Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

by Marea Mitchell

  If we take, for example, the character of Urania we can see how specific changes Weamys makes alter the narrative dynamics of the text.

  As we argued in the first chapter, Sidney’s Urania is one of the most dependent on stereotypes, and one of the least developed.14 In Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania, she becomes part of the exploration of ‘interior selfhood’,15 and of the possibilities for female action, however fragmen-tarily represented. In a third manifestation, in Weamys’s Continuation, Urania seems, at a surface level, to be the epitome of the passive heroine. Pursued left, right, and centre by ardent admirers (including Claius, Strephon, Antaxius, and Lacemon), Urania declares it contrary to her disposition ‘to accept of the least motion concerning a married life’ (p. 75), as befits the representative of celestial or virtuous love, and by the end of Weamys’s text she still seems sufficiently disinterested in her own affairs to hand over the decision of choice of husband to Pyrocles and Musidorus. It would be hard on a simple summary of her case to find a more straightforward example of a heroine not deciding her own fate, but Urania’s circumstances can be seen to be rather more complex in two different ways. First, Urania’s actions consistently demonstrate a keen sense of pragmatism, rather than passivity or inaction – resistance to something rather than apathy towards everything –

  and second, the princes’ choice for Urania is over-determined – that is, it can be seen to address more than one textual and moral concern. It is determined by a sense of what Urania deserves, by narrative expectations, and by readerly anticipation, so the choice is hardly arbitrary or indifferent to Urania’s best interest. What remains in question is how much Urania can be said to be conscious of this, an issue we come to later.

  From the outset Urania is beset by admirers, and by familiar obligations. Her parents would have her marry the rich herdsman Antaxius, a prospect that Urania sees as ‘Too great a burden for me to bear …

  Antaxius is too officious in his love, I wish he were more calm; my parents’ rigor is too too intolerable, unless my disobedience had been palpable’ (p. 88). What Urania discloses here is less indifference than an acknowledgement of the dilemma. She does not reciprocate

  80 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre Antaxius’s love, but cannot directly gainsay parental authority. Under these circumstances she casts herself on God’s mercy to support her in tumultuous times. Kidnapped by Antaxius, pursued by Lacemon, Urania is very much a kind of ‘assaulted and pursued chastity’, envisaged in 1656 by Margaret Cavendish. Two kinds of aid come to her.

  First, Strephon and Claius rescue her and dispatch her abductors, and second, her parents die, ensuring her the ‘liberty to dispose of her self’

  (p. 103). Urania’s disposition to live alone, however, brings only short-lived peace, acknowledging the precariousness of an unattached woman without male guardians. Urania will always be susceptible to passing male admirers, and it is this realization that brings her out of confinement to seek the judgement of the princes. Specifically, Urania wants to end the rivalry between one-time friends Claius and Strephon, without being seen to exercise any choice in the matter herself – without, in her terms, ‘derogating from my honour by censorious suspicions’ (p. 80). The rivalry between Claius and Strephon is compounded by personal antagonism, incited by jealousy of a third suitor, who is in Strephon’s words ‘presumed to gaze upon Urania’.

  Claius’s response is more recriminatory and proprietorial: the unnamed stranger, ‘a haughty youth’, ‘did so amorously seal his eyes upon her that sundry times he made her paint her cheeks with harmless blushes: and my jealous fancy comprehending no other reason than that as he obtained free access with his eyes, so he might with his person’ (p. 81, our emphasis). This is all along what Urania has feared: here are the ‘censorious suspicions’ that her plan to marry will remove.

  Seen in this light, Urania has pragmatically weighed up the situation and resolved that, even free from her parents’ misguided intentions, she will not be safe from unwanted attentions, and subsequently from the unwarranted perceptions of her behaviour by other people. Given the circumstances of virtue under constant, annoying, and malevolent pursuit, redress to the wisdom of princes seems less an act of passivity or apathy than a shrewd and worldly-wise resort.

  Now there are only two possible ends for Urania, marriage to Claius or marriage to Strephon. Throughout the text, in what the title page calls ‘the Historie of the Loves of Old Claius and Young Strephon to Urania’, far more of the narrative has been given to Strephon, aligning him more consistently with the story-telling powers of the princes.

  Exceptions to this only provide Claius with space to exhibit his inappropriateness, such as in the example given above that incriminates him in voicing the ‘censorious suspicions’ feared and anticipated by Urania from strangers. This outburst doubly condemns Claius. First, it

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  reveals him as jealous, and jealousy has been associated with selfish, rather than disinterested love, as attested in Antaxius’s fury against Urania’s confidant, the sparrow, which results in him murdering it.

  And second, suspicions from someone as well versed in Urania’s virtues as Claius is understood to be are unacceptable, irrational, and unjust.

  Furthermore, from the outset, signalled on the title page, one of Claius’s main disadvantages is clear: his age. While youth is not necessarily a sufficient characteristic of an appropriate lover, age is nevertheless far from an advantage. At various points Claius’s actions recall the buffoon, in associating age with physical incompetence, and are accompanied by direct narrative comment: ‘At this Claius, as if he had been revived, ventured to jump, but his heels served him a trick, teach-ing him to kiss his mother Earth, as more suitable to his ancient years than a young shepherdess was’ (p. 83). This recalls the behaviour of another aged lover, Basilius, and the connection is compounded in the text by Basilius’s direct endorsement of Claius – the kiss of death, if ever there were one. Basilius’s support for Claius resonates with language and imagery likely to have an adverse effect on readers and princes alike:

  ‘Despise not Claius his complaints though he be afflicted with the infirmities of old age; youthful Strephon may seem more real and pleasing to the eye, yet Claius’s heart, I am confident, is the firmest settled; youth is wavering, age is constant; youth admires novelties, age antiquities. Claius hath learned experience by age to delight Urania with such fancies as may be suitable to her disposition; Strephon’s tender years cannot attain to any knowledge but as his own genius leads him. Wherefore consider before you denounce your sentence, whether Urania may not be Claius’s spouse better than Strephon’s.’ (p. 77)

  While Prince Pyrocles’s polite reply preserves decorum and the understanding of what is due to Basilius from a subject, he clearly understands ‘that Basilius’s aim was to plead in defence of dotage’ (p. 77).

  Lest readers have forgotten, or do not know of Basilius’s prior history in Sidney’s Arcadia, Pyrocles is there to remind them that Basilius’s current advocacy of Claius is related to his guilt in the earlier story:

  ‘he hath not’, says Pyrocles, ‘unburdened his conscience yet of his amorousness of me in my Amazon’s metamorphosis’ (p. 78). Compounding all this are reminders of Claius’s physical infirmity, and shortly afterwards Claius falls down, faints, and ‘ghastfully lay foaming

  82 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre on the ground’ (p. 79). Claius is clearly not an appropriate husband for Urania, and this point is made throughout the text. Readers other than those with vested interests of their own such as Basilius’s could come to no other conclusion. For our purposes, the significance of this lies in the suggestion that far from passively giving up control of her future to others, Urania has sensibly entrusted herself to those who will choose appropriately.

  Claius dies – breathing Urania’s name – even before the multiple nuptials that end Weamys’s story
can take place. That same morning the dead body of Philisides is found similarly expired, ‘yet not by any other practices than a deep melancholy that overpressed his heart’

  (p. 104). It is this conjunction that is most suggestive of the broad shifts and subtle changes that are taking place within romance.

  Philisides is understood to figure forth the person of Sidney himself16

  and the act of bringing him in, dead, at the end of the story is particularly ambiguous, as Patrick Cullen remarks. It can ‘be read in terms of an agonistic literary relation: the strong poet is murdered by the belated one, her triumph over his incompleteness asserted by the emphatic completeness of her own multiple endings’; it may be an act

  ‘memorial and celebratory’;17 it may also be ‘romantic’ (p. lv). Yet if it is romantic rather than heroic, as Cullen suggests, then it also stands slightly at odds with the rest of the story and the way it works, and it is hard to see how the death of Philisides is not in some way tarnished through contact with the demise of Claius. Both are interred in the same tomb, specifically at Philisides’s request: ‘My ambition is to have the tears of the Arcadian beauties shed at my funeral and sprinkled on my hearse; and when my body is so magnificently embalmed, let it be interred with Claius’s: two lovers, both finishing their lives for their mistresses’ sake’ (p. 104). The tone of the ending, while ostensibly reverent and regretful, nevertheless jars with the otherwise pragmatic understandings that dominate the previous representations of Urania’s situation. These two figures who die, if not directly from love, then at least from melancholy, seem part of an older scheme, out of keeping with the kinds of political understandings demonstrated by Musidorus and Pyrocles, Wroth’s Pamphilia, and, we would argue, by Weamys’s Urania herself.

  From this perspective it is possible to see Urania as far from passively accepting what happens to her, or as tossed on the waves of arbitrary fate. She understands the importance of finding ways of escaping her situation ‘without blemishing [her] owne reputation’, of achieving marriage ‘without derogating from [her] honor by censorious suspi-

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  cions’ (p. 80), and of avoiding situations that ‘might redound to her prejudice’ (p. 103). That these awarenesses are often phrased in the negative – ‘without blemishing’, ‘without derogating’ – suggests active resistance rather than inaction or passivity. In this sense Urania can be seen as exercising a kind of minimum level of activity to achieve a result that, while not necessarily reflecting any directly stated desire of her own, nevertheless accords with fundamental narrative and readerly expectations. Two further examples from Weamys’s text, discussed rather more briefly, illustrate our argument that Weamys is deliberately revisiting Sidney’s text to reposition her female characters in happier positions yet still aware of the necessity of maintaining women’s complementarity to men rather than independence from them.

  As well as alluding to the loves of Claius, Strephon and Urania on the title page, Weamys also singles out the stories of two sets of lovers left stranded in Sidney’s Arcadia: Plangus and Erona, and Helena and Amphialus. The story of Plangus and Erona is complex. Erona, as her name suggests, mistakenly settles her affections on Antiphilus, and marries him, only to be a victim of his deceitful machinations to apprise himself of Artaxia, a woman who schemes for both her sexual and political desires. Weamys’s text redeems Erona, however, and rewards the long term loyalty of her suitor Plangus by bringing them together. To avoid any active desire on Erona’s part – she has, after all, made the monumental error of choosing Antiphilus for herself – Erona is advised, again by the princes, to take up with Plangus. They recommend ‘him to her for her husband as soon as the greatest monarch in the world’, a recommendation she not surprisingly accepts, acknowledging herself ‘bound by so many obligations to [them] that I cannot suffer my requital to be a refusal’ (p. 63). Here it is worth observing that Weamys has altered the story from its basis in Sidney’s Arcadia.

  Erona’s ‘erotic past’ is sanitized, and in Weamys’s version Plangus is the constant suitor to a woman abused by her husband and the wilful woman, Artaxia.18 Her initial refusal to countenance Plangus’s revival of his suit is based on her sense that he failed to help her before and may betray her again. His explanation of events of which she was unaware seems about to soften her resolve when the princes break into the discussion, thus avoiding the necessity of her accepting him without external authority and encouragement. Again, a situation devoutly to be wished is achieved through seeming acquiescence rather than specific activity on the part of the female character.

  A final example from Weamys’s Continuation takes us into slightly different territory in terms of how a satisfactory ending is achieved, but

  84 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre continues the exploration of women’s desire and constraints upon it.

  Helena’s love for Amphialus is an example in Sidney’s text of constant and continued (though unrequited) devotion against the odds, and is complicated by her shadowing of Queen Elizabeth I. Amphialus is fatally smitten with his cousin Philoclea and unwittingly the cause of her torture at the hands of his mother, the scheming Cecropia. In Sidney’s text Helena’s situation is hopeless. Weamys, however, quite literally revives the possibilities for a happy ending by having Helena take the body of Amphialus to her surgeons. While Helena’s love for Amphialus is well understood, it is not a case that she can actually plead for herself, except over his unconscious body. ‘[A]s if he could mind her what she said’ (p. 28), Helena at this stage can voice her feelings.

  ‘Tell me, dear Amphialus’, said she, ‘what occasion have I given you to make you hate me? have I not ever honoured and loved you far above my self? O yes! and if I had a thousand lives to lose, I would venture them all for your sake … yet let me counsel you as a faithful friend not to engage your affections to one that is so negligent of it

  [Philoclea], but rather bestow it upon me that will accept of it. Oh hear me, and have pity on me, O Amphialus, Amphialus!’ (p.28) As Amphialus begins to recover, such direct statements are no longer possible for Helena, and she is even advised to absent herself from him lest her sadness inhibit his recovery. ‘In this golden mean of Patience’

  (p. 29), Helena then abides until news arrives of the princesses’ escape from Cecropia’s imprisonment, aided by the princes Pyrocles and Musidorus. Helena’s response to the news that the rival to her love, Philoclea, is betrothed to Pyrocles, is significant. Rather than plead her own case with Amphialus directly (an indignity for the Queen of Corinth), Helena throws herself on the mercy of her fellow woman, Philoclea, beseeching her for compassion for Amphialus and for a particular kind of punishment for him: ‘let me therefore entreat you’, she writes, ‘to shew your compassion to him by mildness, and suffer his punishment may be sincere affection to me’ (p. 36). The difficulties of writing this letter to Philoclea are evident, and Philoclea’s reply to Amphialus diplomatically leaves out the important fact that Helena has directly intervened in the situation. So Philoclea writes to Amphialus forgiving him for what has happened, and invoking him to obey her petition: ‘as a petitioner I humbly crave of you not to refuse Beauty and Honour when it is so virtuously presented to you by

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  the famous Queen Helena, whose lovelines surpasses all others. Therefore if you esteem of me, prove it by entirely loving of her, who, I am sure, will endow you with all such blessings as may enrich your contentment’ (p. 46). Where Pyrocles and Musidorus intervene for Urania and Plangus, Philoclea directly promotes Helena’s interests. How fraught this enterprise is, however, is revealed in one last exchange between Helena and the rather recalcitrant Amphialus, who seems unable to understand the depth of Helena’s feelings. Offering his love to her, Amphialus receives what should be understood as an unequivocal reply: ‘My Lord … there is no cause given here to induce you to renew your grief, if my yielding my self
to your noble disposal may be valued as a sufficient argument to ease you’ (pp. 46–7). Yet Amphialus fails to get the point: ‘if you please to revenge your wrong upon me the instrument, you cannot stab me with a sharper spear than your denial.’

  Helena’s pained response expresses the depth of her feelings, and the difficulties of finding paths through which to pursue it without endangering her reputation: ‘Why’, said Helena, ‘do you force me to repeat my real affections to you so often? is it your jealousy of my constancy?

  if it be that, with thanks to my Goddess Diana, I avouch that I never harbored the least unchaste thought to scandalize or blemish my purity’ (p. 47).

  Safe now within a relationship that Amphialus has declared, Helena can openly state the extent of her devotion, but the difficulties of reaching this point are evident in the indirect means she has had to employ to achieve it (the request to Philoclea to sue on her behalf) and her distress at having to repeat what a more perceptive lover should have understood – ‘Why … do you force me to repeat my real affections to you so often?’ In returning to stories Sidney left unresolved, Weamys indicates her interest in supplying strong and intelligent women with happy endings, and describes the fraught circumstances of independent female desire in contexts where the ability to express that desire is circumscribed. Furthermore, the stories that Weamys continues from Sidney’s Arcadia demonstrate keen interest in how female characters ‘might navigate the straits of female behaviour in a judgemental and partisan society’, as do continuations and adaptations by other writers.19

  Strategies of indirection: Gervase Markham’s Arcadia

  Gervase Markham’s The English Arcadia, Alluding his beginning from Sir Philip Sydneys ending (1607–13), also turns the attention of the

  86 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre reader to the difficulties of designing women who have minds and interests of their own in worlds that position them ambivalently.