Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

by Marea Mitchell

  Chapter 1

  Women of Great Wit: Designing Women in

  Sir Phillip Sidney’s Arcadia

  1 See, for example, Annabel Patterson, ‘“Under … Pretty Tales”: Intention in Sidney’s Arcadia’, in Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, ed.

  Dennis Kay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 285.

  2 Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), p. 177.

  3 Kay, ‘“She Was a Queen …”’, p. 35.

  4 William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), p. 362.

  5 Barnabe Riche , Farewell to Military Profession, ed. Donald Beecher (Binghampton, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts Studies, 1992), pp. 182, 197.

  6 Morgan, pp. 14–15.

  7 See Maurice Evan’s summary in his edition of Arcadia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 20–7.

  8 See for example Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘Sidney’s Arcadia and the Mixed Mode’, Studies in Philology 70 (1973): 269–78.

  9 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 121–7.

  10 Donald Beecher, Introduction to Barnabe Riche , Farewell to Military Profession, p. 31.

  11 Beecher, p. 43.

  12 Beecher, p. 42.

  13 See our earlier discussion of Morgan’s observations on Arcadia in the Introduction.

  14 See, for example, Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

  15 Duncan-Jones, p. 9.

  16 See, for example, Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

  17 See Maureen Quilligan, ‘Sidney and His Queen’, in Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (eds), The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (Chicago: 1988), pp. 171–96; and Kay, ‘“She Was a Queen …”’, pp. 18–39; and Patterson, pp. 265–85.

  18 Helgerson, p. 11.

  19 See Hannay, pp. 17–8; and Kay, ‘“She Was a Queen …”’, pp. 32–8, where he particularly draws attention to the intricate strategies of conformity and subversion with which these passages engage.

  202 Notes

  20 Maureen Quilligan, ‘Lady Mary Wroth: Female Authority and the Family Romance’, Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 263.

  21 See, for example, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 435–47.

  22 Duncan-Jones, p. 248.

  23 See, for example, p. 216, where Basilius’s song ‘Let not old age disgrace my high desire’ is accompanied by ‘a little skip’, and p. 323 where Zelmane’s rebuke of Basilius results in Basilius’s legs bowing beneath him, and ‘a general shaking’ overtakes his whole body.

  24 Pyrocles takes on the disguise of an Amazon, Musidorus that of a shepherd, to gain access to the princesses in the seclusion imposed on them by Basilius in his attempts to avoid what he sees as the threat of his death as promised by the oracle. While many Renaissance texts construct more or less improbable reasons for cross-dressing, particularly in drama, the resonances in prose are significantly different given the absence of the technical imperatives of the exclusion of women from the stage.

  25 Sidney is working here with a story of January and May. F. N. Robinson argues that while the form of the story is new to Chaucer ‘the figure of the aged or feeble lover is so frequent in literature that it is not necessary to multiply references on the subject’, although he does go on to list some authorities ( The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer [London: Oxford University Press, 1957], pp. 712 & 13.

  26 Katherine J. Roberts, Fair Ladies: Sir Philip Sidney’s Female Characters (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), p. 48.

  27 Sir Philip Sidney was encouraged by some of his peers, at home and internationally, to consider his role in international politics as part of an international protestant league, but this, and his attempts to influence Queen Elizabeth I’s domestic policy (including the vexed issue of her marriage), did not find favour with Queen Elizabeth I. His subsequent retirement to Wilton saw the writing of Arcadia, which critics see as continuing some of his politic interest in pastoral form. See, for example, Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’, and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

  28 Sir Philip Sidney, ‘Apology for Poetry,’ Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. David Kalstone (New York: Signet, 1970), p. 222.

  29 Anne Shaver, ‘Woman’s Place in the New Arcadia’, Sidney Newsletter 10.2

  (1990): p. 9.

  30 See, for example, the Second Eclogues, pp. 407–8. Maurice Evans suggests that the final couplet, which sees Passion and Reason embracing, giving themselves over to ‘heavenly rules’, ‘could be the motto of the whole Arcadia’ (p. 859n).

  31 Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writings 1641– 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 80.

  32 Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authority in the Sidney Circle (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 78.

  33 Helgerson, p. 10.

  34 There is a second, telling comic counterfoil to Gynecia in Miso. Miso’s highly inappropriate advice to the princesses to do what they like with

  Notes 203

  lovers, and ‘it recks not much what they do to thee, so it be in secret; but upon my charge never love none of them’, and her story of Cupid ‘like a hangman on a pair of gallows’ ( NA, p. 308), provide other examples of women’s attitude to love and desire. Shelley Thrasher-Smith in The Luminous Globe: Methods of Characterisation in Sidney’s New Arcadia (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1982) is right to find connections between Gynecia and Miso, but it is also necessary to be aware of the clear distinctions between the characters. Where gender connects them, class divides.

  Miso’s philosophy is functional, self-protective, and cynical, and she also provides a sharp contrast with Gynecia’s position in establishing the limits of understanding female desire.

  35 Katherine J. Roberts suggests that Basilius is comic as ‘the foolish old man in the throes of love … while Gynecia is always tragic’ (p. 54), although our view is that Gynecia is often rather than always tragic, as there are moments of humour in the text around her representation.

  36 Sidney, Apology, p. 241.

  37 Sidney, Apology, p. 242.

  38 Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 120.

  39 Sir Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 4, hereafter cited parenthetically ( OA).

  40 Heather Dubrow notes how phrases throughout this passage in New Arcadia distance the narrator from his judgements (p. 168).

  41 Cleophila and Zelmane are of course substantially the same character, the disguised Pyrocles. In Old Arcadia the imitation of the beloved Philoclea by reversing her name, and the adoption of Pyrocles’s unrequited lover’s name in New Arcadia are part of different patternings in each text.

  42 In Old Arcadia Gynecia perhaps foreshadows the representation of the predatory female seen in Shakespeare’s Venus in Venus and Adonis.

  43 Susan David Gubar, Tudor Romance and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, PhD

  thesis, Graduate College, University of Iowa, 1972, p. 36.

  44 In relation to Gynecia’s afterlife with Basilius, there are some very telling images that prefigure this as a kind of living death. See, for example, Gynecia’s dream in which she thinks she is called by Zelmane only to ‘find a dead body like unto her husband … [which] took her in his arms and said, “Gynecia, leave all, for here is thy only rest”’ ( NA, p. 376). See also Margaret Mary Sullivan, ‘Getting Pamela out of the House: Gendering Genealogy in the New Arcadia’ ( Sidney Newsletter 9. 2 [1988–89]: 3–18), where she argues that ‘ New Arcadia is a handbook for turning queens into
wives’ (p. 3).

  45 Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: The Description Of A New World Called The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: New York University Press, 1992), p. 47.

  46 William Craft, Labyrinth of Desire: Invention and Culture in the Work of Sir Philip Sidney (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), p. 121.

  47 Gubar, p. 85.

  48 Craft, p. 116, his emphasis.

  49 Lamb, Gender and Authority, p. 106.

  50 Hackett, 2000, pp. 123, 128, 163.

  204 Notes

  51 Katherine J. Roberts, p. 87.

  52 Caroline Lucas, Writing for Women: The Example of Woman as Reader in Elizabethan Romance (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989), p. 2.

  53 Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction 1558– 1700: A Critical History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 58.

  54 Feminist theorists and critics such as Luce Irigarary and Hélène Cixous have, of course, argued that this differentiation along an axis of sameness and hierarchization where the feminine end of the spectrum is marked as inferior is a characteristic of Western thinking, as represented in that famous collection, New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980).

  55 John Lyly’s Gallathea provides a point of comparison here, where two girls disguised as two boys fall in love, and explore their dilemma until Venus turns one of them into a boy. This seems to be the play that takes the dilemma of same sex love most seriously because both cross-dressers are of the same sex originally, even though the play is predominantly a comedy.

  See also Alison Findlay’s discussion of this play, ‘Women and Drama’, in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), pp. 500–1.

  56 Shakespeare’s Cressida also directly articulates the difficulties of expressing desire (I. ii. 272–82) and is negatively interpreted by Ulysses despite her best efforts (IV. v. 54–63) ( Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Muir [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998]).

  57 Maurice Evans glosses ‘accusing’ as ‘betraying’ ( NA, p. 232), which nicely suggests the sense of self-guarding, against inadvertently revealing something that might entail self-damage.

  58 The next event in the narrative is the kidnapping of Pamela and Philoclea by Cecropia’s agents. This event, like the incursion of the lion and the bear earlier on, symbolically suggests the dangers confronting the central characters at this point. The uncertainty of Pamela’s ability to withstand Musidorus’s pressures is underlined by the fact that what she in fact would have done next is left unknown. Pamela is saved by her aunt’s plots.

  59 Kay, ‘“She Was a Queen …”’, p. 39. See also Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 18.

  60 We shall see in the next chapter how many difficulties bad parental decisions bring about in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania.

  61 See Alan Sinfield, Literature and Protestantism in England 1560– 1660 (Kent: Croom Helm, 1983), where he argues that while Protestantism and humanism might not be without their points of conflict, in Sidney’s writings common factors emerge.

  62 It is significant that at first Musidorus sees Pyrocles’s love for Philoclea as a threat to their friendship. The friendships that develop between Pyrocles and Philoclea and Musidorus and Pamela begin to reflect the notion of companionate marriage and to replace the idea that friendship can only exist between men because women are not capable of the qualities that sustain friendship. As Michel Montaigne put it: ‘the ordinary suficiency of women cannot answer this conference and communication, the nurse of

  Notes 205

  this sacred bond; nor seem their minds strong enough to endure the pulling of a knot so hard, so fast and durable’ ( Selected Essays of Montaigne in the Translation of John Florio, ed. Walter Kaiser [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964], p. 60). In Weamys’s and Wroth’s work the notion that friendship might exist between women is further explored.

  Chapter 2

  ‘Free Gift Was What He Wished’: Negotiating

  Desire in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania

  1 Josephine A. Roberts, The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), p. 24.

  2 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), I.i. 99–110.

  3 In our discussion we include both parts of Wroth’s Urania. There are, of course, significant issues here concerning the differences between these texts particularly in relation to their reception and the influences they might have had, given that the first part was met with some consternation.

  The second part seems never to have been published. It does, however, seem important to include both parts in a discussion of the representation of female desire, and to encourage discussion of it.

  4 A. R. Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyrics in Europe 1540– 1620

  (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 2.

  5 Luckyj discusses and criticizes the very influential work of Peter Stallybrass,

  ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed’ (in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], pp. 251–770). As Luckjy suggests, it is an orthodoxy that requires revision (pp. 7–8).

  6 Naomi J. Miller, ‘Engendering Discourse: Women’s Voices in Wroth’s Urania and Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991) cites examples of Wroth’s characters turning misogynist metaphors around, but sometimes misogynism is repeated in Urania.

  7 The connection between bodily movement and promiscuity in the representation of female monstrosity here has its origins in depictions of the grotesque carnivalesque body where movement connotes excess, lack of discipline and unruliness. See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), which draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias.

  8 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 77.

  9 Some of these reworkings are more Pythonesque than biblical. While some of the temptations represented by women are linked back to Eve and the serpent, some owe more to the comically rapacious women like Sir Bertilak’s wife in Gawain and the Green Knight. Urania Part I contains numerous references to women ambushing unsuspecting men. See, for example, pp. 254, 349 & 403.

  206 Notes

  10 Philarchos is searching for his lost children who, with others of the leading princes and princesses, have been sent to Lesbos for their education. The fact that he is being distracted from his fatherly duties adds to the humour here.

  11 There is a similarly jarring note in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, where, although Roxana claims her arguments in favour of the liberty of a single life are a smokescreen to hide the fact that she thought her suitor was just after her money, they are so powerfully argued that they are difficult to set aside. She suggests that marriage requires a woman to give ‘herself entirely away from herself’, since ‘the Very nature of the Marriage Contract was … nothing but giving up Liberties, Estate, Authority, and everything, to the Man, and the Woman was indeed a meer Woman ever after, that is to say, a Slave’

  ( Roxana, ed. Jane Jack [London: Oxford University Press, 1964], p. 147).

  12 It is of course important that the Brittany Lady is a widow, an experienced woman, and not a young virgin, but the problems that she faces are in many ways seen as the same, in Wroth’s Urania, in terms of the dangers she faces in following her desires.

  13 Josephine A. Roberts, Urania II, p. 514n.

  14 Luckyj, p. 43. Luckyj’s work acknowle
dges the influence of Hull’s book, as well as providing criticism of it. Louis Althusser’s work on the internalization of dominant discourses through interpellation so that they are naturalized is relevant here, as is the concern that his arguments so effectively describe how these discourses work that it is hard to imagine how resistance ever occurs. See ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy (London: New Left Book, 1977).

  15 Maureen Quilligan, ‘Lady Mary Wroth: Female Authority and the Family Romance,’ in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 273.

  16 Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (London: Yale University Press, 1996) discusses the importance of standing and withstanding as active values, as does Alan Sinfield, Literature and Protestantism 1560– 1660 (Kent: Croom Helm, 1983).

  17 Luckyj herself does not discuss the second part of Urania.

  18 Luckyj cites Thomas Becon’s use of this adage in New Catechism (1560) where it already had the status of a proverb (p. 49).

  19 Here we are using Elaine Hobby’s arguments in a slightly different way because Wroth’s Urania troubles at some levels Hobby’s appealing argument. Taking the execution of Charles I and the death of Aphra Behn as her starting and ending dates to promote an argument about the growth and decline of women’s agency in the middle of the seventeenth century has the disadvantage of not being able to include Wroth’s work at all, as it precedes 1649. However, in many ways Urania is consistent with Hobby’s arguments about women writers who are interested in the ‘shapes of the spaces inhabited by women’, in ‘designing strategies to win as much space as possible’ (pp. 98 & 100), and of making conduct-book admonitions work for them rather than against them. Perhaps this suggests that the usefulness of the movements and patterns Hobby describes and identifies in literary texts cannot be as tightly ascribed to social and political events as she argues. The