Declaring her intention to join the convent ‘the second day after your receipt of these’ (p.182), Panthalia deceives the nuns, anticipating that Alocasto will save her in the nick of time:
though She could not be confident of the issue, whereto her intendments were addressed; her Care accompanied with much Secrecy, so fitly prepared; as the grounds of her designe promised faire, howsoever the event might second it. (p. 194)
Brathwait’s narrative is ambivalent about the morality of Panthalia’s actions, and the successful conclusion relies, once again, less on Panthalia’s devious conceits than on ‘divine Fate’ (p. 215). On the verge of being accepted into the convent, Panthalia is asked by the Agent of Ceremonies a question intended to be rhetorical: ‘To whom are you pleased that I shall give you’ (p. 217). Panthalia sidesteps the response expected of her, as she turns to Alocasto and says ‘To this Gentleman … for He has the greatest interest in me.’ This is an astonishing move by Panthalia. The convent is extremely annoyed at the
‘gross deluding’, and Panthalia’s argument that only her prior commitment to Alocasto prevented her ‘resolution to religion’ (p. 217) is only partially convincing to her audience. As the narrator wryly remarks:
‘This ingenuous acknowledgement might seem to allay, but not wholly to cure this indignity’ (p. 218). Readers’ judgements might be even more sceptical, given the superior knowledge they have, yet the text has established the difficulties of women in pursuit of love. While Panthalia in male disguise asserts: ‘That wench for me, and none but shee, / That’s neither froward nor too free (p. 157), this rhetorical convention is undercut by another woman’s sense of the impossibility of these contradictory behests: ‘How pittifully are we weak woman tax’d, to be forward, froward, coy, or what not? Whereas you subtile men be those Coy-duckes that lure us’ (p. 158). The irony of one woman lamenting the constraints on female behaviour to another (disguised as
94 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre a man) who is elaborately involved in bypassing those constraints would surely not be lost on readers.
These portraits of intelligent and resourceful women also indicate the fault lines that occur between conflicting pressures, between the imperatives of narrative interest and the social injunctions not to step beyond the lines of feminine decorum so often represented by a failure of strategies to work out as their inventor intended. The tangles that female characters get into illustrates how difficult it is to determine just how far a woman can or should go without endangering her reputation or her narrative credibility. If an early modern female protagonist does not want to be obedient to the will of her father regarding her marriage, or, as is so often the case in Urania, changes her affections from her husband to another, then she is often forced into or chooses elaborate stratagems, as we have seen, to further her ends without public censure. This necessarily results in engaging in false seeming.
That is, time after time, the female protagonist says something not entirely accurate about the state of her feelings or her intentions.
Cecropia, the arch enemy of love and good government in Arcadia, advises her son to take Philoclea by force, arguing that ‘“No” is no negative in a woman’s mouth’ ( NA, p. 533), and at least partly bases her argument on the constraints placed on women about speaking their feelings. Selenissa, in Barclay’s Argenis, uses a similarly sinister logic.
Taken into Radirobanes’s confidence, she offers him this advice:
[Radirobanes] is a King, hath an Army, and a Navy, and by rape the gods also have taken to themselves Wiues: loue excuseth rash enter-prizes, and the sacred name of Husband blotteth out inuries: neyther am I cruell against my Nurse-childe, Argenis desires to be forced and for this reason, that she may keepe her word with Poliarchos, to whom she promised never willingly to be married to another. (p. 220)
The significance here is, as the narrator points out, not only that ‘by the fraud and treason of Selenissa, there was a deadly rape intended upon Argenis’, but also that, ‘which was more lamentable’, this is presented ‘as if she had desired it’ (p. 221). Cecropia and Selenissa reveal the invidious logic that lurks beneath the speciousness of their arguments. Readers of a number of seventeenth-century texts know that female characters may not always be telling the truth, and may be indulging in devious stratagems, manipulating events and other characters to achieve ends that may be very desirable. How are male
Stratagems and Seeming Constraints 95
characters to respond to these female protagonists and how do they know when to believe what the heroine says, given that they do not have the insights afforded the privileged reader? How are female characters to pursue their own ends, preserve their chastity, and avoid censorious suspicions, while at the same time avoiding accusations of duplicity and of not saying what they mean? How dangerous are these strategies of indirection? The next chapter takes up these issues of female self-governance and its perceptions in the amatory novel.
4
‘A Scheme of Virtuous Politics’:
Governing the Self in ‘Assaulted
and Pursued Chastity’ (1656),
The History of the Nun (1689),
Love Intrigues (1713), and Love in
Excess (1720)
The politics of amatory fiction
The term ‘amatory fiction’, or sometimes ‘the amatory novel’, is now loosely applied to a diverse range of texts written by women in the period from the mid-seventeenth century to the first few decades of the eighteenth century in which a heady mix of sentimental love and sexual intrigue is let loose in narratives that confront with a new explicitness the predicament of not simply the wooed but also the wooing woman. It is a term that, as David Oakleaf suggests, captures, albeit unintentionally, a certain ambivalence towards the nature of the narrative project in which these writers are engaged. It suggests, for example, that these works, while not synonymous with romance, at least bear a family resemblance – ‘romantic’ and ‘amatory’ both signifying to the modern reader that a love affair is at hand – though at the same time distancing the frankly sexual passion of these works from the fey otherworldliness associated with ‘romance’. For Oakleaf, the widespread use of the Latinate term can be explained by its ‘safely donnish’ dignity that still acknowledges a preoccupation with sexual love,1 though for others it is not dignified enough, the ‘amatory’ label trivializing narratives that allowed women, not simply to tell love stories, but also to ‘enter public discourse and, through narrative enact-96
‘A Scheme of Virtuous Politics’ 97
ment and projection in fictional characters, publish their opinions on the most absorbing topics of the day: the intersections of religion and politics, the family and marriage, the nature of woman and female sexuality, the limits and abuse of authority, and the rights and obligations of monarchs’.2
In critical analyses of amatory fiction in recent years, it has been the broadly political dimension that has received most attention, particularly the ‘intersections of religion and politics’ in the works of Aphra Behn, Delarivière Manley, and Eliza Haywood. 3 Ros Ballaster has been the most forceful advocate for reading this fiction as a direct party political engagement by women writers in the public life otherwise denied them by their gender, and she makes a persuasive case for understanding ‘the female plot’ of ‘embattled virginity, virtue rewarded or ravished’, as a means ‘to reflect and refract male plotting, in other words, the party, dynastic, and ideological conflicts’ of public life.4 In this study, however, our main interest is in that other absorbing topic of the day, ‘the nature of woman and female sexuality’, and the ‘politics’ with which we are chiefly concerned involves the strategies for governing the self to which the heroine of Jane Barker’s Love Intrigues refers in her ‘Scheme of virtuous Politics’.5 In the fiction of this period, alongside the wider social and party political concerns,
‘this little Microcosm’, the self ( LI, p. 89), is also under scrutiny, as prose f
iction sought to depict, as John Richetti argues, ‘an interiorized equivalent of that life of public honor peculiar to the elites of antiquity’.6 In the works under discussion in this chapter, then, it is the microcosm rather than the macrocosm that interests us: not so much the opportunity provided by fiction for women to engage with public issues, as the ongoing struggle to find ways of accommodating a specifically female subjectivity within the constraints of the feminine code.
The ‘Model of Perfection’ that Barker’s Galesia recommends lies firmly within those constraints: ‘ Deny thy self’, the older, wiser Galesia enjoins, ‘not only in Deeds, but in the most secret Intentions’. But ‘a Scheme of virtuous Politics’ that acknowledges ‘secret intentions’, even if only to restrain them, sends some worrying signals. In a scheme of virtuous politics, intentions are everything (and in Love Intrigues, as we will discuss later, Galesia is particularly severe on herself for having done the right things for the wrong reasons). But intentions are also necessarily, if not secret, at least encrypted in a behavioural code premised on the assumption that good intentions are not enough.7
‘A scheme of virtuous Politics’ need not imply a virtue more politic
98 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre than principled, but it does suggest a self in need of governance – a self that is known by its desires and presumably conscious of its own best interests. There is in the fiction of this period a dual movement: a movement away from idealized female characters whose virtue speaks for itself towards characters whose virtue is often contingent upon their ability to plead the force of circumstances; and a movement away from performance-based notions of honour towards an honour based on the integrity of the self.
The interiorized equivalent of the life of public honour that Richetti attributes to female characters in amatory fiction takes the form of an authenticity and integrity founded on an intensity of emotional response that enables them ‘to emerge from the remote world of courtly romance where women are idealized, decorous, and reticent and to point by their innocence, vulnerability, and intense emotional involvements to an interiority that claims to be universal rather than class specific’. In this version of the democratization of fiction, interiority is a leveller: even though the heroines still come from the leisured elite, ‘their emotional and sexual intensities’, Richetti argues, ‘embody a naturalized and universalized humanity’, in contrast to the posturing and ‘inauthentic’ representatives of the privileged hierarchy who attempt to seduce them.8 However remote these works might seem from the material and social conditions of the period, they speak
‘in broad ideological terms’, he suggests, to emerging social and class tensions.
There are numerous variants of this account of the eruption of female desire into the decorum of prose fiction, each with an explanatory power that derives from the plotting of generic change against the coordinates of shifting social, economic, and ideological power bases. And there is much to explain: the entry, in numbers, of women into the literary market-place; the popular success of their works; the erosion of prohibitions on the expression of female desire. The heroines of amatory fiction give voice to their feelings with a rare candour, although irresistible desire, forgivable as a force not to be reckoned with, is nonetheless culpable, and generally punishable. True agency, in the sense of a licensed intervention in a state of affairs in order to achieve change, is still far from common. The real subversiveness of these fictions lies, in fact, less in the voice they give to passions silenced by masculine constructions of women as chaste and reserved, than in the opening they provide for a reassessment of what precisely is at stake in the behavioural codes that police such constructions. As we have seen, we do not have to wait until amatory fiction for female
‘A Scheme of Virtuous Politics’ 99
characters to begin to make their move away from being idealized, decorous, and reticent; it is more or less incumbent upon them to do so once they assume a role in narrative that amounts to being more than a ‘sommer-games prize, a horses Race-bell, or a Grey-hounds collar’ (Markham, pp. 28–9). The problem has always been to do it safely, and what is new in amatory fiction is that female characters have become shrewder – or more openly calculating – in their assessment of where the real dangers lie.
Unconscious attraction in ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’
An early casualty of the more pragmatic assessment of options seems to have been confidence in the convention that a woman ought not to love first, a notion that also becomes increasingly more difficult to support alongside a developing transparency of consciousness. In earlier fiction, there is the sense that the less said about this convention the better, possibly because the practicalities of such a love do not bear close scrutiny. And in fact narrative strategies have so effectively protected the heroine from suspicion of having initiated a romance, or of loving before she herself is honourably beloved, that more often the puzzle is not so much when she began to love as how she could ever have loved at all. Scenarios such as we find in Sidney’s Arcadia, where the lover’s disguise as a lowly servant or Amazon princess effectively precludes consciousness of even the existence of a worthy suitor, are time-honoured strategies – Chrétien’s Ywain, for example, can be confident of loving first when he sets his sights on the wife of the knight he has just slain, and, thanks to a magic ring, is invisible to boot. The threat of sexual violence is an equally powerful preventative
– at least of the possibility of a consciously reciprocated passion –
though the suitor who introduces himself as a potential rapist is not easily recuperated.9
We do not have to wait until Richardson’s Pamela, however, to discover that the potential rapist is not totally and permanently inca-pacitated as a suitor. Margaret Cavendish’s ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’, a novella published in 1656 as part of Nature’s Pictures (a motley collection of poetry and prose, fable and treatise, memoir and romance somewhat kindly described as a ‘generic experiment’10), could not be further from the social and economic realities in which Richardson’s novel is embedded. But there are interesting similarities in the plot that remind the reader how close to fantasy Richardson’s vaunted realism is sometimes sailing. Cavendish was a political
100 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre conservative, aligned with the royalists, but in her literary ambition apparently bound by no known laws of tradition or kind, publishing (prolifically) on philosophical and scientific topics as well as prose fiction and memoir. In ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ Cavendish commandeers the romance genre as a vehicle of lawless excess that functions also as social commentary with a utopian bent.
Cavendish’s heroine, Miseria (aka Travellia and Affectionata), is impeccably virtuous, highly articulate, and fiercely uncompromising in her sexual integrity. After being cast ashore by a storm in a foreign land, she finds herself sold to a bawd who prepares her for the pleasure of her most valuable customer, a Prince with a reputation as ‘a grand monopolizer of young virgins’ (p. 50). Miseria appeals to the noble mind that usually dwells in honourable persons such as he appears to be, insisting (as Richardson’s Pamela later does) on the ownership of her own body and the injustice of taking ‘the goods [that is, her virginity] from the right owners without their consent’ (p. 52).11 But Miseria’s tears only fuel the Prince’s passion, and determined not to be put off by rhetoric, he attempts to seize his prize. So Miseria shoots him. It is not, however, a fatal wound, and while he prepares the ground for a second assault, the attentions of ‘so personable and well favoured’ a young man begin to make an impression,
insomuch that at the last she did not dislike his company; and grew to that pass, as to be melancholy when he was gone, blush when he was named, start at his approaching, sigh, weep, grew pale and distempered, yet perceived not, nor knew her disease; besides, she would look often in the glass, curl her hair finely, wash her face cleanly, set her clothes handsomely, mask
herself from the sun, not considering why she did so. (p. 59)
The Prince recognizes the tell-tale symptoms of an awakened passion, and decides to take his chance before it wanes, but when he grows intemperate, Miseria takes poison (though it, too, does not prove fatal).
Miseria is clearly ignorant of her burgeoning affections, however transparent the symptoms to a watchful lover who construes, presumably correctly, her attentions to herself as interest in him.12 It is an assumption that is commonly made, though not always correctly –
Cecropia’s interpretation of Pamela’s attention to her appearance as ‘a sign of an unrefusing harbour’ ( NA, p. 484) is clearly mistaken – but even modern critics are quick to infer the desire to attract another’s attention from a woman’s attentions to herself.13 Contemporary
‘A Scheme of Virtuous Politics’ 101
conduct books continually warn, moreover, of how slight the evidence of encouragement a man needs to overcome his scruples. In Halifax’s Advice to a Daughter (1699), for example, women are warned that
‘ Mankind, from the double temptation of Vanity and Desire, is apt to turn every thing a Woman doth to the hopeful side; and there are few who dare make an impudent Application, till they discern something which they are willing to take for an Encouragement’.14 The onus is on the woman, therefore, to keep men at a distance, but without driving them away through rudeness, simpering bashfulness, or oppressive reserve. It is a fine line that is being drawn, and one that can be safely negotiated only by a woman who has nothing to hide, either consciously or unconsciously, since it is the eyes that give most away. As Halifax observes, men’s capacity to discern encouragement is ‘so very nice, that it must engage you to have a perpetual Watch upon your Eyes, and to remember, that one careless Glance giveth more advantage than a hundred Words not enough considered; the Language of the Eyes being very much the most significant, and the most observed’.15
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