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Wives Writing Privacy, 1640-1670 Please do not remove this page Wives Writing Privacy, 1640-1670 Mamolite, Lauren https://scholarship.miami.edu/discovery/delivery/01UOML_INST:ResearchRepository/12355288010002976?l#13355527100002976 Mamolite, L. (2019). Wives Writing Privacy, 1640-1670 [University of Miami]. https://scholarship.miami.edu/discovery/fulldisplay/alma991031447190302976/01UOML_INST:ResearchR epository Embargo Downloaded On 2021/09/30 13:24:52 -0400 Please do not remove this page UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI WIVES WRITING PRIVACY, 1640-1670 By Lauren Mamolite A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the University of Miami in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Coral Gables, Florida May 2019 ©2019 Lauren Mamolite All Rights Reserved UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy WIVES WRITING PRIVACY, 1640-1670 Lauren Mamolite Approved: ________________ _________________ Pamela S. Hammons, Ph.D. Susanne Woods, Ph.D. Professor of English Professor of English ________________ _________________ Tassie Gwilliam, Ph.D. Guillermo Prado, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English Dean of the Graduate School ________________ Elaine Hobby, Ph.D. Professor of Seventeenth Century Studies University of Loughborough MAMOLITE, LAUREN (Ph.D., English) Wives Writing Privacy, 1640-1670 (May 2019) Abstract of a dissertation at the University of Miami. Dissertation supervised by Professor Pamela S. Hammons. No. of pages in text. (223) Wives Writing Privacy, 1640-1670 investigates how seventeenth-century married women writers imagined novel forms of publicly constitutive privacy in which early modern wives or potential wives could appropriately participate. In verse by Anne Bradstreet and Katherine Philips, and in prose and drama by Margaret Cavendish, (potential) wives experiment with forms of privacy different from those typically considered proper for either femes covert or assumed potential wives to adopt, like domestic labor and enclosure or properly feminine modesty.1 These authors nevertheless depict kinds of privacy like solitude or retirement, exchanging gifts with female friends, and occupying roles as collaborative producers and influencers of culture as constituting proper wifely behavior. Bradstreet, Philips, and Cavendish use discourses of household labor, chastity, modesty, discipline, and friendship, among others, to insist that these innovative forms of wifely privacy legitimize wives’ public authority. These portraits of publicly generative wifely privacy are presented as parallel to the legitimizing forms of privacy understood to be the purview of men —- namely, governing the household, 1 I use the term “potential wives” to refer to unmarried women who are identified as potential candidates for marriage. While “potential wives” might self-identify as such, I also use the term to refer to unmarried women whose intent to marry is assumed – accurately or in some cases erroneously – by others in the community. I extend the term “wifely privacy” to include these “potential wives,” given the influence of the “maid, wife, or widow” paradigm – in conjunction with conduct books aimed at encouraging young women to internalize commonplace expectations of wives as a precursor to marriage – on their ability to construct a private identity of their own. owning property, pursuing a private vocation, or claiming an independent legal identity in ways that registered in the public sphere. This project’s new historicist perspective uses theories of gender and sexuality, privacy studies, and Habermasian theories of the public sphere to consider how these writers depict novel forms of wifely privacy as non- restrictive — because they are largely unburdened by male regulation — despite their location within marriage. For example, each author presents her manuscript as the product of a private vocation independent from husbandly intervention, even if Bradstreet, Philips, and Cavendish earned the support (or at least tolerance) of their husbands in pursuing writing. By adopting such vocations, these writers redefined laureate status for women and relocated it in relation to public and private spheres of activity. Previous scholars have begun to tease out the ways in which separate realms of activity ultimately reinforced men’s public stature by emphasizing women’s non- participation in public arenas like formal education, politics, and religion. Despite markedly diverse religious, political, and personal contexts, these authors each have a unique perspective of exile that ultimately informs their drive to imagine novel forms of privacy, allowing them to disengage strategically from key public arenas and authorities, rather than being coercively excluded. These authors nevertheless contribute to a female literary tradition, unified by the context of intense religious and political upheavals from the Civil Wars through the Restoration, that was invested in overcoming imperatives to political non-participation and probing the limits of access to private sovereignty informed by gender, rank, and marital status. Chapter One examines Anne Bradstreet’s poetry in Several Poems to show how her descriptions of isolation and solitude affirm her intellectual discipline and poetic modesty in ways that signify publicly. These portraits express her relative independence from public literary, religious, and political arenas that formally exclude her because of her dependent status as a wife. By emphasizing her voluntary disengagement rather than her unwilling exclusion, Bradstreet illustrates her individual authority even within coverture. Redefining conventional feminine modesty tropes, Bradstreet distinguishes her authorial identity from the male-dominated literary system, asserting the authenticity of her poetic identity despite its failure to conform to the conventions of publicly generative male-authored poetry. In “The Author to Her Book,” Bradstreet’s poetic speaker uses the conventional modesty trope of poetic deformity to express the inadequacy of her verse to meet the criteria for inclusion in the male-dominated literary system. At the same time, the speaker asserts the greater authenticity of her poem despite these supposed shortcomings, advising the poem not to appear amongst “vulgar” company incapable of determining her true poetic authenticity. In this and other poems, Bradstreet uses the discourses of domesticity, wifehood, and maternity to posit innovative forms of wifely privacy as consistent with proper behavior for wives. But she also adapts these discourses to show how they could register public autonomy just as effectively as forms of privacy practiced by men. Bradstreet’s most overtly spiritual poem, “Contemplations,” recreates Biblical history against the backdrop of solitary wilderness in order to highlight the speaker’s spiritual authority as a poet and English colonist. Thus Bradstreet expresses poetic and political independence from public arenas that she impeaches, but also imaginatively reshapes them to validate novel forms of publicly constitutive wifely privacy. Chapter Two conceptualizes the shared ownership and exchange of gifts, secrets, names, and texts that lend autonomy to exclusive pairs or small groups of female friends in Katherine Philips’ poetry, including “Friendship in Embleme,” “In Defense of Declared Friendship,” and “To the Excellent Mrs. Anne Owen,” among others. Such unconventional forms of cooperative custodianship help Philips — “The Matchless Orinda” — to publicize the private virtues necessary for proper ownership, like self- government, moderation, and temperance. Moreover, these practices highlight the intimacy of female friendships in the poetic society amongst whom Philips circulated her poems, allowing her to innovate male friendship discourse to give poetic authority to the female friend rather than the male poet. In particular, I document how Philips revises concepts of wifely and royalist retirement to construct cooperative forms of private ownership engendered by withdrawal, presenting them as parallel to the independent legal ownership that endowed men with public autonomy. In poems like “To the Excellent Mrs. Anne Owen,” Philips shows that forms of expansive, empowering privacy like bestowing names could be exercised by wives even within marriage. In “Friendship in Embleme,” Philips transforms common emblems like hearts and flames, as well as innovative imagery such as compasses, featured in seventeenth-century verse about heterosexual love and male friendship into symbolic possessions that allow women to make their contributions to these discourses legible in the public sphere. In doing so, they exercise mutually self-protective, autonomous forms of privacy and thereby disrupt the idea that wives were possessed and stored away by their husbands. I read poems like “In Defense of Declared Friendship” as complicating coverture, instead reflecting wives’ individual, virtuous public autonomy; friendship appropriately magnified wives’ claims to intellectual possession where marriage could not. Chapter Three considers portraits of elite wives who enjoy singular, elevated status and who both encourage and participate in complex forms of collaborative ownership, emulation, and intellectual or artistic partnership. My readings of The Blazing World and The Convent of Pleasure register how Cavendish’s elitist notions shaped novel forms of privacy that she imagined as uniquely accessible to high-ranking married women — a
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