More specifically, as Morgan noted, one of the significant things about Arcadia is its shift of interest from adventure to courtship.13
Aside from the specifically literary contexts of Arcadia, we include two other dimensions that relate to the construction of its female characters. The first of these takes in broad political and social contexts, while the second includes the specifically familial, and then we consider the subset that is the interaction between these two arenas as represented in Arcadia. Work by Richard Helgerson and others has outlined the complicated political environment that was the extended world of the Elizabethan courtier and politician.14 While there are many differences between the social status of Sir Philip Sidney and Barnabe Riche, there are also shared experiences that suggest some of the parameters of Elizabethan masculinity. Both enacted public, diplomatic and military roles for Elizabeth and both experienced mixed rewards for so doing. Both were involved in the complex negotiations between England and Ireland, and both were involved in military oper-ations in Zutphen. Like many other men of the time, Riche in particular took up writing as a commercial enterprise, deliberately appealing to women readers, and directly engaging with them and what might be perceived to be their interests. He unashamedly followed fashionable trends in following and imitating Italian sources. Though the differences between Riche and Sidney might be great, in different ways both
Women of Great Wit 29
men turned their hands to writing in a time when it offered new commercial and intellectual possibilities facilitated by humanist interests in learning, and entrepreneurial interests in selling the products of intellectual labour to an expanding market, as did Gervase Markham and Richard Brathwait (whom we come to later) and many others.
In relation to Sidney specifically, the significance of family structures cannot be ignored. As Katherine Duncan-Jones refreshingly comments,
‘the complex ways in which Elizabethan noble families interconnect make the detailed study of their family history extremely confusing.’15
In terms of the immediate production of Arcadia the most significant of these family relations is recognized to be with his sister Mary, the Countess of Pembroke, to whom the text is addressed, and who formed part of its first audience. Much has been written about Mary Herbert, both as patron, and as writer and translator, and the production of the first version of Arcadia at Wilton to amuse her and her immediate circle.16 Arcadia’s first audience, no less than Riche’s or Painter’s, can be expected to have exerted influence over the kind of text that Arcadia became, determined in its case by a coterie of highly educated aristocratic women rather than the more diverse market supplied by a commercial venture. There is also the political dimension of Arcadia and the arguments that it reflects or negotiates Sidney’s complex relationships with the most powerful woman in his life, Elizabeth I.17 While it is not always possible to identify precise connections between a character in the text and a historical figure, it is evident that Arcadia, like many other pastorals, does comment on the political world through a rural veil. As we suggested earlier, it is entirely plausible that Basilius as the misguided leader who abandons his political duty on a wilful personal interpretation of an oracle (despite the best advice of his clearly wiser subordinates) represents a version of the wilful and recalcitrant Elizabeth. As we shall go on to argue below, the main focus of the narrative is not on Basilius’s gender but on the office that he holds and his abrogation of the duties belonging to it. So Basilius can be read as suggesting some of the dimensions of Elizabeth’s position.
Arcadia works with a series of equivalences that ‘figure forth’, as Sidney’s first biographer Fulke Greville wrote, particular ideas and issues, working through suggestion and shadowings rather than precise identifications. So the strength of the passages surrounding Philisides and the Iberian tournament in Arcadia establishes a connection, as Dennis Kay suggests, with Sidney and Elizabeth’s Accession Day tilts, and these textual events invite readers to understand Philisides as sometimes more successful than his historical counterpart. As
30 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre Helgerson puts it, an author who encourages a reader to draw connections between a character and the author, as Sidney surely does in naming Philisides (Phili[p]sid[n]e[y]s), leads us to expect that ‘he wanted to be thought like him’,18 even if the similarities are vague. Kay also argues that just as in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene more than one character can be seen to shadow Elizabeth, so too in Arcadia Helen of Corinth might also be seen as a version of the English monarch, with particular interest for our argument later on. And again, there is the correlation between Sidney’s mother Mary Dudley and Arcadia’s Parthenia where Mary’s real life disfigurement from smallpox appears magically cured in her son’s text. A materially and emotionally devastating experience has its damage reversed and denied in a fictional transmogrification.19 As Maureen Quilligan suggests, ‘Parthenia’s magical healing may represent the son’s wish to erase his mother’s pain.’20
There are many connections to be drawn between particular and general patterns of events in Sidney’s life and background and his Arcadia, but we want to canvass just one more point of connection.
Our interest in Arcadia begins with its depiction of women who resolve to follow their own desires against various kinds of odds, and who, as we suggested before, escape the kinds of stereotypes that dominate prose fiction of the sixteenth century. Sidney’s own romantic relationships have been rather less clearly connected with Arcadia than with Astrophil and Stella for the fairly obvious reason that Stella most clearly refers to Penelope Devereux,21 one of the women Sidney might have married. Prior to Sidney’s lack of success in a projected marriage to Devereux (who married Lord Rich in 1581), Sidney had also been unsuccessful in a proposed union with Ann Cecil who in 1572 married Edward De Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Duncan-Jones’s account of Sidney’s eventual marriage to Frances Walsingham, following her ‘rash contract’ with someone called John Wickerson, suggests how vulnerable and contingent noble marriages could be and how much a woman’s own personal preferences might form part of often volatile arrangements.22 If Penelope Devereux was married to Lord Rich against her will, she had methods of coping with this later, as we shall see, and her own sister precluded such a possibility for herself (including the Earl of Leicester’s plan to marry her to the hapless Philip Sidney) by marrying Thomas Perrot on her own initiative in 1583.
In his own person, and from his own experience, as well as the experience of his circle and his family, Sidney must have been keenly aware of the fraught connections between financial and familial advantage
Women of Great Wit 31
and personal persuasions in the area of courtship and marriage. As we shall see in the next chapter, these connections are even more closely explored in fiction in the work of Sidney’s niece, Lady Mary Wroth.
It is with all of these very complicated historical factors in mind that we begin our investigation of how Sidney’s Arcadia explores the representation of women and female desire.
Gynecia: limiting designs
a woman of great wit, and in truth of more princely virtues than her husband; of most unspotted chastity, but of so working a mind and so vehement spirits as a man may say it was happy she took a good course, for otherwise it would have been terrible. ( NA, p. 76) Kalander’s description of Gynecia in Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia outlines a personal and social problem that is never resolved within that text. It is a problem for Gynecia personally and it has broader social implications. Kalander, the wise elder statesman, here has the role of explaining simultaneously to the newcomers, Pyrocles and Musidorus, and to the reader the strange set of events that has led to the voluntary exile of Basilius, taking his wife and two daughters into the countryside of Arcadia. Kalander’s admiration for Gynecia is tinged with the sense that the same qualities that make Gynecia remarkable and admirable could lead to her downfall. That is, she is a woman of great
wit, wise beyond her gender, and certainly superior to her husband. She is chaste, but passionate and intelligent. This combination of qualities is ‘terrible’, in the full sense of that word, when Gynecia’s vehement spirits get the better of her, and she acts on her desires for Prince Pyrocles.
Gynecia, then, provides an appropriate starting point for a discussion of the designing woman – a woman who acts in her own interests and on her own desires – primarily because she does so without becoming simply a negative exemplum. In what follows we want to explore the tensions between Gynecia’s status as an interesting and complexly developed character, and as a character in error. Her position is unique in sixteenth-century fiction in the part she plays in the broader designs of a text. She provides a good starting point for the examination of women in romance and their negotiation of the diverse demands placed upon them, and for understanding the tensions between the demands of narrative interest and conventions of feminine decorum.
32 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre Kalander’s analysis of Gynecia, beautiful young wife of an older and unwiser husband, suggests that Sidney’s descriptions and ideas of love are influenced by medieval traditions, and yet depart from them.
Gynecia and Basilius’s relationship reprises the stock figures of the old husband and young wife of medieval fabliau: ‘He, being already well stricken in years, married a young princess named Gynecia … of notable beauty’ ( NA, p. 76). Basilius, in particular, has connections back to Chaucer’s January, indicating his indebtedness to the emblem of clown and fool, both emotionally and physically,23 primarily in his fantastical courtship of the Amazon ‘Zelmane’, who is in fact the Prince Pyrocles disguised.24 Basilius can be seen partly as stock comic characterization but it is the comparison between Basilius and Gynecia that is Sidney’s invention and that significantly alters the tone of the characterization. What begins as comedy edges over into potential tragedy.25 When Gynecia sees through Pyrocles’s Amazonian disguise to the Prince beneath, the tenor of the episodes changes. Her great wit, working mind, and vehement spirits turn comedy into potential tragedy and in Arcadia she stands as one of the most ambiguous explorations of the designing woman. Unlike the absent ideal Urania, she actively pursues the object of her desire. Unlike Artaxia and Cecropia, two other women who take their destinies in their own hands, she is distinguished by a conscience through which she makes it clear to herself and to the audience that what she pursues is inappropriate and morally wrong. As Katherine J. Roberts points out, the reader is invited to understand Gynecia’s position through access to her thoughts and feelings, to the extent that we are given greater access to them than we are to those of either of the two princesses.26 In all manner of ways Gynecia damns herself, by her own mouth and by association with the book’s negative stereotypes, adulterous women and unnatural mothers who put themselves before their children, and with women who deliberately pursue their own desires. Yet this is not the whole story of Gynecia.
The portrayal of Gynecia and Basilius is part of a broader humanist exploration of human potential and frailty, and an extension of Sidney’s courtly and political duties, denied more general political exercise,27 but comparison of husband and wife is also particularly telling in terms of literary hierarchies as outlined by Sidney himself.
Basilius is comic, a fool incapable of government in times of difficulty, damned by Kalander with particularly faint praise as ‘a prince of sufficient skill to govern so quiet a country’ ( NA , p. 75). Metonym-ically, neither can Basilius govern himself, neglecting his duties on his
Women of Great Wit 33
whimsical and wrong-headed interpretation of an oracle, against Philanax’s advice, thus endangering both country and family, and thoughtlessly giving in to his ill-conceived passion for a ‘woman’
who is actually a man. At a broad level Basilius represents the dangers of a political leader who fails to take advice from his counsellors – a situation familiar to Philip Sidney and many others like him.
Gynecia similarly conceives a great passion, but her position is very differently marked within the patterns of the book. Her error is singular, not part of a theme of the character-based mistakes to which Basilius is heir. Apart from this transgression, Gynecia is worthy, indeed is ‘of more princely virtues than her husband’ ( NA, p. 76).
Furthermore, she sees through the false appearances of disguise, and most importantly, in terms of the ethics of the book, and in Sidney’s protestant schema, is distinguished from her husband in that she has a conscience, an ‘erected wit’, that at least attempts to work against her
‘infected will’.28 Basilius foolishly, unselfconsciously, and unthinkingly gives in to his lust for Zelmane, failing to recognize the prince beneath the disguise. Gynecia recognizes the masculine reality beneath the feminine disguise and quite self-consciously acknowledges the error of her desire. Gynecia’s is a ‘dark passion’,29 and she makes Basilius look even sillier by comparison in seeing through the disguise that is opaque to him. Her self-questioning also locates Gynecia within the frequently rehearsed debate between Reason and Passion.30 Or, to put it another way, this debate is one that we, as readers, see taking place within Gynecia herself. In a series of painful self-analyses and acknowledg-ments, Gynecia makes it clear that she knows what she is doing is wrong, and we see the strength of the desire that propels her onwards.
The dilemma couched in abstract terms in the rhetoric of the eclogues is also directly played out in the character of Gynecia in a kind of psychomachia. With antecedents in medieval forms, she illustrates a movement towards psychologically plausible character development and is part of a shift away from symbolic or emblematic representa-tional forms. ‘The notion that the real nature of things shines through their aesthetic representation, rather than being superimposed on them through the addition of symbolic devices’, as Lois Potter argues,
‘is potentially a programme for psychological realism.’31 ‘Clearly this text in no way advocates adultery’, as Mary Ellen Lamb puts it, but ‘its depiction of Gynecia’s tortured soul feelingly represents the agony of her situation.’32
Gynecia knows that in pursuing her adulterous desire for Pyrocles, who is in love with her own daughter, she violates her central roles as
34 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre wife and mother. Time after time she rehearses her dilemma and yet resolves to continue on her path. While Gynecia is part of a tradition of flawed but human figures, what is unique about Gynecia is her gender. It is made very clear in Arcadia, through the use of Gynecia in this way, that the problems that beset human beings in Sidney’s Protestant terms are human, not gender specific. In this context, while Gynecia is particularly interesting, from a modern feminist perspective, in articulating strong feelings, the significance of her gender here is complicated by her close approximation to what is properly princely, and therefore what is inherently masculine. In this sense Gynecia can also be seen to represent Elizabeth I who famously declared in the Tilbury speech of 1588 that if she had ‘the body of a weak and feeble woman’ then she also had the ‘heart and stomach of a king.’ If Basilius represents the dangers of a leader who abdicates his political responsibilities, then Gynecia represents the dangers of a woman struggling with sexual responsibility, endangering her family as Basilius endangers both family and state. Both partners illustrate the follies and dangers of poor government and the correlation between self-government and political control. If Basilius’s fault is greater and entails the situation in which Gynecia finds herself, it is telling that it is Gynecia’s that is treated more seriously and commands greater narrative interest.
At the level of narrative, however, the variations on a theme also testify to the literary invention and rhetorical skills of the gifted author. (‘Now watch me tell the story in a different mode’.) The lines between sexual and political responsibility criss-cross in late sixteenth-century fiction, as do the didactic and the romantic.33
> The inevitable and consistent comparisons of Gynecia’s and Basilius’s behaviour draw attention to the dangers of political leader-ship wilfully subjugated to personal preferences. They also mark Gynecia as a character to be taken seriously.34 ‘Sidney treats Basilius as comic character – the foolish old man in the throes of love –’, as Roberts suggests, ‘while Gynecia is always tragic.’35 This is particularly significant given Sidney’s own work on literary value and the distinctions he makes between comedy and tragedy. The comic, for Sidney, had its own purposes and was not to be denigrated: ‘comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life [represented] … in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be. So as it is impossible, that any beholder can be content to be such a one.’36 Here is Basilius – the fool who cannot tell that the Amazon is a prince, and has no sense of his own foolishness. He is marked as hubristic, and as unable to govern and understand his feelings and his country, unable to tell a hawk
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from a handsaw, whichever way the wind is blowing. Gynecia’s character, in contrast, is marked as tragic, and serves a different purpose from Basilius’s comedy. As Sidney argues in the ‘Apology’, it is ‘the high and excellent tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers … that with stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration, teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded.’37
A comparison of Old Arcadia and New Arcadia is instructive in illustrating how Gynecia’s character is developed by Sidney in his revisions of his original work and how she is associated with the tragic as understood by Sidney. While, as Helen Hackett argues, many of the central issues raised by Gynecia are present in Old Arcadia, 38 there are two key changes made by Sidney that alter the tone, significance, and affect of Gynecia’s roles. First, while Kalander’s description in New Arcadia sounds a note of warning about what might happen to Gynecia, in Old Arcadia her character is announced with a much clearer sense of the end to which it will come, and with a much firmer tone of judgement from narrator to reader. So here Gynecia is
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