Helen Wilcox [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996]), Dorothy Leigh’s The Mother’s Blessing, one of the most popular ‘mother’s books’ in the seventeenth century with 16 editions between 1616 and 1674, argues along with many other writers that ‘“God hath given a cold and temperate disposition” to women – cold and moist, as opposed to hot and dry – so that they would incorporate [the virtue of chastity]’ (p. 67).
20 Shoemaker, p. 19.
21 Ilza Veith, Hysteria, quoted in Marlene LeGates, ‘The Cult of Womanhood in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 10:1 (1976): 22.
22 Shoemaker, p. 63.
23 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500– 1800
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 394.
24 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. James Kinsey and Frank W. Bradbrook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 3, hereafter cited parenthetically ( P&P). The example of Pride and Prejudice – and, indeed, of Clarissa – reminds us that, whatever the explanatory power of social theories, in practice they tend to be provisionally entertained rather than believed in implicitly, and are invoked, or not, as circumstances require. Mr Bennet clearly does not have a lot of time for Mrs Bennet’s nerves or the consideration she expects shown to them, and while Lovelace claims to be expecting rather than merely hoping that Clarissa will fall pregnant (‘it will be very surprising to me if it do not happen’), he seems prepared to overlook the implication that ‘to have a young Lovelace by such an angel’ would prove Clarissa less than angel – the ostensible agenda behind the trials to which he subjects her (Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, ed. Angus Ross [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985], p. 1147).
25 Fletcher, p. 378.
26 Fletcher, pp. 378–82. Ingrid Tague, in Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690– 1760 (Rochester: Boydell, 2002), also observes that ‘although there had been didactic works written for and about women prior to this time, most of them dealt with particular
196 Notes
areas of female conduct – advice for princesses and nuns, for example –
rather than trying to create a complete woman, as was the goal of the later manuals. Moreover, they were rare in comparison to the numbers produced in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. One of the more popular early seventeenth-century works, Richard Brathwait’s English Gentlewoman (1631), appeared in three editions by its last printing in 1652.
Compare this with Richard Allestree’s Ladies Calling (1673), which went through 12 editions by 1727, and which – in another eight editions from 1696 to 1737 – was also revised and published under the title of The Whole Duty of a Woman’ (p. 23).
27 Richard Steele, Tatler No. 52, quoted in Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 78.
28 Ruth Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 5.
29 This is the social virtue at the heart of the gentlemanly code of conduct that took shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exemplified in Richard Steele’s understanding of modesty as a ‘moderation of self’ that, as Edmund Leite put it, requires that ‘I show my respect for you by limiting the extent to which you must experience me’ (quoted in Yeazell, p. 9), and still strongly informing the later more broadly based, less class-specific definitions of the gentleman such as we find in John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University (1852).
30 Yeazell, p. 16.
31 John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774; rpt. New York: Garland, 1974), p. 67.
32 Yeazell, p. 41.
33 Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman (London: B. Alsop and T. Fawcet, 1631, STC 3565), p. 203.
34 As Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford note, even among the plebeian classes, where women on average were older when they married and accustomed to greater autonomy, courting rituals still assumed that a woman would not take the initiative, and that her role was ‘to scorn, jeer, and generally discourage’ while a man’s was ‘to solicit as vigorously as possible’
(pp. 116–7).
35 Yeazell, p. 51. See also Gregory’s observations on the ‘maxim’ laid down among women – ‘and a very prudent one it is’, too – that a woman’s love should be a consequence of a man’s attachment, discussed in Chapter 4.
36 Preparing for the imminent arrival of her master, Fielding’s manipulative little trollop pulls down her stays to reveal as much of her bosom as possible, practises her airs in front of a mirror, and then sits down to read ‘a Chapter in the Whole Duty of Man’ (in Anti-Pamela; or, Feign’d Innocence Detected / Eliza Haywood and An Apology dor the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews / Henry Fielding, ed. Catherine Ingrassia [Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004], p. 257).
37 Fletcher, pp. 122–3.
38 Fletcher, p. 123. Not just in the advice literature but also in the community based customs of the lower ranks there is widespread evidence, as Mendelson and Crawford argue, that women worked around the constraints of gender roles rather than simply bowing to them (p. 109ff.).
Notes 197
39 Tague, p. 6.
40 Sir Philip Sidney, Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 238, hereafter referred to parenthetically ( NA).
41 Wayne quotes Edmund Tilney in The Flower of Friendship (1568) urging husbands to use a wife’s love to ensure her subjection to his will: ‘The wise man maye not be contented onely with his spouses virginitie, but by little and little must gently procure that he maye also steale away hir private will, and appetitie, so that of two bodies there may be made one onely hart, which she will soone doe, if love raigne in hir’ (p. 67).
42 Deborah Ross, The Excellence of Falsehood: Romance, Realism, and Women’s Contribution to the Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), p. 4.
43 Charlotte E. Morgan, The Rise of the Novel of Manners: A Study of English Prose Fiction between 1600 and 1740 (1911; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), p. 14. This ‘back-dating’ of the term ‘romance’ to ancient Greek love stories from the period 100 BC to the third century AD acknowledges the distinction between epic tales of national heroes and tales of individuals in their private capacity. As Hubert McDermott notes in Novel and Romance: The Odyssey to Tom Jones (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1989): Allowing for exceptions at individual points in individual stories, the Greek romance follows a well-defined pattern. A young couple fall in love, and are prevented from consummating their love. This ‘prevention’
usually takes the form of physical separation, as they travel about the world facing one danger after another, until they are reunited, return home, are married, and live happily ever after. There are numerous incidents which recur with boring regularity in the romances – shipwrecks; capture by pirates; narrow escapes from death, rape and seduction; trial scenes; reunions; and sensational recognitions. Despite the obsessive preoccupation with chastity, … it soon becomes obvious that chastity in the Greek romances means regard for the concept rather than practice of virtue. (p. 27)
Doody refers to the Greek romances, along with all other fictional narratives, as novels, which at least has the virtue of reminding us that, whatever the differences in the way we go about telling stories, we keep telling much the same kinds of stories – a point that did not escape Mrs Barbauld in 1804
when she observed that ‘If we were to search among the treasures of ancient literature for fictions similar to the modern novel, we should find none more nearly resembling it than Theagenes and Chariclea, the production of Heliodorus’ ( The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 6 volumes [1804; rpt. New York, AMS Press, 1966], p. xi).
44 If we compare Arcadia with another romance written around the same time, Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), we find the wooing couple, Dorastus and Fawnia, have met and are smitten within consecutive pages, though it tak
es a few more to overcome reservations on both sides arising from the fact that he is a prince and she (apparently) ‘a beggar’s brat’ (97). Even given that this is a much shorter tale than Arcadia, the perfunctoriness of the courtship (which amounts to Dorastus having to convince first himself and then Fawnia that he is prepared to marry a shepherdess) is of a piece with
198 Notes
the general lack of interest in why things happen (the answer always lies in the whim of Fortune), just as long as things do keep happening. The obstacle of the apparent difference in rank, for example, is little more than the pretext for elopement. In contrast, in Arcadia, the obstacle of the apparent difference in rank in the case of Musidorus and Pamela (and of apparently same-sex love in the case of Philoclea and Pyrocles in his Amazon disguise) is the occasion of anguished soul-searching.
45 Peter Lindenbaum, ‘Sidney’s Arcadia as Cultural Monument’, in Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, ed. Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 80.
Sidney’s Arcadia appeared in 13 editions between 1590 and 1674, but, as Lindenbaum continues,
A full determination of the extent of the appeal of the Arcadia in the seventeenth century would … need to take into account not simply the number of editions but also the various offshoots from Sidney’s work, most specifically, Quarles’ 5000-line poem Argalus and Parthenia, based on a single episode extending from Book I to Book III of the Arcadia, which went through 22 editions between its first publication in 1629 and 1700.
It was itself reduced to a prose chapbook version which was published five times between 1672 or 1673 and 1700. There was also an abridgement of the whole Arcadia which appeared in 1701 (in 158 duodecimo pages) and a longer prose version (that is, longer than the 24-page chapbook version) of the Argalus and Parthenia story, entitled The Unfortunate Lovers, which began to appear as early as 1695. There were also continuations of the Arcadia that were not absorbed directly into the volume of Sidney’s work, for instance, Anna Weamys’ A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, published in 1651 and perhaps again in 1690. Beyond all these are the various plays based on the Arcadia’s material which were written in the course of the seventeenth century, ranging from King Lear and Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge (1608) to Shirley’s Arcadia (1632), Glapthorne’s Argalus and Parthenia of 1638 (based more on Quarles than Sidney), the anonymous Andromana (post-1642) and at least one manuscript play, Loves Changelinges Change. (91n) 46 Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 4–5.
47 Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), p. 10.
48 The rule of vraisemblance, as Lennard Davis observes, ‘demands that though the work is a fictional one, the actual foundations for the work should be true and the characters should conform to historical reality, though their exploits may be made up’ ( Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel
[New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], pp. 29–30). In this respect, French heroic romance declares itself, in Catherine Gallagher’s terms, definitively ‘prenovelistic’, since novelistic narrative is ‘forthrightly fictional’, openly ‘telling the stories of people who never actually lived’
( Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670– 1820 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994], p. 165).
Notes 199
49 While for much of the eighteenth century ‘novel’ and ‘romance’ were not generically distinct terms and were often used interchangeably, there was some attempt to exploit the sense of newness or recentness of the term
‘novel’ to distinguish ‘romances’ set in a historically remote era from the new romances, or ‘novels’, that, like the French nouvelles, were set in the present or recent past and not based on traditional stories, and to distinguish the older romances of prodigious length from shorter tales fashioned on the Italian novella.
50 Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 42.
51 Davis, p. 25.
52 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600– 1740 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); John Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990).
53 Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (London: Harper Collins, 1997), pp. 1–15; Philip Stewart, ‘The Rise of I’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 13.2–3 (2001):171–2.
54 Davis, p. 27n.
55 Stewart, p. 166.
56 In this respect it is interesting to note that as late as the mid-twentieth century love hardly figured in the Oxford Dictionary in definitions of romance, and in the 1933 OED and 1973 SOED not at all.
57 Duncan, p. 2.
58 Rosemary Guiley in Love Lines: The Romance Reader’s Guide to Printed Pleasures, includes Pamela, along with Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, as one of 23 books ‘that belong in every romance library’ (p. 69).
59 Alan Sinfield, ‘Power and Ideology: An Outline Theory and Sidney’s Arcadia’, ELH 52.2 (1985): p. 275.
60 See, for example, Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, and, more recently, Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002).
61 Rose, p. xii.
62 Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 96–8.
63 Rose, p. 84.
64 Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics-Queer Reading (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 19.
65 See Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
66 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 255.
67 See, for example, Constance Jordan’s arguments that Sidney’s ‘concept of the feminine, as it describes private and moral as well as public and political action, has a greater and more impressive scope than any other writer of the century discerned’ in Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 221.
68 Maureen Quilligan, ‘Sidney and his Queen’, The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 196.
200 Notes
69 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 39.
70 Lorna Hutson, ‘Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth-Century England’, Representations 41 (1993): 91.
71 A. J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: The Complete English Poems (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 358. In New Arcadia this scene is also associated with another watery incident where a prince is aroused by the sight of the water running around his naked lover’s body, which leads to his lengthy and phallic song, ‘What tongue can her perfections tell, / In whose each part all pens may dwell’ (pp. 287–91), which again sees female beauty primarily as the source of male creativity.
72 See Christopher Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ (1599), and Walter Raleigh’s ‘The Nymph’s Reply’ (1600).
73 Gervase Markham, The English Arcadia Parts I and II (1607 & 1613) STC 17351 & 17352, I: 84, hereafter cited parenthetically (Markham I), (Markham II).
74 Again there is an interesting shift from Sidney to Markham. New Arcadia refers to Pyrocles’s ‘divine fury’ (p. 287), thus linking the moment back to Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. That the moment is at least tongue-in-cheek in asserting some kind of higher purpose is suggested by the fact that the position of the song ‘What tongue can her perfections tell’ has been moved from book three in Old Arcadia where Pyrocles �
��is about to consummate his love with Philoclea’ ( NA, p. 856), suggesting that the fury is rather more corporeal than divine. Melidora invokes the recognition that what male lovers often claim as complete submission masks a desire to conquer. That she does so for her own less than explicit reasons reveals that the politics of the game of love can be manipulated by both sides. What is good for the gander, it appears, might work as well for the goose.
75 The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania by Lady Mary Wroth, ed.
Josephine A. Roberts (Binghampton, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), p. 750. All references are to this edition and The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s ‘Urania’ by Lady Mary Wroth, ed.
Josephine A. Roberts, completed by Suzanne Gossett and Januel Mueller (Tempe, Arizona: Renaissance English Texts in conjunction with Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999). Hereafter cited parenthetically as U, I and U, II. There are other examples of this image being used in Urania, such as, for example, where Antissia sees herself as the fish and ‘Amphilanthus stil the nette that caught her, in all shapes, or fashions she could be framed in’ ( U, I: 324). Later on there is also a scene where pastimes seem to be gender specific as Queen Dalinea fishes and her husband King Parselius of Achaia hunts ( U, I: 518).
76 We return to this incident in more detail in terms of its meaning in Urania as a whole in Chapter 2.
77 As we explore in Chapter 2, it is impossible not to be aware here of Wroth’s own position in relation to her husband and her cousin, by whom she had two children after her husband’s death.
78 Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Peter Sabor (London: Penguin, 1980), p. 168, hereafter cited parenthetically ( P).
79 Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 22, hereafter cited parenthetically ( FQ). There are, of course, earlier
Notes 201
examples of foolish women misinterpreting what they see, such as Robert Anton’s Fairy Queen in Moriomachia (1613), who tries to milk a bull, and then in response to his ‘strange and unusual courtesy’ decides ‘to have him transformed into the habit and shape of a man’ ( Short Fiction of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles C. Mish [New York: New York University Press, 1963], p. 49). While this can be seen as a ‘parody of chivalric romance’ (p. 45), it does not have the focus on the understandings of the female protagonist that is the concern of The Female Quixote.
Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre Page 28
