Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

by Marea Mitchell

  Notes 207

  relationship between society and culture is rather more fluid and uneven as Raymond Williams suggests in Culture (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1981) and elsewhere.

  20 Part of this ambiguity lies in the question as to whether Pamphilia’s husband is dead or not. See the notes to pages 406 and 407 in the second part of Urania that discuss Rodomondro’s death and resurrection.

  21 See the interesting discussion of ‘civilite’ ( Urania U, II: p. xxxvi) and the text’s tendency to mock knights’ invocations of their obligations to women to authorize their own amorous interests.

  22 The issue of the expression of male desire and its responsibilities is something we touch on throughout this book, but deserves fuller exploration in ways that might reveal how the hegemonic effects of dominant or traditionally ‘appropriate’ masculinities are often undermined and are more contradictory than they appear to be. Urania itself refers disparagingly to

  ‘carpet-knights’ and ‘tongue-knights’ to suggest where the outer shows of masculinity unacceptably become the substance. Sidney’s New Arcadia describes how Phalantus becomes embroiled in the game of love with Artesia, for example, as she tries to use him for her own purposes. There are also interesting distinctions made between male lovers. Wroth’s Leonius argues that Cilandro’s loss of the lady is less to be felt because she loved someone else, to which Cilandro replies that this remark classifies Leonius as ‘a self-lover’ who loves ‘but for your owne ends’ ( U, I: 407). In this context it is entirely appropriate that in the second part of Urania Leonius succumbs to a ‘woeman dangerous in all kinds, flattering and insinuating abundantly, winning all matchless intisinge, and as soon cast of[f], butt with hatrad sufficient to the forsaken or forsaker’ ( U, II: 158). That Leonius is besotted ‘of and with this creature’, is discovered by Steriamus lying on the ground, ‘she dandling him, (as it were) and playing with his delicate, soft lockes’ ( U, II: 161), and has to be goaded into more appropriately masculine behaviour is the punishment for his selfish love. Steriamus’s accusations that his ‘armes are layd up … in your ladys Cabinett, your sword in her sharpe tongue, and prove, I fear, butt a poore defender of such stout language’ ( U, II: 162) illuminatingly relocate Leonius’s lost phallic power on the phallicized monstrous female.

  23 See, for example, the Queen of Bulgaria’s assessment that ‘Pamphilia so much of an admired Lady, was the dullest shee ever saw’ ( U, I: 459). Her refusal to wear any knight’s favour, and her refusal to explain why, earns her a more general condemnation, making ‘her of many to be esteemed proud’ ( U, I: 64).

  24 See, for example, U, I: 81 where Amphilanthus, like Musidorus in Arcadia, expresses his fear at a negative response: ‘I am no coward, though mistrust my strength in her sight; her looke … are to me (if frowning) more terrible than death.’

  25 If technically the situation is ambivalent, and the status of verba de praesenti marriages is uncertain, one of the significant factors here is that the marriage between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus precedes their public marriages. This may also be a reference to the long standing intimacy between William Herbert and Mary Wroth as cousins. From another more general perspective, it is also true that these different forms of marriage ceremonies

  208 Notes

  provided ‘an important source of plot complication in early seventeenth century’ fiction, as Josephine A. Roberts notes in ‘The Marriage Controversy in Wroth’s Urania’, in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), p. 127.

  26 There are other problems in remaining silent in Amphilanthus’s presence, such as the inability to say no when he tries to kiss her ( U, II: 262), and the desire to remind him what his behaviour has cost him.

  27 Josephine A. Roberts, Introduction to The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth.

  28 Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, ed. Eslpeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox (London & New York: Routledge: 1989), p. 35.

  29 See the discussion by Megan Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 92–3.

  30 William A. Ringler, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) p. 448; Maureen Quilligan, ‘Sidney and His Queen’, in 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.

  31 This is a challenging reversal of the tactic used by Musidorus in Arcadia where Musidorus addresses Pamela through the lower-class Mopsa. While in terms of the class and gender politics of Arcadia this has a kind of accept-ability (however dubious from a modern point of view), the reversal here where a young woman uses her king/father as a vehicle for her own ends is quite different.

  32 It would take too long to document here but there are indications that Amphilanthus’s self-analysis moves from a type of self-justification to a critical self-awareness, helped along the way by the kind of stern admonition from his sister Urania that he meets on Pamphilia’s wedding day: ‘Urania went and advised her brother, being that day to beare itt like him self since non butt him self was the cause of itt. This was small comfort, yett beeing truthe, hee must suffer itt’ ( U, II: 275). This is of a piece with Urania’s sharp advice to another lamenting lover, Perissus, at the beginning of part one of Urania, when she finds out that for all his wailing he does not know for certain that his love, Limena, is actually dead. Admonished for his ‘unreasonable stubborn resolution’ and ‘woman-like complaints’, Perissus is finally threatened with the reputation of ending ‘his dayes like a Fly in the corner’ ( U, I: 12–3) – words that have the desired and entirely salutary effect of galvanizing Perrissus into action that results in the salvation of Limena and their reuniting.

  33 Forsandarus is taken to be a reference to Hugh Sanford, tutor to William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, Wroth’s cousin and father to two of her children. Forsandarus’s treachery is pronounced in the text, given that he was the trusted confidant of Pamphilia and Amphilanthus.

  34 John Loftis (ed.), The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 18.

  35 Loftis, p. 17.

  36 While there has been critical attention to the nature of the torture of Limena, its specularity and the implications of this (see, for example, Helen Hackett, ‘The Torture of Limena: Sex and Violence in Lady Mary Wroth’s

  Notes 209

  Urania’, in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing, ed.

  Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen and Suzanne Trill, [Keele, Staffordshire: Keele University Press, 1996], pp. 93–110), in terms of the narrative as a whole, the torture is important in establishing Limena’s constancy and fortitude, echoing Pamela’s and Philoclea’s resistance to oppression in Sidney’s New Arcadia. Limena’s freedom on the death of her husband also invokes notions of the liberty of the widow.

  37 It is impossible here not to be aware that Wroth herself may well have inhabited all these solutions, as wife, widow and lover. It is also important to see these events as part of more general social patterns – as examples in Graham et al (eds), Her Own Life, suggest.

  38 The RETS editions indicate inconsistencies in the original manuscripts between references to Lesbos and Delos as Melissea’s home. Both of these places have significant interest for women. Delos is the home of Diana (and Apollo), whereas Lesbos is the home of Sappho and her fellow female writers. Perhaps Wroth’s use of both signals general rather than specific interests in women-centred locations.

  39 The explanation of these events occurs in U, II: 385–8.

  40 See U, II: 497, note to 112.31–2.

  41 See U, I: lxxxvi.

  42 See U, II: 491, note to 73.37, and Urania’s ‘masque-like’ moments discussed by Heather L. Weidemann, ‘Theatricality and Female Identity in Mary Wroth�
�s Urania’, in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller, p. 206.

  43 Gary Waller, ‘Mary Wroth and the Sidney Family Romance: Gender Construction in Early Modern England’, in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller, p. 56.

  44 See, for example, Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Women Readers in Wroth’s Urania’, in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller, pp. 210–28.

  45 Goldberg, p. 12.

  46 Lamb, ‘ Women Readers’, p. 213.

  Chapter 3

  Stratagems and Seeming Constraints, or, How

  to Avoid Being a ‘Grey-hounds Collar’

  1 Richard Brathwait, Panthalia or The Royal Romance (London: F. G., 1659), STC 3565, p. 2.

  2 Katherine J. Roberts, Fair Ladies: Sir Philip Sidney’s Female Characters (New York: Peter Lang, 1993) p. 18.

  3 We take this useful phrase from Writing and the English Renaissance (eds) William Zunder and Suzanne Trill (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 110–1.

  4 Whigham, p. 33. Whigham’s book is primarily concerned with the role and production of the courtier and the gentleman, but his observations are also usefully extendable to women.

  210 Notes

  5 This is the discovery of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando when she becomes a woman and realizes the effort underlying traditional notions of femininity: She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled. ‘Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires’, she reflected; ‘for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces, without which they may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline.’

  ( Orlando [London: Penguin, 2000], p. 110).

  6 Hull in Chaste, Silent and Obedient discusses the multiple demands on middle-class women’s lives, and the correspondingly complex roles they needed to develop (p. 36).

  7 Best, Introduction to Markham, The English Housewife, p. xxvii. See also the beginning of chapter four for a further discussion of this distinction between the domestic and the political in relation to romance fiction.

  8 Yeazall, especially chapter two.

  9 Markham, p. 8.

  10 Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman, p. 33.

  11 Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman, p. 34.

  12 Anna Weamys, A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, ed. Patrick Colborn Cullen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 81, hereafter cited parenthetically (Weamys).

  13 Richard Bellings, A Sixth Booke to the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1624) STC 1805, hereafter cited parenthetically (Bellings).

  14 This is in contrast to the general patterning of Sidney’s 1593 Arcadia, as argued in Chapter 1 above, and as suggested by Katherine J. Roberts: ‘A close examination of Sir Philip Sidney’s three major works, the Old Arcadia, Astrophil and Stella and the New Arcadia, reveals that his female characters become increasingly complex as he departs more and more from existing social and literary models of women’ ( Fair Ladies: Sir Philip Sidney’s Female Characters [New York: Peter Lang, 1993], p. 1).

  15 Helen Hackett, ‘The Torture of Limena: Sex and Violence in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania’, in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen and Suzanne Trill (Keele, Staffordshire: Keele University Press, 1996), p. 107.

  16 ‘ Philisides: Sidney’s poetic persona, formed from his own names Phili[ppus]

  Sid[n]e[iu]s, but also meaning ‘star-lover’, from the Greek … (to love) and Latin sidus (star or constellation)’ (Sir Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed.

  Katherine Duncan-Jones [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985], p. 372).

  17 Patrick Cullen, Introduction to Anna Weamys, A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’, p. liv.

  18 See Cullen, Introduction to Anna Weamys, A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’, p. xliv.

  19 See Anna Weamys’ Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1651), ed.

  Marea Mitchell, The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works (London: Ashgate, forthcoming 2005).

  20 Basilius flees his duties for Arcadia, and Blair Worden argues in The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (London: Yale

  Notes 211

  University Press, 1996) that writing Arcadia was a result of obstacles to Sidney’s explicit political agendas.

  21 What happens to Melidora is also about defending the via activa, ‘women’s experience of the world’, and the belief that ‘untried virtue is no virtue at all’; as Constance Jordan argues in Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), ‘man and woman have the same virtue and it requires the same exercise’ (pp. 222–3).

  22 The moment is predominantly comic here and has antecedents in Sidney’s Arcadia, and in William Dunbar’s ‘Treatise of the Widow and the Two Married Women’, where the voyeur gets rather more than he bargained on, and far from hearing anything good, overhears scathing attacks on male sexual abilities.

  23 See our discussion in the previous chapter about the conversation between Cilandro and Leonius concerning the ‘self-lover’ as opposed to the constant lover ( U, I: 407).

  24 [John] Barclay His Argenis: or, the Loves of Poliarchos and Argenis: Fairthfully translated out ot Latine in to English, By Kingesmill Long (London: Printed by G. P. for Henry Seile, 1625) STC 1392.

  25 This sense of the female protagonist having a secret known to few other characters, but shared with the reader, is also a characteristic of Wroth’s central character, Pamphilia. Helen Hackett also discusses ‘the selective disclosure of secrets and the selective admission of chosen individuals to private places’ (‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the “Femininity” of Romance’, in Women, Texts and Histories 1575– 1760 [London: Methuen, 1992], p. 52). On the connections between secrets and private domestic spaces see also Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987).

  26 Quite typically here, marriage silences the previously active woman by reminding her of her femininity. See also the reversion of Clara to submissive femininity in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Love’s Cure or, The Martial Maid, ed. Marea Mitchell (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1992), IV ii 1587–95.

  27 Brathwait, Panthalia, p. 148.

  Chapter 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)

  1 David Oakleaf, Introduction to Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess; or The Fatal Enquiry, 2nd edn (Peterborough: Broadview, 2000), p. 23.

  2 Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti, Introduction to Popular Fiction by Women 1660– 1730: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. xv.

  3 See, for example, Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Toni Bowers, ‘Collusive Resistance: Sexual Agency and Partisan Politics in Love in Excess’, in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work’, ed. Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio (Lexington: University Press of

  212 Notes

  Kentucky, 2000), 48–68; Kathryn King, Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675–1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); and Deborah Burks, ‘Margaret Cavendish: Royalism and the Rhetoric of Ravenous and Beastly Desire’, In-between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 9.1 & 2 (2000): 77–88.

  4 Ballaster, Seductive Fictions, p. 84. Ballaster suggests tha
t ‘the readers of women’s amatory fiction are required to read by a process of constant movement between sexual and party political meaning’, so that in the case of Aphra Behn’s novels, for example, ‘the almost exclusive interest in feminine subjectivity’ in the short novels of the 1680s ‘is, in many ways, a serviceable fiction’ for exploring the politics of public life (pp. 19, 84).

  5 Jane Barker, Love Intrigues, in Backscheider and Richetti, p. 89. Hereafter cited parenthetically ( LI).

  6 John Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700–1800 (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 20.

  7 The insufficiency of good intentions is not, of course, specific to the female code of conduct. It is commonsense for men and women alike, as in Mr Allworthy’s advice to Tom in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones: ‘It is not enough that your designs, nay, that your actions, are intrinsically good; you must take care they shall appear so. If your inside be never so beautiful, you must preserve a fair outside also’ ([Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996], p. 122). But it is of more pressing concern for women, whose virtue is so closely tied to a chastity that must of necessity be known by public repute.

  8 Richetti, p. 20.

  9 The potential rapist would seem to require the development of a fairly flexible and dynamic understanding of moral character in order to be recuperated as a suitor, though, as Ruth Perry argues, we need to be wary of assuming that sex had the same psychological significance – and unwanted sex the same potential for psychological trauma – as it now does. Perry argues that ‘sexual disgust – the feeling that sex with the “wrong” person could be viscerally disturbing – was an invention of the eighteenth century’ and ‘can hardly be found in the repertoire of earlier English written experience’. ‘Even rape’, she observes, ‘is recorded more as pain at physical force than psychological horror at unwanted intercourse registered as an invasion of the self’ (‘Sleeping with Mr. Collins’, in Jane Austen and Co.: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture, ed. Suzanne R. Pucci and James Thompson [New York: State University Press of New York, 2003], p. 217).