of his "beloved's" body to control his own desires or responses to those desires. "Upon Appleton House," like the male-authored texts discussed earlier, does strive to control various threatening powers of women. The nuns are presented as entirely deviant: blasphemous as regards their religion, licentious and totally perverse as regards their sexuality. Just as the male-authored blazon provides no space for the woman love-object to be verbal, autonomous, or powerful, Marvell's Protestant view of Nun Appleton suggests no way in which a community of women living alone can be other than totally deviant. Yet while Cavendish has provided texts which subverted the misogynist thrust of the blazon and used the figure to describe egalitarian erotic relationships between women, Marvell's abbey can be considered

98

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

subversively as a place of autonomy and egalitarianism for women, where their designated "public" roles as the property - daughters or wives - of men can be challenged. As I referred earlier to the convent as a "family," I want to modify that image to consider Marvell's conventual family as more similar to the communities of women Cavendish alludes to in her poems and plays than to the early modern patriarchal family. The all-woman community Marvell has presented in "Upon Appleton House" is very like the groups of women who exchange recipes or work together or for each other - that lurk within Cavendish's poetry. However, a more developed (and perhaps even more similar) woman-woman community is present in Cavendish's play The Convent of Pleasure. This convent is not religiouslyorganized, but created by a wealthy woman, Lady Happy, as a secular retreat from the misogynist world of patriarchal society. The women in this convent, like those in Nun Appleton, thoroughly enjoy each other's company (sexually and nonsexually) as well as the "pleasures" the convent has to offer. Lady Happy describes the luxurious situation of the convent, the rooms hung with tapestries, floors covered with Turkish carpets, bedding of silk or linen, flowers, elaborate clothing, and fine food and drink (Il.ii). The focus on beauty and sensual pleasure in this convent is similar to that in Nun Appleton. Lady Happy justifies her elaborately pleasurable convent: Can any Rational Creature think or believe, the gods take delight in the Creature's uneasie life? or, Did they command or give leave to Nature to make Senses for no use; or to cross, vex and pain them? ... I believe, the gods are better pleased with Praises then Fasting; but when the Senses are dull'd with abstinency, the Body weakened with fasting, the Spirits tir'd with watching, the Life made uneasie with pain, the Soul can have but little will to worship: ... ,35 Now, obviously, there are strong theological reasons for ascetic restraint in food, dress, and physical pleasure.36 But I want to look beyond those for a moment to the communities of women in both these convents, women whose domestic location in patriarchal society guarantees that they (or their sisters) are the primary producers of the luxury items described in both convents. By allowing spaces where women could enjoy - even perhaps dubiously - the products of their needles, voices, or culinary abilities, Cavendish and Marvell record the radical potential for female power that existed within early modern patriarchal society. Restricting women to the private/domestic space, or providing them with the support of like-minded women, does not necessarily deny them the power to exercise their own talents for the production of pleasure for themselves or other women. Cavendish's poems - as well as The Convent of Pleasure31 — celebrate this power through the production of erotic love poems directed to women that are also often recipes, a specifically female genre that validates a woman's creative power. Marvell's poem casts creativity as terrifying because it allows the nuns to violate their multiple

The Domestic Economy of Woman—Woman Eroticism

99

"powerless" positions as cloistered/contained women and challenge that institution that most completely reifies patriarchal society and patriarchal control of women marriage. Creating a parallel life and society for Isabel Thwaites and subsequently denying her to Fairfax thus challenges male power by threatening the Fairfax lineage and revealing the inherent power women have to destroy the patriarchal inheritance scheme. That Isabel Thwaites might possibly have enjoyed life as a nun, secluded from the "wild Creatures" (1.102) that are men, reinforces the threat any woman - especially a wealthy one - presents to patriarchal inheritance patterns. It is not surprising, then, that male poets found it so important to dismember and scatter the pieces of female bodies in their blazons. Women, after all, have the potential totally to sever male bloodlines either by refusing marriage or refusing reproduction. Women shared the recipes they used to make tarts and bisques, simples and herbal remedies. They probably also shared their recipes for love potions, aids to contraception, and abortifacients.

NOTES 1. To understand the patriarchal nature of early modern marriage, consider Claude Levi-Strauss's comment in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) that the estate is a "total relationship of exchange not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, [in which] the woman figures only as one of the partners," (115). Levi-Strauss's concept is the basis of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's explorations of male "homosocial" relations in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Consider also Heidi Hartmann's definition — in "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Toward a More Progressive Union," in Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 2-41 - of patriarchy as "a set of social relationships between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enables them to dominate women" (14). See also Veronica Beechy, "On Patriarchy," Feminist Review 3 (1979): 66-82; Gail Omvedt, "'Patriarchy': The Analysis of Women's Oppression," The Insurgent Sociologist 13 (Spring 1986): 30-50; and Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of Women, éd. Rayne R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210 for analyses of how women fit into the patriarchal sexual economy. 2. See Rubin's "The Traffic in Women" for an explication of the sex/gender system. For discussions of the nature of early modern marriage and social/cultural laws relating to marriage and betrothal, see Dympna Callaghan, "The Ideology of Romantic Love: The Case of Romeo and Juliet" in The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics, eds. Dympna Callaghan, Lorraine Helms, Jyotsna Singh (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 59-101; and Frances E. Dolan, éd., William Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996). Dolan considers the following marriage theorists, Dod and Cleaver, William Whately, William Gouge, Robert Snawsell, and T. E., as well as the "Homily of the State of Matrimony" (first published 1563).

100

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

3. Nancy J. Vickers, "The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's Lucrèce" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 123-42, 95. 4. Edmund Spenser, Edmund Spenser's Poetry, ed. Hugh MacLean (New York: Norton, 1968), 11.148^9; 154; 171-78. 5. Critics like Nancy J. Vickers, in "Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 265-79, and Francis Barker, in "Into the Vault," The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), 71-112, have pointed out how even the praising blazon totally objectifies - and fragments - women and comments upon her subservient position within early modern society. Vickers maintains that, [i]t is in this context that Petrarch left us his legacy of fragmentation. ... [B]odies fetishized by a poetic voice logically do not have a voice of their own; the world of making words, of making texts, is not theirs... . Silencing Diana [, the generic woman subject of the male-authored love poem,] is an emblematic gesture; it suppresses a voice, and it casts generations of would-be Lauras in a role predicated upon the muteness of its player. A modern Actaeon offering himself as poet cannot permit Ovid's angry goddess to speak her displeasure and deny his voice; his speech requires her silence. Similarly, he cannot allow her to dismember his body; instead he repeatedly, although reverently, scatters her throughout his scattered rhymes. (227, 278-79) In considering Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," An hundred years should go to praise Thine Eyes, and on thy Forehead Gaze. Two hundred to adore each Breast: But thirty thousand to the rest. An Age at least to every part, And the last Age should show your Heart (11.13-18), Barker calls attention to the specific effects of power - the delight to be had from dismembering a woman's body... For the literal body is in fragments: it is inscribed in the letter of the text as an inventory of parts, each in turn selected, treated and set aside: "Thine Eyes", "thy Forehead", "each Breast", "every part", "the rest." Marvell's "beloved" is distributed across the text in discrete pieces. ...for [the body] has no integrity, but [is] merely a principle of the disconnectedness of its parts which belongs wholly to the discourse that articulates it according to a serial or spatial dispersal. It is appropriated and uttered within a syntax more reminiscent of taxonomy than of the expectations of love poetry. (86, 88-89) My point, like Vickers's and Barker's, is that the "expectations" of patriarchal love poetry cannot be other than totally objectifying. 6. Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies ... (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1653), 177-7S. The complete texts of all the Cavendish poems quoted in this essay will appear in the Appendix. The 1664 edition of Poems and Phancies ... Second Impression (London: William Wilson) contains all of the poems of the 1653 edition - some of them revised - as well as additional poems not found in the earlier edition. 7. Quoted in Louis Adrian Montrose, "A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form," in Rewriting the Renaissance, eds. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 65-87, 79.

The Domestic Economy of Woman—Woman Eroticism

101

8. Penelope J. Englebrecht, in '"Lifting Belly is a Language': The Postmodern Lesbian Subject," Feminist Studies 16 (1990): 85-114, states: "This designation simultaneously refers to ontological separateness and topological sameness: two women, two lesbians, Subject and Other/self. This designation also indicates differences without resorting to diminution; the two categories are equal in power and value. But the categories cannot be considered mutually exclusive. Rather, they are simultaneous, coexistent, even identical in essence, yet different, because they denote different modes which fluctuate from moment to moment. ... Also, because the dynamic of the lesbian Subject-Other/self model is not subjective, I refer to the material and textual inter/action of lesbian(ism) as 'Desire1. ...the Desiring lesbian seeks unification of topological equivalents, each lesbian essentially complete in herself- hence Self and Other/self. This Desire therefore multiplies our voices rather than inscribes division. ... The lesbian Subject Desires the lesbian Other/self who Desires her" (92). A similar lessening of power differential can be seen in male-authored poems whose love-object is male. Christopher Marlowe's blazon of Leander (Hero and Leander) and William Shakespeare's sonnets to the young man (especially 106) do "objectify" the beauty of the love object but are not concerned as much with issues of domination, as are the Spenser and Ralegh poems I examined above. In Englebrecht's terms, "Self7Other" could also not easily map male-male erotic relations, nor could "Subject-Other/self easily do it. Perhaps another binary needs to be theorized: Subject/Subject, Self/Self, or Subject/Subject-Other self? 9. William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrèce, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997), 11.407-9; 411-13. 10. John Donne, "Elégie XVIII-Love's Progress," in Donne: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Grierson (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 11.35; 38-46. 11. Donne, "Elégie XIX-Going to Bed," 11.27-32. 12. Vickers, "The blazon ...," 95. Emphasis mine. 13. Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors (Ill.ii. 108-14). 14. "Dark" complexioned women, in the early modern period, are "usually" assumed to be brunette, as many critics state is the case with Shakespeare's "dark lady" (especially sonnet 130). We need to consider personal as well as social racist attitudes that prevent us from considering either of these characters to be African or non-white women. The proverbial expression of fruitless endeavor - attempting "to wash an Ethiope white" - may very well be at the heart of this description. See Karen Newman, "'And Wash the Ethiope White'," in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, eds. Jean E. Howard and Marion O'Connor (London: Methuen, 1987), 141-62 for how this concept plays itself out in early modern culture and in Othello. 15. Donne, "Elégie VIII-The Comparison," 11.35; 38-46. 16. Cavendish, Poems andPhancies ... , 159. 17. Cavendish, Poems and Phancies ... , 160. 18. Susan J. Leonardi, "Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie," PULA 104 (1989): 340-47, 346. 19. Leonardi, "Recipes for Reading," 342-43. 20. I do realize that many households had male cooks and that boys worked in the kitchen as well as girls. In all homes, though, the mistress of the house had ultimate control over what food was prepared, when, and how. She also was responsible for preserving food, converting milk to butter, cheese, and other dairy products, deciding what fruits and vegetables were to be grown, and making herbal remedies for the household. Such remedies,

102

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

as well as costly herbs, spices, and other commodities — sugar, tea, coffee — were usually stored in her closet where she retired with her (usually female) friends. For more on closets, their intimate nature, and how households were run under the mistress's command, see Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Theodora A. Jankowski, " ... in the Lesbian Void: Woman-Woman Eroticism in Shakespeare's Plays," in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 299-319. 21. Cavendish, "A Tart," Poems andPhancies ... , 162. 22. Cavendish, "A Posset for Natures Breakfast," Poems and Fancies ... , 128. 23. See note 5. 24. The popular seventeenth-century tulip looked like those tulips called "Rembrandt" that appear in present day bulb catalogs. That is, they have a pale colored ground — yellow, beige, or white - streaked with darker reddish color — crimson, maroon, or brick red. 25. Moslem women of North Africa and India have for centuries used henna (mehndi) to color the palms of their hands and fingertips (and the soles of their feet) dark red. For festive occasions, elaborate abstract or geometrical designs are painted on the backs of the hands (and tops of the feet) to the wrist so that the woman looks as though she is wearing lacy red gloves. Could the use of mehndi have occurred in seventeenth-century Europe, or could Cavendish perhaps have seen it on her travels? See Maria Messina, "Henna Party," Natural History (September 1988): 41-47. 26. Three other poems by Cavendish, in Poems and Fancies ... , present completely non-gendered blazons: "A Heart drest," "Head, and Braines," and "A Dissert," 131, 132. 27. Cavendish, "A Hodge-Podge for Natures Table," Poems and Fancies ... , 130. 28. Cavendish, "A Hodge-Podge for Natures Table," Poems and Fancies ... , 130-31. 29. Andrew Marvell, "Upon Appleton House," in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, vol. 1, Poems, éd. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1.106. 30. See Peter Stallybrass's article "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed," in Rewriting the Renaissance, eds. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123-42, for the connection between the open gate or door of a house and the perceived "openness" of the mistress's mouth and vagina. 31. See Simon Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in Seventeenth-Century Drama (New York: St. Martin's, 1981) and Celeste Turner Wright, "The Amazons in Elizabethan Literature," Studies in Philology 73 (1940): 433-56 on Amazons, and Montrose, "Shaping Fantasies," especially on their deviant and threatening power. 32. In the broadest sense, critics - such as Patsy Griffin, The Modest Ambition of Andrew Marvell (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995) - generally see the "nunnery section" of "Upon Appleton House" as a dialogue between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism as "false and true" religions (60), though these are often represented, as Marin-Sofie Rostvig, "Upon Appleton House," in Marvell: Modern Judgments, ed. Michael Wilding (London: Macmillan, 1969) indicates, as the evils of Catholicism opposed to the innocence or goodness of Protestantism, 218-20; or, as Rosalie L. Colie, "My Ecchoing Song": Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) argues, the fallacy and deceit of the Roman Catholic convent's false values, 225, 226. The specifically Catholic notion of the contemplative life and the importance of withdrawal from the world as pictured in the poem is seen as a "perversion" by M. J. K. O'Loughlin, "This

The Domestic Economy of Woman—Woman Eroticism

103

Sober Frame: A Reading of 'Upon Appleton House'," in Andrew Marvell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. George deF. Lord (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 120-42, 124; "moral bankruptcy" by Thomas Wheeler, Andrew Marvell Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1996), 44; or as "hypocritical, unworthy, [and] unnatural" by Ann E. Berthoff, The Resolved Soul: A Study of Marvellfs Major Poems, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 195. But rather than the simple "oddity" of living removed from the world, the nuns' seclusion is most often viewed, as Griffin does, as "perverted spirituality" (72); or "sexual perversity" by John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 245; a "perversion of... admirable ideals" for R. I. V. Hodge, Foreshortened Time: Andrew Marvell and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (Totowa, NJ: Roman and Littlefield, 1978), 146; "unnatural and irregular" for Colie (225); and a case of "the nuns' sexual unnaturalness - and... their pretended chastity..." for A. D. Cousins, "Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax' and the Regaining of Paradise," in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, eds. Conal Condren and A. D. Cousins (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), 53-85, 68. The specifically sexual character of the convent is certainly focused upon in these descriptions of its perversity or unnaturalness, but unnaturalness is also remarked upon in terms of specific characteristics and actions of the nuns. They are viewed by Cousins as "self-indulgent" and allowed to "luxuriate... in the senses," (66). Their ability to enjoy "sinless pleasures" suggests to Berthoff- perhaps perversely - the "spiritual value of the enjoyment of the senses," (194). Similarly, Hodge remarks that the stress on the chastity with which the nuns lie in bed with each other is not the sort of remark that should occur to a nun describing the sleeping arrangements. ... The brio of a discreetly deviant eroticism might appeal to a connoisseur of sensations. The admirable ideal has provided images and even sanction for its own perversion. (147) See also Boccacio's Decameron (1471), Rabelais's "Abbey of Thelema" episode in Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-52), and [Robinson's] The Anatomie of the English Nunnery at Lisbon in Portugal (1623) as literary examples of the kinds of deviance the Protestant discourse of Roman Catholic monastic life drew upon. See Penelope D. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Theodora A. Jankowski, Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), chapter 2, for the lack of empirical evidence of such deviant behavior. 33. Margoliouth, introduction and editorial comment to Vol. 1 of The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, 282n. He goes on to indicate that "an appeal was made to higher authority, [Thwaites] was released by force, and Fairfax married her in 1518. It was to their sons the house was surrendered, it is said by the same prioress, at its dissolution in 1542" (282n). However, Robert Wilcher, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) points out that Marvell's poem "itself is the only authority for the account of Isabel's confinement by the abbess of the Cistercian nunnery and the subsequent legal order which sanctioned Sir William's forcible rescue of his bride" (150). 34. See Jankowski, Pure Resistance, chapters 2 and 3, for a description of how virgin women lost cultural, social, and legal powers under Protestantism. 35. Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure, in Plays. Never Before Printed (London: A. Maxwell, 1668), I.ii. While many of the critics I considered in note 32 mention the perverse, unnatural, or deviant aspects of life among Marvell's nuns, only Berthoff, in The Resolved Soul, and Hodge, in Foreshortened Time, raise really interesting issues about the section. Berthoff importantly calls attention to the poem's assignment of "spiritual value"

104

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

to the enjoyment of the senses, whether admiring the beauty of Isabel Thwaites, or designing beautifully-embroidered vestments and altar cloths, or producing luscious preserved fruits. Hodge calls attention to the fact that the nuns sleep together - certainly an unusual circumstance and one not allowed by any rule - and to the sensual nature of the description of the event. See also Theodora A. Jankowski, "Pure Resistance: Queer(y)ing Virginity in William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure " Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 218-55, and Pure Resistance, chapter 6. 36. Marvell's poem is not unusual among Protestant texts in resuscitating the stereotype of the sexually-active Roman Catholic nun. What is unusual is the underlying "puritanical" attitude reflected in the text. By "puritanical" I do not mean to refer to a specific seventeenth-century religious sect, but to the idea that certain strictly religious people see sin in anything that contains the smallest bit of pleasure - dancing, singing, soft beds, good food, beautiful clothing - whether or not any actual sin is involved. On the whole, this is a twentieth-century connotation of the term "puritanical," but it is also the connotation that lies behind Malvolio's (Twelfth Night, 1600) "killjoy" personality and Sir Toby Belch's accusation "Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?" (Il.iii. 103-4). 37. See Jankowski, "Pure Resistance," and Pure Resistance, chapter 6, for an extended analysis of The Convent of Pleasure.

The Domestic Economy of Woman—Woman Eroticism

105

APPENDIX I have retained spelling and capitalizations as they occur in the original texts of these poems. However, I have eliminated italics and converted the long "s" to our conventional "s". Nature's Landskip I Standing on a Hill of Fancies high, And viewing round with Curiosity's Eye, Under my Thoughts saw several Landskips lye. In Champains of delight, I saw, did Feed Pleasures, as Weathers fat, and Ews to breed; And Cows of Probability, which went In Hope's green Pastures, gave Milk of Content; Some Fields, though Plow'd with care, Unsow'd did lye, Wanting the fruitfull Seed of Industry; In other Fields full Crops of Joys there grow'd, Where some of them Fruition down had Mow'd; Some by 111 accidents were Blasted found, Some blown with Sorrow down, lay on the Ground; Then I Inclosures View'd, which close did lye, Hearts Hedg'd about with Thoughts of Secrecy; Meadows of Youth did pleasant shew and Green, Innocency, as Cowslips, grew therein: Some ready with Old age to cut for Hay, Some Hay cock'd high for Death to take away; Clear Rivulets of Health ran here and there, No sign of Sickness in them did appear; No Stones or Gravel stopt their passage free, No Weeds of Pain or slimy Gouts could see. Woods did present my View on the left side, With Trees of high Ambition and great Pride; There shades of Envy were made of Dark Spight, Which did Eclipse the Fame of Honour's Light; Faults stood so close, that but few Beams of Praise Could enter, and Spight stopt up all the ways; But Leaves of pratling Tongues I did espy, Which sometimes Truth, for th' most part tell a Lye. Then I a Garden did of Beauty view, Where sweet Complexion's Rose and Lilly grew; And on the Banks of Breasts most perfect there Did Violets of Azure-Veins appear; Lips of fresh Gilly-flowers grew up high, Which oft the Sun did Kiss as he pass'd by; Hands of Narcissus shew'd most perfect white, Whose Palms fine Tulips were streak'd with Delight. Close by this Gard'n a lovely Orchard stood,

106

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England Wherein was Fruit of Pleasure rare and good; All Colour'd Eyes grew there, as Bullice gray, And Damsons black, which do Taste best, some say; Others there were of the pure blewest Grape, And Pear-plum Faces of an Oval shape; And Cheeks of Apricotes made Red with heat, And Cherry-lips, which most delight to Eat: But having View'd this Landskip round about, And left this Fancy's Hill, Wit's Sight went out. (1664, 176-78) A Bisk for Natures Table A Fore-head which is high, broad, smooth, and sleek, A large great Eye, that's black, and very quick; A Brow, which Arch'd, or like a Bow is bent, A Rosie Cheek, and in the midst a Dent; Two Cherry Lips, whereon the Dew lies wet, A Nose between the Eyes, that's even Set; A Chin that's neither short, nor very long, A sharp and quick, and ready pleasing Tongue; A Breath of Musk and Amber, Breasts which Silk In softness do resembl', in whiteness Milk; A Body plump, white, of an even growth, That's active, lively, quick, and void of Sloth; A Heart that's firm and sound, a Liver good, A Speech that's plain, and easie understood; A Hand that's fat and smooth, and very white, Whose Inside moist and red, like Rubies bright; A brawny Arm, a Wrist that's round and small, And Fingers long, and Joynts not big withall; A Stomack strong, and easie to digest, A Swan-like Neck, and an Out-bearing Chest: All these when mixt with Pleasure and Delight, And strew'd upon with Eyes most quick of Sight, Are put into a Dish of Admiration, And so served them up with praises of a Nation. (1664, 159-60) A Tart Life took some Flowr of white Complexions made, Churn'd Nourishment, as Butter, she did add, And Knead it well, then on a Board it plac'd, And rouled it oft, untill a Pye was Raise'd; Then did she take Lips like Cherries Red, And Sloe-black Eyes from a faire Virgins Head, And Strawb'ry Teats from th'Banks of each white Breast, And Fingers ends like Juice from Raspes prest;

The Domestic Economy of Woman—Woman Eroticism These put in the Pye, and did it Bake Within a Heart, which she strait Hot did make; Then drew it out with Reason's Peel, to send It up; This Meat did Nature much Commends. (1664, 161—62) A Posset for Natures Breakfast Life scummes the Cream of Beauty with Times Spoon, And drawes the Claret Wine of Blushes soon. There boiles it in a Skillet cleane of Youth, Then thicks it well with crumbl'd Bread of Truth. And sets it on the Fire of Life, which growes The clearer, if the Bellowes of Health blowes. Then takes the Eggs of Fair, and Bashfull Eyes, And puts them in a Countenance that's wise, And cuts a Lemmon in of sharpest Wit, By Discretions Knife, as he thinkes fit. A handfull of Chast Thoughts double refm'd, Six Spoonfuls of a Noble, and Gentle Mind. A Graine of Mirth, to give't a little Tast, Then takes it off, for feare the substance wast. And puts it in a Bason of Rich Wealth, And in this Meat doth Nature please her selfe. (1653, 128) A Hodge-Podge for Natures Table A wanton Eye, that seekes for to allure; Dissembling Countenance, that lookes demure. A griping hand that holds what's none of his, A jealous Mind, which thinks all is amisse. A Purple face, where Mattery Pimples stood, A Slandering Tongue that still dispraises Good. A frowning Brow, with Rage, and Anger bent: A Good that comes out from an ill Intent. Then took he Promises that ne're were perform'd, And profer'd Gifts, that slighted were, and scorn'd. Affected words that signifi'd noe thing, Feigning Laughter, but no Mirth therein. Thoughts idle, unusefull, and very vaine, Which are created from a Lovers Braine. Antick Postures, where no Coherence is, Well meaning Mind, yet alwaies doth amisse. A Voice that's hoarse, where Notes cannot agree, And squintings Eyes, that no true Shape can see. Wrinckles, that Time hath set in every Face, Vaine-glory brave, that fall in full Disgrace. A Self-conceited Pride without a Cause,

107

108

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England A painefull desperate Art without Applause. Verses no Sense, nor Fancy have, but Rhime. Ambitious fall, where highest Hopes do climbe. All in the Pot of dislike boileth fast, Then stirs it with a Lladle of Distast. The Fat of Gluttons in the Pot did flow, And Roots of severall Vices in did throw; And severall Hearbs, as aged Time that's dry, Heart-burning Parsley, Buriall Rosemary. Then powers it out into Repentant Dishes, And sends it up by Shadowes of vaine Wishes. (1653, 130-31) A Heart drest Life takes a Heart, and Passions puts therein, And covers it with a dissembling Skin. Then takes some Anger, that like Pepper bite, And Vinegar that's sharp, and made of Spight. Hot Ginger of Revenge, grated in Plunge, To which she addes a lying cloven Tongue. A lazy stake of Mace, that lies downe flat, Some Salt of Slander put also to that. Then serves it up with Sauce of Jealousie, In Dishes of Carefull Industry. (1653, 131) Head, and Braines A Braine that's wash'd with Reasons cleare, From Grosse Opinions, Dulnesse lying there; And Judgment hard, and sound is grated in, Whereto is squeesed Wit, and Fancies thin. A Bunch of Sent, Sounds, Colours, tied up fast, With Threads of Motion, and strong Nerves to last. In Memory then stew them with long Time, So take them up, and put in Spirits of Wine. Then poure it forth into a Dish of Touch, The Meat is good, although it is not much. (1653, 131) A Dissert Sweet Marmelade of Kisses new gathered, Preserv'd Children that are not Fathered: Sugar of Beauty which melts away soon, Marchpane of Youth, and Childish Macaroon. Sugar Plum-words most sweet on the Lips, And wafer Promises, which wast into Chips.

The Domestic Economy of Woman-Woman Eroticism Bisket of Love, which crumbles all away, Gelly of Feare, that quaking, quivering lay. Then came in a fresh Green-sicknesse Cheese, And tempting Apples, like those eat by Eve; With Créame of Honour, thick, and good, Firm Nuts of Friend-ship by it stood. Grapes of delight, dull Spirits to revive, Whose Juice, tis said, doth Nature keep alive. Then Nature rose, when eat, and drank her fill, To rest her selfe in Ease, she's pleas'd with still. (1653, 132)

109

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 7

"Thy weaker Novice to perform thy will": Female Dominion over Male Identity in The Faerie Queene Catherine G. Canino

Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene is somewhat rare within the annals of literature in that its author has offered his readers a definitive explanation as to its purpose and symbolism. In a letter to Walter Raleigh, Spenser says that "the generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentlemen or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline."1 Having provided a motivation for the work, Spenser proceeds to supply a topical identification for the allegoric characters, specifically pointing out that both Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, and Belphoebe, the virgin huntress, are different aspects of "the most excellent and glorious person of our soveraine the Queene" (xxviii): Gloriana represents Elizabeth as sovereign and Belphoebe represents the queen as "a most vertuous and beautifull Lady." Although the letter to Raleigh mentions only two incarnations of Elizabeth, The Faerie Queene itself implicates a third. Britomart, the female warrior of Book III, is traditionally seen to represent the more militant aspects of the queen who figuratively led her nation to an unlikely and Herculean victory over the Spanish. Spenser's painstaking evocation of Elizabeth, as well as the myriad of dominant, warlike, and often androgynous female characters that inhabit The Faerie Queene, have stimulated a vast number of critical discussions regarding Spenser's attitude toward the rule of women, more specifically his reaction to the rule of one particular woman, Elizabeth I. Some critics believe that Spenser was reformative enough to champion the cause of female rule.2 Others see him as a conservative who, through a subtle subversion of his female characters, is intimating a criticism of Elizabeth and all female monarchs.3 Still others posit that Spenser may have cleaved to the general prevailing notions against the rule of women, but argue that he saw Elizabeth as an exception to these notions and reflected her as such in The Faerie Queene* All of these arguments are based on the hypothesis that the phenomenon of female power in The Faerie Queene is analogous to the phenomenon of female power in England. However, by the time The Faerie Queene was written, this phenomenon had lost much of its edge. Female rule was not simply an established fact in England in 1590; it was, for the most part, an accepted fact. It 111

112

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

might therefore be more prudent to look at The Faerie Queene not in terms of the rule of women in general, but in terms of a specific and unique aspect of Elizabeth's rule that was beginning to dominate thought when Spenser was writing. Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, had, by virtue of her virginity, the singular opportunity to name her own heir and shape England's destiny. In Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, the female characters hold that same power over their male companions. The arguments that link The Faerie Queene to Elizabeth's reign are based on indisputably vehement, but very early, reactions to Elizabeth's accession to the throne. The famous passage from John Knox's The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women is invariably the centerpoint of these positions, which are strengthened by various other misogynist tracts of the day.5 There can be little dispute that, initially, Elizabeth's reign caused some concern, if not outright consternation, within the male hegemony of the mid-sixteenth century. However, by 1590, when The Faerie Queene was written, the concern had shifted from her gender to her virginity. By this time Elizabeth had proven herself a successful ruler and had defied the dire predictions of Knox and others. She may have been viewed by some as nothing more than an exception to the "monstrous regiment of women," but her political astuteness and successful governance proved that, as George Whetstone noted, "there have been women, that in all manner of artes, qualities, and vertues which have equalled the perfitest of men."6 Even the Pope, Sixtus V, was moved to compliment her: "Just see how well she governs! She is only a woman, only a mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all."7 Further indication of this change in attitude lies in the fact that other women in the line of succession after Elizabeth, such as Arabella Stuart, Catherine Grey, and the Infanta of Spain, had vigorous support among many Englishmen, and were disbarred from the throne not because of their gender but because of their lineage or legitimacy.8 Nonetheless, the 1590s witnessed a significant and growing anxiety within England, an anxiety which was engendered by and focused on the celibate state of the queen. At the time Spenser was writing The Faerie Queene, Elizabeth was aging, childless, and resolute in her determination not to name her heir. This was certainly not a new situation. When Parliament had demanded a named heir in 1566, Elizabeth chided the two houses that it was "monstrous that the feet should direct the head," and argued vigorously, if not altogether convincingly, that naming her successor would only imperil herself.9 Parliament reluctantly acquiesced to Elizabeth's demand that the succession be "all my care," but no one was reassured. Elizabeth was young, and in extraordinarily good health, but only a year before she had been desperately ill with gastro-enteritis. She recovered quickly, but her sudden and near fatal illness provoked an apprehension about the succession that was to last the length of her reign. This anxiety was expressed by Bishop John Jewel of Salisbury, who wrote: "O how wretched we are, who cannot tell under what sovereign we are to live!"10

Female Dominion over Male Identity in The Faerie Queene

113

By 1590, the situation was more desperate. Elizabeth had already lived past her life expectancy and the number of contenders for the throne was growing. James VI of Scotland, who eventually took the throne, was by no means the favorite in 1590 - he was "foreign" and the son of an executed traitor, both of which made him unpopular and subject to debarment (he was in fact not actively "courted" by Robert Cecil until 1600). In 1566, during the aforementioned session of Parliament, an unknown member of the House of Commons remarked that the succession question was a "grievous wound" that, if not "healed" quickly, would make England "a prey unto those that ambitiously gape for and devise the confusion and utter ruyne of the same."11 By 1590, the fulfillment of those predictions seemed imminent. Claimants, both legitimate and pretended, were gathering foreign and domestic allies, and either civil war or foreign invasion seemed a real possibility.12 And yet, Elizabeth refused to yield. Furthermore, she forbade anyone to even speculate on her possible heir. After 1567, there is no mention of the succession in Parliament, except for discussions of the fate of Peter Wentworth, who was often imprisoned for publishing pamphlets that opined on the issue.13 Wentworth wrote to Lord Burghley that it was a "great sin" to tempt God by protracting the establishment of an heir, and that, by naming her choice, Elizabeth would "secure to her subjects their religion, lives, wives, children, friends, lands goods, etc."14 In stating this, Wentworth inadvertently touched on something that I believe was an anxiety underlying the open distress over the succession. Elizabeth's choice would indeed affect all aspects of her subjects' future: the fate of England - more precisely, the identity and destiny of England - rested in her hands.15 In having the privilege of choosing her own heir, the queen had a distinct advantage over other monarchs. If Elizabeth had married and produced a child, that child would have been her successor, regardless of its political leanings, its moral character, or its mother's wishes. As a single woman, however, Elizabeth was in the unique position of selecting her own successor. From this position, Elizabeth had not only the power to transform an as yet unknown someone into a monarch, but also had the power to shape, and perhaps transform, England into an as yet unknown type of kingdom. The decision was monumental, the possible consequences were enormous. In his seminal work on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Louis Montrose writes: the woman to whom all Elizabethan men were vulnerable was Queen Elizabeth herself. Within legal and fiscal limits, she held the power of life and death over every Englishman, the power to advance or frustrate the worldly desires of all her subjects.16 I agree with this: Elizabeth had the power of life and death over Elizabethan men and women, as did her father, sister, and brother. I would add to Montrose's argument, however, that, unlike her father, brother and sister, Elizabeth also held the power of the future over every Englishman. If, as Stephen Greenblatt says in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, there was in the sixteenth century an "increased self-

114

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

consciousness about the fashioning of human identity,"171 think we can also argue that there was in the late sixteenth century an increased self-consciousness, and an anxiety, about Elizabeth's power to fashion England's future identity. It is this anxiety, I believe, which is reflected in The Faerie Queene. Many critics, pointing to Spenser's stated intention of "fashioning a gentleman," have recognized that The Faerie Queene is the story of men whose identities are being "fashioned." As David Lee Miller has argued, this "fashioning" requires much more than mere behavioral modification. The male characters in The Faerie Queene undergo a true and radical change of identity. This change, according to Miller, is an enterprise of the characters' own minds in which their identities are reborn in the image of some 'glorious great intent1."18 Miller sees the female characters primarily as passive bystanders to these male transformations.19 But this is not the case. The Faerie Queene is the story of men whose identities are forged, and whose destinies are decided, by women. Some of these women are traditionally feminine, some "accidentally female," as Maureen Quilligan would say, and some overtly "masculine," but every female in The Faerie Queene possesses and uses this ability, whether she is a "gracious lady," a "female warrior," or a sovereign queen.20 In The Faerie Queene, it is "femaleness," not androgyny, that is the source of power. Each female character is given the prerogative not only to shape a man's identity and future but also to bestow an identity upon him. This makes every female in the book analogous to Elizabeth who, as we have seen, held the same prerogative for England. The scope of this paper dictates that only one Book of The Faerie Queene can be discussed, although the theme of female dominance over male identity is prevalent in all six Books. I chose Book One because its characters fall into more traditional male and female roles, a fact which has caused it to be discussed with less critical vigor than the later Books, in which hermaphrodites abound. In Book One, however, we see very clearly the power of women over the identity and destiny of men. Where Book One differs from the successive Books is in the presentation of its females. Rather than being surrogate males, the females in Book One are traditional, so-called feminine women, who are often seen performing traditional, so-called feminine roles. Nonetheless, despite their conventional makeup, these women wield as much power as their androgynous counterparts. The Book begins, appropriately enough, with an invocation to a female muse: "Helpe then, O holy virgin! chiefe of nyne/ Thy weaker Novice to perform thy will" (I.i.2). This is not the first time an author has evoked a muse, but it is notable that this author, rather than asking for inspiration, is taking a submissive stance and placing himself under the domination of this muse. Without her, the work will not exist; its nature and its destiny are tied to the whim of this mythological female. This submission to female volition becomes a guiding theme of the Book, and, with regards to the male identity, is a portent of things to come. Book One is the story of the Redcrosse Knight, but we become acquainted with him long before the Book's opening lines. In his letter to Raleigh, Spenser gives us a bit of preliminary information on the knight and the inhabitants of Fairyland. The

Female Dominion over Male Identity in The Faerie Queene

115

beautiful, gracious, and all-powerful Gloriana, Spenser's representation of Elizabeth I, is visited in her court by a "tall clownish young man." This young man is never referred to by name, title, or even vocation; he is simply described with the rather vague adjective "clownish." We are left questioning: is he clownish in appearance, in personality or in conduct? We have no way of knowing because the character's identity is not defined. A cloaked lady arrives at court and asks Gloriana to provide her with a knight who can rescue her parents from a dragon. The "clownish person" (now he has lost even his sexual identity) eagerly volunteers for the adventure. The Lady assents, but with a condition, that "unless that armour which she in brought, would serve him... he could not succeed in the enterprise" (xxix). The "clownish person" dons the armour and finds it to be a perfect fit. Thereafter, the clown becomes the Redcrosse Knight. Spenser has once again provided the reader with a clear and resounding image: Redcrosse's original identity and initial destiny are bestowed on him by a woman. (Technically, by two women, since it is Gloriana who gives her consent to the entire situation.) When Book One opens, we discover that the Lady has been given a name, Una. Although her face is shrouded, her identity is clear. The Redcrosse Knight, however, continues to be without a Christian name. His identity is solely defined by the red cross upon the armour he wears, the armour which has been provided by Una. As Kathleen Williams states: "[The Redcrosse Knight] succeeds in the strength of his armour, and that is the gift of Una; without it, and her, he is powerless and disgraced."21 The symbolic identity of the Una character is as significant as her literal identity. Stevie Davies points out, correctly, that regardless of Spenser's careful explication that Gloriana and Belphoebe are the two aspects of Elizabeth, all the female heroines can be construed as representations of the queen.22 Una exemplifies the queen as the personification of the English church and Protestant faith. Elizabeth was seen as the savior of the English Church, the person who returned and secured Protestantism in the realm after Mary's bloody attempts to reestablish Roman Catholicism.23 Although Una does not possess any of the "masculine" traits of Elizabeth, she is nonetheless as much an aspect of the queen as the warrior Britomart or the majestic Gloriana. This reading is strengthened by the fact that Una is, at one point, accompanied by a lion, the symbol of British monarchy. In addition, Una's parents, the aged rulers of Eden, are generally interpreted to represent Adam and Eve;24 as such they are not simply the parents of Una, they are figuratively the parents of the human race. They can therefore be seen as parallels to Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn, who were not simply the parents of Elizabeth, but figuratively the parents of English Protestantism. Of course, Una most replicates Elizabeth in her ability to transform lives. The first adventure of the Redcrosse Knight is the encounter with the monster, Errour. As Redcrosse, Una, and their attendant dwarf approach the cave of the beast, Una gives warning of what lies within and offers Redcrosse the option to flee. Ignoring her advice, he attacks the monster, whereupon he is immediately

116

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

overpowered and daunted from further assault. At this point, Una, the female, gives him explicit instructions, and explicit consent, regarding the slaying of the monster. His Lady, sad to see his sore constraint, Cride out, "Now, now Sir knight, shew what ye bee, Add faith unto your force, and be not faint; Strangle her, els she sure will strangle thee" (I.i.19) Una has not only given the Redcrosse Knight permission to kill Errour, she has given him permission to "shew what ye bee"; in other words, to take hold of his identity. Later, when Errour is destroyed, Una validates Redcrosse's victory and his heroic nature: ..."Faire knight, borne under happie starre Who see your vanquisht foes before you lye, Well worthie be you of that Armory, Wherein ye have great glory wonne this day, And proov'd your strength on a strong enimie" (I.i.27) The Redcrosse Knight, who had heretofore been designated a knight only because he wore the armour of a knight, now begins to be defined by his actions. However, Spenser does not give the knight or even the narrator the power to pronounce such authentication. It is the prerogative of the female to validate Redcrosse's conquest and grant him the identity of a knight. As she provided him with the clothing that gave him the appellation of the Redcrosse Knight, Una now gives him the status and the reputation that must accompany that epithet. Much has been made of the fact that Errour is a half female creature, with a brood of androgynous children, who is killed by a man. It is seen, particularly among the feminist critics, as a metaphor for male supremacy over the hated female. As Quilligan observes, however: Spenser invests the scene with a cannibalistic progeny so selfdestructively greedy as to pose no immediate threat to the hero. So when the knight finally manages to hack off her head, Errour's brood suck their mother's blood... in a matricidal suicide.25 Redcrosse's slaying of Errour is essentially incidental and not really the result of knightly strength, bravery or moral fortitude. Although the Redcrosse Knight ends the mother's life, the death of the entire creature, mother and progeny, is selfinduced. This is, therefore, not a case of a male asserting his power over a female. The accomplishment, the death of Errour, is primarily achieved through her own actions. Accordingly, even though the Redcrosse Knight requires a heroic deed to

Female Dominion over Male Identity in The Faerie Queene

117

validate his identity, the deed itself, as well as the validation, is dependent upon a female. Quilligan goes on to explain that: The knight remains subject to Errour even after he hacks off her head and after her brood (with whom he should contend) destroy themselves. ... The episode seduces the knight into relying on his own unaided valor.26 The name Errour becomes prophetic, since Redcrosse is in error when he believes he has accomplished something on his own accord. The Redcrosse Knight is indeed subject to Errour, as he is subject to every female with whom he contends. Archimago, like Errour, has garnered a great deal of critical attention because he is the manifestation of evil and a representative of Satan.27 Archimago is also a most interesting character because he appears to be the only man in Book One whose power is largely independent of female prompting. But even this mighty sorcerer, whose purpose is "[t]o aide [Satan's] friends or fray his enemies," must rely on a female to accomplish his evil intent. He transforms a sprite into the image of Una, and sends the feigned female to the Redcrosse Knight's bed. The mere imitation of a female is enough to induce a small transformation in Redcrosse, for as the false Una tries to seduce him, the noble knight becomes something of the beast: "That night his manly hart did melt away/ Bathed in wanton blis and wicked joy" (I.i.47). It is true that this metamorphosis is temporary, and that the Redcrosse Knight wakes in such disgust for Una that he is compelled to leave her. But then, it is natural that this transformation is ephemeral; the transforming force is not a real woman. However, a real woman does soon appear on the scene, one who rivals Una in her control of male identity. When Redcrosse first encounters Duessa, she is in the company of the evil Sarazin knight, Sansfoy. The two knights battle and Sansfoy is slain. Because Redcrosse is the victor in a noble and chivalrous battle, his newlydefined identity should once again be substantiated. This time, however, there is no reliable validation of his worth as a knight. Una is not there to provide it, and Duessa is not interested. Duessa most pointedly does not refer to him as a knight, and uses the more generic "sir" when addressing him. It would seem that a battle, no matter how admirable or bravely fought, is not enough to create a champion. There must be acknowledgment by some female force to authenticate the transformation from clown to knight. At this point, it becomes Duessa's game, and story. She pretends to be a princess, named Fidessa, who has been kidnapped by the Sarazin. On first reading, we are lulled, as the Redcrosse Knight is lulled, into believing that Fidessa is the exception to the pattern of the Book, and that she is a woman who is subject to men. Her story is one of male domination. Her betrothed was chosen for her by her father when she was "in the first flowre of [her] freshst age" (I.ii.23). When the betrothed was killed, his body was hidden from her, and she, a confused, frightened young bride, was left alone to wander the world for "many years." Without a man

118

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

to protect her, she fell victim to the Sarazin. Fidessa's poignant tale is accentuated by her act of submission to the Redcrosse Knight. She pleads with him for his mercy and protection, and subjugates herself to his "mighty wil" (I.ii.21). Redcrosse is moved by this helpless victim, but we soon learn that Fidessa's story is as false as the idea that a woman could be powerless in this Book. The Redcrosse Knight succumbs to the charms of Duessa/Fidessa and they begin to travel in each other's company. She dictates the journey: when the sun becomes too hot for her to endure, they stop to rest (I.ii.29). After "seemely pleasaunce each to each other makes," the Redcrosse Knight proceeds to do a strange and quite "unmasculine" thing; he cuts a tree bough to make a garland for the lady's hair (I.ii.30). This act, traditionally the activity of a young maiden, undermines the image of the brave and virile knight. His new-found identity as a "Faire knight, borne under happie starre" who "proov'd [his] strength on a strong enimie" is eroding away at the hands of this new woman. He is becoming more feminine, more subservient. On cutting the bough, he discovers that the tree is a former lover of Duessa, named Fradubio, who was transformed by her when he discovered her true nature. Fradubio warns Redcrosse that Duessa is a foul witch, but the warning is fruitless. The Redcrosse Knight is under the power of this new woman, and, as he picks flowers for his beloved, he seems doomed to the same fate as Fradubio. Duessa is generally believed to be a representation of the Roman Catholic Church: interpretations of her range from Mary Queen of Scots to the Whore of Babylon. As a character, Duessa is the direct antithesis to Una. As a figure of female power, however, she surpasses Una, and every other female in the Book, perhaps even the omnipotent Gloriana. In the scene with Fradubio we see that Duessa embodies the theme of female power over male identity. Duessa has the ability to rob a man not only of his masculinity but also of his humanity. This is not a transient or superficial change, as it would be at the hands of Archimago. Nor is it the simple ending of a life, which is the only power the other male characters seem capable of mustering. The victim is deprived not only of human life, but also of his true form, substance and soul. All that is left is his voice, and that proves to be virtually powerless: Fradubio's story is touching but his warning is unheeded. In sixteenth century England, only one person possessed the ability to change men's lives or identities so completely, and that was Elizabeth. Through her prerogative of choosing her heir, she also possessed the power to change men's futures. It is interesting to note that Fradubio believed Duessa to be young and beautiful, until he saw her "in her proper hew,... a filthy foule old woman" (I.ii.40). Duessa's age and grotesqueness had, according to Fradubio, been hidden beneath her finery. One can imagine that the young men who came to Elizabeth's court felt much the same way, as they saw the queen's rapidly decaying face painted in heavier and heavier make-up. To point out the discrepancy would, of course, be tantamount to treason and would no doubt result in the same figurative fate as Fradubio's. It seems, therefore, that in addition to representing the various Catholic demons that haunted the realm, Duessa is also another, and provocatively revealing, aspect of Elizabeth.

Female Dominion over Male Identity in The Faerie Queene

119

The unfolding drama that takes place in the House of Pride is yet another demonstration of female power over the male identity. Duessa leads the Redcrosse Knight to this house of evil, which is ruled by Lucifera, the personification of Pride. Although pride is one of seven deadly sins, Lucifera is the only sin who is represented by the female gender. She has usurped her rule "with wrong and tyrannie" (I.iv.12) and aspires to sit higher than Jove himself; as a female, she would be powerful enough to accomplish both aims. The other six deadly sins are masculine, and have no proper names. They are simply known by their sins. The "male sins" are described as Lucifera's counselors; however, it seems that their sole task is to mount their appropriate beast and pull her in her chariot, or to serve as her stewards. Even in the netherworld, the female provides purpose, and identity, for the male. Once in the House of Pride, the Redcrosse Knight engages in battle and mortally wounds the second Sarazin, Sansjoy. When Duessa throws a cloak of darkness over the dying Sarazin, the act does much more than simply hide him. He disappears from view: when lo! a darkesome clowd Upon him fell: he no where doth appeare, But vanisht is. The Elfe him calls alowd, But answer none receives: the darkness him does shrowd (I.v.13) Duessa has, in effect, obliterated Sansjoy from the world. We are assured he is still alive. The question is, however, if one cannot be seen or heard or felt by the world, is one really alive? In the case of the Sarazin, he simply exists no longer. Duessa enlists the personage of Night to aid the fallen Sansjoy. Night, a female deity, is said to be "older than Jove," and thus it is implied that she has some status above the king of the gods. She hesitates to obey, until she is literally forced by Duessa to save the Sarazin. Night carries the body of Sansjoy into the realm of hell, a hell occupied primarily by men who owe their present circumstances to women. Sansjoy is taken to Aesculapius, and Night and Duessa direct the physician to save the fallen knight. Aesculapius also hesitates to oppose Jove's will, but Night reminds him he is in the presence of a far greater power than the king of the gods: Why fearest thou, that canst not hope for thing, And fearest not that more thee hurten might, Now in the powre of everlasting Night. (I.v.43) It is true that Aesculapius is a male, and it is through his skills that Sansjoy is restored to health. But Aesculapius is only acting on the command of Night, who in turn is acting on the command of Duessa. It is the women who orchestrate and

120

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

demand Sansjoy's recovery. It is also a woman, Duessa, who controls Sansjoy's identity, since it is she who obliterates and then restores his existence to the world. It is now time to turn our attentions to Una, who has been having her own adventures, and who has been exercising her own power over the male gender. Through Una we learn that the male does not have to be human to be subject to the female. She meets a lion, and the savage beast is instantly transformed into a gentle guardian. Una describes the change: "The Lyon, Lord of everie beast in field," Quoth she, "his princely puissance doth abate And mightie proud to humble weake doth yield, Forgetfiill of the hungry rage, which late Him prickt, in pittie of my sad estate" (I.iii.7) After further misadventures, Una is rescued in the woods by a group of Fauns and Satyrs. These creatures, noted in classical mythology for their lust and savagery, become, in the presence of Una, docile and respectful: Their frowning forheades, with rough homes yclad, And rusticke horror all asyde doe lay, And, gently grenning, shew a semblance glad To comfort her, and, feare to put away, Their backward bent knees teach her humbly to obay (I.vi.ll) The Fauns and Satyrs have rescued Una from a predicament that appears unusual for Book One; Una, the powerful governess of masculine identity, has fallen victim to two male creatures. First, the evil Archimago has assumed the guise of the Redcrosse Knight and deluded her into accompanying him. Second, the third Sarazin, Sansloy, after defeating the disguised Archimago and slaying the guardian lion, takes Una as his captive. These events point out a fact that should be noted: not all men in The Faerie Queene are transformed by women. However, these events also point out other salient facts that should not be ignored. One is that Una, although under the momentary domination of a male, never undergoes a real change. Her identity is unalterable no matter what her circumstances or who the aggressor. As with Duessa and the other female characters in Book One, Una's essential identity is not capable of even the slightest modification. These women are the agents, never the victims, of change. The second point to consider is the character of Archimago. Quilligan states that "Archimago is clearly the organizer of Book I's plot."28 This is hardly the case, nor could it be. Although Archimago is constantly referred to as a threatening, evil force, his highly touted powers prove to be quite weak compared to the female's. He is capable of assuming the appearance of the Redcrosse Knight, but the change

Female Dominion over Male Identity in The Faerie Queene

121

is transitory and superficial. Because he cannot recreate the Redcrosse Knight's skill, he is promptly defeated by the Sarazin. As soon as he takes the blow, Archimago reverts to his true form, demonstrating his inability to change his own identity in any permanent or profound way. Even Sansloy is amazed at Archimago's failure: His hasty hand he doth amased hold, And halfe ashamed, wondred at the sight: For the old man well knew he, though untold, In charmes and magicke to have wondrous might, Ne ever wont in field, ne in round lists, to fight (I.iii.38) While it is true, as Camilla Paglia states, that "[o]nly evil characters readily change form" in The Faerie Queene?9 when that evil character is a male, the change is always transient. Although women may ultimately fall victim to men, there is no doubt as to which gender is ultimately in control. Spenser ensures that the organizers of the Book One's plot are very clearly Una and Duessa. The greatest adventures of the Redcrosse Knight, the ones that lead to the discovery of his true identity, occur after he leaves the House of Pride, and are entirely controlled by women. They begin when Redcrosse and Duessa stop at a spring. This spring has been poisoned by another woman, the goddess Diana, and, predictably, it renders men impotent. The Redcrosse Knight drinks from the tainted pool, and, after a time, he grows increasingly feeble, and sickly: "Eftsoones his manly forces gan to fayle,/ And mightie strong was turned to feeble frayle" (I.vii.6). Spenser is careful to point out that the Redcrosse Knight does not simply lose his health. He undergoes a genuine transformation, wherein his identity as a knight is replaced by the persona of a lover. Yet goodly court he made still to his Dame, Pour'd out in loosnesse on the grassy grownd, Both careless of his health and of his fame (I.vii.7) The Redcrosse Knight is no longer concerned about his knighthood, or his quest. His sole interest is Duessa. In contrast to Archimago's self-induced transformation, Redcrosse is changed both outwardly and inwardly. Outwardly, he is weakened and emasculated; inwardly he is absorbed with adoring love. His manliness has failed, and he has taken on the passive role and devoted demeanor of a traditional woman. Because the transformation is induced by a female, the change is all-encompassing and intransient. When the giant, Orgoglio, appears on the scene, the Redcrosse Knight is barely able to put up a fight; he is thoroughly and humiliatingly defeated and taken prisoner.

122

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

It is, of course, up to Una to save him, and she does, with the help of another wandering knight, the British hero Arthur. Arthur appears as a deus ex machina in the Book, arriving just in time to save the Redcrosse Knight, then disappearing again. Although Redcrosse is rescued by a man, it is important to note that Arthur is acting on the wishes and instructions of Una. There is no doubt that Una is orchestrating events, even to the point of instructing Arthur on the defeat of Duessa: "To do her die," (quoth Una) "were despight, And shame t'avenge so weake an enimy; But spoile her of her scarlot robe, and let her fly" (I.viii.46) Arthur merely acts as Una's tool, just as Aesculapius acted as Duessa's. And, despite the fact that Arthur is a mythological hero and forefather of Britain, he is by his own admission a man without an identity. At birth he was taken to a "Faery Knight" to be raised and trained in the art of combat. Hence, as he states: "both the lignage and the certein Sire,/ From which I sprong, from mee are hidden yitt" (I.ix.3). Only a vague hint of his true identity is provided by Merlin: Him oft and oft I askt in privity, Of what loines and what lignage I did spring; Whose aunswere bad me still assured bee, That I was sonne and heire unto a king And in her just terme the truth to light should bring (I.ix.5) It should be noted that Spenser has given the concept of truth a feminine gender. This "genderizing" was a popular literary convention during the Renaissance and, in this case, Spenser has made highly appropriate use of that convention. According to Merlin, it is "truth" who will ultimately enlighten Arthur as to his legitimate identity. Hence, "Truth," in Fairyland, would have to be female. It is interesting that Una, whom Spenser repeatedly refers to as "Truth," is able to address the knight as "Prince Arthure" without the benefit of an introduction (I.ix.5). Arthur apparently misses the clue that Una possesses an unusual cognizance of his identity. His lapse is understandable, since he is presently in thrall to another female. Arthur explains that he was visited by a dream in which the Faerie Queene lay with him. Subsequently, he has been compelled to wander through Fairyland searching for this woman, who "so ravished his heart with delight" (I.ix.13). He has, he states mournfully, been traveling nine months (I.ix.15). In the tradition of courtly romances, Spenser has made Arthur a knight errant, a pilgrim who is pledged to serve the females he encounters. However, unlike the conventional knight who seeks quests to prove his worthiness, Arthur has already been

Female Dominion over Male Identity in The Faerie Queene

123

designated by Spenser to be the paradigm of worthiness. Although Arthur's spoken quest is to find the Faerie Queene, his true quest, we learn later, is to discover his "loines and lignage" and realize his true identity. Una may recognize the necessity of Arthur's quest, and this could be the reason she does not press the matter. Arthur quickly departs after performing his task for Una, and continues on his own mission. When Una encounters the Redcrosse Knight in the dungeon of the giant, she acknowledges that the "Faire knight, borne under happie starre" has lost his true self: She said, "Ah dearest Lord! what evil starre On you hath frownd, and pourd his influence bad, That of your self e ye thus berobbed are, And this misseeming hew your manly looks doth marre?" (I.viii.42, emphasis added) In this weakened state, Redcrosse is in no condition to battle his next foe, the "cursed man" Despair. As Despair catalogues the miseries of life, the battered remains of the Redcrosse Knight's identity come perilously close to vanishing: "[T]hat all his manly powres it did disperse/ As he were charmed with inchaunted rimes" (I.ix.48). He is about to succumb to the temptation of suicide, when Una forcefully intervenes, snatching the knife out of his hand and dashing it to the ground. As she does so, she attacks and exposes the knight's new, ignoble identity: "And to him [she] said, 'Fie, fie, faint hearted knight! ... Come, come away, fraile, fleshly wight'" (I.ix.52, 53). In truth, it is doubtful that the Redcrosse Knight is in much danger. Despair, after all, is a male. Had it been a female who tempted the Redcrosse Knight to self destruction, Una would have had a far greater problem. As it is, she handily rescues Redcrosse and takes her pitiable friend to the House of Holiness for spiritual rehabilitation and ultimate recognition of his true identity. The House of Holiness, generally perceived to be a counterpart to the House of Pride, is also a house almost entirely inhabited, and certainly ruled, by women. Dame Caelia lives there with her three daughters, Fidelia, Speranza, and Charissa, representing Faith, Hope, and Charity, respectively. Quilligan points out that Charissa, who is sustained by her happy brood of children, is the parallel to Errour, who was betrayed and vanquished by her progeny.30 They are analogous to each other in another way: Errour is the instrument by which the Redcrosse Knight attains the first glimpse of his character, and Charissa is the instrument by which he receives the vision of his ultimate identity. After the Redcrosse Knight is succored by Hope and disciplined by Penance, Remorse and Repentance (whose gender is not discussed), Charissa deems that he is ready to realize his true destiny. He is forcibly escorted by another female, Mercie, to a wise man, Contemplation. Mercie informs the wise man, very specifically, that it is Fidelia's command that the Redcrosse Knight be shown the truth.

124

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

Whereof the keies are to thy hand behight By wise Fidelia? She doth thee require, To shew it to this knight, according his desire (I.x.50) Contemplation promptly obeys; in fact, we are given the impression he has no choice. Again, as Aesculapius and Arthur previously demonstrated, in Fairyland even men with exceptional attributes exist only to serve women. Contemplation reveals that the Redcrosse Knight is St. George. Through the efforts and power of women, the Redcrosse Knight finally obtains a permanent identity that goes beyond the clothing he wears or the actions he performs. He now has a name, not simply a title, and he is even provided with a destiny: to become the patron saint of England. Nonetheless, despite the glory that awaits him, the wise man reminds him that he is still subject to Una: "That may not be," said he, "ne maist thou yitt Forgoe that royal maides bequeathed care, Who did her cause into thy hand committ, Til from her cursed foe thou have her freely quit" (I.x.63) The Redcrosse Knight agrees and returns to Una, quite literally a new man: "At last whenas himself he gan to find/ To Una back he cast him to retire" (I.x.67). The remainder of Book One, with the slaying of the dragon, the rescue of Una's parents, and the marriage of Una and the Redcrosse Knight, seems somehow anticlimactic, and notably void of suspense. The one exception is the moment when, at the wedding of Una and Redcrosse, Archimago appears with a note from Duessa that claims the Redcrosse Knight as her own. The bridegroom protests, but, again, even with his identity intact, he proves to be fairly impotent. It is not until Una reveals the villains' duplicity that the wedding can take place. As is fitting, it is Una, the all-powerful female, who has the last word in the Book. She exposes not just Duessa, but, in her final words, Duessa's disguised messenger: "Of this false footman, clokt with simplenesse, Whom if ye please for to discover plaine, Ye shall him Archimago find, I ghesse, The falsest man alive; who tries shall find no lesse" (I.xii.34) It is entirely appropriate that Una's final words establish the true identity of a man. It should again be noted that the theme of female power over male identity is not relegated to the first Book of The Faerie Queene. The remaining five Books continue to explore and expand this theme, and each Book contains characters that exemplify it. Scudamore, the Squire of Dames, Marinell, Artegall, and, once again,

Female Dominion over Male Identity in The Faerie Queene

125

the Redcrosse Knight, are all men whose identities are either victimized or redeemed by women. In Book Three, the Redcrosse Knight once more falls under the power of a woman, the lustful Malecastea. The youth Marinell lives in fear of women, and is finally destroyed by one. The Squire of Dames is forced by his lady to search the world for one hundred chaste women, and must himself be rescued from the female Giant. Amoret's husband, Scudamore, is helpless to rescue her from Busyrane, and must rely on the female warrior, Britomart. In the fifth Book, Artegall is totally transformed into an effeminate servant when he comes under the power of Radigund. All of these men are so dominated by women that their identities as knights, princes, and heroes are almost obliterated. In The Faerie Queene, then, we see the plight of 1590s Englishmen dramatized in epic poetic form. This "plight" is more complicated than a mere patriarchal response to female rule. By 1590, there was very little argument that Elizabeth was a successful ruler. Those who objected to her were more likely to point to her religion or legitimacy than her gender as a justification for her overthrow. However, Elizabeth was a woman without an heir, and by the 1590s her childlessness had become a crucial issue for her subjects. It had also become an issue of empowerment for Elizabeth, who was presented with the unique opportunity to choose her successor and thus determine England's future. The English, on the other hand, were forced to wait for their destiny to be decided by a woman who refused to allow them even a glimpse of what that destiny might be. It is not an anxiety about the rule of women that underlies The Faerie Queene. The power of the female characters is not manifest in their leadership or rule. Instead, the power manifests itself in a more subtle, and ultimately more puissant way, as the ability to dictate, transform, and invent the identity of the male characters. The power of the female characters in The Faerie Queene is therefore precisely consanguine to the power of Elizabeth in the 1590s. NOTES 1. The Faerie Queene, preface, xxvii. All quotations from The Faerie Queene are from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (New Haven: Penguin, 1981). Citations will hereinafter be inserted in the text parenthetically. 2. Susanne Woods, "Spenser and the Problem of Women's Rule," Huntington Library Quarterly 4& (19&5): 141-58. 3. See, for example, Henry Berger, "The Faerie Queene, Book III: A General Description," in Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser, éd. A. C. Hamilton (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972), 395-424; Maureen Quilligan, "The Comedy of Female Authority in The Faerie Queene," English Literary Renaissance 17 (Spring 1987): 156-71; and Sheila T. Cavanagh, "Nightmares of Desire: Evil Women in The Faerie Queene" Studies in Philology 91 (1994): 313-38. 4. See Pamela Joseph Benson, "Rule, Virginia: Protestant Theories of Female Regiment in The Faerie Queene," English Literary Renaissance 15 (Autumn, 1985): 27792; and Mary Villeponteaux, "Displacing Feminine Authority in The Faerie Queene"

126

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

Studies in English Literature 35 (Winter 1995): 53-67, and '"Not as women wonted be': Spenser's Amazon Queen," in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations ofGloriana, ed. Julia M. Walker (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 209-25. 5. These views are expressed in The Instruction of A Christian Woman by Lewis Vives and in John Calvin's letter to William Cecil, dated January 29, 1559, in The Zurich Letters (second series), trans. Rev. Hastings Robinson (Cambridge, England, 1845), 34-35. Susanne Woods has an excellent summary of these anti-Elizabeth, or anti-female rule, points of view in "Spenser and the Problem of Women's Rule," 141-44. Still, as Pamela Benson points out, there were a fair number of Anglican defenses of Elizabeth; see "Protestant Theories of Female Regiment in The Faerie Queene" 287. 6. George Whetstone, The English Myrror ( 1586), 136. 7. Quoted by Christopher Hibbert, The Virgin Queen: The Personal History of Elizabeth I (London: Viking Press, 1990), 80. 8. See R. Dolman, A Conference Abovt the Next svceession to the Crowne oflngland (London: 1593) for the argument for the Infanta of Spain. This was countered by Sir John Harington, Tract on the Succession to the Crown (London, 1602, rpt. for the Roxburghe Club, New York: Burt Franklin, 1880), which argued for the Stuart line. For an argument for the Grey line, see John Hales, A Declaration of the Succession of the Crowne Imperiall of England (London: 1564). None of these tracts argue against, or even mention, the gender of their claimant. 9. "Queen's speech to delegation from both Houses, 5 November," in T. E. Hartley, éd., Proceedings in the Parliament of Elizabeth I (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1981), 1: 145-49. 10. Quoted by Alison Weir, Elizabeth the Queen (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), 153. 11. "Speech on nominating an heir and bill of succession," in T. E. Hartley, éd., Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1981), 1: 131. 12. The state papers of the 1580s and 1590s contain numerous discussions of these plots to take the throne. Some of these plots required the queen's premature death - other claimants were willing to wait until the queen's natural end. See, for example, Public Record Office, "A brief discourse addressed to the Queen, against Succession," January 1585, Cal.S.P. Dom. Reign of Elizabeth [I] (1581-1590) (London: 1865; reprint, Nendelin, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 225; Public Record Office, "Voluntary declaration of Margery, wife of Wm. Kinnersley of London," 16 March 1591, CalS.P. Dom. Reign of Elizabeth [I] (1591-94) (London: 1865; reprint, Nendelin, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 19; Public Record Office, "Instructions by Wim. Woodward," 1591, Cal.S.P. Dom. Reign of Elizabeth [I] (1591-94) (London: 1865; reprint, Nendelin, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 161-62; Public Record Office, "Treatise by Robert Parsons," 16/26 May 1592, Cal.S.P. Dom. Reign of Elizabeth [I] (1591-94) (London: 1865; reprint, Nendelin, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 220; Public Record Office, "James Young alias Dingley, a priest, to Lord Burghley," 27 Aug. 1592, Cal.S.P. Dom. Reign of Elizabeth [I] (1591-1594) (London: 1865; reprint, Nendelin, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 255-61; Public Record Office, "Information by Thomas Phelippes," 1592, Cal.S.P. Dom. Reign of Elizabeth [I] (1591-94) (London: 1865; reprint, Nendelin, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 302; Public Record Office, "J. Cecil (alias Snowdon) to Sec. Cecil," 30 Dec. 1595, Cal.S.P. Dom. Reign of Elizabeth [I] (1595-97) (London: 1865; reprint, Nendelin, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 144-47; and Public Record Office, "J. Petit to Peter Halins," 25 May 1597, Cal.S.P. Dom. Reign of Elizabeth [I] (1595-1597) (London: 1865; reprint, Nendelin, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 419.

Female Dominion over Male Identity in The Faerie Queene

127

13. "Anonymous journal, 19 February-10 April," in T. E. Hartley, éd., Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I (London: Leicester University Press, 1981), 3: 61-68. 14. Public Record Office, "Peter Wentworth to Lord Burghley," 27 September 1591, Cal.S.P. Dom. Reign of Elizabeth [I] (1591-94) (London: 1865; reprint, Nendelin, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 107. 15. The queen did not have an unlimited selection of candidates for the succession to the throne but her choice was quite wide, nonetheless. Henry VIII and Edward VI had named the Suffolk line (the Grey sisters) as heirs to the throne in their wills. By 1600, the Suffolks had been joined by twelve other serious contenders: James VI of Scotland; Lady Arabella Stuart; Edward Seymour; Lord Beauchamp; Henry Seymour; the Earl of Derby; the Earl of Huntington; the Earl of Westmoreland; the Earl of Northumberland; the son of the King of Portugal; the Duke of Parma; the King of Spain, and the Infanta of Spain, Public Record Office, "The State of England, Anno Domini 1600 by Thomas Wilson," June 1601, Cal.S.P. Dom. Reign of Elizabeth [I] (1581-1590) (London: 1865; reprint, Nendelin, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 60. 16. Louis Montrose, "A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form," in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 65-87, 6567. 17. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 2. 18. David Lee Miller, The Poem's Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 112-14. 19. Miller, The Poem's Two Bodies, 218. 20. There have been many analyses of powerful female characters in The Faerie Queene, but the emphasis is always on these characters, and not on the corresponding male characters who have been transformed by female power. For example, in The Feminine Reclaimed: The Idea of Woman in Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), Stevie Davies narrows her consideration to the evolution of the female characters, and provides little insight into the separate but equal evolutions that occur within the male characters. In Milton's Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), Maureen Quilligan admits that "Spenser... is analyzing the behavior of men held in the sway of female power," but her study neglects to expound on Spenser's analysis of the male characters' behavior (181). In a more recent study, Quilligan notes again that the females "counsel, or seduce, the male protagonist whose adventures carry the process of 'fashioning'," but centers her argument on laughter as the response to female power; see her "The Comedy of Female Authority in The Faerie Queene" English Literary Renaissance 2 (1987): 156-71, 163. Still, all of these studies focus their attention on the female characters in Book Three. I contend that the female power in The Faerie Queene is present in all six books. 21. Kathleen Williams, Spenser's World of Glass (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 6. 22. Stevie Davies, The Feminine Reclaimed, 53. 23. Neville Williams, Elizabeth: The First Queen of England (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 64-65. 24. Graham Hough, A Preface to the Faerie Queene (New York: Norton, 1962), 148. 25. Quilligan, Milton's Spenser, 82-83. 26. Quilligan, Milton's Spenser, 83.

128

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

27. Williams, Spenser's World of Glass, 8. 28. Quilligan, Milton's Spenser, 107. 29. Camilla Paglia, "The Apollonian Androgyne and The Faerie Queene," English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979): 42-63. 30. Quilligan, Milton's Spenser, 84.

PART III "Scanted Courtesies": FAMILY DYNAMICS AND DISPOSITIONS

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 8

"Natural" Boys and "Hard" Stepmothers: Sidney and Elizabeth Elizabeth Mazzola

The situation of non-satisfaction in which the amounts of stimulation rise to an unpleasurable height... must for the infant be analogous to the experience of being born.1 Your faire mother is a bed, Candles out, and curtaines spread: She thinkes you do letters write: Write, but first let me endite: (Fourth Song, Astrophil and Stella) Introduction Infancy has a variety of narratives, few of them tender. Breast-feeding becomes an occasion, for instance, for destructive impulses, anxiety, sadistic biting: even the seemingly-contented baby may be impaired by an "excess of oral satisfaction."3 If such accounts of childhood are always shaped by adult rationalizations (so that "although but little aggression may be observable it is not possible to ignore the destructive element in the aim of the infant"4), then these mature stories demonstrate how flawed all development is, how much growth is founded on error. We are always in a state of being born. This may also suggest that we are always at war with our mothers, an insight the childless Elizabeth Tudor frequently used to her political advantage.5 Her nation might someday have a wiser ruler, the Queen once told her people, but no one would love them better. "And though you have had and may have many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat," she stated in a 1601 address to Parliament, "yet you never had nor shall have any that will be more careful and loving."6 In a culture of manifold fictions and symbols, this picture of exclusive "loving" was the Queen's preeminent "shaping fantasy," her symbol of herself.7 But the poetry that exploited Elizabeth's symbolism had at once to sustain and numb 131

132

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

this symbol's power, for the Queen's kind of mother's love had its own singular rewards and punishments - the magical realm it fashioned also built out of calculated indifference, willing subjugation, and often obscure victory. In Elizabeth's nursery, childish pleasure was political, and therefore inconstant, unreliable, and short-lived. Because acknowledgment trumps knowledge in the mother's kingdom, affection is a narrow secret, so vulnerable because so unlike other forms of reason. D. W. Winnicott's picture of the world shared between mother and child takes this epistemological difference into account, proposing the same maternal qualifications and abilities Elizabeth had outlined for her people: A mother need not have intellectual understanding of her job because she is fitted for it in its essentials by her biological orientation to her own baby. It is the fact of her devotion to her own baby rather than her self-conscious knowledge that makes her good enough to be successful in the early stages of infant nurture.8 However, as Winnicott later notes, while the mother's "biological orientation" equips her for responsibilities towards her child, the child experiences her physical presence as something psychological, in terms of the powerful feelings which frustrate or content him.9 Winnicott's - or Elizabeth's - shrewd distinction between wisdom and care would therefore mean little to those whom the Queen promises to love. Indeed, such opacity is the burden of Elizabeth's subjects, made partners in a loving game which presumed their inability to know better. Philip Sidney attempts to rewrite the rules of this game, as I hope to show in this essay: he seeks to win the Queen's maternal love without remaining her child. One example of this tricky maneuvering occurs explicitly in the apology which opens his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. "LOVING in truth, and faine in verse [his] love to show,/ That the deare She might take some pleasure of [his] paine," the self-conscious sonneteer Astrophil is unable to submit to conventional strategies for winning his beloved by making her his nurse or his teacher, so that her "Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine" (11.1-2, 4). Astrophil cannot occupy the standard role of lover reduced to frustrated baby for, "great with child to speake" (1.12), he suffers the pangs of labor, too. Seeking "fit words" and "[s]tudying inventions fine," the pain Astrophil experiences is literary anxiety, not the disease of infancy, because he seeks to be interpreted, not to be silenced. And if his anxiety appears regressive - "Biting [his] trewand pen, beating [him] selfe for spite" (1.13) - Astrophil nevertheless is able to substitute his efforts for those of a mother. Indeed, he assumes Elizabeth's professed limitations and plays at playing dumb, simply looking in his heart and writing. Although Astrophil regularly positions himself against poetic rivals as figures of insincerity or immaturity ("Enam'ling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold" [iii.4], their "rimes, running in ratling rowes" [xv.6]), he also suggests the puerile if perilous quality of the love he craves from his beloved. The scene in Astrophil's

Sidney and Elizabeth

133

study recapitulates many of the terrors of the nursery, where the mother can seem a monster and even the reach of the child's body can become a source of distress. But in the Fourth Song we learn that Astrophil and his beloved can "in their best language woo" when the mother is held "Dumbe" with "sleepe" (1.16, 26). Under these relaxed conditions Astrophil is free to acknowledge Stella's talents too, telling her: "Write, but first let me endite" (1.40).10 We might use the details of Sidney's biography as a guide to Astrophil's complicated representations of intimacy in the nursery, for the "faire mother" of Penelope Rich (the model for Stella) was Lettice Knollys, Sidney's uncle Leicester's second wife. When Sidney is presumed to be writing the sonnets, sometime in 1581-82, Lettice had just given birth to the son who displaced Sidney as Leicester's heir. The same figure who thus encourages Astrophil's talents in the shape of Stella produced a rival who dashed all of Sidney's dynastic hopes.11 I would propose that Stella's mother and Stella herself are two aspects of Sidney's Queen, one a nurturing force who threatens the poet with disfavor, the other a generally unresponsive reader with her own powers to hate, or to write.

While sheer generational conflict is the subject of many Renaissance narratives,12 a more awkward discrepancy between adult aspiration and childish want (or between instruction and delight) is almost as often taken up in early modern texts. More's Utopia and Machiavelli's Prince provide two examples of the disjunction between urbane invention and rude necessity. The split is pushed far apart in Shakespeare's King Lear, when Cordelia cannot force her heart into her mouth during the King's speaking contest and flatter her father. Indeed, there are numerous instances in Lear where parents and children are at odds or where mature reasoning deflects immature desire. A shamed Gloucester, for example, is unable to reconcile his worldly knowledge with a lawless appetite - his fatherhood, in fact, something only supported by his learning. We see the educational process still occurring when he introduces his bastard son Edmund to Kent: "I have so often blushed to acknowledge him," Gloucester discloses, "that now I am brazed to't" (I.i.8-10). At first, Kent does not grasp Gloucester's rueful admission about his son or about the hardened condition of his body and tells the father, "Sir I cannot conceive you," but Gloucester reassures him: "Sir, this young fellow's mother could." Gloucester's formula for paternity really works the other way around: Edmund's nameless mother comprehends the father because she comprehended their son, her knowing another part of her "biological orientation," inconsequential because inevitable. But like the mother "a bed" in Astrophil's Fourth Song, Edmund's mother is a figure of authority exactly because she is dumb. The "facts" of "devotion," as Winnicott terms them, shape other facts, larger epistemologies. This is because the first schoolroom, the nursery, has its own array of techniques for construing knowledge, whereby affection can silence reason or

134

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

ignore sons "by order of law" like Edmund's brother Edgar. We would be wrong to overlook these early sites of ill-disciplined learning or uncoordinated thought. We would be wrong because even "bad" ideas have an important place in any system or culture. The philosopher Gregory Bateson supplies them with the same weight as good ideas in his account of the "double bind" a child can find himself trapped in, when the right answer is just as inappropriate or threatening as a wrong one can be. Caught in this "no-win" situation "in which the other person... is expressing two orders of message and one of these denies the other," "[t]he child is punished for discriminating accurately what [the mother] is expressing, and he is punished for discriminating inaccurately - he is caught in a double bind."13 Bateson illustrates his premise with the scenario of a child whose overwhelming need for love disarms the mother and whose seeming refusal of it angers her. But another example is provided by Astrophil's continued retractions in the sonnets. Sidney's spokesman indicates the problem of the double bind most clearly when he spells out how epistemological and affective purposes are in conflict in his verse to Stella, his reasoning always in "weake proportion" to his love: "So that I cannot chuse but write my mind,/ And cannot chuse but put out what I write" (L.vii.9-10). If his awareness of the problem is acute, Astrophil is still unable to resolve it, and instead finds himself backsliding "[wjhile those poore babes their death in birth do find" (1.11), again and again forced to relearn how to speak and feel. Every occasion for intimacy always risks the possibility of incoherence, but such occasions were multiple at Elizabeth's court - Sidney's pastoral entertainment The Lady of May a famous instance where the Queen obtusely failed to carry out the part the poet had carefully scripted for her. "Privilege" and "privation" could be rudely yoked in early modern England,14 where status supplied proximity to the Queen even as wealth underwrote sites far removed from public scrutiny or approval.15 The connections between privilege and privation flourished, too, in Elizabeth's princely assurance of a mother's tenderness, promising to love her subjects because they did not question her ability to do so. Of course, all royal subjects must yield to their rulers: the difference was that Elizabeth pretended to yield to her people as well. As a result, her courtiers found themselves in the "double binds" Bateson describes throughout her long reign, baffled by the Queen's mixed messages of power and tenderness, virginity and desirability, remoteness as an icon and frailty as a woman. In their dismay and confusion, many of Elizabeth's subjects advanced their careers through the juvenalia of tournaments and "cautious innovations" of love poetry, in youthful pastoral songs and apologies and the doubtful affirmations of allegory.16 If the Queen instructed her "favorites" to remain infants, she made infantile desire acceptable, even artful, behavior.

Sidney and Elizabeth

13 5

Before I explore Sidney's reinvention of infantile power - even as he chose (or was required) to employ the Queen's symbols and affects - I want to examine the sometimes crude dynamics of Elizabeth's court at greater length. Bateson's picture of the schizophrenic child's environment may seem an unusual analogy to the political and psychological exigencies of the Tudor world; yet his model of how loving mothers mandate dissimulation and enforce humiliation writes large the vulnerable and volatile state of the nursery, a setting where privilege and privation are perhaps nowhere else more closely bound. Bateson claims that the schizophrenic child is not physically imprisoned by his parents but held captive by their logic, the child's knowing completely governed by adult desires when the mother controls "the child's definitions of his own messages, as well as the definition of his responses to her."17 Astrophil recognizes such imaginative constraints when he points to the limits of his skill along with those of his audience, complaining: "WHAT may words say, or what may words not say,/ Where truth it selfe must speake like flatterie?" (xxxv.1-2). No wonder every effort to communicate in Bateson's universe becomes a paralyzing gesture, every attempt at reason transformed into a dangerous error. This is a world that brooks no agreement, much like the brilliant cosmos over which Elizabeth ruled for forty-five years. The consequences for ignoring such a mistress could be just as severe as serving her, and Spenser, Ralegh, Essex and Sidney's careers all reflect the foreshortened perspective of the nursery, where ambition had to be curtailed since devotion proved always inadequate. To be sure, the conflated picture Elizabeth presented of herself as queen and mother, virgin and lover, inspired a range of feeling, combining slavish admiration and witty innuendo with trivial self-aggrandizement. If a child's relation to his parents evolves then his conflicted feelings of hate and desire and awe will sort themselves out. But works of art do not banish immaturity or insist on clear-cut articulations of emotion: they may instead cultivate psychological limitation; and in Elizabethan poetry we have a miscellany of reactions to maternal power and stratagems for reimagining its tensile force which never completely dislodge it, or really even aim to. When Bateson details the pathology that "[occurs] in the human organism when certain formal patterns of the breaching occur in the communication between mother and child,"18 we can make out the patchwork image of Elizabeth, veiled by nervous myth-making and enveloped by crippled courtiers.19 The Queen not only insisted on the stunted exertions (or "ornate capitulations"20) Bateson describes but made them a cultural policy, the preferred way to conduct business or to produce art.

Under Elizabeth, courtly poetry and politics alike were transformed into vehicles for wooing a capricious, despotic beloved, someone who would survive aggression and withstand rage and remain beautiful, desirable, and entirely in possession of

136

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

her courtiers' faculties.21 This pathology is diagnosed by Joseph Loewenstein as a peri bathous or "art of sinking," molded by a culture of steady repression, boredom, and repetition.22 One of its most famous artifacts was presented by a chastened Sidney when he made a 1581 New Year's gift to his queen of a pin coated with jewels and shaped like a whip. Sidney provides Elizabeth with an elegant means to punish him and elevate herself, along with an obviously public statement about the inevitability of this transaction.23 The witticism cannot override Sidney's humiliation; it only adorns it. Such debilitating arts could be required of other queens, too, as when Mary Stuart was invited to yield her maternal role so that Elizabeth might better carry out her own. While imprisoned in England, the Scottish queen was asked to persuade her son James VI to cooperate with Elizabeth's advisors, and Elizabeth's secretary of state Francis Walsingham was likewise instructed, "You shall then [in your meeting with Mary] as of your self lay before her the inconveniency, and danger that may grow both to her self and her son in case she shall show herself any way unwilling to employ her credit and authority with her son for the performance of those said offers."24 If the best mothers ultimately deny themselves for their children's advancement, then Elizabeth and Bateson insinuate how the best children will mortify themselves for their mother's pleasure. Keith Thomas and Joseph Loewenstein have explored the unusual demographics of an early-modern world grown dangerously juvenile. As Thomas explains, "the prevailing ideal was gérontocratie: the young were to serve and the old were to rule. Justification for so obvious a truth was found in the law of nature, the fifth commandment, and the proverbial wisdom of the ages."25 But the new wisdom redefined what it meant to be young, too. The thirty-four year-old Robert Sidney was told, for instance, that his Queen "thought him too young for any place about her"26 (my emphasis). Drawing on the work of Loewenstein and Thomas might help us to explore the aesthetics of this world, and help us to see how Sidney's writings struggle to think through the "double bind" by persuading his Queen to acknowledge his adult position. It would seem that Sidney was only partly successful. For one thing, Petrarchan poetry more typically functioned as a set of mnemonic devices or "commemorative fictions" which signaled a poet's faulty vision: it was hardly the means to clarify what a lover could say to his beloved or what a baby might teach his nurse.27 At the same time, the Queen was increasingly becoming an "antique image"; once "the subject of painters" she was now more of "an object on which paint would be applied."28 The rewards of Elizabethan art and politics became increasingly premised, in other words, on the artist's inability to see or tell. His "young braine captiv'd in golden cage" (xxiii.ll), poets like Astrophil are both a threat to and balm for this system, flatterers who urge their readers not to take them seriously. Their instruction can require disabling effort. If Sidney invents Astrophil, Astrophil will in turn invent a pathetic double, telling Stella, who "cannot skill to pitie [his] disgrace," "I am not I, pitie the tale of me" (xlv.3, 14).

Sidney and Elizabeth

137

While reason, ambition, and the New World were compressed by the parameters of the Queen's gaze - made into mirrors in which she might "behold" or remake her face (The Faerie Queene, proem to Book Two) - more and more courtiers were confined to the world of Elizabeth's nursery, where they could remain safely ignored or overruled.29 A sizeable portion of Elizabethan poetry was written by subjects who remained "young" and on the margins of power, including figures like Sidney (1554-86) and Spenser (1552-99), and players even further removed from court, like Robert Greene (1558-92), Robert Southwell (1561-95), Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), and Christopher Marlowe (1564-93). Katherine Duncan-Jones comments.on "the obvious point that all Sidney's poetry is early poetry"30 but we might press her point harder. Certainly Petrarchism served many poets as an adolescent game, its pedantry competitive, its stifled sentiments not only passive but pacifying. Yet there were other immature sentiments, and Theresa Krier outlines alternative responses to Elizabeth's royal repressions. Reactions towards the Queen's maternal figure ranged beyond mere gynephobia or misogyny, for in arrogating to herself so much of a mother's cultural authority, Elizabeth also inspired much of the anxiety which that image induces, inflaming fears about infantilism and dependence, animating longing and frustration. As Krier suggests, what emerged culture-wide was a dense "choreography" of gestures and movements towards this figure, "complex instances of identification and disidentification, acknowledgment and disavowal." Spenser's Faerie Queene utilizes many of these gestures and movements, combining allegory and romance to describe political and psychological frustration as well as to obscure it. Spenser represents the sovereign mother by splintering her into multiple and contradictory images, some glorious - like the virgin princess Una or warrior bride Britomart- and some menacing - like the emasculating queen Radigund, or warrior bride Britomart. Clearly the splitting of the maternal image was not always effective, even in Spenser's capable hands. "It is not accidental," Krier writes, that so much work on subject formation in Renaissance culture uses psychoanalytic theories of infancy and their complex negotiations with feminist theory... . Attention to the infant's subjective experience of the threshold between preoedipal and oedipal has become a powerful instrument suited to English culture and writing in the sixteenth century. ...[given] the boy's sharp rupture from the feminine that was so often central to English Renaissance child-rearing, educational institutions, and professions.31 I would simply add that the boy's uneasy relation to his mother signaled additional tensions within English culture. The choreography Krier describes was staged not only in nurseries (where wet nurses and mothers took turns identifying and

138

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

rejecting children) but in churches as well (where embattled Catholics and Protestants rescued their God's body from each other's symbols) and in the earlymodern theater (where audiences were educated about the rudiments of experience and learned which passions to identify with or expel).32 "[F]amisht" and in an "Orphane place," Astrophil will conclude his sequence by characterizing Stella as an "ABSENT presence" (cvi.3, 6, 1), highlighting at once his imaginative autonomy and his despair at attaining it. The harshness of such labor as well as the delight in the "choreography" Krier describes are things infants quickly discern in their energized immobility and eloquent blankness. Their knowing and feeling transparent to each other, their most profound relatedness is sparked by the idea that the mother has no inner life but belongs entirely to them. What they learn early on is that the one-sidedness of such intimacy can work both ways.

I now turn to consider the contentment and anxiety Sidney experienced as the Queen's "foster child" or stepson.33 Astrophil is the most concrete vehicle Sidney uses to formulate his undeveloped experience, a figure who insists on the "facts" of "devotion" with the determination of a child refusing more learned distinctions, "Desire still cr[ying], 'give me some food'" (lxxi.14). Many critics take Astrophil's outbursts at face value and emphasize Sidney's shrill insistence of his needs rather than his eloquent analysis of them.34 These readers vacillate only between treating Sidney's case as one of house arrest or of arrested development, unsure of whether Elizabeth was wise to curb his vast political ambitions or needlessly fearful about ambitions which were doomed to self-destruct.35 Sidney's work deepens such confusion. This is because, like the gift of a jeweled whip, it employs deliberately emptied signs36 to show how mothers and children humor each other. Indeed, the jeweled whip is a neat metaphor for the cunning and strength of the double bind, a signal that Sidney knows of and knows how to succumb to infantile defeat. As I explore more fully below, Astrophil's sonnets similarly draw on Petrarch's fawning treatment of the beloved while transforming this talent into facile self-promotion.37 Maureen Quilligan reminds us too that "in the midst of a prevailing fashion for courtly compliment... [Sidney's invention of Stella] may have been its most pointed aggression against [Elizabeth's] central authority. He would not play politics by her rules but would turn her Petrarchan forms to his own purposes."38 Still, Astrophil and Stella is just one battle in a larger psychological war, and Elizabeth is only one of his opponents. Sidney's poetics repeatedly traverse the ground between childish tantrum and polemic directed against himself, something we can also see in the two defenses he produced in his short career, like bookends demarcating public triumphs and private pains. Another example of such divided accomplishment is located behind the polite criticism Sidney inserts into a 1579 letter protesting the Queen's rumored marriage to the Catholic Alencon.

Sidney and Elizabeth

139

Sidney explains the Queen's poor choice of suitor by reminding her of a royal defect, maintaining that, unlike the courtiers who monitor her whereabouts constantly, she can not see herself. "Our eyes," he suggests, "[are] delighted in the sight of you... your own eyes cannot see yourself."39 Sidney hints that the delights of the nursery are not always reciprocal, that in fact Elizabeth might also be diminished by her unique positioning. Shakespeare's Volumnia seems to comment on a similar dynamic when she tells her warrior son Coriolanus, "Thy valiantness was mine, thou sucked'st it from me" (III.iii.129). Yet Sidney's "valiantness" never completely belonged to him, either: his renowned act of generosity on the battlefield, when the wounded hero gave his water bottle to a dying soldier, is likely a fiction. And there are other borrowings. The self-styled "pro-rex" of Ireland, Sidney was also Leicester and Warwick's heir and "a universal nephew figure" to a number of older humanists who lacked heirs.40 As his childhood friend Fulke Greville sums up, Sidney was "a great lord by birth" but also by "alliance and grace."41 Greville is especially sensitive to the rougher edges of Sidney's position. Describing his friend's reasons for drafting the risky letter to the Queen, Greville explains, for Sir Philip, being neither magistrate nor counsellor, to oppose himself against his sovereign's pleasure in things indifferent, I must answer that his worth, truth, favour and sincerity of heart - together with his real manner of proceeding in it - were his privileges, because this gentleman's course in this great business was not by murmur among equals or inferiors to detract from princes, or by a mutinous kind of bemoaning error to stir up ill affections in their minds, whose best thoughts could do him no good, but by a due address of his humble reasons to the Queen herself. (37) Greville details the unmatched assurance the humble Sidney expected to find in his queen through a privileged relation that would make every other tie with equals or inferiors - with anyone else, that is - unnecessary. But if Greville's account outlines an impressive bond then it also implies its enervating effect; and after the failure of the letter Greville seeks to reassure readers about Sidney's unimpeded abilities, inadvertently exposing his friend's weakened condition. Greville comments that Sidney now "seemed to stand alone, yet he stood upright" (38).

Likely undertaken after what Greville calls the "dangerous error" of the letter and Sidney's subsequent retirement from court (a period Sidney himself describes as his "not old years" and "idlest times"), The Defence of Poetry (1579-80) outlines a way for Sidney to be a poet without having to publish poetry, supplying a means to espouse his "unelected vocation" and at the same time escape from it, allowing him

140

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

to own up to mature self-awareness and still remain a child.42 Ostensibly his argument is that poetry leads to virtuous action and Mtake[s] naughtiness away,"43 but poetry also makes allowances for childish behavior. The poet, Sidney claims, "is the food for the tenderest stomachs,"44 and "men (most of which are childish in the best things)" "will be glad to hear the tales of Hercules, Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas."45 He describes poetry's gentle sustenance and epistemological value in contrast to the Queen's unapologetic rules of engagement, calling it "the first lightgiver to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges."46 Moreover, only poetry promotes true affection between parents and children, for Sidney likens the "ungratefulness" of poetry's detractors to "vipers, that with their birth kill their parents."47 Nevertheless, if being a child is how Sidney feels, it also serves as a way to express adult frustration, now that England, once "the mother of excellent minds," has become so "hard a stepmother to poets."48 Astrophil and Stella (1581-82) elaborates this picture of the poet as child by continually rewriting sexual desire in terms of infantile contentment.49 Indeed, while Arthur Marotti reads Astrophil's erotic longings as a screen for Sidney's political ambitions (so that the Queen was being courted in the sonnets solely for political favors), childish confinement appears something desired by the poet, at odds with, maybe suspicious of, any adult ambitions.50 As Astrophil explains it: LOVE still a boy, and oft a wanton is, School'd onely by his mother's tender eye: What wonder then if he his lesson misse, When for so soft a rod deare play he trie? And yet my Starre, because a sugred kisse In sport I suckt, while she asleepe did lie, Doth lowre, nay, chide; nay, threat for only this: Sweet, it was saucie Love, not humble I. (lxxiii.1-8) Astrophil revises the scenario of the Fourth Song, since here the boy disturbs the sleeping mother to steal from her a "sugred kisse." If the lovers are conflated with the conventional picture of Venus and her son Cupid, Astrophil pushes this imagery still harder, using it to avoid responsibility and undercut ambition: "Sweet, it was saucie Love" he tells her, "not humble I." His regressive impulses are matched by ones that magnify Stella, and Astrophil warns others: "But no scuse serves, she makes her wrath appeare/ In Beautie's throne, see now who dares come neare" (11. 9-10). But this reading of intimacy (with its playful rhetoric of insubordination: "see now who dares come neare") construes babies as helpless bullies and maternal wrath as seductive, for the emboldened child Astrophil concludes "[t]hat Anger' selfe I needs must kisse againe" (1.14). Later he avers: "I will but kisse, I never more will bite" (lxxxii.14). Astrophil's picture of infantile power can in fact be simultaneously generous and menacing: Stella is also a baby who in the Fift Song

Sidney and Elizabeth

141

has been given "Ambrosian pap" (1.26), yet she is admonished that "Sweet babes must babies have, but shrewd gyrles must be beat'n" (1.36).

Alongside these complex consolations Sidney occasionally turned to the comfort of the tirade, or what Astrophil calls a "wailing eloquence" (xxxviii.ll). Perhaps this relief is depicted in Greville's account of the tennis court insult. Apparently days after the letter to the Queen,51 the Earl of Oxford (one of the party in favor of Elizabeth's nuptials) tried to force Sidney from the courts and Sidney refused, complaining that the "ill-disciplined" Earl's lack of courtesy prevented his acquiescing.52 Courtly combat quickly degenerated into something like a sandbox dispute, where an enraged Oxford called Sidney a puppy and Sidney retorted with an almost unintelligible genealogical riposte, telling Oxford: "all the world knows puppies are gotten by dogs and children by men" (39).53 A similar revisionary mythology is presented, however, in The Defence of the Earl of Leicester (1584-85), perhaps Sidney's last work and the only one intended for publication, written in response to the anonymous Leicester's Commonwealth which appeared in the summer of 1584.54 Leicester's Commonwealth saddled Leicester with all kinds of charges (many already familiar to its readers) including Leicester's involvement in his first wife's death, his ambition to marry Elizabeth and/or remove the Queen from power. Ignoring these scandalous charges, Sidney instead strives to glorify the noble links he shares with his uncle, his aim to countenance the libel that Leicester "want[ed] gentry."55 Katherine Duncan-Jones claims that Sidney was "too anxious" in the Defence of Leicester "to show himself Leicester's 'loyal and natural boyf" after the death of his uncle's son in 1584.56 Yet Sidney's earlier aim to deliver a "golden" world from Nature's "brazen" one as outlined in the Defence of Poetry51 also fits into these larger ambitions to posit lineage and ratify affection. Sidney had elsewhere implied that the Queen could be replaced by more satisfying forms of consolation, as he wrote to his father-in-law Walsingham, describing the economic perils afflicting Leicester's troops in the Netherlands: If her majesty were the fountain I would fear considering what I daily find that we should wax dry, but she is but a means whom God useth and I know not whether I am deceived but I am faithfully persuaded that if she should withdraw herself other springs would rise to help this action.58 This hypothesis of alternative sources of sustenance similarly motivates the strange designs and energies of The Defence of Leicester.59 Just as much of Sidney's poetry tackles the tangled issues of the poet's autonomy and audience, his prose works wrestle with these problems as well, only here Sidney's more private anxieties - a

142

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

child's need for comfort, a courtier's need for promotion - were more publicly exhibited, justified, and allayed. But Sidney's harried response to Leicester's libeller was never published. This is probably a good thing, since the work contains none of Sidney's masterful wit or irony, only sarcasm and self-regard and the petulance of someone who knows he's being looked at, buttressed, he claims, by the assurance of a "nobility never interrupted."60 Sidney now upholds a patchwork model of a patriarchal order, a model which makes clear that even if all of Leicester's "great honours came to him by his mother"61 Leicester is clearly not dependent on the Queen. Indeed, Elizabeth takes her glory from him: "[Leicester's] faith is so linked to her Majesty's service, that who goes about to undermine the one, resolves withal to overthrow the other."62 In addition, Sidney proposes a revised vision of maternal power utterly divorced from the Queen's royal authority by relocating it to ancient history. He reports that "even from the Roman time to modern times in such case they might, if they listed, and so often did, use their mother's name; and that Augustus Caesar had both name and empire of Caesar only by his mother's right."63 In this way Sidney's propaganda for mothers becomes propaganda for himself. Conclusion If a mother first rescues the infant from extinction, her caring may foist a thicker oblivion on her baby, the way Titania imperiously tends the orphaned child of her votaress in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titania's love and care can never symbolize or be replaced by another's, as the fairy queen assures Oberon, "Set your heart at rest/ The fairyland buys not the child of me" (ILL 122). What better reminder in Titania's exclusive loving of what Stephen Greenblatt calls the "tragic inescapability of continuous selfhood"?64 And what better monument to the strained compass of poetry, which strives again and again to compensate children finally forced from their mothers' arms? We have another monument in the tragic figure of Sidney, the same narrative of tenderness and oblivion, violence and indifference at work in accounts of his unsatisfying career and untimely death. Once his Grand Tour was concluded in 1575, the young Sidney served Elizabeth more or less as a "carpet knight": denied Henry Sidney's post in Ireland or any sustained diplomatic service abroad; succeeding his father only as ceremonial "Cup-bearer" to the Queen in 1576; forced into "retirement" at his sister's estate in 1579/80; knighted solely as a courtesy to Prince Casimir in 1583; and prevented from accompanying Francis Drake on a 1585 expedition to the West Indies.65 Interestingly, a good part of the works which comprise Sidney's magnificent oeuvre were composed during the brief period (1581-84) when he was not Leicester's heir and therefore most in need of the Queen's favor.66 After Sidney was finally permitted to accompany his uncle to battle against pro-Spanish forces in the Low Countries in November 1585, he died a few months later, wounded in a skirmish at the age of thirty one. On his deathbed he begged that his work be destroyed.

Sidney and Elizabeth

143

Even Sidney's elegists contradict themselves, puzzled by the meaning of his short life and pointless death. In some accounts Sidney is a Protestant martyr who heroically threw off his cuisses to meet his unarmed opponent; in other accounts he had simply been too hasty to do battle and neglected to properly arm himself.67 Moreover, Sidney's considerable frustrations as a courtier and the little pride he took in his "unelected vocation" as poet hold no place in contemporary stories about him.68 What counts is the mangled body and the generous spirit, his defeat a poignant signal that the Queen understood her subjects better than they did.69 In the aftermath of the tennis court incident, Greville recorded the Queen's gentle rebuke of her subject after Sidney had rashly challenged Oxford to a duel. Greville's account experiments with the positioning of queen and subject, mother and child, alternating similes with other images of relation, contrasting figures of autonomy with those of dependence: "[L]ike an excellent monarch," the Queen "la[id] before [Sidney] the difference in degree between earls and gentlemen; the respect inferiors ought to their superiors; and the necessity in princes to maintain their own creations" (41). Greville's picture couples princely affection with noble disinterest, maternal devotion with queenly equanimity. The same scrupulous Elizabeth must have delighted in the tribute paid to her as queen and mother in A Midsummer Night's Dream, attended on by frail mortals who give her their children. To be sure, mothering is frequently rewritten by Shakespeare, brought into line with angry offspring, as when Hamlet tutors Gertrude, or magically redeemed by a kiss that renders the mother mortal, the way Hermione is stirred from art to life in The Winter's Tale. Spenser makes motherhood the ultimate wish-fulfillment for poets and their nations alike, his figure of Britomart both lost child and great mother of England. But Sidney's biographer Greville supplies us with a drastically different image of maternal authority in describing Elizabeth's interview with Sidney: "although [Sidney] found a sweet stream of sovereign humours in that well-tempered Lady to run against him, yet found he safety in her self, against the selfhess which appeared to threaten him in her" (37).70 Perhaps Elizabeth's princely heart was less a "sanctuary" unto Sidney (Greville 38) than an opulent grave, her love the kind which reduced the men around her to children, though it might exalt some of them with poetry. NOTES My research has been greatly facilitated by Richard Uttich and the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Department of the Cohen Library at City College, and by the Reading Room staff of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. The insights of Kate D. Levin and Ernest B. Oilman put me on surer footing. I am also grateful for a 1999-2000 Professional Staff Congress/ CUNY Research Award which allowed me to finish drafting this essay. 1. Sigmund Freud, "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety," (1926) S.E., 20, 137; quoted by Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey. rev. ed. (New York: Delacorte Press, 1975), 125.

144

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

2. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). All citations to Sidney's poems are to this edition. 3. Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, 123. 4. See D. W. Winnicott, "Breast Feeding," in The Child and the Family: First Relationships, ed. Janet Hardenberg (London: Tavistock Publications, 1957), 144. The recent work of Theresa M. Krier directed me to Winnicott, although she and I draw on his thinking with different ideas about what Krier calls the "conditions of infancy" (295). See Krier, "Generations of Blazons: Psychoanalysis and the Song of Songs in the Amoretti," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 293-327. 5. Louis Adrian Montrose quotes C. L. Barber's claim that "the very central and problematical role of women in Shakespeare - and in Elizabethan drama generally - reflects the fact that Protestantism did away with the cult of the Virgin Mary. It meant the loss of ritual resource for dealing with the internal residues in all of us of the once all-powerful and all-inclusive mother." As Montrose adds, however, "a concerted effort was in fact made to appropriate the symbolism and the affective power of the suppressed Marian cult... . The Queen was the source of her subjects' social sustenance, the fount of all preferments." See Montrose, '"Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," Representations 1, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 61-94, 63-64. 6. J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments 1559-1581 and 1584-1601 (two volumes) (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1958). Neale claims this speech was known to posterity as "the Golden Speech of Queen Elizabeth," and reprinted several times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (391). The speech is cited by Christine Coch, who explores the biological and political pressures weighing on Elizabeth to produce a successor, along with "the range of meanings that 'mother' possessed in the [early modern] cultural imagination." See '"Mother of my Contreye': Elizabeth I and Tudor Constructions of Motherhood," ELR 26, no. 3 (1996): 423-50, 450. Montrose also mentions Elizabeth's speech in "Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," 78. Compare the Queen's address (delivered two years before her death) with her 1563 speech, presented so much earlier in her biological and political careers, and designed to address anxieties about the royal succession after one of Elizabeth's illnesses. The Queen forestalls the marriage question out of "consideration of my own safety": "For I know that this matter toucheth me much nearer than it doth you all, who, if the worst happen, can lose but your bodies; but if I take not the convenient care that it behoveth me to have therein, I hazard to lose both body and soul" (Neale 108). Elizabeth acknowledges the queen's "two bodies" only to construe motherhood as an entirely political project: "And so I assure you all that, though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have any a more mother then I mean to be unto you all" (Neale 109). Lena Cowen Orlin considers the Queen's rhetorical experiments and affective inversions to claim that "Elizabeth used her familial tropes not only to express and exhort intimate emotion but also to evoke and impose the structures and obligations of the family." See "The Fictional Families of Elizabeth I," in Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, eds. Carole Levin and Patricia A. Sullivan (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 85-110, 85-86. 7. As Coch puts it, "[b]y transforming motherhood into a self-descriptive metaphor, Elizabeth escaped practical and cultural constraints while retaining the political benefits of an emergent maternal authority" (425). 8. Winnicott, "The Child's Needs and the Role of the Mother in the Early Stages," in The Child and the Outside World: Studies in Developing Relationships, ed. Janet Hardenberg (London: Tavistock Publications, 1962), 15.

Sidney and Elizabeth

145

9. See Winnicott, "The Child's Needs," 18. 10. For a brief discussion of Stella's handiwork, see Helen Hackett, "Courtly writing by women," in Women and Literature in Britain 1500-1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 169-89, 170. 11. Maureen Quilligan reads the connections between Stella and Penelope Rich (and Lettice Knollys) from a slightly different angle. See "Sidney and His Queen," in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, eds. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 171-96, 186. 12. See Anthony Esler, The aspiring mind of the Elizabethan younger generation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1966); and Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) for two accounts of the way such conflicts clouded political and literary ambitions alike. 13. Gregory Bateson, "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia," in Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1972), 201-27, 208, 215. Bateson's picture of the "double bind" relies heavily upon the image of the hostile, insecure mother: "If the child correctly discriminates [the mother's] metacommunicative signals, he would have to face the fact the she both doesn't want him and is deceiving him by her loving behavior. He would be 'punished' for learning to discriminate orders of messages accurately... . [Or] he must deceive himself... in order to support mother in her deception" (214). While I reject the explicit sexism of Bateson's account, some of the broader connections recent critics have drawn between mothers and children with Elizabeth I and her courtiers make his model nonetheless useful. 14. Privilege and privation are linked as early as 1398 in the loaded meaning ascribed to "private" (OED 4a): "Not open to the public; restricted or intended only for the use or enjoyment of particular and privileged persons." 15. For background information on the Renaissance development of the private sphere, see Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Elizabeth Mazzola, "Marrying Medusa: Spenser's Epithalamion and Renaissance Reconstructions of Female Privacy," Genre 25, no. 2-3 (1992): 193-210. 16. Krier, for instance, describes Spenser's innovations in the "limited register" of Petrarchism. An account of the apology as an "infantilizing genre" is provided by Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). See also Joseph Loewenstein, who claims that "Astrophil's selfrepresentation regularly splits him between the schoolroom and the nursery, and often makes sites of disappointment of both," in "Sidney's Truant Pen," MLQ 46 (1985): 128-42, 134, 136. For the younger child, of course, these two sites would be identical. As is obvious to any reader of this essay, Loewenstein's work has been of tremendous importance to my thinking, particularly his comments on a "late Elizabethan tradition of literary meditations on youth culture, a tradition in which The Shepheardes Calender as well as city comedy participate" (141^42). 17. Bateson, "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia," 214. 18. Bateson, "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia," 202-3. 19. For an account of the reciprocal nature of this process, see Louis Adrian Montrose, "The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text," in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, eds. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 303^0.

146

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

20. I borrow this term from Loewenstein, who describes the psychological costs exacted by the ambiguities of the Elizabethan political scene (130). Richard McCoy likewise argues of the Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella: "Sidney's rhetoric is alternately passive and aggressive, defensive and impulsive," in Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 61. 21. In "Breast Feeding," Winnicott describes the "survival of the mother" in face of infantile aggression (144). Winnicott's account has a limited application to Renaissance culture, where wetnurses more commonly tended wellborn babies. But see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992) for an argument about the suspicions wetnursing aroused in Shakespeare's England (4-5). 22. See Loewenstein, "Sidney's Truant Pen," 133. John K. G. Shearman similarly suggests the "endless opportunities" for boredom in a courtier's life in "Variety and Monotony," in Mannerism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), 141-51. I am grateful to Jon Quitslund for directing me to this source. 23. For an extended analysis of Sidney's New Year's gift as evidence of his "sexual subjection" see Sally Minogue, "A Woman's Touch: Astrophil, Stella, and 'Queen Vertue's Court'," ELH 63, no. 3 (1996): 555-70, 555. Quilligan briefly takes up the episode in "Sidney and His Queen," 180, as does Loewenstein, "Sidney's Truant Pen," 132. 24. "Instructions for A. B." [Elizabeth's letter to Sir Francis Walsingham] CecilStamford-Towneley MS, The Pierpont Morgan Library, MA 664, 396-97. 25. Keith Thomas, "Age and Authority in Early Modern England," Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1976): 205-^8, 207. Thomas's work is cited by Loewenstein, "Sidney's Truant Pen," 133. 26. Thomas, "Age and Authority in Early Modern England," 212, nl. 27. Roland Greene investigates the limits of these fictions in Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 3. 28. See Dennis Kay, "'She was a Queen, and Therefore Beautiful': Sidney, His Mother, and Queen Elizabeth," RESn.s. 43, no. 169 (1992): 18-39, 34. Kay also relays Ben Jonson's story about Sidney's mother, who had contracted a disfiguring case of smallpox while caring for the Queen, to suggest yet again how Elizabeth's "beauty was bought dear, and [how] the cost... fell to others" (23). 29. Edward I. Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998) suggests that English poetry under Elizabeth suffered a steep decline at the beginning of her reign, and directs readers to Steven W. May's statistics about literary output during this period. See May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: the poems and their contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991). 30. See Katherine Duncan-Jones, "Philip Sidney's Toys," Proceedings of the British Academy 66 (1980): 161-78, 161. In Rebellion in Arcadia, McCoy similarly notes of Sidney's output: "All the major works are marked by inconclusive development, thematic contradictions, and problems of closure" and they all "culminate in an impasse" (26). 31. Krier, "Psychoanalysis and the Song of Songs in the Amoretti" 304-5. 32. Thomas likewise suggests the new parameters of a world with so few members on top: "So far as the young were concerned, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are conspicuous for a sustained drive to subordinate persons in their teens and early twenties and to delay their equal participation in the adult world. This drive is reflected in the wider dissemination of apprenticeship; in the involvement of many more children in formal education; and in a variety of measures to prolong the period of legal and social infancy"

Sidney and Elizabeth

147

(214). This passage is cited by Loewenstein, "Sidney's Truant Pen," 133. See also Mary Ellen Lamb, who explores how Latin tutors were viewed as having rescued young boys from a female culture of nursery rhymes and vernacular fictions in "Apologizing for Pleasure in Sidney's Apology for Poetry: The Nurse of Abuse Meets the Tudor Grammar School," Criticism 36, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 499-519, 504-5. 33. I borrow the term "foster child" from the triumph Elizabeth staged as entertainment for the French ambassadors representing Alencon. In it, the "four Foster Children of Desire" besieged the Castle of Perfect Beauty only to be defeated by the defenders of Beauty's fortress. As Loewenstein reminds us in his analysis of the episode, Sidney was one of the four foster children (131). "Stepson" is a much looser allusion. As son of Henry Sidney, charged with the government of Ireland, and heir to Leicester, the Queen's favorite "favorite," Sidney would have been seen by his contemporaries as enjoying a quasi-familial, quasi-legal connection to Elizabeth. 34. See also David Kalstone, whose reading emphasizes the architectural rather than destructive impulses of Sonnet 71, in Sidney's Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 117-18. 35. For examples of this critical uncertainty, see Neil L. Rudenstine, Sidney's Poetic Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 12; and Loewenstein, who maintains that Sidney's is a poetics of self-inflicted humiliation; "Sidney's Truant Pen," 133, 141. Sidney's mentor Languet, in his letter of 22 October, 1578, combines Sidney's tendencies toward abasement with those toward pleasure, reproaching Sidney for trying to "escape the tempest of affairs" by retiring to the "privacy of secluded spaces." 36. I borrow the phrase from Gary Waller, "Struggling into Discourse: The Emergence of Renaissance Women's Writing," in Silent But For the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985), 238-56, 239. 37. In "Psychoanalysis and the Song of Songs in the Amoretti," Krier likewise describes the discomfort with Petrarchan sentiments and strictures in the Tudor period, pointing to Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion, where the "diction, motifs, and themes [which inform] these poems are inaccessible, even unimaginable, to the tormented and exasperated Petrarchan lover" (308). 38. Quilligan, "Sidney and His Queen," 188. Elsewhere Quilligan describes "the underlying politics of the sequence as a subtle resistance to the queen" (190) and points out that "Sidney addressed no poem to Elizabeth, save for The Lady of May" (195 n35). 39. See John Michael Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 53. 40. See Duncan-Jones, éd., Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), viii. 41. See The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 37-41, 41. Hereafter, references to Greville's text will be made parenthetically in the text. 42. Sidney, The Defence of Poetry, éd. J. A. Van Dorsten (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966, 1997), 18; hereafter cited in the notes as DP. In "Apologizing for Pleasure," Lamb explains that, "[l]ike rabbits and ducks, warriors and infants perform a mental trompe d'oeil as they vie for the prominent position in the Apology which will render the loser invisible" (500-1). In analyzing Sidney's motives Lamb also points to early modern fears that the effeminizing pleasures of poetry might reduce the male poet to immaturity or "the essential femininity of early modern boys"; but I think Lamb's reading

148

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

overlooks the kind of power that comes with childishness. See also Loewenstein, "Sidney's Truant Pen," 137; and McCoy, Rebellion in Arcadia, 76-84. 43. DP 31. 44. DP 34. 45. DP 40. 46. DP 18. Lamb cites Loewenstein's findings, "drawn from the many references in Astrophel and Stella to the schoolroom and the nursery, that poetry was perceived as essentially childish" (514). I would argue that it is not so much that poetry is childish as that the Elizabethan poet had to operate as a child. Along these lines, Berry describes Sidney's "continuing vocational crisis," and says of The Defence in The Making of Sir Philip Sidney that "the character of the persona [is]... itself a persuasive argument" (x, 4). 47. DP 18. 48. DP 61. 49. In "Sidney's Truant Pen," Loewenstein hints at such a reading too, commenting that Sidney figures "desire itself as regressive... . [Astrophil] is plainly a novice, animated by adolescent jealousy and adolescent disdain for those who have subdued courtship to routine" (134). 50. See Arthur Marotti, '"Love is not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order," ELH 49 (1982): 396-428, as well as Jonathan Crewe's objections to Marotti's "antiromance" model in Hidden Designs: The Critical Profession and Renaissance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986), 72-76. According to Crewe, Marotti insists on the "assimilation of major sixteenth-century authors to limited patterns of competition, clientage and career advancement," "indeed to limited conceptions of the political as such" (72). In some ways, my essay is an effort to broaden these conceptions in order to suggest that politics makes up a good deal of a poet's earlier life. 51. Greville's is the only contemporary account of the tennis court disagreement between Sidney and the Earl of Oxford. In Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), Katherine Duncan-Jones connects this episode with Sidney's letter to Elizabeth (163-64). 52. Quilligan's reading of this episode privileges the sociology of Bourdieu over Huizinga, making aristocratic play (and provocation) a matter of exchange rather than rigorous, even scientific experimentation; see "Sidney and His Queen," 172. Both contestants are remade in Greville's account, according to Quilligan's analysis. 53. See Quilligan, "Sidney and His Queen," 173. She claims that in both his argument with Oxford and in his sonnet sequence Sidney takes control of his inferior social situation (171), putting Oxford in his place by insisting upon his position above Sidney. Moreover, she proposes that "Sidney's humility - and specifically his sense of his own socially inferior position - becomes a weapon of honor against the very hierarchy that would limit the power of the inferior position" (172). I think Quilligan's shrewd analysis of this episode and of Sidney's continued criticisms of the Queen's nuptial choices nonetheless gives the poet too much credit. She maintains, for instance, that: "Humility and a profound sense of social inferiority allow Sidney not merely to triumph over, but to obliterate, Elizabeth's challenge to his authority; such a move becomes a virtual Sidney signature" (177). This interpretation transforms Sidney's lifelong arrogance into virtue and makes youthful brashness a sign of wisdom. I would argue that Sidney's faults are just as interesting and formative as his virtues. Much like the favorable spin Quilligan puts on Sidney's argument with Oxford, Lamb ("Apologizing for Pleasure") locates success in Sidneian circumlocutions such as the poet's attempts to surpass or bypass the female role in reproduction in The Defence of Poetry (507).

Sidney and Elizabeth

149

54. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, has the autograph version (MA 1475). For a corrected and modernized text (the autograph appears rushed and is nearly illegible in places), see Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, eds. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), especially their introduction (123-28). Hereafter, this work will be cited in the notes as DL. 55. DL 134. 56. Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet, takes this description of Sidney from Gloucester's picture of Edmund in Lear II.i.85 (269). 57. DP 24. 58. Rpt. in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 3:166-67 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); quoted by Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney's Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 46. 59. In Dazzling Images: The Masks of Sir Philip Sidney (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), Alan Hager argues for a different organizing principle, claiming that "behind that angry masks lies an essay on slander and naming that develops with wit a paradoxical theme concerning the effects of fame" (57). 60. DL 137. 61. DL 135. 62. DL 129. 63. DL 134-36. 64. Stephen Greenblatt, "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture," in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, eds. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 210-24, 214. For a useful corrective to Greenblatt's romantic picture of history (rather than of individuality), see Elizabeth J. Bellamy, "Psychoanalysis and the Subject in/of/for the Renaissance," Bucknell Review 35, no. 2 (1992): 19-33. Bellamy argues that "Greenblatt's argument constitutes the paradigmatic new historicist one whereby psychic experience disappears in the gaps of the subject's dispersal in the discursive formations of ideology" (21). 65. See Duncan-Jones, "Philip Sidney's Toys," 164-65, and Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet. McCoy takes Sidney's aspirations and frustrations as both "distinctive and representative" and describes the "social and personal predicament of an Elizabethan aristocrat, caught up in a tangle of diminishing feudal power, Renaissance notions of statecraft, a zeal for military glory, courtly dependence and intrigue, and a cult of devotion to a formidable, emasculating queen" (Rebellion in Arcadia x). See also Rudenstine who, in Sidney's Poetic Development, calls Sidney a "charming truant," and Loewenstein, whose picture of Sidney's "masochism" in "Sidney's Truant Pen" suggests something darker in the shape of a self-confessed criminal or Elizabethan public enemy (141). 66. See Duncan-Jones, "Philip Sidney's Toys," 162, 165. 67. See John Buxton, "The Mourning for Sidney," Renaissance Studies 3 (1989): 4656, 46-47; and Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney, 162. Esler describes the "honourable recklessness" which killed Sidney in The aspiring mind of the Elizabethan younger generation (91). 68. See Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney, 6-7. 69. Perhaps a similar signal - this time relayed by a representative of Elizabeth's successor James - is sent when Ben Jonson reports that "Sir P. Sidney was no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples" (Kay, "Sidney, His Mother, and Queen Elizabeth," 19). 70. Quilligan also takes up this interview in "Sidney and His Queen," 174, 178.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 9

Mystical Sororities: The Power of Supernatural Female Narratives in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania Sheila T. Cavanagh

Over the course of the complete, 600,000 word Countess of Montgomery's Urania, its innumerable characters travel, marry, rule over inherited territories, defend their countries and sovereigns, and engage in a host of other independent and communal activities.1 The Urania is a bountiful text, with dozens of characters who cover wide expanses of land. As I argue elsewhere,2 in addition to presenting these countless adventures, the narrative also explores a range of intellectual issues, including the role of the occult in everyday life.3 In the world of the Urania, supernatural occurrences tend to be greeted with equanimity.4 When characters meet figures or events from this realm, they respond without surprise or undue concern;5 instead, they address whatever situation ensues and move on. Although some of these encounters last for a considerable period of time, and often include life changing circumstances, the narrative does not treat these episodes any differently than those focusing on more common human experiences. This easy familiarity with the occult helps mask one of the remarkable aspects of the Urania's supernatural environment, however. In this narrative where female power is expectedly limited, the mystical appurtenances of the occult provide women with a substantial amount of control over their male companions. In fact, although both male and female figures fall under supernatural influences upon various occasions, almost all of those wielding these extraordinary powers are female. As a result, women in the Urania often alter the course of their male cohort's lives through otherworldy interventions. These women generally do not derive personal benefit from these activities; nevertheless, they establish an arena wherein women can exert considerable influence. The most prominent women operating within supernatural parameters are the seer Melissea and the assorted female relatives and spirits who work with her. Throughout both the printed text and the manuscript, this group of women demonstrates Melissea's "infinite love to the Morean Court" (2: 61) by guiding and protecting countless members of the Urania's central families. Although many females, including Antissia, Urania, and several of the lost daughters, receive help 151

152

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

and protection from Melissea and her community, her assistance to men is particularly noteworthy because it demands that numerous powerful and prominent males place their lives and faith in the hands of these women without much assurance that they will not be manipulated, deluded, or harmed. Sometimes their trust is rewarded and occasionally they suffer for their credulity, but the women involved always gain at least temporary dominance over the knights and kings who become participants in their occult endeavors. Since the women who operate within these realms commonly work with each other's knowledge or support, these mystical communications also often further female cooperation in the Urania. Such magical incidents thereby confirm the prevalence of female authority in the romance, at the same time that they illustrate the frequent interweaving of women's communities and narratives with their supernatural practices. Melissea figures most centrally in this confederacy of women exerting magical power over prominent males. Fortunately for all concerned, this talented seer devotes herself toward the benefit of Pamphilia, Amphilanthus, and their immediate cohort. Although she professes to possess limited mystical abilities (2: 4-5), the apparent extent of her powers would make her a formidable enemy. There is nothing in the text to suggest, however, that she ever uses her magical knowledge with evil purpose, and the central characters greatly profit from her repeated interventions into their affairs, though she yields considerable influence over the course of countless characters' lives; therefore, everyone continues to follow her bidding without hesitation. This pattern begins early in the printed text when Melissea famously instructs Amphilanthus to throw his sister Urania into the sea in order to cleanse her from unrequited passions directed toward Pamphilia's brother Parselius (1: 190). Numerous other characters soon decide to accompany the royal pair upon this treacherous journey; thus, most of the recurring figures in the romance risk drowning because Melissea sends them into the water, with the narrative insisting that the perceived perils are real (1: 230). As Amphilanthus's immediate acquiescence with the seer's charge indicates (1: 190), all of these characters quickly conflate Melissea with "heaven" and the powers she represents.6 Thus, however drastic or strange her advice occasionally appears to be, her instructions are always obeyed promptly. When Melissea insists that jumping into the water will save these sorrowful lovers from their misguided affections, no one balks. Melissea's admonition to Amphilanthus affects this entire community of friends and lovers, but the sage typically here directs her prophecies and other directives towards a man. Although she often works for the betterment of female characters such as Pamphilia, Antissia, and Urania, she frequently offers her plans to the women's male siblings or romantic partners. This strategy helps ensure that these men, such as Dolorindus, remain involved in the care of their spouses and other women even when the abandonment of such ties appears prudent. Thus, when Antissia's husband reaches the point where he is "parpetually in torment" (2: 50) and barely able to contend with his mad wife, Melissea diverts his ship to Délos instead of allowing it to reach St. Maura, its intended destination (2: 51). Melissea's

Supernatural Female Narratives in Urania

153

merciful intervention frees Dolorindus from his tortured memories of Antissia's insanity (2: 53) at the same time that it restores the poor woman from her "frenzies" (2: 50). Although Antissia does not receive the gift of forgetfulness, nevertheless the seer ensures that the addled poet will not lose her husband in the process of regaining her wits. Keeping the exhausted Dolorindus involved in Antissia's recovery seems to be part of Melissea's overall intention. This pattern of prodding and directing male characters as a way to maintain the stability of the entire community characterizes much of Melissea's activity in the romance. She restrains the melancholy emperor Amphilanthus from suicide, matches up couples who have been destined for each other, and keeps the main characters' offspring safe after their unwitting parents send a multitude of children away into enchantment (2: 3-4; 2: 145-46). Although purportedly rarely leaving her home on Délos (2: 5), this powerful prophet engineers many of the narrative's significant plot developments. The relative infrequency of Melissea's travel stands out in this environment, where characters hop aboard passing ships with startling regularity. As the story progresses, most of the central figures visit numerous countries and interact with a variety of people and experiences from outside the regions they consider home. In contrast, Melissea tends to draw visitors toward her own enclave, rather than encountering them elsewhere. She offers her island as a safe haven for characters in need of solace or redemption and provides a place to keep some of her company out of harm's way. When she brings people to Délos, by shipwreck or other contrivance, the wise woman expands the breadth of her influence even further. Characters often arrive at Melissea's island home involuntarily, but they always leave in a more invigorated state than seems attainable elsewhere. Melissea brings Amphilanthus to her island, for instance, after Urania and Selarina have been working to keep the emperor from jumping overboard (2: 174). The prophet announces that she has lured the party toward her in order to prevent a terrible occurrence: I was the absolute cause of your coming hether. For had you held your course, you, most excellent Amphilanthus, had binn slaine; and you, most rare Urania, and sweetest Selarina, forced and imprisoned in the bacest way by Villaines. (2: 174) While saving her guests from this terrible fate, she also relieves the women of the difficult task of keeping the suicidal emperor alive. Just as she earlier directed Amphilanthus on his correct course of action with the assurance that "My Art shall attend you, and I never faile to serve you" (1: 142), the seer here gives Amphilanthus the group's charge, accompanied with her promise that soon "the scarfe of ignorance showld bee taken from ther eyes" (2: 174). As usual, Melissea provides non-negotiable instructions couched in assertions of her trustworthiness. Once again, moreover, the emperor and his companions follow the prophet's guidance without question or hesitation.

154

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

Since Melissea often remains at home, while the community she protects seem to be continually on the move, she occasionally sends others to intervene on her behalf, particularly in the manuscript when the cast of characters expands to include the next generation of royalty and knights. Her niece Dénia, for example, enters the story immediately after the events related in the manuscript pages that are now missing.7 Sent by her aunt to free the young knights Follietto and Clavarindo from captivity, Dénia plays a significant, though limited role in the narrative. Apparently fated to wed Clavarindo, son to the King of Thessaly, she tells the knight that he is "ordainde for hapiness and for mee" (2: 61). She also informs him of upcoming events in the saga of the lost children, wherein he will help save the most noble offspring: "Nor are some of thes [to be] delivered, butt onely of the blood and the best of the blood" (2: 61). Marking an unusual marital link between Melissea's family and the knights she serves, the brief story of Dénia and Clavarindo reinforces the prophet's continual orchestration of persons and events in order to ensure that fate is fulfilled. As Dénia remarks to her beloved, they are destined for happiness, unless Melissea errs: "when other then happens to uss (if ever), wee may blame the Sage Melissea, mine Aunte" (2: 61). The learned woman, therefore, not only foresees the future, she helps make it happen. In addition, Dénia follows her aunt's lead by joining the action initially in order to tell some of the knights what they can and cannot do. Accordingly, she presents her aunt's prophecy at the same time that she details the limits of Clavarindo's involvement: Yett is ther more to do. You must goe alongé with ths bodys and see them throwne into yon brooke, and leave them their, who will rise againe to your best comfort... Therfor after you have dunn this and refresht your selves, depart and follow your owne adventures... And governe your selves well, els you wilbee beefor the end of this in fanmore trouble and vexation then now you were, and just in this place. Clavarindo, you must onely heere abide. (2: 61) As these detailed instructions indicate, Dénia does not offer the knights much latitude in their response to this information. They are given a choice either to obey or to face "trouble and vexation." Since Clavarindo also enjoys the prospect of Denia's love, he receives an additional incentive to follow these orders. Regardless of this inducement, however, it is clear that the knights cannot ignore the charge of Melissea's proxy without serious consequences. Like the mystical words of her aunt, Denia's prophecies and orders cannot be slighted with impunity. Once again, therefore, these women's access to the supernatural world grants them considerable authority over even the most valiant knights. Not surprisingly, therefore, Denia's entrance into the story does not bring happiness to all the characters she meets. At the same time that she offers great joy to Clavarindo, she also prompts sorrow and anger in his companion, the choleric Follietto. Like Pamphilia's husband Rodomandro, this knight is dark skinned, but

Supernatural Female Narratives in Urania

155

Follietto does not receive the same level of respect that the Tartarian king gains from the narrator or the other characters. Instead, the text focuses upon the anger that overwhelms the knight's admirable qualities: "Follietto went away Angry, for hee never had patience to grieve, butt fume and frett, yett certainly hee had som good parts, if hee had knowne how to use them" (2: 61).8 In this instance, Follietto's anger has been generated in response to Denia's romantic rejection and her unpleasant prophecy for this knight. He attributes the woman's preference for Clavarindo to that knight's fair complexion: " 'One may see,' sayd Follietto, 'what feminine fairnes doth among ladys. My tanned, scorchd face cowld gaine noe thing'" (2: 60). Whether or not the thwarted lover rightly identifies the cause of Denia's love for Clavarindo, he instigates an angry exchange with his liberator wherein she foresees his future enslavement to love: I shall see you the gréâtes slave to love and loving follys that yett ever lived. Soe, Follietto, I leave you, wishing you onely to remember mee when you are in your saddest dumpts and hart-rending sorrow for Cupids sake. (2: 60) Labeling Dénia as his "scorner" (2: 60), Follietto appears to forget that she has freed him from captivity; instead, his outbursts underscore her rejection of his suit. While it is difficult for readers to ascertain whether or not Follietto's unwanted romantic overtures and subsequent outburst prompted Denia's unencouraging prophecy, they eventually learn that she has predicted his fate accurately (2: 21920). The woman's own flash of temper raises questions about whether she has the ability to change the destiny of those who cross her, but this possibility is not explored in the narrative. Denia's stories, however, suggest once again, that women's narratives can determine men's paths and alter their futures, particularly when the women work in conjunction with each other and with access to the supernatural. This powerful configuration asserts its influence again in the story of Selarinus, who is brother-in-law to both Pamphilia and Urania.9 After the death of his wife Philistella, this grief-stricken man runs into a variety of women who are associated with the occult, but like Follietto, he draws limited joy from these encounters.10 Although Melissea's other niece, Saphalina, is sent to bring the woeful man to the home of the prophet's sister, "the Grave Lady" (2: 3-5), these meetings with Melissea's close female relatives do not offer the beneficent sanctuary that characters might expect in such a hallowed environment. Instead, the story of Selarinus highlights the kinds of problems female narratives can create for susceptible males, who fail to judge the character of the tellers accurately. While Melissea's sister and niece are seemingly above reproach, they remain either unwilling or unable to protect Selarinus from his lustful folly. They use their words to warn and rebuke him, but their stories do not keep him from harm. Much of the time, the recalcitrant man refuses to follow their instructions and is punished for his lapses: "hee would breake orders [and] was often punnisht, and fairy-pricked for

156

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

his labour" (2: 233). Eventually, when Selarinus "asked the grave Ladys leave to depart" (2: 233), she does not attempt to restrain him, but orders him to wait for a boat "alone without any in her" (2: 233). Ironically, he follows this command, which leads him to his fateful meeting with the spirit who will enslave him. Despite the apparent care of Saphalina and the Grave Lady, Selarinus falls back under the spell of this spirit who seduced him initially in the guise of the "daughter of the King of Tartaria" (2: 6-9).n In their earlier meeting, the woman set the stage for this later involvement. The spirit's original story is long and filled with compelling details that link her to several persons within the families that comprise Selarinus's most immediate circles. In addition to invoking the Tartarian royal family, for instance, she tells a credible account of her vexed marriage to Tolendo, the younger son of the King of Frigia, whose throne has since been inherited by Urania's sister-in-law Veralinda (2: 9). Thus, the seductive spirit uses her considerable narrative abilities to convince the love-stricken man that she holds a place within familial structures that intersect with his own. She also claims that she bore two children with Tolendo, who are now "inchanted, wher alsoe many more are" (2: 9). From a genealogical perspective, therefore, the woman's credentials are unassailable. Her tale soon begins to break down, however. As soon as she has lured Selarinus into her eroticized narrative web, the spirit urges him to forget that they have ever met and to deem their meeting "a fiction" (2: 10) unless she returns at a later time to request his assistance: Serve mee onely this: to beeleeve this butt a fiction, and dunn to please and pass the time away with, and many of thes you shall see and bee beeguiled with beefor you part hence. Therfor credett noe thing butt the grave Lady, who is often times deluded by us vaine spiritts heere. (2: 10) Far from living in safety at the grave lady's house, Selarinus loses the opportunity to remain in protective isolation, instead becoming captivated by a beautiful seducer who will eventually keep him enslaved "till she had tow children by him" (2: 305). Although Selarinus holds most of the responsibility for this decision, the grave lady's interactions with him offer readers a striking perspective into the extensive role of the supernatural in his downfall. When Melissea's sister scolds the deluded man for succumbing to "vaine phantesies" (2: 10), for instance, she surprisingly offers to substitute the vision of the lady with more benign illusions: the Lady sent for him, charging him noe more to follow vaine phantesies ther, for itt was a place wholy for delusions, and what hee desird to have, if musick, ore what els, he showld have itt, soe as hee wowld tell her of itt... from mee you shall have all reall dealings, and what you can desire. (2: 10)

Supernatural Female Narratives in Urania

157

Thus, although Melissea's sister chastises the knight for believing in fictions, she urges him to request more, encouraging him to believe that she will provide "reall dealings" in contrast to the delusions proffered by the spirit. A less gullible or susceptible man might have responded cautiously to this subsequent offer, but the text depicts Selarinus merely as a "beeguiled King" who is now "ashamed of his own readdines to breake his vowe" (2: 10). The story then moves on to other characters and adventures, not returning to the spirit's interactions with Selarinus until much later in the manuscript. The similar techniques used by these characters who supposedly occupy opposite sides of the moral spectrum offer the reader some valuable insights into the power that often emanates from women's narratives when the storytellers are affiliated with the supernatural. Like the seductive spirit, Melissea's sister uses her familial connections and her skill in oral presentation to draw Selarinus toward conjured visions. While there is no evidence to suggest that the grave lady means any harm, her resemblance to the spirit indicates that men who escape the lure of fantasies may simply be lucky rather than morally superior, especially since the vulnerability to such stories demonstrated by the King of Epirus is hardly unique among the male figures in this romance. Fortunately for the easily deluded men, however, the numerous women who possess these kinds of talents are generally trustworthy, despite the chastening experience of Selarinus. Most of the time, such female characters provide welcome support to the men they meet, occasionally with miraculous results. After Clavarindo separates from Dénia, for instance, he meets Clianté, another woman who possesses magically strong narrative powers. Although emanating from less exalted genealogical stock than many similar female characters, this woman proves fortuitously adept at infusing her stories with remarkable attributes. Despite her relatively humble origins, Clianté illustrates yet another significant facet of women's facility with interweaving stories and magic. In this episode, Clavarindo meets the captives of Lofturado, the Engian giant who has imprisoned many people, including some of the lost children. The young prince is befriended by the jailer's daughter (Clianté), who recently concocted a scheme to overcome the giant by going in search of Clavarindo. Taking advantage of Lofturado's festering wounds, the young lady secures permission to travel to the island of Cressanté in order to obtain an "uncktious hearbe called Curall" (2: 65) that she assures the giant will cure him. Anxious to obtain relief, the evil captor grants her permission to go and she leaves in a group comprised of those loyal to her and "thos most trusted by the beast" (2: 65). As soon as they leave, the narrator reveals that the party "tooke their way towards a Mountaine and spring which never was nor ever had binn: onely a fiction cunningly framed to compass her intentions" (2: 65). The illusory destination proves fatal to the giant's confederates, however, when Clianté's "skill in deceaving devills" (2: 65) enables her to conjure a group of formidable foes. When the party encounters "as tirible a place as if fained to bee hell" (2: 65), the resourceful young woman maintains that the surrounding "stenching Vapours" (2: 65) come from the "breathe of most dangerous monsters"

158

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

(2: 66) who "kept that spring from the use of mortalls" (2: 66). After Clianté maintains that they could never survive if the monsters leave their den, a pair of Lofturado's men race into the noxious cavern, never to be seen again. The others "wowld make them selves beeleeve they heard great clashing of armes and strange noyses, as of a great fight" (2: 66), whereby they succumb to the "noysomnes of the Vapours" (2: 66), fall into the cave and die. Clianté then leads the group in a "merry ditty" (2: 66) and they continue on their way. Almost immediately, they meet up with Clavarindo, who leads a successful charge against the giant.12 Although the castle is freed, the episode, however, ends in mystery, since Clavarindo, Clianté and most of the others disappear into a "white Clowde" (2: 73) and do not return during the remainder of the narrative. The knight's friend Licandro, who is left behind, proclaims that "this is noe delusion" (2: 74) and determines that they have been "carried away by inchanted spiritts" (2: 74), but no further information is offered.13 Cliante's successful deception, first of Lofturado and later of his knights, emphasizes her ability to create realistic fictions that will further her cause. When her group first approaches the lethal fumes, for instance, she convinces them that they can see the fictive mountain in the distance: "for thorough the wood they now might see the shaddow of that fearfull, black, and dismall mountain" (2: 66). She apparently accomplishes all of her delusions exclusively through the power of her words, assisted by her credible presentation. Unlike Melissea's family, the young woman does not seem to possess special access to the spirit world; instead, she fabricates fantasies, then allows the evil men to suffer the consequences of their gullibility. Since she disappears with Clavarindo, who is fated to marry Dénia, her future remains unknown, but the story of her triumph over Lofturado and his men establishes her as one of the significant women in the Urania whose narratorial skills grant her considerable mystical powers in a male dominated terrain. Cliante's position is unusual in several respects, since she lacks both the familial and the magical status enjoyed by most of the other women who share her kind of narrative ability. She also presents her stories more straightforwardly than many of the women who display similar powers, but who do not belong to Melissea's family. There is a cluster of these female figures, who wield substantial authority over the men in their lives, but who communicate most effectively through dreams or mystical events, rather than in direct encounters. Two of these characters reach the height of their apparent power after their deaths in the manuscript, although the first to illustrate the force of this model is introduced relatively early in the printed text, at the beginning of her many appearances in the romance. Since each of these three women hold prominent positions in the Urania's genealogical structures, their supernatural narratives bring this kind of female conjunction between humanity and otherworldliness directly into the heart of the romance and demonstrate how successful these female strategies can be in determining the direction of their male partners' futures. Readers first encounter Melasinda, Queen of Hungary, when Ollorandus recounts a fateful dream to his close friend Amphilanthus (1: 78). According to his

Supernatural Female Narratives in Urania

159

retelling of this experience, Ollorandus could not determine whether he was witness to a dream or not. Nevertheless, the experience has serious, permanent consequences. As he recollects the vision, the prince emphasizes its indeterminate nature: me thought I saw a Creature, for shape a woman, but for excellencie, such as all the rarenes in that sexe, curiously, and skilfully mixed, could but frame such an one; and yet but such a one in shew, like a Picture well drawne, but the subject more perfect. (1: 78) In this account, Melasinda appears to be too "perfect" to be either woman or picture. Since Ollorandus has already indicated that he was unsure initially whether it was day or night and whether these representations were, in fact, a dream, it seems clear that he is unable to distinguish much that is certain during this experience. Despite this confusion, the knight does, however, recognize the power behind Melasinda's image: "[she had] Eyes like the perfect'st mixtures of heavenly powers, not to be resisted but submitted to. Lipps fully commanding the plenty of duty, when they seem'd to demaund obedience" (1: 78). Although he focuses upon her physical beauty here, he demonstrates an acute awareness of the queen's commanding stature. As his subsequent story amply demonstrates, she not only "demaund[s] authority," she receives it, from Ollorandus. However unexpected and unclear this vision might be, it is sufficiently powerful to change the course of this knight's life and career. Many of his remaining adventures over the course of the narrative will involve helping Melasinda protect and preserve her kingdom.14 When she demands in this dream that Ollorandus "Arrise, leave Bohemia, and rescue me from the hands of Rebels" (1: 78), the queen is setting into motion a relational pattern that will continue until Ollorandus's death many years later. While this partnership begins rather unconventionally, the bond formed between this pair remains strong, although Melasinda continues to keep her sovereignty over Hungary at the forefront of her concerns. The women who communicate posthumously with their spouses seem to make these appearances primarily as a means to alter their husbands' futures. The men's lives are less under control than Ollorandus's at the point of Melasinda's intervention, and both Philistella and Dalinea provide opportunities for their spouses to receive needed messages about their behavior. Like the Hungarian queen, Philistella also reaches out through a dream, although when the deceased woman gives her widower his instructions, she seems concerned with his welfare, not her own situation. Since Selarinus has just escaped from lengthy sexual bondage to a spirit, which resulted in two fairy children, Philistella's timing seems inauspicious, but it still instigates a promising change in the direction of Selarinus's life.15 At the time of the dream, Selarinus has found sanctuary in the home of the woman who will eventually take on the upbringing of his half-human children. Exhausted from his seducer's abandonment (2: 397-98), he shows little semblance of his former stature as exalted knight and king. Instead, he appears to be stuck in a

160

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

serious state of decline, with his dream arriving just as he begins to convalesce. The vision seems to emanate in part from his own thwarted desires, with Philistella appearing as a young woman. The narrative provides a hint of irony here, also, since the spirit is said to treat Selarinus better than she did in life: "For Philistella appeer'd to him as when hee first lov'd her and courted her, butt she much kinder to him then ever" (2: 398). Despite this gentleness and her subsequent offer of forgiveness, Philistella also issues a deserved rebuke: "bitterly correcting him for his faults twise with spiritts and faries" (2: 398). Although the text never clarifies whether this dream represents Selarinus's conscience or an actual visitation by his departed spouse, the penitent and depleted man takes its messages to heart and determines to change the literal and the moral direction of his life. As an aid to this decision, the spirit offers a specific, although problematic, charge. After ordering her husband to avoid sensual temptations in the future, she urges him to join forces with her brother Parselius, whose lamented wife Dalinea purportedly waits with Philistella for an eventual connubial reunion in heaven: Yett injoining him to do no more soe, butt goe and live with Parselius, who as they beegann in a kinde together, they might end and come to their truest loves together, who stay till their coming, attending, and as if in the clowdes to wellcom them. (2: 398) According to this vision, therefore, Dalinea and Philistella are together in the afterlife, waiting for their husbands to join them. The presumed subtext of this directive suggests these errant spouses can help keep each other out of trouble until that day arrives. Although Philistella does not seem to be an omniscient spirit - if she knows that Parselius is missing, she doesn't mention it - she is an effective catalyst and her advice falls upon Selarinus's ready ears: "This dreame soe comforted him, as hee was all on fire to [bee] with Parselius" (2: 398). He seems ready to follow this path immediately, but the woman who is caring for him urges caution: "I pray, take more consideration and nott (as you are weake your selfe yett) runn into desparate dangers" (2: 398). She also informs him of Parselius's long absence and brings the provenance of the vision into question, while reinforcing its hallucinatory qualities: "If you have dreames ore Visions that please you, content your self with them till you have abilitie of body to indure traveile. Tis frenzie, nott Vallour, that putts thes whimsies in your braine" (2: 398). Despite this suggestion that the dream is illusory, the woman encourages his belief in its reality. When he asks whether "Philistella will soe kindly appeere to mee againe?" (2: 399), she indicates that the spirit probably will return: I thinke since she hath dunn soe heere this night, she will as soone ore sooner com to you heere then any wher els, since this hath binn the chosen place for her (since her death and your faulshood) to visitt you. (2: 398)

Supernatural Female Narratives in Urania

161

Accepting this uncertainty, Selarinus stays with the woman until he has recovered sufficiently in order to join forces with his nephew Stervianus, who soon arrives unexpectedly en route to the Morean Court (2: 399). As noted, Philistella's intrusion into her widowed husband's life is simultaneously clear and indeterminate. Thus, while Selarinus cannot know for certain whether or not his deceased wife actually returns to him in a dream, he receives specific instructions to abandon his sexual transgressions and to join Parselius. Although he appears to have enjoyed his illicit relations with the spirit who held him captive (2: 305), the admonition to avoid such future encounters seems wise, while the suggestion that he join forces with Parselius will at least bring him back into the Morean royal family, whether or not it helps him sustain a life of integrity. While Philistella's communication from beyond the grave cannot cure all of Selarinus's problems, following her orders gives him the best available chance for moral and physical recuperation. Parselius's departed wife Dalinea's supernatural involvement is even more mystifying than Philistella's, but it also initiates significant changes in this widower's life journey. In this episode, the deceased spouse's communication is murkier than that proffered to Selarinus; nevertheless, the incident and its aftermath instigate similarly memorable events. Ironically, although Dalinea proves that she can be forceful and direct early in the printed Urania?6 by the time of her death, she has lost the ability to speak. When Parselius arrives back from a lengthy journey to find her dying from childbirth, his wife is heartbroken by her loss of speech: "bitterly weeping in nott beeing able to speake to him, till her eyes strings brake and closed for ever" (2:318). Her mute finale does not mean that Dalinea has lost the power to direct Parselius, however. As soon as the grief stricken knight allows the enactment of "thos duties which beelonge to dead bodys" (2: 319), she enters a mystical world wherein her body facilitates Melissea's firm injunctions to the sorrowful, but erring, Parselius. The narrator warns readers that the episode describing Dalinea's entombment relates events that cannot be understood in normal human terms: "nor cowld speculation parfectly demonstrate to our Understanding the true essence of this wourke. Therfor leave itt as itt is: a miracuous wourcke nott for mortalls to presume to sift into" (2: 319). At the same time that the narrator cautions against trying to comprehend this occurrence, however, she insists that those present believed it to be real: "this was seene apparantly, and truly beeheld by all eyes" (2: 318). Like Selarinus's dream of Philistella, therefore, the miraculous events following Dalinea's death cannot be verified, but appeared credible to those present. Thus, Parselius finds himself living within a "new world of wounders" in what he perceives to be "an inchanted quarter" (2: 319), but whether or not he is trapped in a delusion cannot be readily ascertained. According to the text, a mystical structure descends after Dalinea's death: "a strange-formed and built Castle apppeering in the middest of thos lights, and in the Castle a most stately Tombe" (2: 318). Amidst "death-threatinge flames" (2: 319) and other spectacular effects, Parselius relinquishes his wife's body where it will

162

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

lay in the enchanted place for "thrice three years" (2: 319). Although the bereft knight initially vows to end his days by Dalinea's side, a continuous barrage of "strange and miraculous accidents" (2: 319) finally convinces him that "my sorrowes can as well bee uttered as truly felt in any place as well as heere" (2: 320). Before he has an opportunity to act upon this new resolution or to continue this "fine dialogue beetweene him self and his owne hart" (2: 320), however, Parselius is thrust into the midst of another adventure, this time with a group of monsters who are so horrific that "noe immagination cowld reach to the understanding of who they were" (2: 320). The knight successfully defeats these new challengers, but this terrifying battle prompts the arrival of Melissea, who begins to instruct Parselius in the meaning and consequences behind this series of mystical occurrences. Melissea's subsequent chastisement of this prominent knight serves as the deathbed admonishment that Dalinea was unable and perhaps unwilling to give. From the early pages of the printed text until the point of his own death later in the manuscript, Parselius demonstrates an uneven relationship with the truth. As noted, he tries to lie to his father about his relationship with Dalinea and their child. Much later, after he has become a pilgrim in recompense for his earlier sins, he misrepresents the nature of his pilgrimage (2: 344). Although Parselius is often lauded in the text, he also receives regular criticism, both subtly and more overtly. Rather than dying honorably in battle like his brother Philarchos, moreover, he eventually succumbs to the consequences of extended lethargy (2: 402). In short, the narrative does not ignore Parselius's shortcomings, nor does it allow him to make quiet reparation. Instead, these memorable scenes in the manuscript openly acknowledge the knight's failings and their results. Accordingly, Melissea does not mince her words when she explains the rationale for recent events to the wayward King of Achaya: You are a Christian, and ought soe to carry your self. You knowe what devine powers are, how to bee observ', yett still will you runn into these strange errors. Your wyfe is taken from you, and placed as she deserves; by a naturall cause she came to her end. You must [nott] question these thes things, nor the highest powers. Take thes afflictions as punishments for your faults, resolve to live as you have profest to do, leave all worldy affaires. (2:321) In addition to this strong message, Melissea tells him explicitly that his son will not inherit his throne because of Parselius's youthful mistreatment of Urania (2: 322). Even though Urania and Parselius both enjoyed happy marriages with other people, the day of reckoning has finally arrived for this ethically challenged knight, with the consequences hitting him in a particularly vulnerable spot: his lineage. The children he had with Dalinea will both hold exalted places (2: 322), so the punishment will not resound against his blameless wife or children, but a distinct message is sent nonetheless: breaking promises of love can have severe

Supernatural Female Narratives in Urania

163

repercussions long after the events have passed.17 Parselius's subsequent activities suggest that even these ramifications have only a limited impact upon his later choices,18 but the women involved in this scenario still assert considerable impact over the shape of his future and that of several countries and their rulers.19 As the women discussed above illustrate, many of the female characters represented in the Urania create narratives and magical visions that dramatically alter the course of numerous male lives. Unlike most of those just recounted, not all of these interventions arise from honorable intentions, as Selarinus learns during his captivity with the succubus, and as Amphilanthus realizes after the Candian Queen successfully urges him to marry someone other than Pamphilia (2: 132134).20 Whatever the source of these expressions of female power, however, they regularly prove effective. Even in this world where women have limited authority in some areas, they demonstrate a surprising level of influence over men's personal affairs. Armed with access to occult domains that few male characters in the text share,21 numerous women in the Urania assert themselves over the future of their male spouses, confederates, and victims. Crafting mystical spaces, compelling narratives, or other illusions that the men fail to interpret easily or correctly, these women can proclaim mastery over even the most dominant male figures, thereby including the emperor, kings, and exalted knights among their conquests. While none of these women, including Melissea, can claim omnipotence, or even allencompassing knowledge, each of them still changes these men's lives in significant ways, with consequences that will continue throughout the entire romance. Though these women do not control the spirit world and often face its vagaries and inconveniences themselves, they still demonstrate ways of using or manipulating the occult environment that the male characters cannot duplicate. However powerful these exalted knights and rulers often appear to be, therefore, major aspects of their destiny are shaped by the will of their women. NOTES 1. Mary Wroth, The second part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller, Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, Vol. 211 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999). The first part of the Urania was published in 1621, but did not become widely accessible until Josephine Roberts's extraordinary edition in 1995: The first part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, Vol. 140 (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1995). Until recently, the second part of the romance was available in a single holograph manuscript in the Newberry Library. Thanks to the commitment and generosity of Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller, who took over the editing of this manuscript after Professor Roberts's tragic death, the second part of the Urania was published for the first time in 2000. In my citations, I refer to the first part as "1" and the second as "2."

164

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

2. I discuss the intellectual project underpinning the complete Urania in Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth's "Urania" (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001). 3. By the time Mary Sidney Wroth was born, the Sidney family had a well established interest in the occult, which included a close relationship with John Dee. There is substantial evidence in the Urania to suggest that Wroth inherited this fascination and that she had access to numerous books in these fields. 4. In the manuscript, for example, the appearance of Melissea's "chariott drawne with four firy dragons" prompts no concern: "The Queenes were neither of them afrayde, parseaving itt to bee an incha[n]tment" (2: 112). 5. Rosindy, for instance, responds with surprise in the printed text when Selarinus bemoans Philistella's enchantment: " 'Why waile you thus,' said Rosindy, 'since shee is but enchanted?'" (1:411). 6. When Melissea offers to explain her instructions, for example, Amphilanthus stops her, crying "He feare no ills that Prophesies can tell" (1: 191). 7. The introduction to the recent edition of the manuscript Urania discusses these missing pages (2: xxv-xxvi). 8. The color of Follietto's skin is relevant, but not central to the current discussion, although it clearly offers an important early modern representation of ethnic difference. For a valuable discussion of Follietto's characterization, see Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: economies of race and gender in early modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 208-9. 9. Selarinus is brother to Urania's husband Steriamus and he marries Pamphilia's sister Philistella. He begins the story as Prince of Albania and later becomes King of Epirus. 10. While Selarinus appears to engage in volitional sex, he suffers greatly for his indulgence (2: 305). 11. I discuss this lady's purported Tartarian origins in more detail in Cherished Torment and in another essay which is not yet in print. 12. Clavarindo gains entry to the castle by dressing up as a woman. The giant is so dazzled by the newcomer's beauty that Licandro is able to kill him (2: 72). 13. Since the manuscript Urania was never revised for publication, it is impossible to know what kind of loose ends might have been picked up and which would have remained as we have them. As it stands, these characters vanish after this episode. 14. I discuss many of the details of Melasinda and Ollorandus's lives together in Cherished Torment. 15. I suspect that Philistella's late arrival here reflects Wroth's highly tuned sense of irony. The Urania is often an extremely funny text. Philistella's tardy response to her husband's sexual vulnerability resembles other moments in the romance where the narrator or other characters express exasperation with another's romantic distresses. 16. In the printed text, Parselius abandons his beloved Urania after he meets Dalinea. He later has a dream about his first love which prompts overwhelming guilt. Lying to Dalinea, he leaves her and their infant in order to return to Morea. When he tries to deny his involvement with her and the paternity of their child, she demands justice articulately and without hesitation (2: 241-42). 17. It seems likely that Parselius's punishment here reflects Wroth's dissatisfaction with her treatment by her cousin and lover William Herbert. Amphilanthus, whose inconstancy continually defines him, generally appears to figure Herbert in the romance. Amphilanthus often escapes the consequences of his own infidelity, however. Parselius's circumstances

Supernatural Female Narratives in Urania

165

enable Wroth to depict a chastened adulterer whose actions resemble those committed frequently by the emperor. 18. Parselius has difficulty keeping his vows as a pilgrim and often returns to his knightly ways (2: 396). 19. At the same time that Melissea explains the situation to Parselius, she also sends his children off to further challenges. Trebisound, for instance "must pass many hasardous and strange adventures beefor hee shall compass the soveraintie" (2: 322). 20. The queen was helped in her quest by Forsandurus, who misleads the emperor regarding Pamphilia's marital status (2: 132-33). 21. There is a male necromancer in the manuscript (2: 329).

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 10

Looking for Goneril and Regan1 Cristina León Alfar

It has always been a dream of mine to communicate how I feel about Shakespeare to other people. So I asked my friend[s]... to join me, and by taking this one play, Richard III, analyzing it, approaching it from different angles, putting on costumes, playing out scenes, we could communicate both our passion for it, our understanding that we've come to, and in doing that communicate a Shakespeare that is about how we feel and how we think today. Now that's the ethic we're going to give it, here. - Al Pacino, Looking for Richard2 In Looking for Richard, Al Pacino offers the above rationale for making his film, and it comes as a response to a goal. Following interviews with actors in which both alienation from and admiration for William Shakespeare is expressed, the screen goes dark and then words appear; the audience reads "The question." This tag is shortened and becomes "The quest." Accordingly, throughout the film, Pacino relentlessly searches for Richard's motives by rehearsing and performing scenes as well as by interviewing people on the streets of New York. Richard III becomes, in the process, a dynamic and multi-valenced character whose death is not only the result of a long history of over-arching political ambition among England's monarchs, but also, in the late 20th century New York view, the just punishment of a thug, the leader of a gang. Pacino's ethic for the film recalls, unconsciously, Louis Adrian Montrose's analysis of cultural materialism as interested in "the uses to which an historical present puts its versions of the English past."3 Communicating a Shakespeare "[who] is about how we think and how we feel today" is in some sense the conscious and self-reflexive aim of cultural materialists. Willing to think of scholarship on Shakespeare's plays as, in Ivo Kamps's view a "construction of a Renaissance historical context... through a selective consideration of dominant and marginal ideologies (both Renaissance and contemporary), class, Renaissance political and religious doctrines, and everyday material processes," a cultural materialist practice treats "the literary text... as an enactment or production... of that context... ."4 In this light, we participate as much in the production of Shakespeare's plays and their meanings as the culture in which they were first produced. We do this not by attaching meanings to the plays that are not there, but through close readings that yield new meanings in part because we 167

168

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

bring different insights into those readings, via our cultural context. Pacino, Montrose, and Kamps's approaches to reading a text, particularly a Shakespearean text, are useful because, as I will argue here, a self-conscious form of reading allows us to see that responses to Shakespeare's "evil" women tell us more about ourselves than about the playwright. While I do not search for Goneril and Regan by examining performance options as Pacino does, I want to animate open-ended conversations about them, a process of looking that will be part quest and part intellectual re-evaluation.5 In King Lear, the power Goneril and Regan desire and the violence in which they participate defy orthodox notions of appropriate feminine conduct. Because power as a feminine attribute is rejected by scholars as a violation of nature, Goneril and Regan become "evil."6 Their "evil" has less to do with Shakespeare's own view of feminine power, however, than it has to do with cultural prejudices against and expectations for specific and discrete behaviors naturalized according to gender. Women cannot be tyrants, it would seem, or if they can be, such tyranny must be a result of an unnatural femininity rather than the product of specifically cultural and political notions of kingship. Rather than assuming that real women, or good women, will not defend their own power or the sovereignty of their nation with violence, I argue that the play points precisely to the abuse of power by all monarchs, regardless of gender, as inherent to absolutism. Lear's banishment of Cordelia and Kent, in addition to his parceling of the country according to a game of words, establishes a grossly self-indulgent system of monarchy at best. At worst, his behavior smacks of tyranny. Thus Goneril and Regan's performance of monarchy in like modes cannot be a surprise. In fact, their ruthless grasp at power demonstrates the play's profound anxieties about the nature of kingship. And it is in a démystification of monarchical authority, I argue, that Shakespeare's tragedies help us to find contradictions and forms of resistance that liberate his "evil" women from their vilified histories. For the tyranny Goneril and Regan perform comes out of Shakespeare's portrayal of the early modern system of government that takes its authority from God, and answers only to God, as a way to mystify the monarch's absolute right to rule, a portrayal highlighting the potential for tyranny in absolute systems. Thus as Jonathan Dollimore argues in regard to Edmund, Shakespeare's complex characterization of Goneril and Regan suggests that they are not "evil."7 Rather, Goneril and Regan's ruthlessness is produced by competing discourses on gender and power staged by the play as a way to raise questions about absolute forms of monarchy. Traditionally, however, both King Lear's eldest daughters have been labeled villains. Their "evil" is in part defined by the reactions of male characters to them as the play progresses from its initial domestic squabble to an all out war for sovereignty over England.8 Undeniably, characters from Lear to Kent to Albany all agree that Goneril and Regan behave unnaturally toward their father, and that, therefore, they are monstrous fiends. As critics we have taken our view of Goneril and Regan from these male characters, so that their evil is defined by acts of will, power, violence, and sexuality - acts that disrupt the patrilineal morality's

Looking for Goneril and Regan

169

definitions of "appropriate" femininity. The male characters in King Lear operate under orthodox notions of femininity that cannot be reconciled with the idea of women in power. They view Goneril and Regan first and foremost as daughters and disregard the political state of emergency against which the women militate. Thus reading Goneril and Regan as "evil" reifies female subjectivity as split into the fictions of good and evil to which the male characters in King Lear subscribe. But I will suggest that we need not depend on Lear's or Albany's view of the sisters at all, nor need we look to them as illustrative of Shakespeare's own view. As David Scott Kastan has observed, we too often accept the words of characters as standing in for the beliefs of their creators. He writes, "A republican sentiment in the mouth of a literary character does indeed provide evidence that republican sentiments were thinkable; it does not necessarily prove.that the author thought them or used the text to advance them."9 In the spirit of Kastan's observation, I want to suggest that we reexamine Goneril and Regan in the context of the political practices of the play, for their behavior is contingent on complex domestic and political systems of power and gender. To do so would be to separate their characterization from arbitrary moralization and, instead, to probe the conditions informing their acts. It would also introduce the possibility that their behavior is evidence neither of Shakespeare's condemnation of women in power, nor of his misogyny or his sympathy with Lear. While the sisters plot to neutralize their father's power, engage in extramarital affairs with the same man, and stand by as Gloucester's eyes are gouged out, these actions are not evidence of their innate "evil" but are symptomatic of the patrilineal structure of power relations in which they live and to which they must accommodate themselves.10 Arguing for complexity in Shakespeare's tragic women, however, apparently is futile.11 According to Madelon Sprengnether, Goneril's parting line in King Lear, "Ask me not what I know" (V.iii.160) ... refus[es] us insight into her presumably desperate state of mind. She will die by her own hand, unloved and unmourned, her fate the antithesis of that of a tragic hero, the opacity of her consciousness an emblem of the lot of women generally in Shakespeare's tragedies. For the ingeniousness lavished on the development of the tragic hero, from his first fatal error to his final agonized awareness of his ignorance or transgression, does not extend to the women he resists, idolizes, or reviles. We will never know what they know. The subject position not only of Shakespeare's tragedy but of tragedy defined as genre in the Aristotelian tradition seems to preclude this very possibility.12 In Sprengnether's reading, feminist criticism destabilizes the liberal humanist notion of universal meaning attributed to Shakespeare's plays. In the process of this laudable and crucial task, however, Sprengnether works from the assumption that recognizing Shakespeare's plays as "not a universal essence but rather a historically specific encoding of practices and values" cannot lead us to a fuller understanding

170

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

of his female characters (18). The subject-position of Shakespearean tragedy is uncompromisingly male, so that female characters are rendered flat and vacuous. Thus Sprengnether repeats the effacement of female characters such as Goneril that the universal reading, traditionally privileging male experience, first enacted. Either way, it would seem, a space for female characters, whether in historically specific encodings of representation and subject formation or in notions of universality, is lost, making only the male characters subjects of tragedy. My study assumes, however, that Shakespeare's subjects of tragedy are also female and that the difference between men and women in his tragedies is not a reflection of his disinterest in female experience or psychic development, but of our own investments in male subjects, in male experience, and psychic development. Our own biases and investments in binaries of active/passive and good/evil, reiterated in that of male/female, are projected onto his plays, blinding us to the complexity of Goneril's characterization. It is precisely by attending to early modern categories of gender and power that new ways of seeing his women as a product of those categories will develop.13 Thus the contradiction that the play stages between Goneril and Regan's monstrous female wills and their appropriate and necessary defense of England against an invading army opens a space for the women to become subjects of a tragedy that interrogates the tyranny of masculinist power relations. While monarchs such as Elizabeth did not think of themselves as tyrants and while philosophers of monarchy worked to define the parameters of absolute rule within just and benevolent lines, violent defenses of the crown were sometimes necessary. Elizabeth quashed insurrections through arrest and execution of rebels and defended the nation against invasion through war. As conventional as these acts may seem now, they were backed up by a theory of monarchy that gave Elizabeth a divine right to perform them. The potential for tyranny in such a system is evident in early modern treatises such as the 1570 An Homily against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion as well as in King James I's own letters and speeches to Parliament. Because the monarchy was mystified through divine right, not only was a monarch's word law, but anyone strong enough to take hold of the crown could claim legitimacy of rule. After all, as the Homily makes clear, As in reading of the Holy Scriptures we shall find in very many and almost infinite places, as well of the Old Testament as of the New, that kings and princes as well the evil as the good, do reign by God's ordinance, and that subjects are bound to obey them; that God doth give princes wisdom, great power, and authority; that God defendeth them against their enemies, and distroyeth their enemies horribly; that the anger and displeasure of the prince is as the roaring of a lion, and the very messenger of death; and that the subject that provoketh him to displeasure sinneth against his own soul... ,14

Looking for Goneril and Regan

171

Shakespeare's King Lear confronts the tyrannous capacity of absolute monarchy when, as is evident in the above quotation, no distinction is made between the just king and tyrant insofar as divine right is concerned. The mystifications of divine right demonstrated by the Homily (and also advocated by King James in both the Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies) make it clear that the reigns of both the tyrant and the just monarch are sanctified by God. As a way to protect the sanctity and the sovereignty of the monarchy from rebellion - for one man's just monarch is another man's tyrant - a sacred and prophetic chain of command is deployed. God's divine ordinance is conveniently assumed, making it not simply treason to act against the king, but a sacrilege leading to damnation. Perhaps an even more interesting example of the power monarchs could assume as their own comes to us from King James I, whose speech of 21 March 1609 to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at Whitehall clarifies his role: Kings are justly called gods for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth. For if you will consider the attributes to God, you will see how they agree with the person of a king. God has the power to create, or destroy, make, or unmake at his pleasure, to give life, or send death, to judge all, and to be judged nor accountable to none; to raise low things, and make high things low at his pleasure, and to God are both soul and body due. And the like power have kings. They make and unmake their subjects; they have power of raising and of casting down, of life and of death; judges over all their subjects, and in all cases, and yet accountable to none but God only. They have power to exalt low things and abase high things, and make of their subjects like men at the chess; a pawn to take a bishop or a knight, and to cry up or down any of their subjects, as they do their money. And to the king is due both the affection of the soul and the service of the body of his subjects.15 While James also advocated a clear distinction between just kings and tyrants, his logic that monarchs are accountable to God only points to the circularity of early modern notions of kingship: a monarch ordained by God is accountable to God, but a monarch ordained by God is also, according to James, licensed by God to rule absolutely. And God remains accommodatingly silent in his judgements. The ruthlessness with which James endows both God's and the king's power provides a source of profound anxiety for those who depend upon the king's good will. For not only is the source of the king's power circular in nature, but his use of that power is also potentially capricious. Shakespeare struggles with these definitions of divine right in many plays, including Henry V and Richard HI. Hal faces a moral dilemma once he becomes king, based on his father's violent and illegitimate acquisition of the throne, a usurpation that is no less endowed with divine right. And the women of Richard III pose a powerful and heart-wrenching critique of the potential for tyranny in a

172

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

violent system of rule reinforced by divine right. Both plays confront the contradictions of absolute monarchy in which both legitimate king and usurping tyrant are ordained by God. The contradictory nature of the monarch's rights and responsibilities under this system opens spaces for interrogation because James's claims to the power to make and unmake his subjects, to raise up or cast down, and, perhaps most chillingly, to the power of life and death become a logical extension of a divine right government. The chain of command implicated in divine right - from God, to the king, to the father/husband - also highlights the specifically patrilineal basis of kingship. The power of the monarch is associated with a historically masculinist system of inheritance. As such, the duties of the monarch - to protect the crown and the nation, to make war and peace, and in James's view "to judge their subjects" become expressly masculine. This backdrop to the culture in which King Lear was written offers us the opportunity for a complex reading of Goneril and Regan's deployments of power. It provides a specifically historical basis for their behavior independent of gendered moralization and allows us to see the play as part of Shakespeare's interest in the violent tendencies of a patrilineal system of kingship. In King Lear, as opposed to Richard HI and the Henriad, Shakespeare tests the boundaries of power by giving it to women, disrupting orthodox notions of appropriate feminine conduct. Rather than offering us an absolutist vision of good against evil, King Lear discloses a ruthless tradition of kingship that is based on an understanding of power as gendered, as masculine. When Goneril and Regan respond to their roles as leaders of the state in a traditionally masculine manner, rather than by behaving as women and caring for their father first and the nation second, we, as readers, reject their violence as unnatural. I argue, however, that we have misrecognized that which the play asks us to disavow. Rather than denouncing the women for their masculinist performance of power, the play asks us to reject the tyranny of absolute monarchy, which is a system built on divine right of rule, transferred by inheritance, and propped up by routine elimination of traitors and violent defense of borders. Monarchy, in this light, is both mystified and performed according to traditionally masculine jurisdictions: authority from God, patrilineal right of birth, and war. Shakespeare highlights the self-interest in a system of government that attempts to control disobedience to and rebellion against the crown by invoking the God-given right of the king to eliminate those who have sinned against him, and therefore God, in their challenge of his authority and wisdom. Thus Goneril and Regan cannot be held to artificial and politicized notions of femininity but, rather, ought to be placed in the context of their assertion of power, which is a transgression of gender required by absolute notions of power. Rather than approaching the play through traditional configurations of male and female, I read the dynamics of gender and power in King Lear as a process that both produces and subordinates the subject, so that the social formation of the subject depends on forms of power as much as on its submission to those forms. Judith Butler writes in regard to this process:

Looking for Goneril and Regan

173

We are used to thinking of power as what presses on the subject from the outside, as what subordinates, sets underneath, and relegates to a lower order. But if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are.16 Butler's analysis of subjection is useful to an understanding of Goneril and Regan because her examination of the workings of power accounts for a psychic dimension, an effect of the contradictory functions of power on the subject. In this regard, Goneril and Regan are produced by competing discourses on female gender and power: the first assumes a passive female subject "naturally" inclined toward mercy and obedience while the second assumes a ruthlessness and action that is "natural" to masculinity. When Goneril and Regan refuse to indulge Lear's demand for 100 retainers, they do not only resist the role of submission assigned to them, but they also reproduce patrilineal structures of domination. Because, as I have argued in regard to Macbeth, power is defined by qualities associated with masculinity, Goneril and Regan must resist their culture's definition of femininity if they are to take up the crown and rule the nation.17 Thus the sisters both resist and re-produce early modern paradigms of power. They resist gender configurations insofar as they refuse their subjection, as women, both to their father and to the social duty to act in feminine modes of compassion and obsequiousness. Their resistance, however, is enacted in order to reproduce the hierarchy of absolute monarchy, as Shakespeare sees it, wherein the monarch owes obeisance only to God, from whom s/he takes her/his power and subjects others to her/his will in the name of state security. As my (deliberate) use of both pronouns in the previous sentence attests, such power is the prerogative of the monarch regardless of her/his gender. As An Homily against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion defines it: ... it is most evident that kings, queens, and other princes (for [Saint Peter] speaketh of authority and power, be it in men or women) are ordained of God, are to be obeyed and honored of their subjects; that such subjects as are disobedient or rebellious against their princes disobey God and procure their own damnation, that the government of princes is a great blessing of God given for the commonwealth, specially of good and godly; for the comfort and cherishing of whom God giveth and setteth up princes; and on the contrary part, to the fear and for the punishment of the evil and the wicked. Power here belongs equally to male and female princes, and power itself remains a patrilineally inherited and protected right regardless of the prince's gender. Thus Goneril and Regan's resistance to traditional conceptions of appropriate forms of

174

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

feminine conduct emerges in order to recoup a masculine-based monarchical power, so that they recover the same form of power that demands their subjection as women. As Butler makes clear, psychic resistance thwarts the law in its effects, but cannot redirect the law or its effects. Resistance is thus located in a domain that is virtually powerless to alter the law that it opposes. Hence, psychic resistance presumes the continuation of the law in its anterior, symbolic form and, in that sense, contributes to its status quo. In such a view, resistance appears doomed to perpetual defeat. (98) Goneril and Regan's deployments of power cannot be expected to emanate from naturalized configurations of feminine goodness if they are to reproduce the forms of monarchical power already in place prior to their acquisition of the throne. A performance of power consistent with naturalized conceptions of femininity would not contribute to the status quo but, in fact, would associate monarchical forms of power with weakness and instability believed to be natural to femininity. Power, as the early modern period knew it, would cease to exist. But neither is Shakespeare's play a pure representation of the status quo, for as Butler explains, this process of reproduction never achieves pure duplication: If conditions of power are to persist, they must be reiterated; the subject is precisely the site of such reiteration, a repetition that is never merely mechanical. As the appearance of power shifts from the condition of the subject to its effects, the conditions of power (prior and external) assume a present and futural form. But power assumes this present character through a reversal of its direction, one that performs a break with what has come before and dissimulates as a self-inaugurating agency. The reiteration of power not only temporalizes the conditions of subordination but shows these conditions to be, not static structures, but temporalized - active and productive. The temporalization performed by reiteration traces the route by which power's appearance shifts and reverses: the perspective of power alters from what is always working on us from the outside and from the outset to what constitutes a sense of agency at work in our present acts and the futural expanse of their effects. (16) Butler demonstrates the slipperiness of power, the ways in which it simultaneously precedes and emerges from the subject to have effects outside the subject, transforming as power passes through time and potentially having oppositional implications. Such slipperiness is also evident in King Lear. What seems to be Goneril and Regan's individual agencies, their free desire to humiliate and even bring physical harm to their father, is instead their repetition of a prior and external power that they perform in order that such power should continue to survive. Their

Looking for Goneril and Regan

175

ruthlessness subscribes to a mode of power enabled by the period's mystifications of absolute monarchy and responds to the dangers of insurrection and invasion occasioned by Lear's threats to retake the throne and Gloucester's knowledge of France's impending aggression. At the same time, as women, the power they exercise ruptures definitions of femininity. Their agency simultaneously is produced by, produces, and disrupts historically specific forms of power and domination in place in the early modern period and assumes the right of self and national preservation that is the duty of the monarch. Goneril and Regan cannot be held to standards of femininity fabricated to uphold a patrilineal order dependent on absolute authority if they are to perform a culturally specific form of kingship based on masculinist structures of power and domination. Thus the self-interest Goneril and Regan display is embedded in early modern notions of absolute monarchy. This much is demonstrated by the love test Lear deploys as a public spectacle of domestic and monarchical inheritance practices. As some scholars have noted, Lear's reasons for splitting the monarchy and stepping down from the throne are personal and driven by his investment in retaining control over his daughters, especially Cordelia. Lear abuses his authority and exploits his daughters when he demands that they publicly measure their love for him as a way to receive the largest portion of land. His expectation that filial affection and gratitude will eclipse political ambition is at best naive; at worst, his command for public declarations of love breeds resentment by forcing his daughters to cement marital alliances in a public performance. His plan fuses his daughters' value on the marriage market with a stabilizing of their positions within the monarchy. It also assumes that all three daughters will respond according to traditional definitions of womanhood: with love, compassion, and a desire to care for an aged father. While all three daughters' stability within the monarchy is seemingly secure, Lear stages a spectacle based on powerless and dutiful femininity that rings false before Goneril and Regan comply with his request. He miscalculates the responses of all three of his daughters, who answer first in order to achieve power and second to cement marital alliances. The scene Lear so carefully choreographs with his opening speech disintegrates in the face of Cordelia's "Nothing."18 As Stanley Cavell notes, Lear's rehearsed combination of political business and familial affection collapses because he forces one to depend on the other (67). Having set up the love contest not because he is too old to continue running the kingdom but because he desires a guarantee that Cordelia will always love him first, Lear's rage results from his realization that no such guarantee exits.19 In King Lear the self-interest the king displays is systematic of power relations in a hierarchical, patrilineal state. His own admission that he never intended to give the largest portion of land to the daughter who said she loved him most, but to Cordelia, betrays his interest in manipulating his kingdom, his power, and his daughters to satisfy his personal need for Cordelia's "kind nursery" (I.i.124); Lear's concern for the best interests of his nation, then, is suspect. The theatrics of Lear's ceremony disclose the contradiction between the benevolence toward family and nation he claims and the coercion that surfaces

176

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

when Cordelia fails to speak when cued. Lear's opening speech defining the rules of the contest he has staged sets the pace and tone for the rest of the scene: ... Know that we have divided In three our kingdom; and 'tis our fast intent To shake all cares and business from our age, Conferring them on younger strengths, while we Unburden'd crawl toward death. Our son of Cornwall, And you, our no less loving son of Albany, We have this hour a constant will to publish Our daughters' several dowers, that future strife May be prevented now. The princes, France and Burgundy, Great rivals in our youngest daughter's love, Long in our court have made their amorous sojourn, And here are to be answer'd. Tell me my daughters (Since now we will divest us both of rule, Interest of territory, cares of state), Which of you shall we say doth love us most, That we our largest bounty may extend Where nature doth with merit challenge? (I.i.37-53) Lear's speech succeeds at making the stakes of his demand absolutely clear. The political and economic power he offers motivates, as it means to, his eldest daughters' obedience when they speak. His method of utterance exaggerates his age and weakness, so that Lear approaches the ceremony he has arranged theatrically. Filled with kingly importance, his use of the royal "we" comes off practiced and ceremonial. He exaggerates his infirmity - Lear is hardly crawling toward death partly because he wants Cordelia near him, but also because the grand style fits the awesome nature of his retirement. Anticipating that rivalry between his children will attend his death and invoking the rivalry between France and Burgundy for Cordelia's hand, he prompts his daughters to speak in competition with one another in order to gain preferment and power over each other. His ego expands, fills the hall, and orders his daughters to feed it, so that the play unmasks the investment of ego and control of women and children in settling of money and power crucial to the maintenance of patrilineal authority. As he directs his daughters to say "which loves us most," he also seems to say, "Take your cue from me, and make your declaration of love as theatrical as you can." As a model of kingship, he produces a court spectacle with each movement, word, and purpose emphasizing his benevolence - as both father and king - toward his daughters and their great love for him. Goneril and Regan, perceiving the conditions of their advancement to power, submit to Lear's demands, in contrast to Cordelia.20 Their replies, rather than exhibiting an insincerity innate to their characters, take their cue from their father's formality and hyperbole, performing their love as his demand requires of them.21

Looking for Goneril and Regan

177

When Goneril and Regan accept his proposition and declare the depth of their love for and loyalty to him, they obey their father's command. In keen imitation of her father's capacity for exaggeration, Goneril answers that she loves her father Dearer than eyesight, space, liberty, Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare, No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor; As much as child e'er lov'd, or father found; A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable. Beyond all manner of so much I love you. (I.i.56-61) And Regan, cued by and competing with her sister's answer, asserts that "[Goneril] comes too short, that I profess/ Myself an enemy to all other joys/ Which the most precious square of sense possesses,/ And find I am alone felicitate/ In your dear Highness' love" (11.72-76). Imitating their father's elaborate speech, Goneril and Regan comply with the conditions of their inheritance. Their exaggeration comes at the instigation of their father, not as a result of their own "evil" and malicious natures. If Lear's division of the kingdom is "a decision that violated the accumulated wisdom of Elizabethan statecraft" (McFarland 102), but was also enabled by his power as king, why condemn his two eldest daughters for taking part?22 Instead, their obedience to Lear is not just evidence of their political ambition, but is also a performance that responds appropriately to the theatrics of Lear's ceremony. As Bruce Thomas Boehrer notes, Lear's words seek to mediate between the expression of unforced loyalty and the imposition of rewards and punishments. On the one hand his daughters' love must be freely offered because... it is "beyond what can be valued" (Li.57); yet on the other hand that very love is subject to an elaborate set of pressures and constraints.23 Because the contest is not meant, except superficially, to provide evidence of family love but to demonstrate Lear's authority over his children, as their king as well as their father, the scene makes familial love an effect of power and the power differential Lear emphasizes.24 He uses love to satisfy his desire for control even as he relinquishes political power. Moreover, that he reacts to Cordelia's refusal to obey and to Kent's advice by banishing them both demonstrates a capriciousness of rule allowed by divine right. Subjects may refuse to obey and advisors may advise, but finally all voices contradicting the king's wishes are silenced by the king's power to raise up and cast down his subjects. This is an effect of rule Goneril and Regan appear to recognize as they comply with their father's command. While Goneril and Regan clearly inflate their love for Lear, they are not yet actively hostile to him. Goneril and Regan's brief exchange at the end of this scene demonstrates that neither of the sisters intends any malicious plan in regard to Lear, but that, instead, like their father, they wish to protect their new authority:

178

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

Goneril. You see how full of changes his age is, the observation we have made of it hath not been little. He always lov'd our sister most, and with what poor judgement he hath now cast her off appears too grossly. Regan. Tis the infirmity of his age, yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself. Goneril. The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash; then must we look from his age to receive not alone the imperfections of long-ingraffd condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them. Regan. Such unconstant starts are we like to have from him as this of Kent's banishment. Goneril. There is further compliment of leave-taking between France and him. Pray you let us hit together; if our father carry authority with such disposition as he bears, this last surrender of his will but offend us. Regan. We shall further think of it. Goneril. We must do something, and if thf heat. (I.i.288-308) In a moment in which Goneril and Regan might be expected to express their malice toward their father, or to reveal a plot to do him harm, we can see that nothing of the kind is revealed or plotted. Because Lear has ensured that their "love" is a function of power, Goneril and Regan's efforts to protect their power certainly have the potential to ride roughshod over their father. However, at this point, no active plot against him surfaces. Rather, the sisters agree that what they have witnessed is typical of his past behavior; the banishment of their sister and of Lear's closest adviser, Kent, once more confirms his rashness. Significantly, their conference agrees with Kent's view that exiling Cordelia and refusing her a dowry achieves nothing for Lear but the absence of his favorite daughter. In fact, ostracizing Cordelia, according to Goneril, is evidence of Lear's poor judgement and is not an opportunity for celebration. Their conversation is dominated by a sense of caution and reveals that Goneril and Regan understand that the public love test enacted a displacement of power with love. While their father may have surrendered his authority to them, his actions against Cordelia betray his inability to separate his power over from his love for her. Having just been invested with monarchical authority, if not its title, Goneril and Regan express concern over the likelihood that their father - who in his rashness banished the two people closest to him - will, in similar displays of temper, exert the power he retains as the symbolic head of state with no small retinue of knights to retake the throne. Therefore, having complied with the terms of inheritance and the drama of Lear's ceremony that required them to act as dutiful daughters, Goneril and Regan begin to take control. They plan to forge a united front from which any attempts on Lear's part to regain the crown can

Looking for Goneril and Regan

179

be fought. Their "plot," if indeed it can be called anything of the kind, does not include a threat against his life but does exemplify the suspicious nature of kingship. Just as their father refused to be undermined by Kent's objections to his acts, Goneril and Regan understand that power must ever be on guard against usurpation and subversion. They will rule, then, in a fashion similar to that of Lear. Conflict arises, however, in Act I.iv, when Goneril asserts her new power over a Lear unwilling to submit to his daughter's authority.25 When Lear takes up residence with Goneril, it is with the understanding that, as he makes clear, "Ourself, by monthly course,/ With reservation of an hundred knights/ By you to be sustain'd, shall our abode/ Make with you by due turn..." (Li. 132-35). It is no surprise to Goneril that Lear arrives with 100 knights or that she is responsible for their up-keep. However, their behavior and Lear's evident unwillingness to control them or himself both surprises and angers her. Because Goneril must attend to the rule of half the nation, her frustration in this scene is motivated by her desire to reflect that power. To do so, she must maintain an authoritarian position for her servants as well as for her subjects. She must present an ordered and functioning court to visiting heads of state on the lookout for, and ready to take advantage of, any disruptions of government indicating its weakness or vulnerability. When Oswald informs her that Lear is undermining that authority by chastising and physically assaulting her servants, Goneril is understandably upset: Did my father strike my gentleman for chiding of his fool? By day and night he wrongs me, every hour He flashes into one gross crime or other That sets us all at odds. I'll not endure it. His knights grow riotous, and himself upbraids us On every trifle.... (I.iii.l, 3-7) Goneril expresses legitimate motivation for her anger. Rather than focusing on court business, and just when she should be occupying a position of authority, Goneril finds herself distracted by petty disputes and expected to defer to her father's royal commands as if nothing has changed. She has not been granted the sovereignty of a monarch, nor has Lear relinquished it. The anger Goneril expresses results from her impotence as monarch so long as her father continues to usurp the control that is now rightfully hers. More than a domestic dispute between a father and a daughter, the struggle that begins in this scene is also political; Lear's demands and the behavior of his knights manifest themselves as a political threat in Goneril's mind, "set[ting] us all at odds." She and her sister are of one mind "[n]ot to be overrul'd" (I.iii.l6), and her subsequent appeal to him attempts to maintain a hierarchical order in which Goneril rules and Lear respects her authority. Yet Goneril contains her anger long enough to state her case to her father rationally. Not having fully adopted the ruthlessness of patrilineal forms of power, Goneril explains to her father the disruptive nature of his behavior:

180

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

... Sir, I had thought, by making this well known unto you, To have found a safe redress, but now grow fearful, By what yourself too late have spoke and done, That you protect this course and put it on By your allowance; I do beseech you To understand my purposes aright, As you are old and reverend, should be wise. Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires, Men so disorder'd, so debosh'd and bold, That this our court, infected with their manners, Shows like a riotous inn. Epicurism and lust Makes it more like a tavern or a brothel Than a grac'd palace. The shame itself doth speak For instant remedy. Be then desir'd By her, that else will take the thing she begs, A little to disquantity your train, And the remainders that shall still depend, To be such men as may besort your age, Which know themselves and you. (I.iv.204-9, 238-52) In contrast to Lear, who reacts explosively to Kent and Cordelia's unexpected responses to his spectacle in Act Li, Goneril explains to her father the nature of her complaint and attempts to persuade him to adopt a compromise. Clearly, Goneril also asserts her independence, showing her father that she means to be more than a figure-head. As queen of her half of the kingdom, she argues that the inhabitants of her castle must behave with decorum and respect for the business of a court. She reminds Lear that he must set an example for the men in his train by respecting her position. Such persuasion suggests that Goneril has not entirely committed herself to the ruthlessness of her father's monarchical example. While her request that he reduce the number of his knights comes only after Lear loses his temper at her criticism of his men, Goneril's attempt at negotiation is veiled none too subtly in a warning. She intends to reduce the number of his retainers whether he agrees or not. But that, as well, reflects the power she wields as queen. Like her father, who was her model for kingship, she uses her power as an inducement for him to comply with her request "voluntarily." Like her father, Goneril tinges her request with the shades of a threat. Nevertheless, the matter of her request is reasonable and posed in such a way that reflects respect for Lear's position as she appeals to his aged wisdom and his ability to control the men who are loyal to him. While she knows her father's temperament to be explosive rather than reasonable, Goneril humors her father rather than immediately making demands.

Looking for Goneril and Regan

181

Goneril's fear that her father is determined to overrule her and set everyone at odds is proved by Lear's response. "Darkness and Devils!" he explodes, "Saddle my horses; call my train together!/ Degenerate bastard, I'll not trouble thee;/ Yet have I left a daughter" (I.iv.252-55). As he did Cordelia, Lear rejects this daughter and his paternity of her when she does not comply with his demands. Lear expects unquestioned obedience. Goneril wants respect, and that request angers Lear because granting his daughter respect yields her power. As far as Lear is concerned, Goneril's petition reflects only her disloyalty to him, reflects, in fact, that she cannot be his daughter. But Lear's authority is limited; he cannot banish Goneril as he did Kent and Cordelia. Instead, as a punishment for stripping him of his power and identity, Lear assaults his daughter with his rage: Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful. Into her womb convey sterility, Dry up in her the organs of increase, And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honor her! .... (I.iv.275-81) Lear spits a scorching curse at Goneril, motivating her response to him throughout the remainder of the play. Like his curse and banishment of Cordelia, his curse of Goneril debases her nature, making her into a monster. She is not only a "degenerate bastard" (I.iv.254) but a "marble-hearted fiend," (I.iv.259). Goneril's body shrinks, shrivels, and metamorphoses until she is no longer recognizably a woman. Instead, she is a "creature" devoid of femininity, devoid of reproductive and nurturing abilities because Lear believes that Goneril herself lacks conventional feminine - obsequious - feeling. Lear's disfigurement of his daughter's body is symptomatic of his fear of the female body, which in his mind is a site of pollution and disease.26 But it is also an effect of the power to which he has become accustomed. Able to make of his subjects what he will, Lear progresses from a curse of his daughter's womb and its seed to his own polluted state in having fathered this "creature," this monster woman, making the female body the site of "evil," what Edgar later calls "the dark and vicious place" (V.iii.173). The effects of Lear's curse - sterility and the cutting off of the lineage - would effectively disrupt the patrilineal system. Gay le Whittier notes that "[s]ince the bonds of fatherhood are in large part nominal bonds, they can only be repudiated by cursing, specifically, through the womb itself."27 Lear abjects Goneril, in Julia Kristeva's sense, exorcising her power over him by conjuring the evil of the female body. Dissociating himself from the sexual act by disowning Goneril, Lear attempts to neutralize her power by making her claim to the throne illegitimate, a claim that depends on Goneril's inheritance of the throne and on her ability to have children. Lear's abjection of his daughter multiplies and proliferates in its effect: his curse severs her physically from himself, anatomizes and mutilates her body, and also

182

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

renders her valueless in a patrilineal order that marks women's worth through their patrimony and through their function as the bearers of children. While Lear's misogyny is significant on its own, the humiliation and abuse Goneril experiences in this scene motivates her subsequent ruthlessness and cruelty toward her father as she protects her sovereignty. Though Marjorie Garber has no lasting sympathy for Goneril, she notes of Lear's curse that "the parent, who should give life, devours; the womb becomes transformed into a consuming mouth, the vagina dentata of psychology and anthropology" (152). Goneril's anger and rush to send word to Regan about their father's unwillingness to see reason become a practical performance of monarchical sovereignty designed to protect the power Goneril inherited at the same time that it reproduces the ruthlessness of Lear's absolute form of authority. Lear's blistering abuse makes her determined to find an ally in her sister. It is not that Goneril, like a child, wants sympathy from her sibling after a parent's anger, but that she knows the kingdoms she and Regan rule are vulnerable to his influence. Lear makes his intentions in that regard perfectly clear. "Thou shalt find," he threatens, "That I'll resume the shape which thou dost think/1 have cast off forever" (I.iv.308-10). Having threatened to retake the throne and resume his monarchical authority, Lear confirms in his daughters' minds the fear that until then is merely a possibility. Their rule is not necessarily permanent, but as transitory as Lear's love for Cordelia and Kent. Goneril and Regan's alliance becomes calculated at this point in its effort to paralyze their father's power and to protect their own. Their united decision to reduce Lear to fifty, twenty-five, and then zero knights is an attempt to strip him of feudal devotees and to neutralize his ability to retake the throne. The sisters reveal the fear his threat engenders as they struggle with him for power over the number of men in his train: Regan. ... What, fifty followers? Is it not well? What should you need of more? Yea, or so many? sith that both charge and danger Speak 'gainst so great a number? How in one house Should many people under two commands Hold amity? Tis hard, almost impossible. Goneril. Why might not you, my lord, receive attendance From those that she calls servants or from mine? Regan. Why not, my lord? If then they chanc'd to slack ye, We could control them. If you will come to me (For now I spy a danger), I entreat you To bring but five and twenty; to no more Will I give place or notice. (II.iv.237-49) The daughters' diminishment of Lear's train is clearly calculated, but not as a heartless attempt to humiliate their father. On the contrary, their calculations reflect both the instability and self-interestedness of the power with which Lear invested

Looking for Goneril and Regan

183

them. Their strategy takes heed of the muscle Lear's knights represent and reflects their grasp of the sincerity of his threats: his men could form a greater army to retake the throne for their leader. They attempt, in this regard, to defend themselves against the danger one hundred knights pose.28 Despite Lear's retention of the title, in order to continue enjoying its privileges, he gave up the material power of kingship to his daughters and their husbands, retaining merely the symbolic power. I want to suggest that the material power his daughters now possess never included the requirements of mercy. Because women rule, it does not follow that their power will derive from traditional definitions of femininity. Judging from Lear's own example, kingship signifies ruthlessness - not just against strangers and traitors, but against family as well. His daughters rule in perfect imitation of their father, acting to preserve the power given them. Rather than assuming that Goneril and Regan disrupt the patriarchal order,29 I argue that their rule exposes the violence of patrilineal structures of power. The women rule in a patrilineal fashion, reproducing existing forms of power, rather than according to naturalized gender distinctions. While Lear, by himself, poses relatively little threat against Goneril and Regan, Cordelia, under the flag of France and at the instigation of Kent, has invaded England with the intention of re-establishing Lear on the throne.30 For all intents and purposes, then, the kingdom that Goneril and Regan inherited is under siege, and anyone caught acting in sympathy with Lear or France is a traitor. Certainly, any military action on France's part that threatens the stability of England's crown must be seen by those wearing that crown as an act of war. Similarly, any action on the part of English subjects that threatens those who wear the crown must be seen as treason and rebellion. Gloucester, by this logic, in possession of a letter that reveals France's imminent arrival and having arranged for the safe passage of Lear to those who represent Cordelia in Dover, has committed treason. Clearly, Cornwall, Regan, and Goneril view Gloucester as a traitor when Edmund makes his father's part in the letter known. Once Oswald confirms that Gloucester "hath convey'd [Lear] hence" accompanied by "Some five or six and thirty of his knights,/... Who, with some other of the lord's dependents,/ Are gone with him toward Dover, where they boast/ To have well-armed friends" (III.vii.1516, 18-20), the will to survive both politically and physically motivates their torture of Gloucester. As a traitor to their government, Gloucester suffers no more than any other Renaissance traitor31 - in fact, he does not suffer death because "the form of justice" (III.vii.25), or a proper arraignment, has not been conducted and later because Regan thrusts him out of doors in her concern for her wounded husband. If as readers we want Regan to show mercy to Gloucester, we are imagining that her duties as a ruler should be limited by her gender. Instead, the requirements of her role as ruler in a kingdom under attack by invaders, include under Renaissance notions of rule - the methods by which the stability of the nation must be preserved; as Elizabeth's defense of England against the Spanish Armada and her decisive actions during Essex's rebellion demonstrate, those methods include war, torture, and execution. A politics that requires those in power to

184

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

survive in the face of military threats motivates the actions that dominate the last three acts of the play. I want to make clear, however, that the scene works to interrogate that ruthlessness rather than to justify it; I do not argue that Gloucester deserves his torture, but that Shakespeare's staging of Gloucester's blinding demonstrates both the play's anxiety about the routine violence of early modern forms of kingship and its abhorrence of that violence. Thus the visual enactment of such violence dramatizes images of violent power in the name of political security that cannot be dismissed by an audience.32 The scene, therefore, graphically encapsulates the abuse of power, regardless of the gender of the monarch, embedded in divine right monarchy that the entire play calls into question. Thus far in the play, Goneril and Regan's deployments of absolute authority have enacted a fairly pure rejection of traditional and naturalized feminine conduct in favor of a reiteration of monarchical power. "Feminine" qualities such as sympathy, reconciliation, and compliance are abandoned in favor of the brutality and violence of masculinist structures of domination. However, following Cornwall's death and the escalation of conflict with France, the sisters shift from a position of independence to a "feminine" dependence on a masculine subject. It is at this moment where resistance most appears, as Butler contends, "doomed to perpetual defeat," for their refusal of traditional performances of gender becomes reinscribed in their attachment to Edmund (98).331 argue, however, that a desire for political survival drives, at least partially, their involvement with Edmund. For critics their liaisons testify to the sexual license that is symptomatic of female "evil." The transgression against putatively gender-appropriate conduct that makes Goneril and Regan "evil" always include acts of unlawful desire.34 That Goneril pursues Edmund despite her husband's good health is ostensibly a symptom of the same "evil" she exhibits by chastising her father as a way to maintain her authority. Regan's contract with Edmund, though it takes place after Cornwall's death, ostensibly makes her faithfulness while her husband lived suspect, and further reinforces the "evil" of her violence against Gloucester. But I argue that Goneril and Regan's attraction to Edmund is symptomatic of the authority that both women need in order to rule. As women, they do not possess power in any culturally constructed sense but are subject to their culture's definition of femininity as weak and subservient. While Goneril and Regan have resisted traditional feminine roles, their interest in Edmund demonstrates a need for a powerful and, it would seem, masculine ally. Goneril, erroneously, believes that her husband does not possess the violent power necessary for kingship despite his commitment to the war against France; and Regan's husband, once quite effective at his ruthless hold on power, is now dead. Edmund possesses the masculinist ruthlessness that Goneril and Regan need to rule. Goneril explains most effectively her objections to Albany's method of rule after Oswald describes his less than enthusiastic reaction to her return: ... It is the cowish terror of his spirit That dares not undertake; he'll not feel wrongs

Looking for Goneril and Regan

185

Which tie him to an answer. Our wishes on the way May prove effects. Back Edmund, to my brother, Hasten his musters and conduct his pow'rs. I must change names at home, and give the distaff Into my husbands hands. (IV.ii.12—18) Goneril ridicules her husband's manhood, describing him as feminine, weak, and forgiving. In her eyes the very nature of rule is rigid, unforgiving, and violent, which in Goneril's estimation also makes it masculine. Her reference to changing gender roles with her husband in order to take charge of the escalating conflict demonstrates her masculinist conception of power. Realizing that her husband flinches at her mode of rule, she identifies him as feminine, discards him as an ally, and searches for a substitute who will stabilize her power. Despite her apparent contestation of naturalized forms of gender and power, therefore, Goneril's subjectivation to those forms remains undisrupted. At the same time, however, Goneril and Regan's desire for Edmund responds to their need to protect their power. Hungry for power of his own, Edmund willingly assumes the ruthlessness necessary for the defense of the state. Goneril looks to him to give her the potency that her husband cannot: "My most dear Gloucester!" she confides to him as he leaves her to return to Cornwall, "O, the difference of man and man!/ To thee a woman's services are due,/ A fool usurps my bed" (IV.ii.25-28). Sexual roles, in Goneril's mind, also conform to patrilineal interests. Edmund, because he is willing to sacrifice all for power, fulfills Goneril's definition of a sexually potent man. Her husband, however, who in his failure to support her deployments of power becomes sexually impotent, deserves her infidelity. Similarly, Regan, now widowed, turns to Edmund as an ally who exudes the same power as her husband. Regan's claim to him is the more legitimate, she feels, because her husband is dead (IV.v.30-32). In fact, he has already begun to represent her officially, as she informs Albany: "He led our powers,/ Bore the commission of my place and person,/ The which immediacy may well stand up,/ And call itself your brother" (V.iii.63-66). Both sisters, consequently, seize on Edmund as a symbol of masculinist potency, as a means to legitimize their own desire and exercise of power through an affiliation with the new, and satisfactorily ruthless, earl of Gloucester. They reproduce gender configurations based on binaries of active/passive, male/female in order to reproduce monarchical forms of domination. Such systems depend on traditional definitions of gender, making such power masculine. Early modern notions of femininity and power, it would appear, are reinscribed through each woman's alliance with Edmund. The seeming failure of their resistance demonstrates the malleable, proliferative, and conflicted space of subjectivity. The absolute form of power Goneril and Regan repeat requires a constant shifting, so that as Butler explains in her elaboration of Foucault's theorization of power,

186

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England in its resignifications, the law itself is transmuted into that which opposes or exceeds its original purposes. In this sense, disciplinary discourse does not unilaterally constitute a subject in Foucault, or rather, if it does, it simultaneously constitutes the condition for the subject's deconstitution. ...the disciplinary apparatus produces subjects, but as a consequence of that production, it brings into discourse the conditions for subverting that apparatus itself. In other words, the law turns against itself and spawns versions of itself which oppose and proliferate its animating purposes. (99, 100)

The reiteration of power in subject formation, in which Butler is interested, clarifies the apparent contradictions of Goneril and Regan's acts throughout King Lear. For if the sisters are interested in keeping power, why do they suddenly share it with Edmund, a man who has no relationship to them and, in fact, as a bastard is barred by law from assuming the power he desires? The fact is that Edmund, as a man, represents the lawful, orthodox definitions of masculine brutality, and as a consequence he enables both women to perform the brutality that they are, culturally, prohibited from performing. But at the moment that I argue Goneril and Regan assume traditional roles as women, a contradiction surfaces as a result of the law prohibiting adultery and unions with bastards, with men who retain no advantages of lineage and inheritance. Clearly, traditional forms of femininity Goneril and Regan assume by allowing Edmund to perform the brutality they, as women, cannot are canceled out by the adulterous and class transgressive alliance with Gloucester's bastard son. Thus, while both Goneril and Regan appear driven to repeat a performance of feminine gender dependent on a masculine strength, their adulterous desire for the bastard son of the earl of Gloucester certainly exceeds the original purposes of the patrilineal order. Monarchical power is consolidated through a recuperation of gender "norms" but also breached by an adulterous alliance, so that absolute systems of authority are reinscribed and subverted. Edmund's masculine strength upholds both the dynamics of gender and power staged in the play at the same time that its deployment acts to subvert systems of inheritance based on pure bloodlines. Thus, power in King Lear moves through a process of reiteration and subversion, a process that (temporarily) shifts the actors from male to female, legitimate to illegitimate, but ultimately does not change the effects of power. While it might seem that such an argument contradicts my earlier claim that the play interrogates systems of gender and power, I argue that the play's simultaneous reiteration and subversion of orthodox forms of power through women's performance of it renders inadequate the attribution of an archetypal evil to Goneril and Regan as a result of their use of that power. Goneril and Regan's power collapses despite their attempts to consolidate it. The feud over Edmund that separates the sisters intensifies as their attention is forced toward war and the forces that would reinstate Lear. Regan's public announcement of her marital and political alliance with Edmund seemingly checkmates her still-married sister. But Goneril determines not to allow her sister

Looking for Goneril and Regan

187

that victory, revealing in an aside that the monarchy takes second place to her fight for Edmund: "I had rather lose the battle, than that sister/ Should loosen him and me" (V.i.18-19). But in the quickness of the last act's movement, Albany's confrontation of both Edmund and his wife with their plot against him forces the crisis. Before Regan can officially make her title Edmund's, Albany takes action against all three of them: ... Edmund I arrest thee On Capital treason, and in thy attaint, This gilded serpent [pointing to Goneril]. For your claim fair sister, I bar it in the interest of my wife; Tis she is sub-contracted to this lord, And I, her husband, contradict your bans. If you will marry, make your loves to me, My lady is bespoke. (V.iii.82-89) Albany's exquisite sarcasm, compounded by accusations of treason and monstrosity, work their intended purpose. Edmund is taken off guard by Edgar; Goneril, also taken off guard, stays long enough to hear the allegations against Edmund, but exits in defiance of the indictment her husband makes against her. Regan, poisoned by her sister, is doubly paralyzed. The power that all three children sought to protect is taken away by Albany and Edgar with disarming swiftness. Such an ending suggests that "evil" is righteously overcome by good. But the play's ending is more ambiguous than absolute. First of all, neither Goneril nor Regan accepts Albany's identification of herself as a monstrous, "serpent" woman. Rather Regan and Goneril die ever-defiant of Albany's moral righteousness. Goneril's exit, in particular, demonstrates her refusal both to accept her husband's evaluation of her as monstrous and to give up power and submit to the accusations that he brings against Edmund and herself: Goneril. Say if I do [know], the laws are mine, not thine; Who can arraign me for't? A Ibany. Most monstrous ! O ! Knows't thou this paper? Goneril. Ask me not what I know. Exit. (V.iii. 159-62) Rather than reading Goneril's refusal to speak what she knows as Shakespeare's refusal to endow her with complexity, as Sprengnether claims, Goneril's response to Albany rejects his accusations against her ("Introduction" 1). Goneril both asserts her position as the law and scorns the power structure for which her husband stands. His invocation of the law demanding her submission as a woman

188

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

conflicts with her role as monarch and stimulates her contempt, keeping her from internalizing his moral judgement of her as monstrous.35 Goneril's suicide is an act of resistance to the punitive consequences that Albany plans by arresting her for treason. While suicide traditionally signifies religious despair, if Goneril feels despair, it is not religious but political, for she refuses to acknowledge Albany's claim to power or his control of the law. Catherine Belsey argues that "[s]uicide reestablishes the sovereign subject... . As an individual action, therefore, suicide is a threat to the control of the state."36 In this light, Goneril's suicide is not acted to reassert herself into the "social body," in Belsey's words. Instead, she acts to guarantee her self-definition as a monarch against the state that would control her by defining her uses of power as immoral. Similarly, Regan's death, though instigated by her sister, is punctuated neither by apologies nor by regrets on her part. In fact, even as she begins to feel the effects of Goneril's poison, she asserts her power, "creating] [Edmund] here,/ [Her] lord and master" (V.iii.77-78). While she may not know she is dying, the lack of a self-deprecatory speech in the face of imminent defeat is significant.37 I would argue that both Goneril and Regan's refusals to internalize patrilineal definitions of "moral" femininity suggest a refusal on Shakespeare's part to condemn them wholly for their actions. As for their plot to kill Lear, I would note that no real proof of any such plot exists because Gloucester provides only hearsay in that matter. Though he tells Kent, "I have o'erheard a plot of death upon him" (III.vi.89), Gloucester's ability to overhear the truth is suspect. This is the man, after all, who heard Edgar plot against his own life in a conversation with Edmund. Further, Edgar does not accuse Goneril or Regan of anything; notably, his whole attention is dedicated to the betrayal he and Gloucester suffered at Edmund's hands. While Edgar's accusations against his brother seek "justice," he does not appear interested in delivering the same justice to Lear's older daughters. Goneril and Regan, whose inheritance of the crown is legitimate, seem less immediately culpable than the bastard usurper. Finally, that Goneril kills her sister and then kills herself is important because no representative of Albany's or Edgar's "moral" order takes that action. While they seem to have internalized patrilineal dictates by asserting their monarchical power in violent fashion, neither woman allows patrilineal morality to define her identity or question her authority. Edmund alone faces the wrath of the patrilineal system in the form of his brother Edgar and internalizes the structure's definition of his "nature" as "evil" (V.iii.244-45). His wrongs seem to be greater because he had no legitimate claim to kingship. Yet Edmund's illegitimacy is also a construct of the same patrilineal order that Goneril and Regan resist in their death. Edmund's "wrongs" are as constituted by patrilineal configurations of power as is Goneril and Regan's "evil." As Dollimore contends, "Edmund's scepticism is made to serve an existing system of values; although he falls prey to, he does not introduce his society to its obsession with power, property, and inheritance; it is already the material and ideological basis of that society" (198). Edmund's putative betrayal of his father and brother is a response to old and entrenched resentments. As a bastard, Edmund

Looking for Goneril and Regan

189

is not entitled to power, to legal existence. Consequently, only attaining Edgar's inheritance will satisfy him, for verbal acknowledgment pales in comparison to legal and material acknowledgment. The quality of acknowledgment this bastard receives from his father in Act Li is an acknowledgment to which Gloucester is "braz'd" (Li. 11), crudely laughing off the "sport at his making" (1.23).38 Gloucester's reference to Edmund as his mother's son reveals his anxiety about the young man's paternity. Because a guarantee of paternity is of the utmost importance in a patrilineal order, Edmund can never be anything more than a source of irritation and anxiety. When Edgar, the legitimate, confronts Edmund as a traitor in the name of God, father, and brother, Edmund's skepticism and rebellion collapse: "What you have charg'd me with, that have I done,/ And more, much more, the time will bring it out" (V.iii. 163-64). Edmund accepts and internalizes the patrilineal order's condemnation of his desire as "evil." Perhaps the play's ambiguity, its own skepticism, is best expressed through Edgar's entrance in Act V.iii.39 As a victim of the patrilineal order's ruthlessness, Edgar might have promised the greatest potential for a modification in the structure of power relations. But instead the power simultaneously reproduced and resisted by Goneril and Regan is here spectacularly reiterated by Edgar, who enters as the patrilineal system incarnate, armed, wielding a sword in the very name of vengeance against one who dared threaten the patrilineal order. He chooses to ignore his brother's youth, eminence, valor and heart because patrilineal morality is based on absolute rather than partial truths; it accepts no excuses, admits no motivation for rebellion. The "moral" codes that relegated Edmund to illegitimacy support patrilineal interests and power. True to the structure that made him legitimate heir, Edgar cannot see beyond his brother's treason to question that structure. Such treason can be answered only with the sword: "My name is Edgar, and thy father's son./ The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices/ Make instruments to plague us./ The dark and vicious place where thee he got/ Cost him his eyes" (V.iii. 170-74, emphasis mine). Displacing the responsibility of Edmund's act of rebellion onto the immorality and pollution of female sexuality, Edgar discloses his own anxiety about Edmund's illegitimacy (Dollimore 203). He aligns himself with father and gods against Edmund in alliance with the patrilineal order's moral codes. As a product of those codes, Edgar, like his bastard brother and Lear's "immoral" daughters, functions within a ruthless and brutal structure of power. I cannot assert, then, with Morriss Henry Partee that "the play, which began with Lear's coupling of irresponsibility and absolute power, concludes with Edgar's declaration of a new spirit of moderation and duty" because Edgar in fact returns to and in the spirit of vengeance against the bastard usurper.40 His moral duty lodges firmly with the patrilineal order that Lear and Gloucester represented on absolutist and unforgiving principles. The suffering and marginalization Edgar experienced might have taught him mercy, but such an opportunity is irrevocably lost as Edgar champions patrilineal moral authority with the violence of his sword. Thus Edgar enters in the service of the same masculinist forms of power that Goneril and Regan defended. His entrance is not a return to order because the order of absolute power

190

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

endowed by father and gods was never in question, never in jeopardy. While Goneril and Regan were women in power, their enactment of power did not ascribe to feminine gender roles. Edgar's entrance constitutes, therefore, a reproduction of power first directed by Lear, and subsequently performed by Goneril and Regan. Therefore, the play's ending finds no comfort in Edgar. For he repeats the brutality with which Lear, Gloucester, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund ruled, a brutality that lead each of them to their annihilation.41 The play seems to suggest more than that ruthless uses of power lead to annihilation; that, rather, the nature of power itself demands violence and brutality and leads, therefore, to annihilation. Thus, patrilineal forms of power are exposed as flawed and in need of revision, which, as I have argued, Edgar cannot enact. Yet as Dollimore argues, [i]n the closing moments of Lear those who have survived the catastrophe actually attempt to recuperate their society in just those terms which the play has subjected to sceptical interrogation. There is invoked first a concept of innate nobility in contradistinction to innate evil and, second, its corollary: a metaphysically ordained justice. (202) Though Dollimore contends that the play resists that recuperation in the deaths of Cordelia and Lear, I would argue that Edgar's entrance enacts just such a recuperation (203). Absolute power is enacted through violence whether in the hands of men or women. In this light, the closing scene merely confirms the violent and resilient nature of power, evidencing Shakespeare's discomfort with a system of power relations for which even he cannot envision an alternative. The difference between interrogation and repetition is, perhaps, slippery. There is no lasting shift in power relations in King Lear, and this "failure" has caused many critics to assume that Shakespeare supported a system of monarchy that severed women from acts of power and reinscribed them within passive roles through violent punishment of their transgressions. The risk of interrogation is, it seems, that what is being cast as detrimental to systems of state and subject formation will be interpreted as endorsement of those systems and formations. Perhaps a clearer subversion of early modern systems of power would have been to make Goneril and Regan's ascension to power a successful matriarchal alternative to Lear's monarchy. But such a dramatization would have meant a total re-vision of power in the early 1600s. It would have meant a valorization of feminine based forms of power that were not in evidence even in Elizabeth's reign and, as a consequence, a vision of power that Shakespeare, as a subject of his time and place, may not have been capable of imagining - at least at this point in his career. But it does not seem to me that the only way to stage questions about absolute forms of rule is to dramatize ideal alternatives. If indeed a playwright is nervous about his nation's mode of power, perhaps the most effective stand is taken by dramatizing the status quo. Thus a staging of an Utopian monarchy would have meant the loss of a dramatization of the gender based definitions of power that are entirely independent of the gender of the monarch. For if monarchy, as a system of power,

Looking for Goneril and Regan

191

is a masculine domain, it would follow that monarchs will approach their roles as men, as subjects of a system of power understood according to gender divisions. While the play itself, in its recuperation of patrilineal power through Edgar, Albany, and Kent's reordering of the social system, appears to close off the feminine from power, it must finally be seen as staging the contestatory space for the subject Butler seeks through her examination of the ways in which "power that first appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes the psychic form that constitutes the subject's self-identity" (3). Goneril and Regan's deployments of monarchical authority, in this regard, cannot be separated from the specific forms of power in play during the early modern period that were constructed on absolute principles. The dynamics of gender and power Shakespeare stages are, as I have shown, in conflict throughout the play, but not so as to condemn feminine desire or agency as "evil." Rather a paradox emerges wherein "a subject only remains a subject through reiteration or rearticulation of itself as a subject, and this dependency of the subject on repetition for coherence may constitute that subject's incoherence, its incomplete character. This repetition or, better, iterability thus becomes a non-place of subversion, the possibility of a re-embodying of the subjectivizing norm that can redirect its normativity" (Butler 99). While King Lear appears to reject the feminine power it depicts, instead it calls into question the very structures of domination prohibiting women's access to power through a naturalization of masculine and feminine genders. Such structures are revealed as false, but perhaps more importantly, they are revealed as deployed in the self-interests of the very power Goneril and Regan appear to resist. The play's apparent endorsement of Goneril and Regan's monstrosity - as depicted by Lear, Kent, and Albany's views - is vexing. But these male characters' condemnations both elide and are contradicted by the political emergency posed by France's invasion of England. It is not possible historically or textually to read Goneril's and Regan's defenses of their nation as either a mistake or as a monstrous arrogation of power. In fact, the play separates the domestic from the political, so that even Albany must admit that a defense of England against France is of chief importance: Albany. Our very loving sister, well bemet. Sir, this I heard: the King is come to his daughter, With others whom the rigor of our state Forc'd to cry out. Where I could not be honest, I never yet was valiant. For this business, It touches us as France invades our land, Not bolds the King, with others whom I fear, Most just and heavy causes make oppose. Edmund. Sir you speak nobly. Regan. Why is this reason'd? Goneril. Combine together 'gainst the enemy;

192

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England For these domestic and particular broils Are not the question here. Albany. Let's then determine With th' ancient of war on our proceeding. (V.i.20-32)

If indeed Goneril and Regan's defense of England partly constitutes their illegitimacy as monarchs as well as their bloodthirsty defense of power, why does Albany agree that France's invasion cannot be dismissed or allowed? Moreover, it is significant that Goneril urges everyone to take a united stand against France and herself separates the political urgency of this stand from the "domestic and particular broils" of Lear's position. Such a distinction suggests that Goneril does not see the war as necessarily carried out against her father but as a national defense of borders. Surely her view is not unreasonable. Queen Elizabeth defended England against Spanish invasion and against Mary Stuart's claims. Why then is Goneril in particular, but Regan as well, accused of evil, of illegitimate rule? The answer must lie in the affront to femininity that such violence implies. But to depend on orthodox gender paradigms for our interpretation of these women and the play is to discount what is finally its primary action: the defense of national sovereignty. That Goneril and Regan are correct in that defense suggests something about the play's view of their rule. At the very least, the play's view is ambiguous, and in this regard it struggles with the tyrannical tendencies of absolute monarchy, tendencies embedded in philosophies of government that are also necessary to the sovereignty of the nation. Thus the play depicts that rule as both appropriate and informed by violent practices with which the play is uncomfortable. I would go so far as to suggest that the primacy given to the pathos of Lear's grief, confusion, and deep sense of injustice on the heath by Shakespearean scholars throughout the years does not cancel out my reading of the political conditions of the play, which insist on absolute protection of the crown and therefore on absolute ruthlessness. The pathos of Lear's emotional breakdown focuses attention on Shakespeare's interrogation of absolute monarchical systems that build their authority on a competition, not just between siblings, but between fathers and their children. If power is all, then family relations fall by the wayside to be trampled in the rush for power. Surely, the contest Lear stages in Act Li demonstrates just this. For when Lear's own power to orchestrate the smooth transition of power from father to daughters is questioned by Cordelia, his first reaction is to sever himself from his daughter. Family bonds are rejected in favor of what Lear sees to be his primary function and right as king: to be obeyed. Goneril and Regan reproduce Lear's mode of kin(g)ship, in this light, acting as monarchs first and ultimately losing sight of filial bonds. Thus Lear's grief, compounded by Gloucester's suffering, dramatizes the play's discomfort with the ruthless and alienating tendencies of absolute monarchy. Thus Goneril and Regan are queens, monarchs, in a system of power relations that deploys mercilessness, vengeance, and cruelty to defend its interests. Goneril and Regan cannot, therefore, rule within the limitations of their gender. Instead,

Looking for G oner il and Regan

193

they must subscribe to the brutal nature of kingship.42 While Dreher notes that "the logic of the [play] condemns them, not because they rebel against traditional feminine passivity, but because in so doing they become cruel and inhuman tyrants," I would argue instead that the logic of the play requires Goneril and Regan to rebel against traditional feminine passivity to become cruel tyrants, to become monarchs (106). King Lear exposes the marginalization of women from acts of power and desire, interrogating the nature of patrilineal power and uncovering its brutality. Because power has been defined in traditionally masculine terms, King Lear exposes the masculinist structure of kingship as necessarily vengeful and destructive at the same time that it interrogates conceptions of femininity as naturally, and necessarily, passive and obedient. In this respect, what critics specify as the "immorality" of Goneril and Regan's choices becomes instead symptomatic of a ruthless patrilineal structure of power relations they are required to reproduce as representatives of that structure.

NOTES 1. An earlier and shorter version of this argument appears in Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8, no. 2 (1996): 375-400, under the title "King Lear's 'Immoral' Daughters and the Politics of Kingship" and appears here by permission of Pegasus Press. A subsequent version of this article appears in my forthcoming book Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy (Newark: University of Delaware Press). The current title responds, in part, to Ann Thompson's question: "Are There Any Women in King Lear?," in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (New York: Harvester, 1991), 117-28. 2. Looking for Richard. Dir. Al Pacino. Perf. Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin, Estelle Parsons, Aidan Quinn, Winona Ryder, and Kevin Spacey. 112 min. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1996. 3. Louis Adrian Montrose, "Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture," in The New Historicism, éd. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1536, 27. 4. Ivo Kamps, "Materialist Shakespeare: An Introduction," in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps (London: Verso, 1995), 1-19, 5. 5. I have chosen to focus solely on the two sisters and not to extend my reading to Edmund, though clearly my argument applies to his culturally derived class as a bastard and as, according to Stanley Cavell, "the central evil character" of the play. See Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 76. 6. The verdict against Goneril and Regan comes in asides, as a given about which scholars need not provide proof. See Harry Berger Jr., who establishes a dichotomy between "good" characters and "self proclaim'd knave[s]," in "Text Against Performance: The Gloucester Family Romance," in Shakespeare's "Rough Magic," eds. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 210-29, 211; and Linda Bamber, who argues that Lear is an example of Shakespeare's misogyny because Goneril and Regan, along with Lady Macbeth and Volumnia, are "nightmare females... not just

194

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

women who are evil; their evil is inseparable from their failures as women," in Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), 2. See also Paul Delany, "King Lear and the Decline of Feudalism," in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps (London: Verso, 1995), 20-38. For Delany, King Lear looks back at feudalism nostalgically, rejecting the ruthless bourgeois economics of Edmund, Goneril, and Regan, so that the play, in his reading, proceeds from the points of view of Gloucester and Lear. He writes, "Though Lear has let the garden of England run to seed, it is clear that Edmund, Regan, and Goneril have no interest in restoring it to its proper condition" (34). What that proper condition is, Delany does not specify, though presumably it would be some other form of state, neither feudal nor bourgeois. See also Diane Elizabeth Dreher for whom Goneril and Regan are "Shakespeare's evil women... sociopaths, individuals without conscience or empathy, motivated only by power and appetite," in Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 105-6; Jodi Mikalachki, The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1998), for whom it is a given that Goneril and Regan are an example of England's savage native origins; and Marianne Novy, who claims that "Few of [Goneril's and Regan's] lines carry hints of motivations other than cruelty, lust, or ambition, characters of the archetypal fantasy image of women as enemy," in Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 153. Claudette Hoover's analysis of Goneril and Regan is a momentous exception to the dearth of criticism on Goneril and Regan. She makes a solitary case for what it is that Shakespeare is rejecting in his representation of the women. See her "Goneril and Regan: 'So horrid as in woman'," San Jose Studies 10, no. 3 (1984): 49-65. Only Stephen Reid attempts a full defense of Goneril and Regan based on Oedipal and sibling rivalries in "In Defense of Goneril and Regan," American Imago 27 (1970): 226-44. 7. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 2nd ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 198. 8. While Ann Thompson has noted that a great deal of criticism of King Lear fixates on fathers and "male power relationships, class and property... [and] the role of Edmund," only recently have feminist critics focused on the problem of the absent mothers in the play (119). But even this analysis is focused primarily on Lear and Gloucester. Much of Lear criticism is interested in Cordelia. See Claire McEachern, "Fathering Herself: A Source Study of Shakespeare's Feminism," Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1988): 269-90; Richard Knowles, "Cordelia's Return," Shakespeare Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1999): 33-50; and Catherine S. Cox's '"An excellent thing in a woman': Virgo and Viragos in King Lear" Modern Philology (November 1998), New York: Hunter College, CUNY+ Library Information Systems, electronic, Infotrack, Hunter C, 1 April 2000. Despite Cox's claim that the positions of virgo and virago describe the "patterns of ambiguous gender identity that characterize the daughters of King Lear," her essay sees ambiguity only in Cordelia. Goneril and Regan "seem evil not merely because they are female but because they simply are evil" (6 of 9). For those readings which see their "evil" as archetypal and/or attribute it to the misogyny of their creator, see Coppélia Kahn, "The Absent Mothers in King Lear" in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 33-49; Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, "Hamlet" to "The Tempest" (New York: Routledge, 1992), especially 103-29; Madelon Gohlke [Sprengnether], '"I wooed thee with

Looking for Goneril and Regan

195

my sword': Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms," in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 150-70; Claudette Hoover, "Women, Centaurs, and Devils in King Lear," Women's Studies 16 (1989): 349-59; and Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 9. David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), 50. Kastan's book is very useful in its view of drama as subversive of dominant ideologies, not just polemically but in the nature of its production. 10. My reference is to events contained in the Riverside edition of the conflated text of King Lear. Thus I am not accounting for discrepancies between the quarto and folio editions of the plays (they are now considered separate in both the Oxford and Norton complete works). Clearly, a study of the differences between quarto and folio would yield fascinating results for my argument, but I have chosen to contain my present project to both the representation of the daughters as they are portrayed in the conflated text and to scholarly reactions, most of which have been to the conflated text. For lively and pivotal readings of the differences between quarto and folio editions of King Lear, see R. A. Foakes, "The Two Texts of King Lear," 21-34; Michael J. Warren's "Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar," 35-47; Gary Taylor's "The War in King Lear" 48-58; and Jay L. Halio's "The Transmission of the Texts," 59-71; all four articles can be found in Critical Essays in Shakespeare's King Lear, ed. Jay L. Halio (New York: Hall, 1996). For parallel text editions of the plays see Michael Warren's The Complete Texts of King Lear, 1608-1623 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and René Weiss's modernized King Lear (London: Longman's, 1993). 11. There are several analyses that do not insist on Lear's or Cordelia's goodness, Goneril and Regan's "evil," and Shakespeare's misogyny. Reid defends Goneril and Regan in "In Defense of Goneril and Regan," 226-44. Jonathan Dollimore notes in Radical Tragedy that Lear's behavior with all of his daughters is based upon a particularly brutal hierarchy, 199; McEachern defends Shakespeare from accusations of misogyny in "Fathering Herself but centers her defense on Cordelia rather than the two elder daughters, 2; Thomas McFarland's analysis of family relations avoids delineations of good against "evil"; see "The Image of the Family in King Lear," in On King Lear, ed. Lawrence Danson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 91-118, 98. Paolo Valesio, in a rhetorical analysis of Act I.i, argues that Cordelia, no less than Goneril and Regan, desires the kingdom, rejecting her father's rhetorical framework (flattery) to position herself, advantageously, against her sisters. Valesio's analysis deconstructs both Goneril and Regan's "evil" and Cordelia's virtue; see Novantiqua: Rhetorics as a Contemporary Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 41-60. 12. Madelon Sprengnether, "Introduction: The Gendered Subject of Shakespearean Tragedy," in Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, eds. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 1-27, 1. 13. I invoke here Montrose's attention to "the processes by which the canon of English Renaissance Authors and Works incorporated into English [and American] culture and the British [and American] educational systemfs] has helped to forge and perpetuate a dominant ideology" ("Professing the Renaissance" 27); Claire McEachern's analysis of Henry Fis also relevant in this context. She argues that looking for Henry's humanity as something separate from his kingship or tyranny is anachronistic and, in fact, that "[a]pprehensions about the shifting appearances of Henry's fellow feeling owe less, I suspect, to the stringency of a postmodern ethos of discontinuous subjectivity than to a pious attempt to purge the terms

196

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

human and humanity of what we would like to believe are non-human (or, conversely, alltoo-human) tendencies: self-interest, for instance, or the will to power." See her "Henry V and the Paradox of the Body Politic," in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps (London: Verso, 1995), 292-319. 14. An Homily against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion (London, 1570). 15. James I, "A Speach to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at White-Hall, on Wednesday 21 March 1609," in The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard Mcllwain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), 307-8. 16. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 2. 17. See my "'Blood will have blood': Power, Performance, and Lady Macbeth's Gender Trouble," f: A Journal in Culture and Criticism 2, no. 2 (1998): 179-207. Julia Kristeva observes that when "women have assumed commercial, industrial, and cultural power [that] has not changed the nature of this power... . The women who have been promoted to positions of leadership and who have suddenly obtained economic (as well as narcissistic) advantages that had been refused to them for thousands of years are the same women who become the strongest supporters of the current regimes, the guardians of the status quo, and the most fervent protectors of the established order" (214-15). Kristeva approaches events in Eastern Europe, Germany, and Chile as I would like to approach Goneril and Regan's political practices and deployments of a power that proves resilient in its reiteration regardless of the gender of its subjects. See New Afaladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 18. King Lear (I.i.89), in The Riverside Shakespeare, éd. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). All further references to King Lear will be to this edition and cited parenthetically in the text. However, I have deleted the editorial brackets used in this edition; all brackets used in quotations of King Lear are my own. 19. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 116; Mark J. Blechner, "King Lear, King Leir, and Incest Wishes," American Imago 45, no. 3 (1988): 309-25; Kahn, "Absent Mothers," 3349; Mark Taylor, Shakespeare's Darker Purpose: A Question of Incest (New York: AMS Press, 1982); and Kay Stockholder, "Sex and Authority in Hamlet, King Lear, and Pericles," Mosaic 23, no. 3 (1985): 17-29, agree that Lear's "darker purpose" is a reflection of his desire to keep Cordelia under his control. For discussions of Lear's reaction to Cordelia's "Nothing," see Jeffrey Stern, "King Lear. The Transference of the Kingdom," Shakespeare Quarterly 41, no. 3 (1990): 299-308; and McEachern, "Fathering Herself," 269-90. 20. Johannes Allgaier focuses on Lear's authority over his daughters in the love test. See "Is King Lear an Antiauthoritarian Play?," PMLA 88, no. 5 (1973): 1033-39. That King Lear is an anti-authoritarian play is my point; however, I extend that argument from the authority of a father over his daughters to argue that the play as a whole uncovers authority in its uniquely patrilineal and monarchical form as destructive and violent in nature. 21. See Valesio, Novantiqua, 41-60 passim. 22. See Dreher, Domination and Defiance, 64; and Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), especially 134-42. 23. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, "King Lear and the Royal Progress: Social Display in Shakespearean Tragedy," Renaissance Drama 21 (1990): 243-61, 247. 24. See McFarland, "Image of the Family," 100, 104. 25. In a fascinating Lacanian reading of King Lear, Tamise Van Pelt argues that "Lear's impossible, insatiable desire to 'retain/ The name, and all th' addition to a king' while

Looking for Goneril and Regan

197

dividing 'the sway, revenue, execution of the rest' between Albany and Cornwall (Li. 13537) separates the name of the King from the power of kingship, separates the signifying 'addition' glossed as 'honors and prerogatives'... from the imposition of the law, and separates the nom (the signifier which encodes the law) from the non (the phallic prohibition which enforces the law). To the horror of his court, Lear performs ritualistic self-castration. When Lear gives up the phallus, he reveals to everyone the gap between the chain of signification and the chain of drive on which castration locates itself in the unconscious. This gap, once sutured by Lear's kingship, now yawns wide with the loss of the king as a phallic referent" (100-1). Clearly, Lear's conflict with Goneril in Act I.iv dramatizes a struggle over who precisely has become that phallic referent. See "Entitled to Be King: The Subversion of the Subject in King Lear," Literature and Psychology 42, no. 1-2(1996): 100-12. 26. In "Women, Centaurs, and Devils in King Lear" Hoover reads Lear's vision of women as centaurs as a symptom of his association of his daughters with sexual pollution — an association that also includes references to Eve, witchcraft, and death. But Hoover's conclusion that Lear ultimately succeeds in rejecting that misogyny "as a necessary prelude to his reunion with his daughter Cordelia" reads that reunion with more optimism than I can (349). Adelman's analysis of Lear's misogyny in this scene is more persuasive (Suffocating Mothers 103-29). 27. Gayle Whittier, "Cordelia as Prince: Gender and Language in King Lear" Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 1, no. 2 (1989): 367-99, 372. Whittier's article offers an important analysis of the specter of the female body that haunts the play and exposes patriarchal nausea at female sexuality. In contrast to my argument, however, she maintains that nausea is evidence of Shakespeare's misogyny (367, 368). 28. On the threat Goneril and Regan perceive in Lear's retainers, Tennenhouse notes that "[wjhen Lear resigns the throne, the retainers operate only as the symbols of a power once located in Lear. Detached from the legitimate right to exercise power, they suddenly pose a potential threat to legitimate authority" (Power on Display 136). 29. See Barbara C. Millard, "Virago with a Soft Voice: Cordelia's Tragic Rebellion in King Lear," Philological Quarterly 68, no. 2 (1989): 143-65, 150-53 passim. 30. Significantly, Valesio notes in regard to Cordelia's arrival with a French army, that "we think we are wise and moral because we blame Goneril and Regan, because we 'see through' their scheming. ...[yet] the bulk of the army has been lying in ambush... thus [we have not realized] that Cordelia's scheming has escaped us" (Novantiqua 58). 31. For accounts of treason and uses of torture in Renaissance England, see James Heath, Torture and English Law: An Administrative and Legal History from the Plantagenets to the Stuarts (London: Greenwood, 1982); and Elizabeth Hanson, "Torture and Truth in Renaissance England," Representations 34 (Spring 1994): 53-84. 32. See Robert Matz, "Speaking What We Feel: Torture and Political Authority in King Lear" Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6, no. 1 (1994): 223-11, 223. 33. I use the phrase "performance of gender" in this sentence in Butler's sense as she investigates it in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 34. On the intersection between adultery and women's transgressive agency, particularly murder of the husband, see Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550—1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), especially 38^8.

198

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

35. Thus I cannot agree with Dympna Callaghan's reading of the sisters' deaths as silent, though she also argues that the women "undermine the centrality of the male tragic hero... if [the plot] can be said to have a centripetal force... [it] moves not inward and upward towards the tragic hero, but rather towards the void at its center, which has been, from the first, the axis of its revolutions." See Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy: A Study of "King Lear," "Othello," "The Duchess of Malfl," and "The White Devil" (New York: Harvester, 1989), 87. 36. Catherine Belsey, Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985; New York: Routledge, 1993), 124-25. 37. See Anne M. Haselkorn, "Sin and the Politics of Penitence: Three Jacobean Adulteresses," in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, eds. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 119-36. 38. See Cavell's analysis of Gloucester who, he argues, "recognizes the moral claim upon himself... 'to acknowledge' his bastard; but all this means to him is that he acknowledge he has a bastard for a son. He does not acknowledge him, as a son or as a person, with his feelings of illegitimacy and being cast out... . Gloucester's] shame... is shown... by the fact that [he] has to joke about [Edmund]: Joking is a familiar specific for brazening out shame, calling enlarged attention to the thing you do not want naturally noticed" (Disowning Knowledge 48, 49). Cavell's sympathy with the bastard Edmund does not extend to Goneril and Regan, however. For Cavell, Regan is "evil" (53) and her "mind is itself a lynchmob" (63). 39. Gillian Murray Kendall notes that Edgar's entrance begins the play's return to order. "Ritual and Identity: The Edgar-Edmund Combat in King Lear," in True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, eds. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Barry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 240-55, 241. 40. Morris Henry Partee, "Edgar and the Ending of King Lear" Studia Neophilologica 63(1991): 175-80, 175. 41. See Valesio, who argues that "[t]he tragedy is that none of the three factions (the king, Goneril and Regan, Cordelia) succeeds in its intent, and the scepter falls from their grip after all of them have scrambled in blood and desperation to conquer it" (Novantiqua 59). 42. Consequently, Goneril and Regan do not "imperfectly replicate [Lear]," as Adelman argues (Suffocating Mothers 108); they replicate him quite perfectly.

Index A Midsummer Night's Dream 142, 143 Abate, Corinne S. 1-17, 31–44 Adorno, Theodor 67 adult, child, conflicts 133-5, 137-8, 142 Alfar, Cristina León 10, 167-198 anatomy, theatre of 75-8 appearances, importance of 34 architecture, domestic, and domestic sphere 36 Aries, Philippe Passions of the Renaissance 34 and privacy 31, 40 Aristotle 6

Butler, Judith 47, 53, 57, 184, 191 on power 172-3, 174, 185-6 Candido, Joseph 37 Canino, Catherine G 10, 111-128 Caruth, Cathy 54 Cavanagh, Sheila T. 10, 151-165 Cavendish, Margaret 5-6 and female alliances 7-8 food allegories, use 90-2 poems 'A Bisk for Nature's Table' 88-9, 90, 106 'A Dissert'108-9 'A Heart drest' 108 'A Hodge-Podge for Natures Table' 91-2, 107-8 'A Posset for Natures Breakfast' 90, 107 'A Tart' 90, 106-7 'Head, and Braines' 108 'Nature's Landskip' 84-5, 88, 105-6 and the poetic blazon 88-9, 90, 92-3 The Convent of Pleasure 98 Cecil, Robert 113 child, adult, conflicts 133-5, 137-8, 142 childish behavior and Astrophil and Stella 140-1 and poetry 140 Comensoli, Viviana 36, 39, 40 commodification, The Taming of the Shrew 32, 35

Barton, Anne 65, 78 Bateson, Gregory 134, 135 Bean, John C. 37 Belsey, Catherine, on suicide 188 Benson, E.F., Mapp and Lucia 89 Berger, Harry 4 Blayney, Glenn H. 66-7, 71 blazon, poetic and Andrew Marvell 91 and John Donne 86, 87-8 and love poetry 83-5 and Margaret Cavendish 88-9, 90, 92-3 meaning 84 Nancy Vickers on 84, 86-7 and The Comedy of Errors 87 and The Rape of Lucrèce 86 body, material and ideal 57 Boehrer, Bruce Thomas 177 Bold, John 36 Boyd, Michael 65

199

200

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

convents as female communities 98-9 and privacy, pre-Reformation 93 coverture, and women 48 Cressy, David 3

Ephron, Nora, Heartburn 90 estate dual meaning 45, 49, 51, 55 of loss 46-7, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60

Danson, Lawrence 38 Davies, Stevie 115 Davis, Natalie Zemon 78 diary keeping, and privacy 40 'distinguish', meaning 2 divine right in Henry V 171 James I on 171 and monarchy 171 m Richard III 171-2 Dolan, Frances 2, 5 Dollimore, Jonathan 75, 168, 188-190 domestic sphere and domestic architecture 36 as 'indistinguished space' 5 and patriarchy 4-5 see also interiority; privacy; private sphere Donne, John, and the poetic blazon 86, 87-8 Drake, Francis 142 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 137, 141

façade, interiority as 25-6 Fairfax family 93, 94 Felman, Shoshana 57 Fielding, Emma 65, 66, 78 Fienberg, Nona 60 food allegories Margaret Cavendish 90-2 and men 92 and women 90-2 food refusal, and women 74 Ford, John The Broken Heart 10 modern production 65 plot 66 and trafficking of women 67-8, 78 Fraser, Nancy 39 Friedman, Alice T. 3 Frye, Susan, Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens 1 Fumerton, Patricia, Renaissance Culture and the Everyday 6

Elizabeth I and The Faerie Queene 111-12, 114-15, 137 Louis Montrose on 113 as mother of her people 131-7 Pope Sixtus V on 112 privy chamber 5 successor, failure to name 112-13, 118, 125 England, early modern primogeniture 48 property rights 47 women's 48, 55 Englebrecht, Penelope 85

Garber, Marjorie 182 Gay, Peggy, As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women 66 Greenblatt, Stephen 142 Renaissance Self-Fashioning 113-14 Greene, Robert 137 Greville, Fulke 139, 143 Grey, Catherine 112 Gutierrez, Nancy A. 10, 65-81 Habermas, Jürgen The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphered theory of spherical construction 31-2, 36, 39

Index

Henry F, and divine right 171 Herbert, Mary 9 Hoby, Margaret, Lady, diary 8 An Homily Against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion 170, 173 Hopkins, Lisa 9, 21-30 Howard, Jean 36, 39 identities male, and The Faerie Queene 114, 115-25 material and ideal 45 'indistinguished space' domestic sphere as 5 Kenneth Muir on 1 and King Lear 1 meanings 1-2 and patriarchy 2 value 8 Ingram, Martin 71 Anteriority and The Duchess of Malfi 2l-3, 29 as façade 25-6 female 23-4 male 24-5 and The Taming of the Shrew 31, 37 transparency of 26-9 see also domestic sphere; privacy; private sphere James I, on divine right 171 James VI 113, 136 Jankowski, Theodora A. 10, 83-109 Kahn, Coppélia 35 Kamps, Ivo 167 Kastan, David Scott 169 Kelly-Gadol, Joan 4 King Lear and female power 168-70, 172, 173, 174-5, 177-88, 191-3 and 'indistinguished space' 1 Knollys, Lettice 133

201

Knowles, James 7 Knox, John, The First Blast of the Trumpet... 112 Krier, Theresa 137, 138 Lamb, Mary Ellen 49 land and marriageability 48 women, allegory 86, 97 Lanyer, Amelia, The Description of Cookham' 7 legal metaphors, and love 48-9 Leonardi, Susan J., on recipes 89-90 Loewenstein, Joseph 136 love and legal metaphors 48-9 and marriage 83 love poetry and the blazon 83-5 subject and object 83, 85, 88 Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince 133 McLuskie, Kathleen 67-8, 78 Margoliouth, H.M. 95 Marlowe, Christopher 137 marriage, and love 83 marriage contracts 71 marriageability, and land 48 marriages, arranged, in The Broken Heart 68-9, 70-1 Marvell, Andrew and the poetic blazon 91 'Upon Appleton House' 93, 94-7 and women 97-8 masculinity, and power 173, 190-1 Masten, Jeffrey 55 Mazzola, Elizabeth 1-17, 131-149 melancholy 74 men destiny, in The Countess of Montgomery's Urania 152-3, 155-6, 157, 163 and food allegories 92

202

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

identity, and The Faerie Queene 114, 115-25 interiority 24-5 Miller, David Lee 114 Moisan, Thomas 35, 38 monarchy and divine right 171 and power 173-4 monasteries, and privacy 94 Montrose, Louis 4, 167 on Elizabeth I 113 More, Thomas, Sir, Utopia 133 Muir, Kenneth, on 'indistinguished space' 1 Murray, Mary 47 Nashe, Thomas 137 Newman, Karen 32, 67 Novy, Marianne L. 36, 37 Nun Appleton house 93-4 Orlin, Lena Cowen 7, 32 Oxford, Earl of, and Sir Philip Sidney 141 Pacino, Al, Looking for Richard 167 Paglia, Camilla 121 Parker, Roszika 3 Partee, Morriss Henry 189 patriarchy and the domestic sphere 4-5 and 'indistinguished space' 2 Perkins, William, Of Christian Economy or Household Government 72 Perret, Marion D. 39 Philips, Katherine 6 poetics, Sir Philip Sidney 138 poetry and childish behavior 140 in The Countess of Montgomery's Urania 57-8 Pollock, Griselda 3

possession 49-51 and the 'symbolic economy' 51, 52, 56, 59 power feminine, in King Lear 168-70, 172, 173, 174-5, 177-88, 191-3 Judith Butler on 172-3, 174, 185-6 and masculinity 173, 190-1 and monarchy 173—4 Pratt, Kathryn 10, 45-62 primogeniture, early modern England 48 privacy and convents, pre-Reformation 93 development 36 and diary keeping 40 Lawrence Stone on 3 meaning 5-6, 38 and monasteries 94 Orest Ranum on 38 and Philippe Aries 31, 40 and Shakespeare 36 and The Winter's Tale 4, 6 and utopia 4 and Virginia Woolf 7 and women 4, 7 see also domestic sphere; interiority; private sphere private sphere as female preserve 39 public sphere, demarcation 31-2, 36, 39 and The Taming of the Shrew 39 see also domestic sphere; interiority; privacy privy chamber, Elizabeth I 5 property rights early modern England 47 women's 48, 55 and wills 55, 69 public sphere as male preserve 39 private sphere, demarcation 31-2, 36, 39

Index

and The Taming of the Shrew 33 and women 3 Quilligan, Maureen 57, 58, 60, 114, 116-17, 120, 123, 138 Rackin, Phyllis 36, 39 Raleigh, Walter, Edmund Spenser, correspondence 111 Ranum, Orest, on privacy 38 Rebhorn, Wayne A. 39 recipes sharing, social context 89-90 Susan J. Leonardi on 89-90 Richard III, and divine right 171-2 Roberts, Sasha 5, 8 Robertson, Karen, Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens 1 Rose, Mary Beth 68 Rowbotham, Sheila 3 Shakespeare, William, and privacy 36 Sidney, Philip, Sir career 142 and the Earl of Oxford 141 poetics 138 works Astrophil and Stella 132-3, 138-9 and childish behavior 140-1 The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia 49, 57-8 The Defence of the Earl of Leicester 141 The Defence of Poetry 139, 141 The Lady of 'May 134 Sidney, Robert 4-5, 59 Sixtus V, Pope, on Elizabeth 1112 Southwell, Robert 137 Spenser, Edmund 'Epithalamion' 84 Walter Raleigh, correspondence 111 see also The Faerie Queene

203

spherical construction, theory, Jürgen Habermas 31-2, 39 Sprengnether, Madelon 169-70 Stone, Lawrence, on privacy 3, 187 Stuart, Arabella 112 Stubbes, Philip, A Crystal Glass for Christian Women 73 subject, and object love poetry 83, 85, 88 in The Broken Heart 67 suicide, Catherine Belsey on 188 supernatural, in The Countess of Montgomery's Urania 151, 156—7, 158-63 'symbolic economy' meaning 45-6 and possession 51, 52, 56, 59 The Taming of the Shrew commodification 32, 35 and interiority 31, 37 and the private sphere 39 and the public sphere 33 The Broken Heart arranged marriages in 68-9, 70-1 subject and object in 67 The Comedy of Errors, and the poetic blazon 87 The Duchess of Malfi, and Anteriority 21-3, 29 The Faerie Queene and Elizabeth I 111-12, 114-15, 137 and male identity 114, 115-25 and women's rule 111-12 The Rape of Lucrèce, and the poetic blazon 86 The Winter's Tale 143 and privacy 4, 6 Thomas, Keith 136 Thwaites, Isabel 94-5, 96-7, 99 trespass, meanings 48 Trill, Suzanne 9

204

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

utopia, and privacy 4 Vesalius, Andreas, De Humani Corporis Fabrica 75 Vickers, Nancy, on the poetic blazon 84, 86-7 Vives, Joannes Ludovico 72 Walsingham, Francis 136, 141 Warnicke, Retha 32, 40 Wentworth, Peter 113 Whetstone, George 112 Whittier, Gayle 181 widowhood 72 Williams, Kathleen 115 wills, and property rights 55, 69 Wiltenberg, Joy 2 Winnicott, D.W. 132, 133 women alliances, and Margaret Cavendish 7-8 and coverture 48 and food allegories 90-2 and food refusal 74 interiority 23-4 as land, allegory 86, 97 and power, in King Lear 168-70, 172, 173, 174-5, 177-88, 191-3

and privacy 4, 7 property rights, early modern England 48, 55 and the public sphere 3 rule of, and The Faerie Queene 111-12 separate spheres 3 trafficking of, in The Broken Heart 67-8, 78 in 'Upon Appleton House' 97-8 Woolf, Virginia 2 and privacy 7 Wroth, Mary, Lady debts 59-60 The Countess of Montgomery's Urania 7, 10 date composed 59 and male destiny 152-3, 155-6, 157, 163 poetry in 57-8 and the romantic genre 49 the supernatural in 151, 156—7, 158-63 Wroth, Robert 59 Ziegler, Georgianna 5 Zizek, Slavoj 54