Wives Writing Privacy, 1640-1670

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Please do not remove this page UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

WIVES WRITING PRIVACY, 1640-1670

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

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 stark contrast to Anne Bradstreet, whose criteria for access to these forms of privacy were less concerned with rank and wealth than with spiritual election. In The

Convent of Pleasure, Lady Happy makes the convent she has inherited available to high- ranking devotees who share in the convent’s pleasure and Edenic abundance through their intellectual and artistic contributions to the rich culture of the convent. Happy stands at the center of the convent as an exemplar who is emulated by the devotees because of her rank and her collaborative efforts with the Prince(ss) to shape the material order, create performances, and develop intimate bonds of friendship. The all-female community allows Cavendish to depict forms of privacy that remain free from intrusive husbandly interference, but that prepare potential wives to assert individual, public authority within marriage, and to cultivate intellectually and spiritually collaborative bonds with potential husbands. Perhaps through her own intellectual partnership with her husband, William Cavendish, in writing The Convent of Pleasure, Margaret Cavendish ultimately recognizes limits to how far women’s experimental forms of collective wifely privacy could (or should) remain entirely free from husbands. Nevertheless, my analysis shows that in both The Convent of Pleasure and The Blazing World, Cavendish suggests that wives could continue to be producers and influencers of culture after marriage, enjoying important roles in symbolically rebuilding public culture after the material losses they and their husbands suffered between the civil wars and restoration. In The

Blazing World, Cavendish’s avatar, the Empress, forges an intensely intimate friendship with the Duchess, her “other self,” that is organized around cooperative authorship and shared symbolic ownership paradoxically emphasized by the fantastical wealth and authority of the Empress as an individual. By experimenting with her handling of material objects, the Empress eventually recognizes the superior capacity for the cooperative ownership and creation of texts, worlds, and knowledge alongside the female friend to endow each wife with public authority. For Rob and my other steadfast adventurers, Patch and Daisy. And for my new adventurer, Molly Rose. This has always been for you.

It never ends — always look for those rare moments of magic.

iii Acknowledgements

This dissertation would not have been possible without the tremendous commitment of faculty, colleagues, friends, and family. Sid Ray, Martha Driver, and

Patricia Pender nurtured my confidence in reading early English literature as an

undergraduate. Ronald Levao and Mal Kiniry generously offered a very green graduate

student opportunities to take doctorate level courses, and to assist in teaching a college

class, respectively. I could not have asked for a better advisor in Pamela Hammons, who

has tirelessly offered patient guidance, gracious mentorship, and spirited encouragement

in seeing this dissertation through its many stages to the very end. Her investment in not

only my dissertation, but in my future, has been remarkable — and it is one I can only

pay forward to others. I will be forever grateful for Tassie Gwilliam’s sharp but effective

criticism, which has made me a more precise writer and a keener reader. In her class, she

assigned exercises focused on pedagogy and performance that have changed the way I

think about engaging with texts. Susanne Woods’ sound advice — “seat to chair, and

write” — and attention to detail have enriched my analysis greatly. In her thorough

reading of my work, she often saw opportunities for analysis that I might otherwise have

never considered. Thanks to Elaine Hobby for her meticulous attention to manuscript

detail, but most especially for impressing upon me the privilege of owning my choices as

a scholar, and the responsibility to justify them. Special thanks also to Kathryn Freeman,

who demonstrated for me the value — in writing and in teaching — of listening first to

what texts say, rather than what others say about them. Thanks also to Mihoko Suzuki,

Frank Stringfellow, Gina Maranto, and Joanna Johnson for the unique and immensely

valuable mentorship they each provided during my time at the University of Miami.

iv Lydia Starling’s incredible kindness and quiet efficiency have been an immeasurably valuable boon to me. These individuals managed to make Miami feel like home when mine was so far away; with their dedication and fellowship, Miami never felt far away when I completed this dissertation at home in New York.

The support I received at The College of Staten Island fostered a sense of camaraderie and essential to my development from student to colleague. Alyson Bardsley has consistently offered energetic encouragement to take on challenging approaches to the literature courses she has kindly sent my way. Gloria Gianoulis has always been a source of warmth and integrity; our frank conversations about my commitment to the dissertation and developing my pedagogical approaches have been invaluable. My friendship with Katharine Goodland blossomed from an engaging and gracious chat in her office following her observation of my class. I continue to be grateful to you for pushing me to seek opportunities, for allowing me to present at the MLA in your place, and for your fellowship, which has remarkably enriched my sense of purpose and identity as a scholar. Francisco Soto, for welcoming me to teach with the SLS program, where I have been fortunate to explore early literature alongside students who ceaselessly inspire me in their willingness to ask difficult questions and engage with challenging texts in ambitious ways.

Thanks to my colleagues at the University of Miami, for your commiseration during times of stress and comradeship during moments of triumph — and especially your humor in weathering this process together — especially Sarah Ritcheson, Allison

Harris, Barry Devine, Alisa Bé, Stephanie Selvick, Libby Goddard, Kurt Voss-Hoynes.

To Rebecca Hu, for the meals and coffee we shared, the writing sessions we never

v seemed to get through for all the good conversation, and for always being able to pick up right where we left off. To Lauren Zwicky, for our talks about mothers, cookies, and navigating the dissertation out of residence: thank you for reminding me that sometimes,

“they’re not your monkeys, not your circus.”

To Alexandra Pazzas, Naveen Paul, and Tara Egebo — the friends who never got tired of asking how my dissertation was going, and who pulled me away from this project long enough to remind me that life happens while pursuing a graduate degree. To the cousins, (great) aunts and uncles, sisters- and brothers-in law, nieces and nephews, and other family: I owe a debt of gratitude for the ways that your hearts shaped me and my work. To my grandmother: I would not be the person I am today without you, and I cannot express how lucky I am to have found a friend, a guide, and a grandmother all in one. This dissertation was written always with the memory of my grandfather, William, and his example in mind. To my father and sister, Krysten, for enduring long phone calls from Miami, for knowing how to take my mind off this stressful endeavor, and for loving me always. Most of all to my husband, Rob: you have gone to the ends of the earth and back for me to make this dream come true, and I can never express my gratitude for all that you have sacrificed to bring this dissertation into existence. Without you telling me to “go for it” and apply nationally to graduate programs all those years ago, this dissertation would be no more than an idea in my head. Your steadfastness, grit, and integrity continue to inspire me, and your patience has seen me through every obstacle of this dissertation. Let this be just one dream of many that we realize together.

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1

1 Chapter One: Writing Sacred Privacy: Female Laureateship and Anne Bradstreet’s (New) England 36

Domesticity and Dogma: Sacred Privacy, Modesty, and the Female Laureate in the Puritan New World 39 Rejecting the Laurel Crown: Bradstreet’s Poetic Predecessors and Puritan Female Laureateship 65

2 Chapter Two: “Nor Envy on a Laurel will bestow / Whil’st I have any in my garden Grow”: Katherine Philips, Friendship, and Possession 96

Enriching the Public Sphere: Women’s Private Friendship and the Language of Value in Philips’ Poetry 99

Redefining Retirement: Wifely Stewardship in the Society of Friends 116 “Insignificant” Possessions: Wives as Agents of Exchange and Poetic Inheritors 141

3 Chapter Three: Collaborative Possession and Intellectual Partnership in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World and The Convent of Pleasure 147

Convents and Country Houses: Material and Performative Creativity in The Convent of Pleasure 149

Refracting Selves, Texts, and Worlds in The Blazing World 177 4 Afterword 202 WORKS CITED…………… 210

vii

Introduction

Wives Writing Privacy, 1640-1670

This dissertation examines how Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips, and Margaret

Cavendish imagined expansive, unconventional forms of wifely privacy that contradicted the logic used to exclude them from public arenas. In verse by Bradstreet and Philips, and in prose and drama by Cavendish, potential wives and married men experiment with private behaviors that are markedly outside the boundaries of what was considered proper wifely privacy, such as domestic labor and enclosure or properly feminine modesty.1 In place of normative private behaviors that wives were encouraged to adopt, these authors depict kinds of privacy like experiencing solitude or retirement, exchanging gifts with female friends, and occupying roles as collaborative producers and influencers of culture as novel but nonetheless acceptable forms of wifely privacy. They revise discourses such as those associated with household labor, chastity, modesty, discipline, and friendship to present innovative forms of wifely privacy as not only legitimate sites of wives’ authority within the household, but also outside the home in the public sphere.

These portraits of publicly resonant wifely privacy are also depicted as commensurate with legitimizing forms of privacy that authorized men’s public voices, including their capacities to govern the household, to own property, to pursue private vocations, or to claim legal identities with some measure of independence from state

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 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.

authorities or social superiors. Bradstreet, Philips, and Cavendish therefore represent

wives using disparate strategies to creatively demonstrate their abilities to manage their

private affairs with measures of independence from the state and male relatives that are

similar to men’s. To do so, these writers imagine unconventional private activities as

non-restrictive — because they are largely unburdened by male regulation — despite

their occurrence within marriage. This allows them, in turn, to occupy their own roles in

the public sphere, rather than bolstering their husbands’ or other male relatives’

reputations therein. From the perspective of authorship, the women writers addressed in

this dissertation present their writing as the product of a private vocation that was

relatively free from their husbands’ control, even if these efforts at authorship earned the

support (or at least tolerance) of their husbands. However, traditional definitions of

privacy did not acknowledge as publicly resonant their activities as producers and

custodians of English culture, retiring friends, Christian believers, and intellectual

partners. For example, although Margaret Cavendish espoused the traditional role of a

domestically enclosed, dutiful wife in her writing, the unconventional aspects of her private identity as a writer, thinker, and wife set her apart as worthy of public notice. The aspects of her private identity that did not fit the expected pattern, like writing natural philosophy or debating Descartes in her correspondence, registered clearly in the public sphere. However, without the patriarchal endorsement garnered by the ways in which she did appear to fit the paradigm of traditional wifely privacy, such as her frequent

assertions of wifely duty, obedience, and silence, her unconventional public role would

have been considered illegitimate and transgressive.

Wives’ private identities were contingent upon their diminished personhood: their virtues were often abridged, confined to the household, and used to support the public lives of their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. Even when publicly resonant virtues like moderation, trustworthiness, self-government, discretion, and creativity could, in unusual cases, be claimed by married women, they were usually understood as a reflection of patriarchally-endorsed feminine virtues instilled by their capable and more inherently virtuous husbands. There were obvious exceptions to definitions of wifely privacy that ultimately reduced wives’ virtues to a matter of husbandly governance, such as Elizabeth I, who often deployed marital and domestic language, fashioning herself as wedded to England in order to justify her own political sovereignty.2 Bradstreet, Philips, and Cavendish endorse similar strategies for women who could not or did not want to identify as exceptions in the way that Elizabeth did; instead, (potential) wives in their texts identify as normative or unexceptional even though they practiced unconventional forms of privacy. Despite evidence that married women did indeed manage households, conduct business, educate children and serve as moral centers of the household, their efforts remained unrecognized. Rather than generating legitimate public autonomy for wives, these activities were obscured by the theoretical and legal logic of coverture by which they could not officially be seen to supervise the household order, declare rights to private property, claim independent legal identities, or even win public recognition for their religious devotion. As a result, many married women did not want to risk their reputations to project their private sovereignty into the public realm. When Anne Clifford

2 One of the most obvious and succinct examples of this is when, in a speech given to Parliament in 1586, Elizabeth famously asserted her wish that she and Mary Queen of Scots could be “but as two milkmaids with pails upon our arms” (May 62).

disputed her uncle’s inheritance of family estates that she believed rightly belonged to her

according to common law, it resulted in a decades-long struggled hindered by her

husband and even King James I.3 While she did eventually win her suit, it was at great risk to her reputation, and especially to her reputation as a good wife, despite the privileges her considerable rank should have afforded her. Bradstreet, Philips, and

Cavendish therefore employ complex strategies to present novel forms of wifely privacy as both “worthy of attention outside their immediate, personal environment” (Van Elk 5) and as normative expressions of proper wifely behavior: Anne Bradstreet’s married poetic speaker, for example, seeks solitude in the wilderness, critically distancing herself from the traditional centers of poetic authority like the court to claim publicly the status of a spiritually elect poet and wife.

Descriptions of women’s privacy written in seventeenth-century England typically fell into two distinct categories. The first was primarily authored by men — although many women also internalized patriarchal concern with wifely privacy — and portrayed wifely privacy as a homogenous, consistent category of identity and behavior.

The second category of writings about privacy were most often authored by women, and were much more diverse and wide-ranging in their discussion of the identities and behaviors associated with privacy that could be considered appropriate for married women to adopt. My research made clear that the diversity of this second category was not simply an anomaly, but a pattern in which women writers seemed to be able to imagine more diverse, novel ways of expressing private identity than what was being

3 For more information on Clifford’s suit, see Mihoko Suzuki 1-3, including the edited excerpt of Clifford’s “Great Book” 5-107 in Women’s Political Writings 1610-1725, Volume 1.

published by more conservative, primarily male authors. What is more, female authors were using these descriptions of wifely privacy to claim independent public roles for themselves as friends, writers, wives, and mothers.

Particularly striking was the fact that many of the women who fit this pattern were married. While unmarried women, such as Isabella Whitney, imagined claiming public roles based on private behaviors, they did so in ways that mirrored men’s publicly generative private credentials. For example, in her poem “Her Will and Testament,”

Whitney claims ownership over London despite her position as an unmarried, middle class woman who did not have the means to own property. 4 However, she nonetheless mimics one of the primary criteria men advertised in order to claim legitimate public roles for themselves: property ownership. Married women, however, imagined entirely novel, or at least radically revised, forms of private behavior and identity that were quite distinct from the means used by men to claim public roles. Moreover, married women constitute a comprehensive case study of women’s privacy in general. Given the paradigm that identified women as either maids, wives, or widows, wifely privacy encompassed the assumed current, future, or past situation of most women. By studying the innovations of married women in this area, I sought to understand the potential breadth of more diverse possibilities for women’s privacy in general.

The texts examined in this dissertation range from poetry composed in solitude

(Anne Bradstreet) to poetry written for a coterie (Katherine Philips) to prose and drama invested in collective feminine identities (Margaret Cavendish): these texts were chosen because of the ways they reflect wives’ engagement with particular communities.

4 See Hammons Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse 124-140.

Although Cavendish has certainly written extensively in poetic genres, for example, I

chose to examine The Blazing World and The Convent of Pleasure because of the imagined communities against which Cavendish’s articulation of novel wifely privacy is positioned. Cavendish’s poems, in contrast, do not feature such contexts and tend to be focused on interiority — a valuable but different form of privacy that does not necessarily

involve negotiating claims to a public role based on legible wifely privacy. Katherine

Philips’ poetry, too, was composed for and circulated amongst a carefully curated

community called The Society of Friendship. While not an imagined community in the

strictest sense, the coterie did involve a certain amount of fictionalization in order to

combat the tensions introduced by the Civil Wars: geographical separation, religious and

political turmoil, the loss or endangerment of property, assets, and titles, and

interpersonal conflict. While many of Philips’ poems dealt with forms of exile and

retirement more familiar to readers of popular Cavalier poetry and other Civil War

writings in general, the particular poems addressed in this dissertation strike a balance

between behaviors and strategies of wifely privacy and (dis)engagement with a partially

imagined, partially real (and ruined) public sphere. Likewise, many of Bradstreet’s poems

have been applauded for the ways in which they herald the arrival of interiority and

intimacy in the seventeenth-century English and American literary spheres. While it

might seem like an obvious choice to include Bradstreet’s marital poems or her more

obviously domestic poems, for example, this dissertation addresses poems like

“Contemplations” and “The Author to her Book” in order to consider how Bradstreet is positioning herself in relation to both English and American communities as they really existed and as she (re)imagined them in their absence or inadequacies.

Initial plans for this dissertation included the possibility of examining the community of Quaker authors, for instance, because of their investment in religious separatism and interiority. Although valuable, texts by Quakers expressed private sovereignty through a coherent set of religious principles which they used to claim that public spaces and practices were in fact private. By contrast, this dissertation is aimed at interrogating how female authors representing different religious, political, and social views, imagined intersectional forms of novel wifely privacy that they used to claim legitimacy for public participation rather than to legitimize their removal of private sovereignty from the state and church. All three authors studied here negotiate complex relations to communities to which they belong, but also harbor the desire to radically revise. As the first American female poet, Anne Bradstreet provides the opportunity to examine verse that reflects one of the earliest Puritan contexts for withdrawal from

England and resistance to the patriarchal imperatives to wifely retirement on the frontier; at the same time, her poetry examines new forms of belonging to the English public sphere and the colonial frontier community as a married woman who might instead have gone the route of Anne Hutchinson, who was exiled for her failed attempts at renegotiating these relations in ways that did not threaten her reputation in the Puritan community. Katherine Philips, married to Parliamentarian James Philips, lends to her poetry the perspective of this marital “mismatch” and the position of exile from which she writes in Wales to a wider network of literary connection that included London and

Dublin; Philips’ poetry enables the investigation of how complex webs of geographical and political affiliation influenced wives’ ability to claim novel forms of private criteria despite the conflict of interests implied by their marital status. Lastly, Margaret

Cavendish’s The Blazing World and The Convent of Pleasure feature the appearance of a fictionalized version of her husband or his direct authorial influence, respectively.

Studying her writing in the context of husbandly encouragement not only to write, but to participate in trans-European networks of literature, philosophy, and natural science

allows this dissertation to consider the connections between imagined forms of

Cavendish’s patriarchally-endorsed (by her husband but not necessarily by members of

these male-dominated publics) intervention in well-known male-dominated spheres of

public activity.

While the texts of all three authors feature disparate forms of imagined privacy,

they have also been chosen for the simultaneously intersectional nature of these novel

forms of privacy. Bradstreet’s female laureate strategy intersects with Philips’

articulation of possession over poetic and other properties, which is amplified in

Cavendish’s more ambitious possession of fictional worlds and imagined communities.

Specifically, the intersections between authors in this dissertation surround the question

of authorship: these female authors make overt efforts to establish and contribute to

female literary traditions specific to the conditions imposed on wives during the Civil

Wars and Restoration, like the closing of theaters forced authors like Cavendish to focus

on closet drama in ways that heightened their engagement with the concept of wifely

retirement that had already been an important context for their authorship.

Scholarship on the poetry of Katherine Philips in the past decade has primarily

focused on descriptions of retreat, retirement, and solitude in her friendship poetry.

Another branch of Philips scholarship has focused increasingly on her manipulation of

traditional seventeenth-century love lyrics to reflect same-sex eroticism as a model for

political obligation. Typically, these strands of scholarship have remained separate; in

bringing these strands of authorship study together in closer dialogue than has been

customary, this project considers how the rhetoric of retirement studied in one strand of

Philips scholarship could illuminate and revise the role of women in relation to the public

and private spheres that was traditionally circumscribed in traditional love lyrics. If

poetry by John Donne, for example, reinforced women’s lack of material access to private credentials for public authority as actual or potential femmes covert, this dissertation traces the way that Philips quite literally rewrites Donne’s poetic conventions in order to subtly claim subjective and imagined forms of novel wifely privacy that could register quite clearly in the public sphere. For example, Donne’s “A Valediction

Forbidding Mourning” forges a comparison between the mathematical compass and his marriage through which his wife becomes the “fix’d foot” that is retired in the sense of

containment and withdrawal from the public sphere. In “Friendship in Embleme,”

however, Philips recasts this metaphor using twin compasses to represent two female

friends, suggesting that in fact, friendship lends the friends autonomous voices that they

help one another to discipline within the public sphere. In other words, their private

relation of friendship allows them to document their oral and written discipline without

male supervision, thus earning public authority rather than conceding it to support male

roles in the public sphere.

In this revision of a key context for wifely privacy, Philips’ poetry highlights

three important early modern understandings of retirement. In the most restrictive

understanding, retirement referred to married women’s withdrawal from the public

sphere and the expectation that their primary focus would be on containment within the

home — not just physically but, in the metaphorical sense, sexually, verbally, legally, and

politically. This meant that women were expected always to emulate containment even

when they were not physically at home, so that their speech, sexuality, and legal and

political identities were governed by the patriarchal restrictions on female autonomy that

they had internalized and learned to associate with retirement in the home. The ability to

discipline their actions in this way or even to virtuously manage their husbands’ homes or

estates in accordance with these patriarchal imperatives to retirement did not, as might be

expected in a modern context, earn married women autonomy in the public sphere;

rather, any virtues involved in this sense of retirement typically served only to further

reinforce their husbands’ private sovereignty and authority over the household.

Royalist retirement, by contrast, allowed men to publicly demonstrate their

independence, as private citizens, from what was becoming an unstable and unfriendly

Commonwealth. Where their wives had already set the stage for married men to claim

public authority more generally through their authority in the household, this politically

charged notion of retirement allowed them to further distinguish their autonomy in

positioning themselves in self-exile from the state. However, prior to the Civil Wars, such independence often required exercising legal property ownership; during and after the

Civil Wars, Royalists were routinely dispossessed of land confiscated by the

Commonwealth. As a result, Royalist men could no longer assert independence through ownership as private citizens because of how tenuous their legal relation to land had become. In a similar fashion to Royalist men’s inability to claim certain forms of publicly resonant privacy, including land ownership, coverture prevented wives’ private authority from manifesting in the public sphere. It is thus the aim of this dissertation to consider the

complex ways in which these discourses of retirement intersect, particularly when reimagined by married women, to offer a new model for various marginalized demographics struggling to articulate publicly resonant forms of private sovereignty.

Lastly, the third sense of retirement relevant to wifely privacy that Philips highlights is the retirement genre commonly adopted by Royalist poets and other seventeenth-century writers, for whom writing in this genre was an important authorial milestone. If wifely privacy implied retirement in the home, this included the theoretical containment of wives’ written words; the retirement genre thus provided an apt proving ground where the literary career-establishing trope of Cavalier retirement intersected with the literary ambitions of women writers grappling with endorsements to the restrictive retirement associated with their status as femmes covert. By engaging with this male- dominated genre, married women in particular could claim authorial voices through empowered retirement without risking being labelled transgressive: by embracing a rhetoric that formed the cornerstone of the very theoretical and legal doctrine of coverture that prevented their literary endeavors, married women could lend the veneer of compliance with patriarchal authority to their work as writers.

Wives Writing Privacy, 1640-1670 joins important recent studies that use theories of gender and sexuality, privacy studies, historicist perspectives, and Habermasian theories of the public sphere to historicize the concept of gendered privacy and to theorize women’s relation to the public sphere.5 The post-Habermasian discussions of

5 For seminal work in these areas, see: Ronald Huebert, “Privacy: The Early Social History of a Word” 21- 38 and “The Gendering of Privacy” 37-67; Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity; Martine Van Elk, Early Modern Women’s Writing: Domesticity, Privacy, and the Public Sphere in England and the Dutch Republic; Mary Trull, Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature; Katherine Larson, Early Modern Women in Conversation; Catharine Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate in Seventeenth-Century Britain; Catie Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-century Quaker Community: A Literary

scholars like Ronald Huebert, Michael McKeon, and Lena Cowen Orlin have helped to define privacy in the early modern context of a rapidly developing public sphere. Key contributors like Mary Trull, Marta Straznicky, Katharine Gillespie, and Martine Van Elk have also begun to focus on women, considering how definitions of privacy emphasized

women’s public non-participation in arenas like formal education, literature, politics,

science, and religion to reinforce men’s public stature in these areas. Ronald Huebert’s

argument that, contrary to assumptions, men viewed privacy as a temporary retreat from

the public sphere secured by domestic work and household order of wives and other

dependents, women experienced and wrote about privacy in far more ambivalent terms.

Building upon his work, I investigate the particular nature of this ambivalence in female

authored work about wifely privacy: if “privacy is a cage for the woman,” how did

married women (or those expected to marry) try to write themselves free from that cage?

Moreover, Huebert investigates the inability of women to truly attain self-actualizing privacy — but rather, like owls in the desert, who “suffer alone, unregarded, unheard” in their solitude — in the context of patriarchal surveillance. Huebert’s premise allowed me

to attend to ambivalence in the writing of wives who, when they did succeed in claiming

emotionally, spiritually, or psychologically satisfying forms of privacy, reimagined these

novel forms of privacy in diverse and sometimes inconsistent ways, as empowering and

publicly significant.

Study of Political Identities, 1650-1700; Mihoko Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England 1588-1688; Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. See also: Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680; Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry and Culture 1640-1680; Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London and Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England; Mary Thomas Crane, “Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England”; Marta Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550-1700; Katharine Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent: English Women Writers and the Public Sphere.

Married women were, more than their single counterparts, “ideally placed firmly

within the home, and whether the private realm was identified as ‘society,’ ‘the market,’

or the negative of public action, women were seen as properly at the heart of the most

intimate space within it” (Van Elk 4). The fluid definition of private and public spheres

found in Van Elk’s work informs this dissertation’s focus on the multifaceted but

coherent set of behaviors depicted in writings by Bradstreet, Cavendish, and Philips in

order to revise previously delegitimizing or limited forms of wifely privacy. This study

echoes Mihoko Suzuki’s focus on married women in this context, extending her focus to recognize more diverse, less obvious behaviors that these female writers proposed could be considered part of the repertoire of wifely privacy. Suzuki traces how married women authorized their entrance into the public sphere through carefully crafted arguments based on their positions as housewives engaged exclusively in private domestic activities who

were forced by the exile and imprisonment of their husbands to leave the home and to

speak publicly.6 Studies like Suzuki’s show that privacy was not always experienced as

enforced or involuntary deprivation. 7 Likewise, Bradstreet, Philips, and Cavendish

imagine positive, constructive, and desirable forms of privacy for wives to adopt; their

creative contributions in this regard differ from the challenges women delivered in the

public sphere which have been extensively examined by previous scholars.8 Katharine

6 See esp. Suzuki’s discussion of petitioning wives in Subordinate Subjects 132-165. 7 Hannah Arendt discusses classical sources in which privacy is depicted as the experience of deprivation that must be fulfilled by the labor of wives and servants in order for men to fully participate in public forms like the polis. While this may constitute part of the underlying association of women with the household in seventeenth-century England, my concern here is with definitions of privacy that link it with the household through chastity, coverture, and other gendered expectations for conduct. See Hannah Arendt 28-38; 50-73. 8 Pohl and D’Monte, for instance, limit female autonomy to transgression and resistance to oppressive containment (1-19), and Marion Wynne-Davies and S.P. privilege containment in their conceptual framework of women’s privacy (1-3). Corinne S. Abate suggests, in her introduction to Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England, that women made the best of the circumstances of their enforced privacy 1-20.

Gillespie examines the ways in which seventeenth-century women who preached and

prophesied used the principle of individual privacy (which she describes as a type of

protective gesture) to categorize their religious devotion and speech as private and therefore separate from the invasive force of the state.9 In doing so, the women Gillespie

studies do not claim public autonomy based on private activities, but resist the right of

public institutions to govern private devotional practices invasively. Catharine Gray

examines the role of seventeenth-century women in generating public culture through

private dialogue, an idea upon which I build to consider more closely how private literary

expression — whether printed or in manuscript — could earn wives reputations as

meaningful contributors to public culture.10 Catie Gill considers how Quaker women

mobilized contemporary ideas about femininity alongside constructions of Quaker

identity to create publicly significant roles for themselves. This study reverses these

emphases to focus on married female authors who invented kinds of private behaviors

that are markedly different from those claimed by women in Gillespie’s study of women

who prophesy and preach, and from the kinds of private conversation and feminine

identity used to earn women public roles in Gray’s and Gill’s work.

Mary Trull remarks that “literary criticism largely continues to limit the topic of

women and privacy to the social space of the home,” (9) identifying a gap in research on

women’s privacy that takes place outside the home, such as that which can be imagined

in relation to female communities, frontier solitude, pastoral retirement, and travel

9 Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent 1-25. 10 Early modern scholars have demonstrated that print and manuscript publication during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cannot be reduced to public and private, respectively, with any reliability. Some texts were printed for decidedly small audiences and never intended for the general public, while some texts circulated in manuscript form were read by quite large audiences, spanning countries and oceans. For thorough treatments of this subject, see Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England and Arthur F. Marrotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric

between worlds. My work supports and deepens the theory of fluid spheres of activity to

consider how marriage inflected the range of private behaviors that married women could

claim and construct. Scholarship like Trull’s complicates redundant definitions of

women’s privacy, instead considering extra-domestic private behaviors, like the female

lament, with the potential to yield new forms of public authority. 11 Lena Cowen Orlin,

interrogating contemporary assumptions about privacy, argues that it could generate

suspicion rather than freedom or exclusivity in post-Reformation England. 12 This study

considers carefully how such connotations might apply to married women, for whom

traditional forms of privacy like enclosure in the home were considered necessary to

prevent their illicit trade in secrets and gossip. For example, Katherine Philips recuperates

wives’ capacity to trade secrets scrupulously, rejecting compulsory enclosure used to

regulate wives in favor of their voluntary withdrawal, which fosters their independent

virtue.13

Moreover, Orlin’s work suggests that if privacy could be an object of suspicion that required public surveillance of the lower classes in particular, it was thus an object of luxury for the upper classes. Building upon Orlin’s premises, I conclude that for well-

respected members of the community with considerable resources, privacy was largely

performative — a means of advertising one’s credentials for public authority. Moreover,

Orlin “locates the private in property, both real and movable” and “refers to the

household (as ‘owned’ by occupance in addition to or in place of legal title) and to its

11 See also the work of Danielle Clarke, Susan Wiseman, and Hilda L. Smith. 12 See esp. Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England. 13 In Locating Privacy in Tudor London, Orlin also expands the range of behaviors that could be categorized as private by grouping together “interiority, atomization, spatial control, intimacy, urban anonymity, secrecy, withholding, solitude,” (1) which she traces in her case study of a married woman, Alice Barnham.

accoutrements (including implements necessary to its operations as well as goods more

indulgent of self-expression)” (Private Matters 1). By unpacking Orlin’s definition of a

primary definition of privacy here, this project examines how despite being unable to

claim the household as their own legally, married women could use “its accoutrements”

and the activities associated with them to appropriately perform their private identities in

ways that would register positively in the public sphere. Thus I also build upon Trull’s

theorizations of privacy as “a spectacle for public consumption” (9) but reconcile it,

rather than contrast it with, the “protective gesture walling off the family from the wider

social world” (9). Specifically, this project explores more empowering forms of privacy

that advertise such protective gestures in order to earn public authority; it also considers

both domestic and extra-domestic activities as congruent forms of novel privacy rather

than dichotomous concepts representing the separate spheres. In doing so, Wives Writing

Privacy adopts paradigms such as that found in Marta Straznicky’s Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550-1700, in which she frames women’s closets as both

sites of protective withdrawal from the physical and intellectual violence of the Civil

Wars and as performative sites of publicly legitimizing privacy. Straznicky underscores

how, rather than a category of inconsequential drama written in isolation for a severely

limited household audience, women’s closet drama during the Civil Wars especially

should be considered widely accessible, politically radical, and written in relation to

deeply complex literary communities.

Wives Writing Privacy, then, treats he expression and practice of privacy as a

distinct object of analysis in its own right, rather than a deficiency of authority, public

stature, and space. This dissertation places particular emphasis on the deployment and

revision of traditional concepts of privacy by women from very different backgrounds who nonetheless took risks in imagining how they could construct legitimate public reputations without access to the same discourses men used to construct their own public voices. The particular life circumstances and expectations of wifely privacy experienced by Bradstreet, Philips, and Cavendish determined the kinds of novel privacy they imagined in their writing. Rank, religious background, and political position would have predisposed them to adopt particular genres of writing, categories of devotional practice, and discourses of intimate friendship, solitude, symbolic ownership, or intellectual and artistic collaboration. Nevertheless, they shared the particular perspective of exile given to them by their experiences of religious and political upheavals in England and the colonies between the 1640s and 1670s. As a result of her experience as a member of the enterprising group of Puritan elect who braved the colonial frontier in the early seventeenth century to found a religious community, Anne Bradstreet witnessed first- hand the spiritual scandal of Anne Hutchinson, and her life was influenced directly by religiously zealous and authoritarian leaders like John Winthrop and John Cotton. In addition, the burning of her house, her husband’s frequent absence, and the untimely loss of her daughter-in-law and grandchildren gave Bradstreet access to the discourses of election, sola fide, the Puritan quest, exceptionalism, solitude in the wilderness, and the suffering of frontier life. She used these discourses to identify herself as the solitary

Puritan believer, and a new kind of laureate whose voice in the wilderness was instrumental in imagining a Puritan “city upon the hill,” in contrast to the corruptions of the English church and state. By contrast, Philips’ boarding school experience and literary exchange with prominent Royalist writers exposed her to French romance,

Cavalier retirement poetry, and the discourses of Neoplatonic love; combined with her

isolation in Wales as the wife of Parliamentarian James Philips and her initiation into

Dublin literary circles, these circumstances offered her material with which to construct

publicly constitutive forms of retired friendship, symbolic ownership, and exclusive gift

exchange for her own authorial persona and those of the married female personas to

whom she addressed her poetry.14 As a woman of substantial rank and wealth, Cavendish

could imagine slightly more direct forms of ownership for her heroines in her texts,

which were enabled by freedom from male authority. Having sued for her own jointure

and her husband’s property during the Civil Wars and experienced the financial burden of

exile, Cavendish understood that collaborative writing, intellectual partnership, and

emulation between friends were stronger than land and wealth for constructing lasting

public identities. Her lively intellectual engagement with well-known thinkers like

Hobbes and Descartes through her husband’s intellectual network, along with her

husband’s investment in her writing and her position in Henrietta Maria’s court,

influenced her to imagine hierarchically-determined access to public arenas like

literature, politics, and natural philosophy through intimate communities and

friendships. 15

In embracing collective feminine identity, Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure

and The Blazing World both reference exclusive female communities withdrawn from

14 Scholars such as Sarah Prescott have identified what she calls Philips’ “myths of seclusion,” a term that suggests that Philips’ writing about seclusion and isolation are literary tropes contradicted by evidence of her engagement in networks of archipelagic and epistolary exchange. I argue that Philips’ representation of exile, solitude, and isolation should not be ignored or reduced to a stylistic choice or trope. While she may not have been exiled in any formal sense, the concept was attractive enough to her to use it as a means of demarcating her position from that of the Puritan public and from dominant notions of married women’s privacy. See: Sarah Prescott, 345-364. 15 On Cavendish’s literary relationship with her husband, see Jeffrey Masten’s chapter “Mistriss Corrivall: Margaret Cavendish’s Dramatic Production” 156-164 and his article “Material Cavendish: Paper, Performance, ‘Sociable Virginity’” 49-68.

traditional sites of patriarchal authority. These include both popularly imagined

communities like the Amazons (whom I discuss in reference to the Empress in The

Blazing World in Chapter Three) and historical counterparts like Henrietta Maria’s court.

Fleeing England with her husband’s jewels, Henrietta Maria reestablished a female court

based in large part on collectively resisting the Commonwealth and re-envisioning the nation through the art and literature of preciosite. Throughout the first Civil War,

Henrietta Maria’s court functioned as a site of refuge for both female and male Royalists; the paradigm of intellectual partnership within an exclusive female community that formed the cultural currency of Henrietta Maria’s court enabled a broader claims to

Royalist political power accessible to men who had been dispossessed of it. Upon the second Civil War, however, the governance of Henrietta Maria’s court was ultimately absorbed by her son and male Royalist exiles. To further underscore the fragility of her attempts at materially realizing an exclusive female community entirely free from the consequences of traditional paradigms of private sovereignty, Henrietta Maria’s efforts to secure funds by selling the royal jewels were unsuccessful because their worth as signifiers of divinely ordained, virtuous kingship did not register in the public sphere; their worth was now symbolic rather than concrete.16 By investigating reimagined forms

of novel privacy, this dissertation considers what happens when literary or artistic

revisions of private behavior are presented as viable solutions to political dispossession,

regardless of gender.

Convents, another reference to exclusively female communities, also form a key

context for expressions of publicly empowering private identity for the female writers

16 See Purkiss 244-251 for a discussion of these biographical events.

this dissertation takes up. While convents were largely an imaginative backdrop by the time that Bradstreet, Philips, and Cavendish composed their poetry and prose, the convent was a culturally powerful currency for revising paradigms of wifely privacy.

Julie Crawford explains that convents form “a particularly apt site both for royalist women’s coteries and for their claims to intellectual and material power” given that

“royalist women who fought for, defended, and petitioned parliament for their rights to royalist estates” and thus “renegotiated the [previously circumscribed] roles they played in the management and ownership of property as well as the ways in which they imagined their access to it” (183). As such, convents could document the particular potential of all-female communities to inform traditional sites of male authority like the church; when convents became sites upon which wives could navigate their political participation in the public sphere, the imaginative currency of this paradigm redoubled because such possibilities became relevant to male counterparts who had been similarly dispossessed of access to property ownership through the civil wars rather than through coverture.

In both the contexts of Henrietta Maria’s court and convents turned into country houses, friendship between women enables women to act as stewards over properties and communities that function as contested sites of power for male-dominated institutions of authority like the church and state. As Laurie Shannon has cogently argued, early modern concepts of political sovereignty intersected with Ciceronian models of male friendship to define consent as both sameness and assent. In The Convent of Pleasure, for instance,

Lady Happy’s female convent is built upon the premise of consent in both senses: though the women are unalike in their station, they assent to a contract of perpetual virginity that

suggests compatibility across rank. In doing so, the play suggests, like the other texts

studied in this dissertation, that novel forms of privacy could be accessible to various

demographics despite differences in wealth and rank, even though the extent of this

availability was still hierarchically determined. In order to offer this paradigm to the wide

readership of the texts discussed in this project, all three authors draw on the rhetoric of emulation as a mechanism for articulating wives’ empowering virtues in the public sphere. In my examination of Philips and Cavendish in particular, I consider how emulation — in the context of Renaissance notions of friendship — allowed true friends

(rather than vulgar or common friends) to equal or surpass one another in the virtues,

political interests, and values they shared. In this way, each friend raised the standards of

the pair according to definitions of perfect friendship, and thus of each wife as an

individual contributors to public virtue.

Moreover, authors like Cavendish and Philips use the rhetoric of intimate

friendship between women to illustrate that wifely privacy and publicly empowering

forms of private identity, like friendship, could coexist. As Valerie Traub points out,

early modern culture often dismissed the idea that erotic and sexual acts between women

were capable of posing any threat to heteronormative marriage. Such acts were

accordingly represented as insignificant. According to Traub, “domestic heterosexuality

further differentiat[ed] marital eroticism from the intimacies of non-marital friendship”

(269). Determining which acts were compatible with patriarchal marriage and which were not required identifying whether such acts threatened domestic heterosexuality’s

“assertion of the intensifying importance of eroticism within marriage…[and] the melding of love and erotic desire” (265). The agreement of the women in The Convent of

Pleasure to remain virgins during their residency, for example, may seem inconsistent

with the idea that these women were also regarded by the outside world as potential

wives. Cavendish thus plays upon the subconscious assumption of characters outside the

convent, and of the play’s audience, that virgins were always-already potential wives.

While the women in the convent agree to remain virgins, they would have been

understood as quarantined inside the convent to ensure their chastity for future male

suitors. In doing so, Cavendish blurs the line between wifely privacy and other forms of

private identity to posit more flexible and inclusive forms of empowering private identity

for wives.

To understand why the case of married women’s relation to privacy was

exceptional, it is necessary to examine the discourses surrounding seventeenth-century

wifely privacy, such as enclosure, domesticity, and coverture. Greek thought theorized a

domestic sphere characterized by the drive to satisfy material needs. In his historical survey of domesticity, Michael McKeon explains that according to these classical constructions of privacy, “the household was deprived of the freedom it was built upon, and that lies beyond, the realm of necessity” (7). The seventeenth century also borrowed from Greek thought the concept that wives’ privacy signified their status as non-citizens whose labor, alongside that of servants, guaranteed the freedom from attendant notions of toil, want, and deprivation that characterized male private identity. In other words, beginning with Greek thought, men’s private status satisfied the conditions for membership in the public sphere for precisely the opposite reasons that privacy restricted

and disenfranchised married women.17 The Greek categorization of the household as

opposite to officially recognized public authority was inherited by early moderns, for

whom wives’ claim to official citizenship or public position was eclipsed by husbands. In

fact, Bradstreet rejected the official titles and honors typically accorded to male laureates

and instead claimed a female laureate position that was only endorsed by the elect and

God rather than the mainstream public sphere.

Married women’s domestic work was valued differently than the work of single-

women or widows, who could potentially take on paid work or practice trades outside the

home that might signify publicly to a greater extent than did housewifery. The word

“spinster,” referred to a private occupational status — the work of spinning itself — that

eventually became a proper legal designation for women who never married.18 Unlike

the work of spinsters, work done by wives served primarily to support their husbands’

public authority, while failure to adhere to such expectations negatively impacted

husbands’ public reputations. By contrast, widows often took over the duties of

overseeing the trades and property previously managed by their husbands and enjoyed

individual, private statuses similar to those of their late husbands; wives could

temporarily or symbolically represent absent husbands’ private interests but without the

17 See, for example, studies such as Michelle Dowd, Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture; Susan Cahn, Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women’s Work in England, 1500- 1660; Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama; and Anne C. Christensen, “Words About Women’s Work: The Case of Housewifery in Early Modern England” 1-28. 18 The term “housewife” denoted the correlation of wives’ private work and public identity to their status as dependent femes covert. Paid housework did not carry with it the restrictive concepts of privacy that wives’ unpaid domestic work did. Of course, female servants who were considered part of the household would have been subject to the governance of their head of household. Male apprentices, too, had to obey down to the most minute detail their superiors’ orders with regard to behavior, dress, sexuality, and even religious devotion. However, I am interested primarily in the ways that married women’s privacy carried with it an additional register of economic, legal, political, and social insignificance and dependence that failed to ratify their autonomous public voices.

benefit of asserting their own public authority. Widows could use their private status to assert distinct public voices and to litigate on behalf of married daughters or dependent grandchildren, but similar acts of surrogacy by wives did not endorse their own public roles.

Even outside domestic spaces, wives were expected to practice private virtues that continued to support their own exclusion from public life.19 While men were expected to demonstrate private virtues that would earn them public credibility, wives were exhorted, as Katharine Gillespie notes, “to emulate emblematum liber…[and to] maintain the demeanor and restraints of enclosure, even when she was beyond the walls of the house”

(67). Even when practiced outside the home, emblematum liber did not win public roles for wives; instead, it guaranteed that wives’ activities outside the home were considered private and publicly insignificant. Tropes like emblematum liber in conduct manuals, sermons, and other texts categorized domestic labor as the only possible private calling for wives. 20 Texts like Gervase Markham’s conduct book, The English Huswife,

19 As Fiona Williamson has succinctly explained, Laura Gowing and other scholars have argued that early modern people “did not view domestic space as private: the household was embedded in the community and privacy meant something very different” (637). I focus on the private status of domestic labor and vocation, although the material objects of the household would increasingly be associated with the eighteenth-century conception of the home as a private haven from the public world. While Gowing insists on a society shaped by lack of privacy, I contend that the household was increasingly categorized as private because it was maintained by domestic labor (carried out by wives, children, and apprentices) that was not publicly recognized. Susan Cahn in Industry of Devotion theorizes the domestic space as one in which, between 1500 and 1660, women found themselves newly “relegated” to, having lost previously held public positions; more recent scholarship, however, like that of Wendy Wall, upturns the question of whether domesticity could be considered part of, or indeed constitutive of, the private sphere. In relation to these two schools of thought, and especially Gowing’s position, my own work seeks to reconcile women’s apparent loss of public position as a result of the conceptualization of the home as private with the argument that their work within the home was nonetheless not always considered trivial in relation to the activities of men in the public sphere. See Gowing, “The Freedom of the Streets: Women and Social Space, 1560–1640” 130–51 and Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth‐Century England 1- 16; Wendy Wall 1-15, 29-36, 32-33 and Susan Cahn 1-10. On the categorization of domestic versus extra- domestic spaces as private, see Trull 1-19, esp. 8-10; Van Engen 48-52. 20 Scholars like Anne C. Christensen have argued that over time, “a traditional hierarchy that privileged male skills [increasingly] eroded the ideological importance of housewifery, though women continued to

emphasize the connection between married women’s moral status and their domestic

vocation. Marilyn Westerkamp explains that “domestic manuals, sermons, and broadsides

all displayed the paradoxical convictions that women were weak and in great need of

male protection, dangerous and able to drag men down after them, and yet capable of

great piety and strength as they performed their duties under the direction of men” (53).

While even the most laudable Biblical exemplars could be accused of serious moral and

sexual transgressions, “such transgressions could be forgotten, and these women could be justifiably honored because each had submitted herself to marriage and the restrictive control of a great patriarch” (53). Elizabeth Jocelin in The Mother’s Legacie most

succinctly captures this common sentiment when she writes that “I desire her bringing up

may bee learning the Bible, as my sisters doe, good housewifery, writing, and good

workes; other learning a woman needs not” (Jocelin 42).21 The implication that

housewifery could be placed on equal footing with Biblical education, good works, and

writing is sustained through the logic that any married woman’s encounter with these

activities would occur within the walls of her home. Moreover, the writers of popular

conduct manuals and sermons aimed at influencing the behavior of married women emphasize the firm location of proper wifely activity within the actual or metaphorical space of the home, the only place where her virtue can be properly manifested. In

do the actual work of keeping goods, stewarding goods, and governing the household,” linking “men, productivity, and profit to business ‘abroad,’ and women, consumption, and leisure with ‘home’ and domesticity” (3-4). As I show, however, the differences in how the intersection between housewifery, domesticity, and privacy register for wives, single-women, and widows still need to be analyzed more thoroughly. 21 Contemporary conduct books and sermons reinforcing this definition include, for example, Gervase Markham’s widely influential The English Huswife (1631), Dod and Cleaver’s A Godly Form of Household Government (1630), Richard Brathwait’s The English Gentlewoman (1631), William Hill’s A New-Years Gift for Women Being a true Looking-Glass (1660), Elizabeth Jocelin, The Mothers legacie, To her unborne Childe (1624), William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties (1634), Thomas Grantham’s A Sermon: A Sermon Called A Wife Mistaken, or a Wife and No Wife, or, Leah Instead of Rachel (1656).

contrast to activities like “gadding,” which underscore the perception that, if left

unsupervised, women’s activities outside the home were publicly insignificant at best and

socially problematic at worst, Katherine Philips capitalizes on women’s reputations for

gift giving to emphasize married female friends’ publicly resonant exchange of symbolic

possessions like names and secrets (“Gad, v.2.”).22 While gift giving did not necessarily

secure married women’s independent roles in the public sphere, women were known to

be politically effective gift givers, and often influenced dynastic and familial relations to

great political effect, if little formal recognition. 23

Despite their diverse life circumstances, Bradstreet, Philips, and Cavendish draw on common observations about the increasing ideological separation of public and private

spheres in seventeenth century England. Inspired by the early modern appreciation for

classical understandings, new ideas about privacy had significant implications for

married women in particular. Michael McKeon argues that the separation of the public

and private spheres arose as a result of the decline of absolutism; the exile suffered by

Royalists most notably, but also by other dissenting or non-normative groups (like the

Puritan community) thus constitutes a key context for the empowering forms of privacy

circulating in the writing of married women, who often stood to lose the most in these

situations. 24 Consider the risk, for instance, that Bradstreet took as a new wife looking

forward to motherhood, who first faced peril on the frontier of the new world, and then as

22 Women’s gossip and gadding were subject to forms of surveillance vastly different from those discussed here. For a thorough study of gossip with its many implications, see: Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England. 23 See Barbara Harris 259-281. 24 While Habermas locates the origin of the bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century, other scholars have investigated the development of increasing separation among the state, the private household, and the public sphere of literary circulation, debate, and public opinion in the previous century. Literary critics and historians have also argued that the seventeenth century marks the birth of the public sphere, as well as that of the private identity upon which one’s public voice and authority was predicated.

a female laureate whose poetic position was unconventional in both New England and

old. All three women writers also faced exile of a sort from various male-dominated

arenas such as the literary sphere, university education, and the church; still yet another

kind of exile they suffered was their theoretical and sometimes actual enclosure within

the home.25 While aristocratic wives often ran quite large households, they still

experienced a sense of exile from the public world of men: husbands could be absent

often and for long stretches, country houses could be far from markets or courts, and

wives’ activities could be limited to certain rooms or spaces.

For McKeon, the distinction between public and private was the result of men’s

ability to claim some measure of the absolutism that typically accrued to the monarch for

themselves. McKeon remarks of women’s relation to this phenomenon in particular that

for women writers such as Margaret Cavendish, whose work I investigate in chapter

three, and Lady Mary Chudleigh later in the 17th century, individual (and thus private)

absolutism “manifests itself in a peculiarly immaterial, interior, metaphorical, virtual, and

ethical form because in their sociocultural existence women are deprived of the potential

for that material and actual sufficiency on which the movement from necessity to

freedom is predicated and through which the devolution of absolutism might be

registered” (152). This project builds upon McKeon’s recognition in this regard to

consider the particular ways in which empowering forms of privacy must manifest for

married women because of how their status in femes covert affected their ability to claim

even “immaterial, interior, metaphorical, virtual, and ethical” forms of private behavior

and identity. Moreover, Wives Writing Privacy maintains the distinction outlined by

25 In the case of markets, however, Amy Louise Erickson notes the important exception of the “feme sole trader,” who could access and trade in markets individually. See Amy Louise Erickson 21.

McKeon that for men, “the experience of taking on some portion of the absolute

sovereignty that had tacitly accrued to the monarch alone might assume the form of

augmented political authority, economic ownership, or social entitlement” (152). By

contrast, McKeon argues that women and marginalized men, among other groups, could

only experience and articulate private sovereignty “in the subjective dimension” (152).

McKeon’s work, however, pays special attention to the ways in which interiority and other rhetorics of privacy could contribute to the “broader and ungendered process of absolutist devolution before it is separated out as a distinctively ‘feminine’ quality”

(152). Instead, my work reverses this trajectory to consider the ways in which married

women offer their distinctive articulations of novel wifely privacy as contributions to the

more general development of increasingly separate private and public spheres. For

example, I examine how the Puritan community to which Bradstreet belonged disengaged

from the corrupt English religious and political structures in order to claim McKeon’s

concept of private absolutism derived from the monarch. Bradstreet participates in this

disengagement, I explain, by restructuring the logic that distinguished between public and

private through the rhetoric of solitude and the wilderness that articulate her claims to

laureate status. These rhetorics carried with them distinct connotations of spiritual and

moral temptation in the sense that the extra-domestic, patriarchally unsupervised nature of the wilderness could encourage dangerously independent private sovereignty outside traditional public institutions of authority. Thus, Bradstreet’s efforts in this regard would have been applicable to many disenfranchised and exiled by a changing public sphere that was increasingly at odds with individual sovereignty.

In particular, Bradstreet is responding not just to the evolution of absolutism in the public sphere, but to the ways in which this changed the (female) literary scene. As

Richard Helgerson notes, during the seventeenth century in England the best and brightest minds — men with laureate ambitions — were turned toward the project of creating a national literature for England. Within this literary scene, amateur poets claimed to reject the very humanistic attributes that qualified them for civil service to the state by paradoxically displaying their command of these attributes in poetry. And yet, both forms of service to England were in jeopardy in the context of national turmoil over the question of whether its monarch had abused power invested in him under the guise of absolutism, and whether that power could be revoked or even snuffed out, quite literally, by the consent of the people being governed by that monarch. This meant that women writers in particular, over and above men, needed to find new ways to navigate the system of authorial roles available to them in order to craft a national literature that addressed the erring society around them. Bradstreet’s rhetoric of solitude and wandering in the wilderness, then, constitutes an immaterial, novel advertisement of empowering privacy that positions Bradstreet as a laureate set apart from problematic English literary, social, and political traditions in ways that mitigate the transgression implied in traditional connotations of solitude and the wilderness, particularly within a Puritan cosmos that identified these experiences as potential inducements to temptation. Instead,

Bradstreet uses her colonial Puritan sensibility and experience of exile to construct a poetic identity that rejected the honors bestowed by the English court; her withdrawal to the wilderness to contemplate God’s glory is one such attempt at articulating her criticism of honors bestowed by a corrupt court and monarch. And yet even this was complicated

for a married woman whose private status was a domestic one that supported her husband’s public role and perhaps those of her male children. Male laureates, whether they received an official title or pension, could exercise solitary poetic labor alongside more common guarantors of private personhood, like property ownership, household government, etc., whereas Bradstreet must demonstrate her poetic labor as an exercise in sacred privacy that could appropriately support her public role.

In response to the multiple forms of exile to which married women or potential wives were exceptionally subject, the authors whose works are analyzed in this dissertation imagine alternative versions of the private criteria that legitimized male participants in public arenas and centers of power. If they could not independently own land, they imagined jointly owning symbolic possessions. Although they would not be publicly recognized for writing amateur poetry, they constructed new female laureate identities or imagined collaborative authorship that registered publicly. They imagined modes of intimate female friendship that were comparable to men’s publicly endowed friendships, which projected their private credentials, cultivated by friendship, into the public sphere to be recognized as legitimate indicators of public standing. In doing so, they contributed to the development of a female literary tradition invested in writing the nation at the level of the private individual whose conditions for autonomy were rapidly changing. By borrowing from the tradition of male-authored retirement poetry, Philips endows retirement with the sense of liberation attached to Royalist poetics of exile, in direct contrast to the restriction attached to wifely retirement. Philips also intervened in

Petrarchan and friendship traditions in early modern poetry to recuperate wives’ agency as authors and custodians of secrets, private knowledge, and symbolic possessions.

Bradstreet’s verse was informed by the concept of the “city on the hill” and the Puritan errand in the wilderness, both of which espoused Puritan exceptionalism; despite claiming that their colony still belonged to the English nation, the Puritans asserted their right to govern their religious activities, homes, communities, and families privately and independently. Despite her indebtedness to the religious, political, and literary institutions of England, Bradstreet’s ideological and religious separateness likely fostered her expression of a private poetic tradition that was strongly critical of these same Caroline institutions. Cavendish’s attraction to collaborative authorship and intellectual exercise amongst women would have been influenced by her decision to follow Henrietta Maria and her court into exile on the continent between 1644 and 1651, when she married her husband, William, and participated in a rich feminine culture centered on art, letters, poetry, and performance. Moreover, Cavendish’s writing also draws on her experience of following William into exile after his military failures and on her attempts to reclaim her jointure and his sequestered estates. Her texts therefore invoke her exposure to women’s powerful roles in arenas such as literature, art, and the market, where they could act as patrons and muses, but also her experience of exclusion from formal education and authorship.26

Bradstreet, Cavendish, and Philips use novel expressions of privacy, such as discourses associated with withdrawal and retirement, to challenge public arenas such as the courts of law, universities, and the literary system, which refused to recognize wives as autonomous individuals capable of occupying public roles without substantial explicit

26 For biographical details on each of the authors I discuss in Wives Writing Privacy, 1640-1670, see: Gillian Wright 57-146; Elizabeth Hageman 566–608; Charlotte Gordon, 240-252; Kathrynn Seidler Engberg 1-35; Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, royalist, writer and romantic; Cavendish, A True Relation (1667).

or tacit support from their husbands. As Katharine Gillespie explains, separatist groups drew on similar concepts of privacy when they “communicated their autonomy through the ironically ‘visible’ act of enclosing themselves within ‘invisible’ spaces — both in order to demarcate their separateness and to protect themselves against detection by angry authorities” (69). Wives represented imaginatively in texts by Bradstreet, Philips, and Cavendish thus strategically demarcate their intentional separation from public institutions that paradoxically assume wives cannot meet the criteria for autonomous public participation because of their compulsory exclusion from the same institutions.

Surprisingly, the wives figured in the texts that this dissertation examines do not necessarily adopt discourses of radical withdrawal or otherness to distinguish their intentional separation from public institutions that dismissed their private sovereignty: instead, they revise and redeploy the language of domestic labor, creative lack, and modesty that were used to expel them in the first place.

Chapter One examines Anne Bradstreet’s “Prologue,” “An Elegie upon that

Honourable and Renowned Knight Sir Philip Sidney,” “Contemplations,” “The Author to

Her Book,” and “An Epitaph on my dear and ever honoured Mother Mrs. Dorothy

Dudley” to argue that her verse portrays married women who describe their poetic labor as both supporting their own public identities and as consistent with proper wifely behavior, like domestic and reproductive labor. Bradstreet’s married female speakers accentuate the importance of her poetic labor as equivalent to the domestic labor expected of her as a proper Puritan believer and wife; that her poetic labor also registers in the public sphere without risking her reputation only further legitimizes her public authority as a poet. Bradstreet uses poetic labor to exhibit virtues such as modesty and the

intellectual discipline typically ascribed to men, adapting the poetic legacy she inherits from mentors who represent the values of the male-dominated English literary system.

Yet she simultaneously depicts her voluntary withdrawal from the traditional literary system, instead showing that her private poetic virtue is worthy to be recognized alongside male laureates, even if she is not quite included in their circle. Moreover,

Bradstreet figures her speaker as an alternate inheritor and guardian of the materials necessary to build New England figuratively: these imaginatively depicted materials include literary texts, the wilderness of colonial New England itself, divine gifts, and children. Bradstreet’s speaker claims as part of her practice of wifely privacy the poetic and spiritual discipline, self-command, and moderation necessary to build a New World physically and discursively.

Chapter Two investigates how Katherine Philips depicts married women’s exra- legal, shared ownership of symbolic possessions such as names, texts, secrets, and gifts. I examine “To Mris. M.A. Upon Absence,” “Friendship in Embleme,” “To the Excellent

Mrs. Anne Owen,” “To Mrs. Mary Awbrey,” “A Retir’d Friendship,” and “In Defense of

Declared Friendship.” In these poems, female friends share ownership of symbolic possessions and exchange them intimately with one another; Philips thereby shows how wives could revise Petrarchan and Cavalier traditions in which the female beloved, treated like an object that the male lover could contain, ultimately bolstered his public reputation at the expense of her own. Chapter Two investigates how such strategies — for instance, depicting the insular and clandestine exchange of gifts between married

women — become forms of sanctioned, autonomous privacy for wives.27 Married

women in Philips’ poetry exchange possessions within the context of friendships to

circumvent the ways that coverture eclipsed their claims to legal possession: exchanging

secrets, symbols, names, and knowledge highlights each woman’s independent handling

of valuable possessions in ways that register on her own behalf. Nevertheless, Philips’

poetry shows that female friends can still remain “good wives” who do not transgress the

legal and theoretical limits of coverture by trying to assert legal ownership over property.

Moreover, she elevates friendship between wives above marriage through the use of

metaphysical conceits such as compasses, gold, and hearts to emphasize the greater

potential of friendship to accentuate wives’ private virtues in ways that support their

individual public roles.

Chapter Three explains how married female friends in Cavendish’s The Blazing

World and The Convent of Pleasure challenge traditional sites of private sovereignty such

as male friendship, individual legal ownership and inheritance, imitatio and even systems

of knowledge and governance as the most effective and authentic indicators of public

authority. Cavendish’s female characters create worlds and texts, reappropriate

inheritance to fashion female communities, adopt eccentric modes of material adornment,

reveal hidden knowledge, and stage performances of intimate friendship and erotic

desire. As forms of creative and intellectual partnership that allow wives to assert public

autonomy in ways that equal or surpass the strategies typically adopted by men, these

novel forms of privacy highlight the need for men and women to imagine new ways of

27 McKeon more fully explains that “if the wife insisted upon that unconditional possession of property that elsewhere signified autonomous privacy, it must be negatively revalued as an evasion of authentic privacy, of ‘good housewifery’” (40).

generating public identity after the fallout of the Civil Wars. Cavendish suggests a political model based on individual sovereignty rather than basing it on one sovereign, to whose public power all others are subordinate.

This project asks how studying women’s literary traditions can help to recover the role of early modern wives in seventeenth-century political thought and how doing so can answer questions about the limits of individual sovereignty and state influence over private matters. Reading Bradstreet, Philips, and Cavendish in this way reverses the privilege often accorded either to women’s contributions to the public sphere or to their obedience to patriarchal expectations of proper wifely behavior that exclude them from it.

Instead, this dissertation asks: how did wives expand the range of relationships and activities that “counted” as publicly significant and as appropriate forms of wifely privacy, and how did they change the range of meanings that conventional forms of wifely privacy could produce?

Chapter 1 Writing Sacred Privacy: Female Laureateship and Anne Bradstreet’s (New) England

In this chapter, I examine how Anne Bradstreet revised commonplace ideas about

domesticity, female inferiority, and religious devotion to express independence from the

English state and from male family members in constructing her own publicly resonant

private identity. In poems such as “Contemplations,” “The Prologue,” “An Elegie

upon...Sir Philip Sidney,” and “The Author to Her Book,” she claims a private poetic

vocation to support her public authority. To justify her poetic vocation, she uses the

discourses of domesticity, modesty, and piety to represent her writing as consistent with

expectations of Puritan wifely privacy. Comparing her domestic work to poetic labor

paradoxically enables Bradstreet to extend her literary virtues outside the home without

risking her reputation as wife and mother.28 Bradstreet defines poetry as an established

avenue of normative wifely privacy, alongside the religious and domestic vocations

considered appropriate for Puritan wives, rather than in opposition to the accepted

behaviors.

Like Ben Jonson and John Milton — male poets who made very direct bids for

laureateship — Bradstreet attempts to craft a publicly legible private identity of her own.

Accomplishing this task requires Bradstreet to engage with the rhetoric of modesty

28 Most Bradstreet scholarship has operated according to the premise that Bradstreet produced what appear to be two radically different books: the public and uninspired 1650 Tenth Muse and the brilliantly original, domestic 1678 Several Poems. Criticism thus often compartmentalizes Bradstreet’s work along the public/private divide. See Wade White, Anne Bradstreet: “The Tenth Muse”; Rich and Hensley ix-xx, xxi- xxxv; Requa 3-18; Stanford 373-389. More recent critics have begun to complicate the tensions illustrated in Bradstreet’s poems between married women’s relationships to domesticity and alternatives to it, as well as the conception of married women’s writing as private or public in nature and in circulation. See Winebrenner 45-69; Van Engen 47-68; Gillespie, “‘This Briny Ocean Will O’erflow Your Shore’” 99-118; Harvey 17-50; Pender 149-170.

strikingly, she defines modesty in relation to spiritual and intellectual control rather than

in relation to physiological or sexual shame, as many women writers did. To claim

female laureateship, Bradstreet uses a rhetoric of modesty and domesticity strategically to

challenge traditional views of women’s poetic inferiority that she often appears to

espouse. She does not dismiss her domestic role; instead, she affirms the steadfastness,

rigor, and piety necessary to survive moral and physical peril on the frontier. She

identifies these virtues as part of her poetic identity, adding to them novel private

behaviors, such as seeking solitude, that together signify her fitness to rebuild the English

nation in the New World, literally and figuratively. Traditional concepts of wifely privacy

encouraged feminine modesty as a means to enforce obedience to husbands, whose

public stature was underpinned by their ability to contain their wives’ agency. Bradstreet

claims the virtues of independent discipline typically associated with men to generate an

autonomous public role that was also compatible with Puritan ideas about wifely

obedience. Her poetry suggests that these virtues exemplify the standards for membership

in an emergent Puritan public sphere populated by the elect, since Bradstreet’s

community represented itself as a “city on a hill” set apart from the invasive, corrupt

authority of the English crown when it came to private matters like religion. 29

29 Katharine Gillespie analyzes the moniker “Tenth Muse” to posit that Bradstreet’s editors recognized her poetic project of reimagining political and gendered withdrawal. Gillespie explains that Bradstreet’s “editorial coterie” understood the moniker to link “their own situation as a colony in relation to England….and Sappho's position as an exile in Sicily from Lesbos in ancient Greece during the period when her native island experienced a series of conflicts between the nobility and the commoners” (101). The reference to Sappho in Bradstreet’s first published collection of poetry invokes the colonists’ sense of exile, but it also conflates a host of other subject positions that, like those of married women, were defined legally and socially by some level of distance from the centers of the nascent public sphere and the state. These positions included Cavaliers, colonists, separatists, and members of other factions who did not want to function autonomously but wanted, like Bradstreet, to imagine ways of distancing themselves from a malfunctioning state and/or patriarchal order so as to address its maladies, and eventually, to reintegrate. Gillian Wright also interrogates the title page reference to Sappho in the context of large-scale editorial and

Fashioning the identity of the female laureate requires Bradstreet to transform the

virtues conventionally associated with wifely privacy into a means to support her own

independent public role. In her poetry, she questions the notion that wives’ virtues could,

at best, secure limited private household authority under the close supervision of a

husband, father, or brother. Instead, Bradstreet provides subtle examples of married

women who could, with some measure of independence from male authority, practice

novel and publicly resonant forms of feminine modesty that cultivated spiritual and

intellectual control. Commonplace definitions of feminine modesty typically encouraged

wives’ confinement to the home to ensure their compliance with normative wifely

behavior, including feminine modesty. By strategically distancing herself from the home

in some of her poems, Bradstreet suggests that wives could independently claim private

behaviors that involved spiritual control, intellectual discipline, poetic virtue, and good

works as evidence of election, thereby supporting their public roles without patriarchal

regulation or surveillance. Rather than espousing the classical sense of privacy linked

with the home, Bradstreet frames these publicly resonant forms of private behavior, such

as poetic composition practiced in the wilderness, as unconventional but appropriate for wives to adopt.30 Her poetic vocation confirms her membership in the Puritan public

sphere through virtues fostered both by domestic labor and, less conventionally, by poetic

publication practices shaping the design of the cover page to The Tenth Muse, considering the vexed position of the muse in relation to women’s agency. See, in particular, Wright’s Producing Women's Poetry, 1600-1730: Text and Paratext, Manuscript and Print 60-65. 30 For a discussion of the ways in which outdoor spaces signified as private during this period, see Crane 4- 22. While assumptions about separate spheres ideology locate women in the private realm of the household and men in the public realm of common space outside the home, I adapt Crane’s argument to suggest that public spaces outside the home might still facilitate men’s experience of privacy — as places where they might practice their private trade or business, for instance — that were parallel to the way that the home shaped women’s experience of privacy.

39 labor. Despite her embodiment of traditional wifely virtues throughout her corpus,

Bradstreet delineates the limitations on public authority that conventional notions of privacy imposed on married women. Since traditional forms of privacy like property ownership, familial authority, and religious devotion were becoming increasingly fraught even for Puritan men to claim in England, Bradstreet considers? alternative ways of achieving public membership in the colonies, instead redefining Englishness as godly election evidenced by faith alone.

Domesticity and Dogma: Sacred Privacy, Modesty, and the Female Laureate in the Puritan New World

In reconciling her poetic praxis with her private identity as a wife, Bradstreet frames the former as an extension of the latter, underpinned by a definition of faith and piety instead of labor. In distinguishing bankrupt forms of private sovereignty and public stature from forms that were spiritually authentic, she drew on the sense of “spiritual parity” afforded to Puritan wives, who were “expected to demonstrate their election by carrying out obligations of their individual vocations, thus working in concert to bring about the New Jerusalem” (Garcia-Rouphail 11). However, “spiritual parity was not to be mistaken for intellectual or moral parity”: wives’ lack of public autonomy resulted from their confinement to domestic vocations. Seventeenth-century readings of Genesis regard

Eve’s confinement to domestic privacy as a model for ensuring wives’ modesty and obedience to their husbands. In contrast, the nightingale Bradstreet describes in

“Contemplations” is free to sing in the wilderness, unrestricted by place or vocation because she is obedient to God, and more importantly, because she espouses faith in her

godly election rather than a drive to “earn” it through good works. According to

mainstream Puritan belief, one’s virtues constituted evidence of election but did not

guarantee it.31 While domestic privacy could cultivate virtues that Puritans might

interpret as signs of election, these signs did not identify wives as worthy of public

recognition. To claim the role of female laureate for a community of godly believers who

separated themselves from fallen religious and political institutions, Bradstreet draws on

the symbolism of the nightingale as a classical figure for female agency and poetic

legitimacy and as a Biblical symbol for exercising virtue as a path toward salvation, but

not as a means to achieve it.32

In “Contemplations,” Bradstreet invokes the mythological Philomela as a

common emblem for poetic voice and authority, since the gods transform her into a

nightingale known for her sorrowful song after her brother-in-law rapes her. Ovid’s

Philomela memorializes the violent assault of her private virtue — chastity — by weaving a tapestry that exposes her rape after her brother-in-law cuts out her tongue.

Bradstreet’s poetic speaker declares that “the sweet-tongu’d Philomel percht ore my head, / And chanted forth a most melodious strain,” after which she “wisht me wings

31 See Westerkamp 29-67. 32 Lee Oser contends that although “English Renaissance poets sometimes treated Philomel as a figure of grief and sadness,” Bradstreet’s bird “is notably ‘merry’” and must therefore “signal a movement away from the classical myth of loss and metamorphosis toward a joyous syncretism” (197). Oser contextualizes “Contemplations,” and the nightingale in particular, in relation to the preparationist debates in which Puritan believers considered the question of whether the soul could be purified in preparation for Christ’s entry or whether this amounted to preaching a covenant of works. Oser suggests that the classical figure of Philomel tied to the image of the nightingale could only be read in terms of “grief and sadness” and therefore divorces it from his religious reading.

with her a while to take my flight” (227, l. 176-177; 182).33 She identifies with the

Ovidian nightingale who, relies, along with her sister Procne, on domestic practices like

cooking and weaving to garner agency and to avenge Philomela’s violated chastity.34

Ultimately, though, the mythological Philomela rejects feminine virtues like sexual

shame and silence and instead exercises her public poetic voice as a way to recover her

private autonomy after her rape.

The centrality of divine intervention to Philomel’s singing ability in

“Contemplations” reinforces the prominence of poetry as a sacred vocation for wives like

Bradstreet. Philomel’s song in the wilderness can be understood as a form of sacred

privacy that is physically removed from domestic privacy and beyond the reach of the

institutional authority represented in mythological accounts by Tereus, who is both a

male relative and monarch. Bradstreet’s choice to align herself with Philomel’s poetic

immortality is a calculated effort to position her own poetry as a sacred vocation rather

than a symbol of worldly glory. Like Philomel, the poetic speaker of “Contemplations”

wanders through private, extra-domestic spaces and asserts her self-sovereignty against

the brutal hypocrisy of patriarchal imperatives that defined wives’ modesty through

33 All references to Bradstreet’s poetry are from Several Poems (1678). For the purposes of this chapter, I will use the names “Philomela” and “Procne” only when referring to the Ovidian account and will use “Philomel” and “Progne” to refer to Bradstreet’s and other accounts or references to the same story. 34 Philomela turns to the wilderness as an alternative private space marked by a lack of domestic labor. In Sandys’ translation, Philomela as the nightingale is associated with the woods, where Procne keeps to domestic spaces in her bird form; in fact, Sandys glosses Procne as becoming a swallow, traditionally associated with barns. Bradstreet draws on this conflation of “barn” and “house” in such translations when she describes the “merry Bird” of “Contemplations,” who “neither toyles nor hoards up in thy barn” (183- 184). In both Bradstreet and Ovid, the nightingale is a creature intentionally separated, with the help of divine intervention, from the home as a space that limits women’s moral and spiritual authority. I base the connection to Ovid’s nightingale on George Sandys’s translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis (1632).

42 domestic enclosure and housewifery.35 According to Patrick Cheney, Ovid’s Philomela became a figure through which Renaissance poets constructed their “particular writing of nationhood” (524) and thus their identity as potential national poets. Bradstreet recasts

“the question of the poet’s voice — his cultural authority, his credentials for the job of

England’s national poet” (my emphasis, Cheney 533) symbolized by Philomel in terms that reflect her credentials as a female poet writing for a community of the elect and for

God as divine patron.36 She articulates her own human limitations by identifying with

Philomel, whose complete reliance on God to furnish her physical and spiritual needs and

modest awareness of her limitations parallels Bradstreet’s own relation to God. Bradstreet

represents poetry as an exercise in sacred privacy that signifies her moral virtue in the

same way that Philomela’s lament in the wilderness declared her innocence and Tereus’

35 I borrow the term “extra-domestic private” from Mary Trull, who writes that “Early modern discourse often envisioned women’s privacy through extra-domestic space. While scholars have noted the multiple meanings of early modern privacy, literary criticism largely continues to limit the topic of women and privacy to the social space of the home” (9). I adapt the term to designate activities, like Bradstreet’s writing, that are represented as separate from the household and domestic labor, but also distinct from the public for which such activities are legitimized. 36 By contrast, Edmund Spenser’s dedicatory sonnet to Raleigh in The Faerie Queene (1590) reinterprets Philomel’s poetic labor as service to a worldly patron and monarch, Elizabeth I. The intimate relationship of patronage contributes to his private status and thus elevates the public significance of his poetic virtue. Spenser, of course, does not recognize in his poem that Elizabeth’s ability to function as a worldly patron and monarch is facilitated by her own revision of typical definitions of wifely privacy, particularly because she presents herself as metaphorically married to England. Bradstreet’s representation of the nightingale draws on Philomel’s pseudo-wifely status in George Sandys’ translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where she exclaims after being raped: “I, an adultresse to my sister’s bed: / Thou, husband to us both; my onely hate” (6.541-542). Philomel is not quite a wife, but she frames herself as having been problematically introduced into the marital economy nonetheless. Bradstreet’s representation of the nightingale references Philomel’s freedom from patriarchal control, and especially from expectations of wifely privacy, because she relies on God for survival and because she abandons commonplace forms of privacy, like domesticity and coverture, that failed to secure her marital chastity. In Bradstreet’s hands, Philomel becomes a figure for the female laureate who, writing from extra-domestic spaces and redefining commonplace concepts of wives’ privacy, rejects worldly institutional authority as corrupt and instead writes a nation of the godly elect.

crime. Likewise, Bradstreet’s private poetic service declares her faith in a divine patron

and signifies her election as both a proper believer and a publicly authorized voice in her

community. 37

In its Biblical context, the nightingale in “Contemplations” becomes an emblem

that her female speaker uses to consider the relations among good works, domesticity,

and sacred privacy in the Puritan cosmos. In Puritan dogma, good works constituted a

path toward salvation but did not merit one’s attainment of eternal life; however, good

works could authorize one’s voice in the Puritan public.38 The potential of good works

encouraged wives like Bradstreet to cultivate private identities based on labor to counter

the institutions that denied them a voice and attempted invasively to control their private

calls to divine action. The nightingale invites Bradstreet’s speaker, as wife and poet, to

identify with it:

O merry Bird (said I) that fears no snares, That neither toyles nor hoards up in thy barn, Feels no sad thoughts, nor cruciating cares To gain more good, or shun what might thee harm, Thy cloaths ne’re wear, thy meat is every where Thy bed a bough, thy drink the water cleer, Reminds not what is past, nor what’s to come dost fear. (p. 227, l. 184-192)

Bradstreet’s speaker meditates on the spiritual contentment of a creature who is free from

the necessity of domestic toil, a situation very different from her own as a Puritan wife on

37 Philip Sidney, like other poets of his age, invokes the nightingale as a figure for poetic identity in “The Nightingale,” where he bewails and ironically belittles the lack of preference he receives from Elizabeth. Bradstreet, too, divorces her image of the nightingale from symbols of institutional authority: she relocates Philomel’s chastity and modesty to an extra-domestic space that fosters her poetic vocation in the same way that, through poetry, Bradstreet imaginatively locates the new Puritan nation in the new world wilderness. See Hebel and Hudson 19. 38 Westerkamp explains further that “Because God offered his grace freely and unconditionally and because, in the end, learning and preparation merited nothing, the gracious experience of conversion came to be recognized as the key sign of election as well as the centerpiece of the Puritan's spiritual journey” (48).

the New England frontier.39 The “merry bird” is not compelled to “toyle,” “hoard up in

[her] barn,” (my emphasis) or suffer “cruciating cares” because her “meat is every

where” supplied by God’s bounty. Despite Bradstreet’s immersion in Puritan beliefs that

supported faith in God’s provision for the basic necessities of life, she would have been

reminded often that the female sex “achieved sainthood...through domestic

relationships,” (Giffen 11) which included domestic labor as a path toward realizing

salvation, but not as a way of earning it. The homes of birds become a common feature of

Bradstreet’s poetic repertoire and extend her engagement with the conventions of pastoral

poetry and poems about gardens. However, in “Contemplations,” this kind of imagery

also encourages believers to prioritize devotion rather than domestic labor because the

former constitutes sacred privacy and therefore reinforces God’s omnipotence alone in

granting salvation. In “Contemplations,” Bradstreet describes a creature who chooses

song over domestic toil, presenting as parallel her own choice to heed her divine calling

to poetry as a form of sacred privacy.40

In “Contemplations,” Bradstreet describes the nightingale in language that mirrors

Jesus’s description of the ideal believer in the Sermon on the Mount. The believer should

“Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your

body, what ye shall put on” and should compare himself to “the fowls of heaven: for they

39 Michael G. Ditmore broadly describes the poem as one in which “the speaker solitarily ventures into nature at eventide to consider the Deity’s providential handiwork in the physical creation” (32). For more on the importance of nature and/or wilderness as a trope and setting in “Contemplations,” see also Stanford 238-254 and Oser 187-202. 40 Later in “Contemplations,” Bradstreet asserts that “names without a Record are forgot” (228), while only the names of the elect, “grav’d in white stone / Shall last and shine while all of these are gone” (231-232). As one of her strongest identifications as a member of the elect, these lines rely on the very literal parallel between writing on paper (“Records”) and engraving stones (“white stone”). They thus suggest that Bradstreet is divinely called to poetry, which renders her verse — itself engraved by her hand in the manuscript version of her volume — as immortal as the engraved stones.

sowe not, neither reape, nor carry into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them” and

to “the lilies of the fielde” who “labour not, neither spin” (Matthew 6:26, 28).41 In

“Contemplations,” the nightingale “feels no sad thoughts, nor cruciating cares, / To gain

more good” (227, l. 186-87). True believers follow divine commands to subordinate their

concern for clothing, food, and shelter to spiritual sustenance and to obey the call to

devotional work rather than tend to domestic “cares.” Bradstreet’s nightingale models

this behavior: her “clothes ne’re wear” out or fray, her bed is “a bough” and her “drink

the water cleer” (p. 227, l. 189), all supplied by God’s natural bounty. Because God’s

grace supplies these needs, the bird is free to engage in more spiritually sustaining work,

like song.

If the chief private vocation of Puritan wives was housewifery, Bradstreet urges

readers to remember that, according to scripture it came second only to the religious

vocation shared by all Puritans, regardless of gender. Jesus encourages followers to give

precedence to religious devotion over “labour” (Matthew 6:28) a term that parallels

Bradstreet’s “toyle” in “Contemplations.” Bradstreet interprets the message of the

Sermon on the Mount to mean that wives’ primary obligation was religious devotion,

despite conduct books that substituted household labor in its place.42 Jesus counsels his

41 All biblical references are drawn from the Geneva Bible, 1560 edition. 42 Contemporary conduct books and sermons such as Gervase Markham’s widely influential The English Huswife (1631), Dod and Cleaver’s A Godly Form of Household Government (1630), William Hill’s A New-Years Gift for Women Being a true Looking-Glass (1660), Elizabeth Jocelin, The Mothers legacie, To her unborne Childe (1624), William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties (1634), Thomas Grantham’s A Sermon: A Sermon Called A Wife Mistaken, or a Wife and No Wife, or, Leah Instead of Rachel (1656) and Richard Brathwait’s The English Gentlewoman (1631) exhorted the wives and daughters of yeomen, merchants, and professionals to supervise household economic practices that satisfied the need (from which the bird is free) to “hoard up,” “gain more good,” or “shun what might thee harm.” Markham’s text characterizes domesticity as “a duty really belonging to a woman” (60), while Dod and Cleaver contend that “the virtuous woman (As Proverbs 31, 17) girdeth her loines with strength and strengthen her armes...She seeketh wooll and flax &c. She putteth her hand to the wheele” (45). As the daughter and wife

audience to “seeke ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousnesse; and all these things” — that is, food, clothing, and shelter — “shalbe ministred unto you” (Matthew

6:33). Bradstreet depicts the believer’s surrender to and glory in God’s will through

sacred privacy in precisely these terms, and she frames her laureateship as an exercise in

the Puritan commitment to sola fide, sola scriptura.

As a devotional text, “Contemplations” mirrors the Puritan errand into the

wilderness and gestures figuratively toward the Puritan withdrawal from Anglican

England to which Bradstreet gives voice as laureate. In the opening lines of the poem that

precede her identification with the nightingale, Bradstreet exemplifies the religious and

social individuality of her community by distinguishing herself as a solitary speaker in

the wilderness. Not a single human appears in the landscape that Bradstreet describes in

rich detail:

Sometime now past in the Autumnal Tide, When Phoebus wanted but one hour to bed, The trees all richly clad, yet void of pride, Were gilded o’re by his rich golden head. Their leaves and fruits seem’d painted but was true Of green, of red, of yellow, mixed hew, Rapt were my senses at this delectable view. (221, l. 1-7)

Bradstreet describes the time just before twilight on an autumn day, when the setting sun

filters through the splendorous colors of the leaves. She emphasizes natural beauty that

quiets her mind and heart and allows her to focus on divine excellence that surpasses

even the “delectable view” of the fallen world, which is nevertheless beautiful in its own

of important members of the gentry who became governors in colonial New England, Bradstreet certainly would have identified with Barnabe Rich’s description of a gentlewoman’s responsibility for domestic labor and worry, in which her “degree” dictated she “putteth not herselfe to bodily labour, yet shee over seeth the wayes of her household, she must see to her children her servantes and her family” (23). Nevertheless, for Bradstreet, sacred privacy subordinates this need to ultimate trust in God, questioning the domestic occupation as the principal experience of privacy for wives.

right. Her sacred solitude allows her to appreciate the natural world as a gift and a sign of

her own election as one who is provided for by God without the need to toil.

The vivid description of landscape underscores divine control over living things,

like trees, that are free from the ugliness of “pride” (221, l. 3) and other signs of

ambition. The totality of Bradstreet’s solitude is echoed in the last three lines, which

rhyme “true,” “hew” and “view.” The staccato rhythm created by the triple rhyme, which

uses short syllables to connote a more complete break from the world, complements the

open vowel sounds that gestures toward the speaker’s fluid connection with God,

manifested in the “delectable view” (221, l. 7) before her:

I wist not what to wish, yet sure thought I, If so much excellence abide below, How excellent is he that dwells on high? Whose power and beauty by his works we know. Sure he is goodness, wisdom, glory, light, That hath this under world so richly dight. More Heaven than Earth was here, no winter and no night. (p. 221, l. 8-14)

Bradstreet’s meditation allows her to identify “his works” as the evidence of God’s own

“power and beauty,” implying that the work of all living things created by God is

evidence of their spiritual soundness. By extension, Bradstreet’s poetic work reflects

God’s own generative work: the speaker’s empirical observation of God’s “goodness,

wisdom, glory, light” is a work of self-discovery in which she recognizes her own limitations without patriarchal intervention.

Bradstreet describes her solitude in the wilderness as a kind of religious and

poetic “wandr’ing” (223, l. 51) — that is, a controlled process in which the speaker

distances herself, literally (spatially) and metaphorically (chronologically), from a false

literary system and improper belief. To accomplish this, Bradstreet invokes the rhetoric

of feminine modesty commonly used to express women’s poetic inferiority in general.

However, she uses this rhetoric to persuade readers that private vocations other than

domesticity could reinforce wives’ proper spiritual and marital chastity. The female

speaker of “Contemplations” practices modesty through poetic composition and

meditation outside the confines of the home in a solitary landscape that enables her to

serve God, rather than an earthly institution, through female laureateship. While the

rhetoric of feminine modesty (pudor) reinforced wives’ lack of self-sovereignty, the

discourse of moderation (modestus) encouraged men to regulate their private behavior

and to demonstrate this control to earn public autonomy. For male laureate poets

especially, modestus involved strict intellectual and spiritual discipline that helped to

fashion their reputation as capable, independent contributors to public discourse who

could control their emotions in serving the public. Pudor did not secure wives’

independent public roles, since this discourse ultimately reflected husbands’ ability to

regulate wives’ spiritual and sexual continence.43 Modesty therefore enabled men’s self-

fashioning and authorized their public voices based on their ability to govern themselves

without any external restraints or surveillance. Women’s modesty, however, was based

on an understanding of the female body as shameful and in need of regulation by

patriarchal authorities. This meant that many wives’ self-negating performances of

modesty were actually internalized extensions of male efforts to ensure wifely privacy in

the sense of intellectual and sexual dependence by excluding them from empowering

43 Tamara Harvey explains how, for men, the performance of modesty was vital to their participation in public because it signaled their ability to regulate the self (not just the body) once it moved beyond the private domestic space. She writes that “modesty was a virtue for men as well, but for them modestus…connoted probity, self-government, and reason” and “helped men negotiate the dual roles of governing and being governed” (1).

public discourses, like those associated with literature, religion, or politics. Bradstreet’s wandering in the wilderness is unsupervised by earthly male authorities and characterized by her independent assessment of her limitations and role in the cosmos.

Delivered on board the ship Arbella en route to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in

1630, John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity illustrates the strict intellectual and

spiritual control that characterized modestus, which he frames as the governing virtue

necessary for both male and female colonists’ survival in the wilderness. To mend the

disorder of England and the Anglican Church, the colonists rely on God alone, who

“ratified this covenant and sealed our mission, and will expect a strict performance of the

articles contained in it” (286). If their “mission” is neglected, Winthrop warns, “the Lord

will surely break out in wrath against us...and make us know the price of the breach of

such a covenant” (286). He uses legalistic language to invoke the kind of austerity often

associated with the law, whether God’s or man’s, and the “strict performance” (286) of

God’s law inimical to the colonists’ pioneering Puritan spirit. He thereby privileges

modestus as the governing directive of the Puritan mission; Bradstreet then brilliantly

adapts Winthrop’s vision of Puritan modestus, through the nightingale and other imagery, to secure her own poetic reputation as a female laureate. Through disciplined poetic and spiritual labor, she signifies her independence both within the home and outside of it. In the New England wilderness, domestic labor required physical, intellectual and spiritual discipline as a matter of survival; poetry required a similar effort for a female laureate speaking on behalf of an intrepid, reforming colony in the New World if she was to avoid condemnation. By framing poetic labor as parallel to domestic labor, Bradstreet suggests that both kinds of labor engender wifely chastity and modesty consistent with notions of

feminine inferiority. Strikingly, though, Bradstreet suggests that these labors are worthy

of enough praise to endow wives with public autonomy.

Bradstreet echoes and revises Winthrop’s idea of modestus as discipline in the wilderness, writing that “Silent, alone, where none or saw, or heard, / In pathless paths I lead my wandring feet” (223, l. 50-51). Not only does the poetic believer “wander” through such “pathless paths,” but as female laureate she leads the “feet” of her poetry

“wandring” through the dangerous maze of a male-dominated literary system. Despite the common association of “wandering” with spiritual erring or a tendency toward sin,

Bradstreet transforms her wandering into a positive sense of self-discipline: she has not gone astray in the wilderness, but pursues her calling to God, “leading” her feet – in both the literal and poetic sense of “feet” – through untamed wilderness with a strategic sense of purpose. The oxymoronic phrase “pathless paths” suggests a keen sense of geographic and spiritual direction that ultimately reveals God’s calling that she must “sing some song.” Contemplating God’s glory in nature prompts her “To sing some Song, my mazed

Muse thought meet, / My great Creator I would magnifie” (223, l. 53-54). In a conventional expression of poetic modesty, Bradstreet’s speaker declares “But Ah, and

Ah, again, my imbecility!” (223, l. 55). Here, she also acknowledges the limits of her own ability to compose a song that will properly honor God “that nature had, thus decked liberally” (223, l. 55-56) the New England landscape. “Contemplations” marks Bradstreet as spatially, vocationally, and spiritually distanced from domestic privacy as well as the public role of the male laureate. By constructing an imagined solitary space, Bradstreet legitimizes the sacred privacy she realizes through poetry as an extra-domestic practice worthy of God’s notice.

Bradstreet uses the rhetoric of modesty to express a sense of political and spiritual independence that characterizes her construction of Puritan laureateship. In doing so, she responds directly to a literary system which, according to Richard Helgerson’s landmark work, consisted of amateur, professional, and laureate positions with little to no room for women, especially wives.44 Nonetheless, Bradstreet presents female laureateship as a valid position within the literary system by emphasizing the private labor that produces it.

According to Helgerson, all three poetic positions were based on the status of a private man, but only laureate poets used their private identities to generate public voices deployed in service of the nation. Indeed, Helgerson asserts that for amateur poets, poetry was solely “a way of displaying abilities that could, once they had come to the attention of a powerful patron, be better employed in some other manner,” while for the laureate,

“poetry was itself a means of making a contribution to the order and improvement of the state” (29). The laureate position was distinguished in that these poets sought “a role apart” characterized by “individual talent and an individual desire for greatness. It depended as well on a system of authorial roles in which that ambition might make sense” (Helgerson 2). If aspiring male laureate and amateur poets who used poetry to exhibit private virtues they hoped to offer in public service sought to be “different in kind” from each other, the same ambition presented a set of obstacles specific to the status of a married woman like Bradstreet—and a Puritan at that. Her solitary wandering in the wilderness is a novel form of privacy that positions her in “a role apart” not just from male laureates, from whom she was “different in kind,” but also from English literary, political, and social traditions. As femmes covert, wives could not theoretically

44 Helgerson notes that “the term public poet...has at least the virtue of excluding no one, but it leads too readily to an opposition with private man, an opposition the poets would have been the first to deny” (4).

52 claim poetic identity based on “individual talent” and the “individual desire for greatness.” Married women with poetic callings, therefore, needed to find different ways to articulate their “ambition” or credentials within the English “system of authorial roles.” Bradstreet therefore uses solitude to channel “publicly less ambitious writers…[who] were ‘hors concours’ to the world of courtly patronage” (Helgerson 4).45

Bradstreet’s colonial Puritan sensibility and experience of exile would have been well suited to constructing a poetic identity that rejected the honors bestowed by the English court; her withdrawal to the wilderness to contemplate God’s glory is one such attempt at articulating her rejection of inauthentic honors bestowed by man.

In “Contemplations,” she achieves this by emphasizing her “otherness” compared to male poets in the English literary system through the language of physical withdrawal into the wilderness. Male laureates sought official public titles and renown as authors who spoke directly from and to the center of power in England. As a wife, Bradstreet was well-positioned to represent her poetry as private, composed without thought for titles or renown, and written from the home. She cultivates a private female laureateship that is removed from the English public sphere and that is also separate from her husband,

45 While Bradstreet adopts male laureates’ self-representation as isolated and withdrawn from society, she does not simply imitate her male predecessors (if we can truly say she has any). She rather uses the rhetoric of detachment from a degenerate English public sphere to supplement her lack of private identity on which to build her laureateship. While male laureates went unrecognized by the center of such authority in the official sense prior to the creation of a state-sanctioned laureateship created in 1668, Bradstreet’s case was remarkable even in this context. As a married woman, her private status was a domestic one that supported her husband’s public role and perhaps those of her male children (thanks to Susanne Woods for this important insight and clarification of my broad theory). Male laureates, whether they received an official title or pension, could exercise public authority generated by displaying their solitary poetic labor alongside more common guarantors of private personhood, like property ownership, household government, etc. Bradstreet would thus need to demonstrate her poetic labor as an exercise in sacred privacy that was distinct from other types of privacy — such as Milton’s stoicism — typically deployed to generate laureate authority. At the same time, Bradstreet maintained a sharp distinction between sacred and domestic privacy because the latter did not support wives’ public lives at all.

53 father, and male poetic predecessors. Bradstreet’s poems are distinct from those of amateur poets because, despite the privacy of her poems, they allow Bradstreet to contribute to the public discourse then shaping the fledgling Massachusetts Bay

Colony.46 Yet as a married woman, Bradstreet could not cultivate a private status or enjoy a public role on the same terms as either male laureate or amateur poets: the language of solitude was one discourse upon which she could draw to empower her own and her community’s resistance to traditional English systems of power.

Bradstreet recuperates solitude from the negative value attached to it by early modern writers who “distinguish[ed] isolation — being psychologically and spiritually alone — from solitude — the physical state of separation from others” (Holmes 13). She imagines a space in which her separateness is endowed with spiritual and poetic agency tempered by her own self-government and discipline. Throughout “Contemplations,”

Bradstreet reminds us of her solitude by emphasizing separation from other humans.

Phrases such as “retired place” (224, l. 78), “Chamber” (222, l. 29), “a lonely place with pleasures dignifi’d” (226, l. 144), and “darksome womb” (222, l. 35) articulate her solitude, often punctuated with reminders that only “abject” (223, l. 61) creatures share her space. While these descriptions might point to the dangerous capacity of solitude to separate the believer from her godly community, Bradstreet complements this

“darksome” state with positive connotations of intentional withdrawal (to a “retired place”), the spiritual pleasure of Biblical space (“beloved place”), and even possession of

46 See Helgerson 26-29.

such places (such as a “Chamber”). These positive connotations of solitude recall her sole

status among these creatures, and her own poetic, intellectual, and spiritual limits, almost

literally embodying sola fide.

Yet Bradstreet is not completely alone in her quest to contemplate and magnify

God’s glory, seeking not only his approval of her as a Puritan female laureate, but his gift

of spiritually authentic poetic virtue and creativity. Bradstreet muses that she “heard the

merry grasshopper then sing,” and the “black clad Cricket, bear a second part” all of them

“Seeming to glory in their little Art” (223, l. 64-66). She laments: “Shall creatures abject,

thus their voices raise? / And in their kind resound their makers praise: / Whilst I as mute,

can warble forth no higher layes” (223, l. 69-72). The grasshopper and cricket,

“creatures” of the animal world who are also God’s creations, can perfectly praise their

creator in song according to the limitations set by him. Bradstreet’s speaker, a less

“abject” creature also counted among God’s creations, is bemused by her own

limitations, which appear ironically greater than those of such inferior “creatures.” In the

passage above, Bradstreet’s modesty is located solely in her humility before God’s

creative power. This form of modesty paradoxically endows her with spiritual authority

because she is able to recognize, without male intervention, the limits of her intellectual

abilities in reference both to God and lesser creatures. Physically separated from the

regulating structures of the home and public spaces, and also from the community of

godly elect, Bradstreet achieves legitimacy as the sole poetic laborer whose independence

allows her to serve God fully. Her intellectual and spiritual moderation enables Bradstreet

to assume public stature as the sole contemplator of God’s glory and to claim a spiritual

“title” supported by godly authority.

Bradstreet paradoxically connects her solitude outside the home to domestic labor, which was considered women’s only calling and which took place inside the home, governed by husbands. Simultaneously, this analogy lends legitimacy to poetic endeavor and public resonance to wives’ domestic labor in the home. The nightingale’s freedom from postlapsarian toil in Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” hearkens to the Biblical past, bringing the poetic speaker back to key depictions of Adam and Eve’s labor and spiritual modesty:

When present times look back to Ages past And men in being fancy those are dead, It makes things gone perpetually to last And calls back months and years that long since fled It makes a man more aged in conceit, Than was Methuselah or’s grand-sire great: While of their persons and their acts his mind doth treat. (p. 223, l. 64-70)

In the lines above, Bradstreet describes the ability of believers to draw on the wisdom of the past through a personal connection with scripture, which she realizes here through poetic imagination — but which others might realize through different means, like reading the Bible, prayer, meditation, or other practices. She legitimizes her poetic vocation by categorizing it alongside other types of religious devotion, mentioned above, that were more readily considered appropriate for wives to adopt. Her own poetic imagination has given her a historical perspective that endows her with virtue, spiritual experience, and discipline equal to the oldest Biblical figures, like “Methuselah or’s grand-sire great.” Through the use of imagination, the poetic speaker travels back to prelapsarian Eden, to Adam and Eve’s punishment, and to Cain’s sinful, tyrannical rule.

Bradstreet’s speaker “Sees glorious Adam there made Lord of all” and “Fancyes the

Apple, dangle on the Tree, / That turn’d his Sovereign to a naked thral” (223, l. 72-74).

The speaker dwells upon how Adam must “get his bread with pain, and sweat of face, / A penalty impos’d on his backsliding Race” (223, l. 76-77). By contrast, Bradstreet writes of Eve: “Here sits our Grandame in retired place, / And in her lap, her bloody Cain new born” (224, l. 78-79). Having birthed Cain, Eve “sighs, to think of Paradise, / And how she lost her bliss, to be more wise” (224, l. 82-83). The painful work of birthing reminds

Eve of her “lost...bliss” and is depicted as strictly confined to a “retir’d place” in the sense of both enclosure and public non-participation, whereas Adam’s agricultural work is less spatially restricted and perhaps more publicly resonant. Where prelapsarian Adam was “Sovereign” — a title with political implications — Bradstreet’s poetic perspective shows readers the moment of Adam’s “thralldom” to suggest his enslavement to labor.

The speaker calls Eve “Grandame,” a reference to her roles as wife and progenitor of future generations, and suggests that Eve retains these private titles endowed with spiritual value because of her sacred, reproductive labor. Bradstreet here references the

Biblical promise that women will be saved through their capacity to bear children:

“through bearing of children she shalbe saved if they continue in faith, and love, and holines with modestie” (1 Timothy 2:15). Her role in birthing Cain – an infant destined by God to become the first murderer – is nonetheless sanctioned by God as spiritually resonant in a godly public sphere and an example of spiritual obedience. Her painful postlapsarian labor in childbirth only fails to earn her public recognition because it has already been spiritually recognized by God as sacred work. Both Adam and Eve’s sacred labor after their expulsion from Eden are recognized in the poem as punishment and, at the same time, a path to redemption and salvation rather than death unredeemed.

Bradstreet represents Adam’s sin and subsequent status as a “miscreant” as parallel to

Eve’s painful childbirth and perspicacious awareness of her own faults. In doing so,

Bradstreet makes an argument for women’s recognition for sacred labor and their ability

to discern and address their own sinfulness. This is an idea that her own generation has

forgotten.

Bradstreet has been prompted by emblems of God’s glory in nature to

contemplate the legacy of Adam and Eve, and its relationship to the fallibility of

“backsliding” state institutions, represented by Cain’s ambition to wield power over

others.47 Bradstreet’s turn to Biblical history implies that Eve’s confinement to domestic

labor and space has enabled the rise of fallible earthly authority, and her experience of

privacy must be revised to restore spiritual authority to its proper place in the public

sphere. Specifically, the above passage illustrates a lost Biblical legacy of spiritual

edification engendered by solitude. Bradstreet’s depiction of Adam’s greater loss after the

fall may signify her critical view of the seventeenth-century thinkers who used Genesis to

justify women’s inferiority based on their consignment to supposedly less significant

domestic labor. Underscoring Adam’s “thralldom” thus highlights Bradstreet’s

perspective that wives’ private labor, in particular, should grant them at least as much

public authority as “thralls” like Adam enjoyed. “Thrall” in this context means “the state

or condition of being a thrall; bondage, servitude; captivity,” suggesting that servitude –

like the kind wives owed husbands within contemporary theories of wifely duty – could still entitle men to public authority, if limited or shaped by hierarchy (“Thrall, n.”). From

Bradstreet’s perspective, Eve’s restriction to the labor of childbirth after her expulsion from Eden has been misunderstood in male-dominated theological discourse as a sign of

47 For an emblematic reading that is methodologically similar to my own, see Michael Ditmore 35-41.

her sinfulness; this erroneous conclusion assumes that Eve must be segregated “in retir’d

place” from the public world of men to contain her inherent transgression. While Adam’s

punishment involves the struggle for sustenance – “to get his bread with pain and sweat

of face” – Eve is assigned punishment specific to her reproductive capacity. Her difficult

task, which has become a form of sacred labor, is tied inextricably (unlike Adam’s) to

sexual activity: the image of “bloody Cain newborn” yokes together Eve’s prelapsarian desire to “be more wise” alongside her sexual identity to locate in women, in particular, a transgressive desire for sexual knowledge. For example, Adam and Eve’s initial reaction to knowledge: shame in their nudity, prompted, according to early modern interpretation,

by Eve’s first and greater sin. Eve becomes a symbol for wives’ inability to claim

individual public stature through the domestic work of household management,

childbirth, and child-rearing. By pinpointing this error, Bradstreet presents her own

private poetic work and Eve’s domestic work as divinely authorized in comparison to the

work of men, whose public worth is guaranteed by inauthentic worldly institutions.

Bradstreet’s bird in “Contemplations” recalls Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian

covenant with God in Eden, which did not require difficult labor, unlike Bradstreet’s

experience on the frontier. When God created Adam, he “tooke the man, and put him into

the Garden of Eden, that he might dresse it, and keepe it,” (Genesis 2:15). In Genesis,

Adam and Eve act as stewards of Eden and as ornaments of God’s glory that “dress” the

garden. “To dress” in this context refers most obviously to an outer garment, especially a

woman’s dress, but could also mean to “direct, guide, steer” or “to prepare (food) for

cooking or eating” (“to dress,” n1). While this term might refer to Adam’s authority, it

simultaneously invokes Eve’s authority in traditionally female arenas of clothing and

food. Ultimately, “dress” implies a parity between the kinds of authority that God calls

both Adam and Eve to exercise with discipline. In return, Eden provides “every tree

pleasant to the sight and good for meate” (Genesis 2: 9), whereas the wilderness outside

the garden would require arduous toil to bring forth fruit from it and would provide little spiritual sustenance. 48 When God punishes Adam and Eve by exiling them after the fall,

he declares to Adam: “cursed is the earth for thy sake: in sorrow shalt thou eate of it all

the dayes of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee...In the sweat of

thy face shalt thou eat bread” (Genesis 3:17). God then declares to Eve, “I will greatly

increase thy sorowes, and thy conceptions. In sorrow shalt thou bring foorth children, and

thy desire shalbe to thine husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16). While

both Adam’s and Eve’s punishments involve grueling physical labor, Eve is restricted to

procreative and domestic labor that occurs under Adam’s rule.

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, prelapsarian Adam and Eve share their pleasant work

more equally, though Eve’s higher level of domestic skill plays a larger role in her public

authority than it does in Adam’s. In the Miltonic telling, Adam spies Raphael’s arrival in

Paradise, where he has come to warn Adam and Eve against Satan’s temptations. Eve

illustrates her superior knowledge of how to transform raw material into domestic

splendor when she explains to Adam that she “will haste and from each bough and break

/ Each Plant and juciest Gourd will pluck such choice” (5.326-327) to impress even an

angel who “beholding shall confess that here on Earth / God hath dispenst his bounties as

48 While the wilderness in Genesis is the space to which Adam and Eve are exiled to suffer in their toil, it is not entirely devoid of spiritual reward. The nightingale in Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” accordingly derives spiritual sustenance from the wilderness, but only avoids the punishment of toil imposed on mankind by trusting entirely in God’s provision, rather than seeking to supplement it by reaching outside her divinely assigned role, as Adam and Eve did in eating from the tree.

in Heav’n” (5.329-330). Milton not only draws attention to her domestic vocation, but to

its secondary status in comparison to God’s bounty on earth. Eve chooses from the

bounty given to her and gathers “Whatever Earth all-bearing Mother yields” (5.338) and

“Heaps with unsparing hand; for drink the Grape / She crushes,” (5.344-345), while she

“tempers dulcet creams, nor these to hold/ Wants her fit vessels pure, then strews the

ground / With Rose and Odours from the shrub unfum'd” (5.347-349). In Milton’s

revision of Genesis, Eve’s domestic vocation supports her public reputation, which is

recognized even by God’s messengers. Adam greets Raphael by inviting him to

“voutchsafe with us / Two onely, who yet by sov’ran gift possess / This spacious ground”

(5. 365-367) by eating and drinking the fruits of Adam and Eve’s labor. In doing so, he

implies a title with public resonance equal to his own: along with Eve, he is one of two beneficiaries of a godly gift of sovereignty. Raphael addresses Eve as “Mother of

Mankind, whose fruitful Womb / Shall fill the World more numerous with thy Sons,” (5.

388-389) a “salutation used / Long after to blest Marie, second Eve” (5. 386-387). To the extent that the meeting between Adam and Raphael might be considered public, Eve’s recognition by the two male figures is based on her reproductive labor and echoed elsewhere in the text. For example, Lynne Greenberg points out that Milton also refers to

a space within the garden as “her Nurserie” (8.46). According to Greenberg, Milton

“explicitly characterizes her private and exclusive ownership rights in the property,” but

“also depicts Eve….nurturing, pruning, watering, supporting and improving the flowers,

providing further indicia of her incidental rights in the property consistent with the

seventeenth-century definition of legal ownership” (171). Both Biblical and

contemporary early modern accounts of Genesis suggest that after the fall, Eve’s

punishment limits her to domestic work that divests her of indicators — like owning

private property — that would signify publicly in her own right. While Adam is “lord” of

Eden, Eve’s domestic skills afford her a similar if unequal distinction.

Just as Eve’s domestic labor earns her a public role in a visit from a spiritual

ambassador, private poetic labor upholds Bradstreet’s female laureate voice, which

actively re-envisions the nation, church, and literature of the elect. Despite her frequent

categorization as a “domestic” poet, her poetry reveals both the obvious anti-Stuart political position that she and her family espoused, and a deep dissatisfaction with the execution of Charles, as well as the subsequent parliamentary regime. Bradstreet’s laureate identity signifies her spiritual and poetic election in ways that highlight the inferiority of institutional titles granted by the inevitably fallible, corrupt institutions of the English crown and Parliament. Since her laureateship is based on private poetic labor, it constitutes a specifically Puritan response to the changing relation of the public and private spheres to the center of power.49

Only after Adam and Eve have been cast, somewhat like the Puritans, from their

“beloved place” of marital privacy in Bradstreet’s account does Cain, murdering Abel,

consider that he can usurp divine authority by turning fellow creatures into thralls to

himself — an act previously reserved for God alone. Eve is the harbinger of a lost

49 For a detailed discussion of how this changed in England during Bradstreet’s time, see Helgerson on John Milton as laureate, 231-282. Habermas’s assertion that “the state is the ‘public authority’” (3) applies to seventeenth-century England, since it sought out and sanctioned poets who were engaged in the task of writing and representing the nation state. Moreover, Habermas explains that the Renaissance borrowed from classical writers the concept that in the public sphere, “the best excelled and gained their essence — the immortality of fame….so the polis provided an open field for honourable distinction: citizens indeed interacted as equals with equals (homoioi), but each did his best to excel (aristoiein)” (4). For Bradstreet, rejecting “honourable distinction” bestowed by a malfunctioning state was critical to articulating the true character of Puritan Englishness.

solitude that results in a public sphere unprotected from Satan’s influence, which

encourages Cain’s drive toward dominating and subjecting others who are his equals:

“The wretch with ghastly face and dreadful mind, / Thinks each he sees will serve him in

his kind, / Though none on Earth but kindred near then could he find” (224, l. 96-98).

Eve’s virtue as an instrument of positive reproductive work only remains secure from

sins like Cain’s lust for domination because she is confined to the home, protected by her

husband’s superior spiritual strength and guidance. Cain’s birth is never described in

“Contemplations” directly, but Eve’s painful labor is referenced immediately afterward:

“And in her lap her bloody Cain new born, / The weeping Imp oft looks in her face, /

Bewails his unknown hap and fate forlorn” (224, l. 79-81). The double entendre “bloody

Cain” links Cain’s future fratricide to the biological work of his mother. The image of

Cain sitting bloodied in his mother’s lap “in retir’d place” might also suggest the

transference of character traits through the mother’s blood and milk. While Cain is

ultimately evil, Eve’s domestic privacy supports his public life, even if it is wretched and

sinful.

By contrast, Bradstreet reconciled expectations of wifely privacy with a laureate

position in which she must stand “alone at the moral center of an otherwise erring

society” (Helgerson 53).50 Bradstreet’s poetic labor fosters private sovereignty that she

50 Bethany Reid’s analysis of Bradstreet’s Hutchinsonian context implies that Bradstreet’s preoccupation with gendered privacy stems from her approach to the meaning of work within a Puritan cosmos. Reid’s argument makes it clear that Bradstreet’s approach allowed her to question the kinds of work that wives contribute to the Puritan errand by considering the question of the covenant of works brought up in the Hutchinson trial. Anne Hutchinson, in an infamous trial in 1638, tried to assert her private sovereignty independently of her husband and the Massachusetts Bay Colony and to claim a public voice on that basis. However, she exhibited private evidence of her election in ways that appeared to threaten the Puritan mission and thus risked transgressing standards of proper wifely behavior. Bradstreet’s construction of a female laureate status altered the conversation: “Contemplations,” for example, rethinks how to generate a public reputation free from the corrupt English court through kinds of work that constitute sacred privacy

figures as parallel, rather than antithetical to, the Puritan withdrawal from false signs of

election. Her poetry thus accords with the ways that Puritans affirmed their independence

from sites of authority that emphasized honors and titles rather than good work and sola

fide. In a different context, Bethany Reid highlights this aspect of Bradstreet’s verse

when she argues that it chronicles her own efforts to construct “a new space in which

women can claim poetic legitimacy precisely because their talents and accomplishments

can be distinguished from those of men” (540). In depicting her own “good works,”

Bradstreet uses language that draws on a “renaissance discourse of gardens [that] was thus inextricably connected to notions of rhetorical places that could both bring order to

‘wild’ knowledge and, by offering the writer a pattern of topics or topoi, could become a

source of poetic invention” (Shuffelton 30). This is nowhere more evident than when

Bradstreet recalls that

Under the cooling shadow of a stately Elm Close sate I by a goodly Rivers side Where gliding streams the rocks did overwhelm; A lonely place with pleasures dignifi’d. I once that lov’d the shady woods so well, Now thought the rivers did the trees excel, And if the sun would ever shine, there would I dwell (p. 226, l. 141-147)

Bradstreet describes her location as “a lonely place” that is nonetheless characterized by

“pleasure’s dignifi’d” rather than deprivation. She implies that these pleasures are God- given and not public titles bestowed by man-made institutions, as the phrase “pleasure dignifi’d” might suggest. Rather than woods — often associated with temptation and

rather than worldly private identity. The language of work in “Contemplations” introduces the idea that wives and other marginalized groups whose labor did not constitute a viable private identity could articulate public autonomy based on previously unrecognized forms of labor.

error — Bradstreet chooses rivers, a symbol of purity and generativity, since images of streams and fountains also connote poetic inspiration.

Moving from the “stately Elm” to the rivers where “if the sun would ever shine,

there would I dwell,” Bradstreet’s meditative efforts recall early modern conceptions of

the godly male poet, but they continue to reflect the literary and political systems in

which those poets wrote. In fact, her conditional phrase “if the sun would ever shine,

there would I dwell” (emphasis mine) suggests that if God’s glory would forever inhabit

the spot by the river — itself a figure for poetic inspiration — where Bradstreet walks,

she would stay there forever. The line’s use of “dwell” also references the concept of

Biblical dwelling in God’s place. Consider, for example, God’s promise to Isaac: “Dwell

in this land, and I will be with thee, and will bless thee: for to thee, and to thy seed I will

give all these countries, and I will perform the oath which I swear unto Abraham thy

father.”51 Through references to Biblical dwelling, Bradstreet invokes the sense of

natural, virtuous, ancient relations to land provided by God’s providence.52 In

representing herself as a “dweller” rather than an owner, Bradstreet also authenticates her

status as a divine poet. Moreover, her use of “dwell” reflects her wish to ground her

spiritual purity in a place removed from patriarchal institutions. Furthermore, since this

line is conditional rather than declarative, readers can assume that divine excellence does

not always “dwell” in this spot: in fact, the time of day (between dark and light) suggests

51 References to Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” are from The Norton Anthology of English Literature (8th ed. Vol. 1) 1434-5. 52 Pamela Hammons discusses the significance of the term “dwell” in her chapter on Katherine Austen (Chapter four) in Poetic Resistance, explaining that Jonson’s use of it distinguishes Penshurst (whose owner, Lord Lisle, is presented in the poem as enjoying a virtuous, natural relation to the land and the laborers who build and maintain it) from other country houses whose ownership was based on ostentation, brutally compelled arduous labor, and inappropriate human relations.

that signs of divine election might be difficult or impossible to detect, initially, by the

poetic speaker’s imperfect vision. The poet’s labor is in fact necessary, according to these

lines, to reveal God’s invisible signs through poetry, filling in the gaps where God’s signs

of election are unclear or distant. While “Contemplations” illustrates Bradstreet’s search

for her own poetic virtue and skill through God, her other poems situate her more firmly

as a female, Puritan laureate in the context of the Puritan errand.

Rejecting the Laurel Crown: Bradstreet’s Poetic Predecessors and Puritan Female Laureateship

In relying on God’s provision alone, Bradstreet crafts an identity as a female

Puritan poet who rejects the typical honors often associated with laureateship.

Encomiastic verse about Bradstreet paradoxically describes her as both an exceptional female writer and a conventionally dutiful wife, highlighting the challenges she presents to ideas about women’s poetic inferiority. Rather than celebrating Bradstreet’s exceptional status as a skilled female writer, John Woodbridge’s prefatory remarks use

Bradstreet’s normative relation to domestic labor to justify her poetic endeavors:

It is the Work of a Woman, honoured, and esteemed where she lives, for her gracious demeanour, her eminent parts, her pious conversation, her courteous disposition, her exact diligence in her place, and discreet managing of her Family occasions, and more then so, these poems are the fruit but of some few houres, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments. (A4r - A5v) Patricia Pender identifies in Woodbridge’s use of modesty rhetoric an “associated trope”

which “represents the book as the product of ‘nocturnal studies’” (23). Depicting a poet’s

work as the result of nighttime labor typically emphasized the author’s diligence rather

than natural gifts and was widely used by Renaissance poets, including Sir Philip Sidney.

Pender asserts that Woodbridge “employs a variant of this trope with reversed gendered

effects when he assures the reader...that the time Bradstreet has spent on poetry has not

been stolen from her domestic duties” (23). Rather than distinguish between Bradstreet’s

natural gifts and her poetic diligence, Woodbridge uses the “nocturnal studies” trope to

depict Bradstreet’s “diligence in her place” with regard to her domestic and poetic work.

Woodbridge’s comments assure readers that Bradstreet’s poetry does not risk exceeding

the limits of “private work” assigned to her by God, but that writing poetry is an exercise

in respecting the limits of “her place” as a married woman. Woodbridge describes

Bradstreet’s poetic corpus as “the Work of a Woman,” equating poetic labor with

domestic labor and household management typically associated with “esteemed” and

“eminent” women. Furthermore, he emphasizes that Bradstreet must borrow time and

effort from her “sleep and other refreshments” to write poetry because, as an English

housewife removed to the brutally demanding colonial frontier, it would be impossible

and inappropriate to curtail time from her demanding housewifely labor.

Woodbridge praises Bradstreet’s “gracious demeanor,” “pious conversation,” and

“discreet managing of her Family occasions,” reinforcing patriarchal expectations about

wives’ practice of pudor and emblematum liber.53 He protects Bradstreet’s poetry by

acting as a close male relative whose control over his sister-in-law only bolsters his

public standing in both England and the New World. Woodbridge protects Bradstreet’s

poetry from earning her the reputation of a “public woman,” instead presenting her as a

53 In Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century, Katharine Gillespie writes that “Even when women were ‘gadding out and about,’ they were exhorted to emulate emblematum liber, that is the image of the tortoise or snail who carried its home on its back. Through a continuous meditation on this mental image, the housewife could maintain the demeanor and restraints of enclosure, even when she was beyond the walls of the house” (67).

67 recreational, if formidable, poet. As a result, Woodbridge’s defense detracts from

Bradstreet’s poetic authority by insisting on her exercise of pudor and other virtues associated with domestic privacy. He references “work” several times in the preface, averring that: “if thou wilt not believe the worth of these things (in their kind) when a man sayes it, yet believe it from a woman when thou seest it” (A5v). He justifies

Bradstreet’s writing by framing her poetry as legitimate work undertaken in the context of domestic privacy, composed at night inside the home and only after she has met the needs of her household.

Woodbridge shields Bradstreet from the opprobrium often aimed at women in print by suggesting that poetry could compete with domestic work without undermining wifely modesty. He encourages readers to “believe the worth of these things (in their kind),” (A5r, my emphasis) implying that poetry and domestic labor both require

Bradstreet to practice pudor, which fosters piety, housewifery, grace, and discretion.

While he does not champion Bradstreet as a laureate poet, he presents her poetry as deserving of attention. At the same time, he anticipates the disbelief with which readers might react to the idea that a woman could work so rigorously, skillfully, and steadily at her craft while continuing to be a good wife and mother. Whereas Bradstreet presents her poetry as an unconventional form of sacred privacy that sets her apart as a female laureate, Woodbridge takes a more conservative approach:

I doubt not but the Reader will quickly finde more then I can say, and the worst effect of his reading will be unbelief, which will make him question whether it be a womans Work, and aske, Is it possible? If any doe, take this as an answer from him that dares avow it; It is the Work of a Woman….This only shall I annex, I feare the displeasure of no person in the publishing of these Poems but the

Authors, without whose knowledge, and contrary to her expectation, I have presumed to bring to publick view what she resolved should never in such a manner see the Sun. (A4v)

Woodbridge’s use of sun imagery to express his anxiety about Bradstreet’s reaction to

her verse appearing in public resonates distantly with her comments about dwelling near

the river in “Contemplations.” Woodbridge also registers Bradstreet’s own reticence

about how the public will judge what she considers her unpolished verse, as well as her

concerns about whether her verse is worthy of the “Sun,” which can be read as a

reference to God. Woodbridge depicts Bradstreet’s poetic labor as at once recreational

and diligent; it thus becomes a type of “women’s work” that, like domestic work, was

inconsequential in the public sphere despite its spiritual value. His declaration that

Bradstreet never wished her poetry to “see the Sun” in “such a manner” implies that her work, like that of amateur poets, calls for an apology because it lacks seriousness and refinement.54 Woodbridge’s “nocturnal studies” narrative implies that Bradstreet might

consent to publishing her verse in a more polished form. In this way, he indirectly links

Bradstreet with the amateur poet who proves his worth for civic service by denying his

possession of skills appropriate to such a task. This strategy allows Woodbridge to

navigate between the celebratory gesture of presenting her writing as worthy of public

attention, and the protective gesture of minimizing Bradstreet’s poetry as an unrefined,

54 Helgerson observes that “Curiously, even in their self-defining rebellion, the amateurs confirmed the values of midcentury humanism. They rarely began without an apology or ended without a palinode. They thus enclosed and rejected the self-as-poet in order to reveal the dutiful and employable self-as-civil- servant” (28).

69 recreational activity carried out within the home. Woodbridge’s strategic recognition that readers might misattribute Bradstreet’s work encourages them to treat it with indulgent consideration rather than harsh judgment.

Bradstreet’s writing takes Woodbridge’s conservative, careful navigation of her poetic identity to a new level by distinguishing subtly between her own poetry and poetry that was formally recognized by the English literary system. If the private virtues according to which Bradstreet justifies her female laureateship are different from those that support traditional male laureateship, so too is the kind of public reputation that she seeks. She categorizes her poetic labor as a form of sacred privacy to show that she writes on behalf of a Puritan community that prizes signs of election rather than titles or honors.

Her complex posturing as a female laureate poet shows that she writes for a divine patron rather than an earthly one who wields only secular power. Accordingly, Woodbridge’s preface focuses on Bradstreet’s poetic practice to draw attention to the difficulty of judging it according to the same standards applied to men’s poetry:

Had I opportunity but to borrow some of the Authors wit, ’tis possible I might so trim this curious work with such quaint expressions, as that the Preface might bespeake thy further perusal; but I feare ’twill be a shame for a man that can speak so little, to be seene in the title page of this Womans Book, lest by comparing the one with the other, the Reader should pass his sentence, that it is the gift of women, not only to speak most, but to speake best. (A3r)

Woodbridge simultaneously affirms Bradstreet’s poetic skill and admits that it is ungoverned by the standards of a male-dominated literary culture. His description of her work as “curious” and thus requiring “quaint expressions” that he must “borrow” from

Bradstreet’s brand of “wit” assume her outsider status to this literary system and its traditional forms of poetic recognition. “Curious” could also mean “careful; studious,

attentive” as well as “careful as to the standard of excellence; difficult to satisfy”

(“curious, adj.”). What appears to be Woodbridge’s apology for Bradstreet’s inferiority as

a female poet could thus also be read as an affirmation of her diligent poetic work. His

use of the second sense of “curious” outlined above perhaps implies his own criticism of

the standards for laureateship, and of the erroneous judgment her private poetic labor

receives as a result. Woodbridge’s attempt to sanction Bradstreet by showing her

aversion to public vocation paradoxically presents her as an exception far and above

typical literary vocations and honors.

Woodbridge’s preface assumes the unlikelihood that Bradstreet’s poetry could

achieve serious recognition in the male-dominated literary system because she lacks the

necessary private qualities men offered to legitimize their own poetic exercises. In “To

my dear Sister, the Author of these Poems,” the speaker highlights Woodbridge’s familial

bond to Bradstreet rather than his editorial relationship to her. He condemns the

foolishness of women who, “acting above their sphear/...to get, what (silly Souls) they

lack, / Esteem to be the wisest of the pack” (A5v, l. 6-8). The speaker ridicules female

writers who seek recognition as amateurs by showcasing their dilettantism, “as if to erre /

Were only wisht” (A5v, l. 5-6). These women’s books are “so witlesse, intricate / So void

of sense, and truth” (A5v, l. 18-19) that they “make this to be inquired / If women are

with wit, and sense inspired” (A5r, l. 25-26). Woodbridge advises these women instead to

look toward “womens Works” — that is, to cast off writing in favor of more appropriate domestic labor — “And never more to meddle with their book” (A5r, l. 35-36). He uses alliteration in the phrase “womens Works” and introduces assonance in “look/book” to suggest both congruence and difference between domestic and poetic labor. On one hand,

the speaker appears to contend that female amateur poets cannot achieve the “esteem”

they seek and that they should instead turn toward their proper “sphear” of influence in

the home. On the other hand, the speaker also implies that poetry could be, in exceptional

cases like Bradstreet’s, a legitimate form of women’s work. He declares that “for a

woman’s Work ’tis very rare; / And if the Nine, vouchsafe the Tenth a place, / I think

they rightly may yield you that grace” (A5r, l. 24-26). The speaker of “To my dear

Sister” insinuates that if the role of the amateur poet was not accessible to women, the

literary system could be modified to accommodate Bradstreet’s genius by making room

for her in the Pantheon of classical Muses. Woodbridge does not simply transform

Bradstreet into a passive muse, but he goes on to give her the epithet “the tenth muse,” a

reference to Sappho, who wrote poetry in isolation from institutions that could have

granted her public recognition and thereby paradoxically became a kind of national

poet.55

In Woodbridge’s writing, Bradstreet is safely marginalized from the official,

male-dominated literary system and thus appears not to presume a position in it. He

depicts his sister-in-law’s poetry in opposition to the English court’s flattery: the speaker of “To my deare Sister, the Author of these Poems” apologetically announces that “least I should exceed, and too much love, / Should too too much endear’d affection move, / To super-adde in praises, I shall cease” (A5v, l. 1-3). By using hyperbole and repetition (“too too much”) to reflect his own difficulty in estimating the value of Bradstreet’s poetry, the speaker removes it from a public literary arena characterized by “mendacious flattery and triviality” (Helgerson 240). Woodbridge is guilty of flattering Bradstreet excessively

55 See Jim Powell 44 and Anne L. Klinck 62.

while claiming not to do so, but his praise signifies differently because of his familial

relation to her in comparison to the “mendacious flattery” that Bradstreet associates with

the court or relations of patronage.

He thus protects her from being accused by the Puritan community of

inappropriately seeking trivial praise from a dissolute popular public or from an English

court characterized by ostentatious values. At the same time, Woodbridge secures

Bradstreet’s poetic reputation by showing that his moderate praise of her justly salutes

the godly content of her poetry despite her lack of poetic eminence. Unlike amateur poets

— like John Donne during the early phase of his career — who paradoxically wrote

private, sometimes licentious poetry to achieve notoriety as potential civic servants,

Bradstreet and her poetry are positioned here as piously grave but undesirous of royal or

popular attention, and thus, as not making a serious bid for public significance.56 Her

poetry reflects her intellectual and spiritual discipline as a female laureate who ultimately

rejects service to earthly patrons, even as she speaks for the nation. While Woodbridge

deems amateur strategies to be safer for a married woman to adopt, Bradstreet shows that

her sacred poetic work warrants public literary autonomy (rather than empty praise) and

proceeds from a divine call that she cannot ignore.57

Woodbridge continues to equate Bradstreet’s poetry with pudor, and to frame her

poetic endeavors as consistent with behaviors supported by domestic privacy. The

speaker of “To my dear Sister” avers that he will “out-face the worlds disdain” (31) for

Bradstreet’s verse because it “...doth not now so neatly stand, / As if ’twere pollisht with

56 Helgerson 1-25. 57 In many ways, Bradstreet’s sacred privacy substitutes for the “prior achievement of an acknowledged position, as Milton’s allusions in Paradise Lost to his blindness and political isolation suppose our recognition of him” (Helgerson 3).

your own sweet hand” and is “not so richly deckt, so trimly tir’d, / Yet it is such as justly

is admir’d” (A6v, l. 63-66). Terms like “pollisht,” “richly deckt,” and “trimly tir’d”

describe the level of exquisite artifice and polish that Bradstreet’s poetry lacks, but

which, through its absence, makes her verse all the more worthy. The terms also arguably

reference wives’ duty to oversee the family’s clothing, but could easily describe the attire

needed for a performance or appearance at court. In arguing that Bradstreet’s verse

“justly is admir’d,” the speaker proclaims those to be injudicious who value the

grandiloquent artificiality of courtly poets over the plain verse of a godly poet like

Bradstreet. Reading Bradstreet’s poetry closely reveals modesty tropes that support her

subtle bid for poetic authority through a Puritan aesthetic of plain speech. The rhyme

“tir’d / admir’d” equates formal “admiration” with rich attire that is vain in comparison to

Bradstreet’s modest verse, to which she also often refers in terms of humble attire.

Woodbridge presents her as exceptional because she crafts skillful verse but does not

presumptuously seek worldly recognition like the female writers her describes, or even

male laureates, whose expressions of modestus were nonetheless aimed at acquiring vain

worldly titles from a temporal patron. 58

Bradstreet would have been unable to reconcile what Helgerson defines as the

laureate’s ability to go to “the center of [her] culture” with going to the “center of

58 That Bradstreet’s 1678 revised edition of her work is titled Several Poems rather than “The Tenth Muse” distinguishes her from the traditionally defined laureate title since Sappho was, despite her exile, honored for her poetry with coins and statues in her image. It is not clear from present research whether Bradstreet directly chose the title of her second publication, although this is possible. Whether this second title was chosen by Bradstreet or her editors, however, the fact of its having been changed indicates awareness — by herself and/or her editors — that she was crafting a very specific poetic persona in relation to the position of poet laureate. Bradstreet’s publication history — her poems having been circulated among friends in manuscript, published in print as a collection titled The Tenth Muse, revised by Bradstreet and published in print posthumously as Several Poems and then collected in the Andover manuscript — must be considered in more depth to answer this question.

[her]self.” As a Puritan who left a corrupt England behind to build a new one,

Bradstreet’s “center” could never be the center of English culture. Helgerson’s male

laureate arrived at the center of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century English culture by practicing the “careful study of Scripture and those various Greek and Roman mirrors of duty” (47) in the service of an earthly monarch, receiving institutional marks of honor.

Bradstreet suggests that her own poetic calling contributes to rewriting the colonial imagination, since it reflects God’s election of the Puritan community. She uses her

“Prologue” to anticipate objections to her female laureateship on the grounds of her marginalization from such a “still and fixed” center. She contrasts the burdensome labor of crafting poetry for God — like the labor of gestation and childbirth — with the male

poet’s unearned gift of art from the muses. Bradstreet complains that she cannot “like that

fluent sweet-tongued Greek / Who lisp’d at first, in future times speak plain” (3, l. 19-

20). Bradstreet’s description of a “sweet-tongu’d Greek” refers to Demosthenes, an ancient Greek orator who, according to legend, overcame a speech impediment by

practicing his speeches with a rock in his mouth. In contrast to the speaker’s inability to

overcome obstacles, “By Art” Demosthenes “gladly found what he did seek / A full

requital of his striving pain” (3, l. 21-22). Demosthenes’ “striving” pain — that is, his struggle with speaking clearly — parallels Bradstreet’s similar struggle to overcome barriers to laureateship. Her exclusion from the institutions of authority for which the laureate is supposed to speak has rendered her skill a “defect” that cannot be corrected.

While this at first appears to be a standard expression of feminine inferiority in writing verse, a closer look suggests that in fact, Bradstreet does not think her “defect” needs to be corrected — but rather the system that judges it to be so.

The poem-as-child trope that Bradstreet uses in the “Prologue” does not express

shame in the strictest sense, as when the trope was used by male amateur and laureate

poets who excused their youthful folly or by women writers who generated auctoritas by

apologizing for their presumption in writing at all. Demosthenes functions here as a

synecdoche for the conventionally male laureate persona and receives a “requital,” or a

public reward for service, that Art bestows on him in the form of natural poetic skill.

Indeed, male authors like Ben Jonson commonly used the poem-as-child conceit in the

service of advertising their poetic skill, and often as a way to express poetic modesty.59

By contrast, Bradstreet implies that her equivalent “striving pain” (3, l. 22) as either poet or mother is not aimed at public rewards or stature, and that thus, it does not receive a

“requital.” Instead, her poetry is unjustly scorned by those who erroneously judge it according to the standards of male laureates. She emphasizes that her poetry is only

“obnoxious” to hypercritical “carping tongue[s]” who judge her poetry unfit for their literary system and instead offer the counsel that her “hand a needle better fits” (4, l. 25-

26). These “carping tongues” (4, l. 26), who represent the male dominated literary system, insist that Bradstreet will “wrong” (4, l. 27) the symbolic power of the “Poet’s

Pen” (4, l. 27), a phallic antithesis to the feminine knitting needle. These poetic authorities cannot judge her poetry properly because it does not fit the model of male

laureateship, and thus Bradstreet complains that even if “what I do prove well, it won’t

advance, / They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance” (p. 4, l. 29-30). Bradstreet’s

modesty trope appears to express her feminine inferiority in composing verse, but

59 In Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son,” for example, he writes that “Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, Here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry” (9-10). See Parfitt 48-49. The poem-as-child trope is also featured in the prefatory material to Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia: see Pender 97- 100.

76 ultimately, it reveals that her poetry is erroneously judged according to a standard that she finds to be flawed. Moreover, the “carping tongues” insist that “Female wits” inappropriately use the “Poet’s Pen” to seek the same forms of public recognition granted to men. Instead, Bradstreet humorously shows her detractors’ lack of originality: the

“carping tongues” can only repeat conventional advice, encouraging wives’ domestic vocations and condemning the public work of “Female wits.” They do not possess the spiritual or intellectual focus to recognize a woman’s God-given talent, or to see that her poetry is not antithetical to her housework: Bradstreet’s potential critics are thus stripped of their poetic judgment in denying her laureate status. Her satirical adoption of the term

“Female wits” allows her to scorn female poets who entered the public sphere for worldly recognition or material wealth. In the affirmative sense of the phrase, though, Bradstreet identifies herself as a genuine “Female wit” whose poetic skill is wrongly reckoned to be inferior. Her description of “carping tongue[s],” hands that better fit “a needle,” and the

“Poets pen” inscribe the limits of organs and instruments that her critics evaluate within an earthly literary system. Bradstreet, like Milton, adopts the identity of a private poet who in true Puritan style “acknowledge[s] no patron but God” (Helgerson 277).

Bradstreet’s biting diction in the “The Prologue” indicts those who deny wives’ poetic skill only because it does not merit public recognition. Later in the poem, she draws attention to the ways in which the myth of poetic genius is figured through maternal relationships, explaining that the Greeks contrived “those nine” — the Muses — when they attributed the “Arts Divine” to “our Sexe...those Nine/ And poesy made,

Calliope’s own child” (4, l. 32-33).60 In other words, the Greeks recognized feminine creativity, but only insofar as they created fictional effigies to represent poetic virtue, rather than recognizing it in living women who composed poetry. Bradstreet rejoins women’s procreative and poetic abilities in the figure of Calliope to question women’s exclusion from the literary system. She exposes the hypocrisy of renowned male authors who used the poem-as-child trope to exhibit their own private poetic virtues and yet withheld from wives their own measure of auctoritas despite women’s more natural relation to poetic creativity. According to conventional thought, motherhood endowed

60 One (more personal) such maternal relation was Bradstreet’s own with her mother, Dorothy Dudley. She describes her mother in “An Epitaph on my dear and ever honoured Mother Mrs. Dorothy Dudley” as “A true Instructor of her Family, / The which she ordered with dexterity” and as a woman who “the public meetings ever did frequent, / And in her Closet constant hours she spent” (13-16). The vocational title of “instructor” she bestows on Dorothy Dudley intimates various kinds of labor involved in household management described in Bradstreet’s remark that Dorothy “order[ed] with dexterity” her household and family. Despite Bradstreet’s praise of her mother as a morally upright wife who embodies the virtues of domestic privacy, these traits do not earn Dorothy public autonomy. The term “instructor” would also have called up for readers the accepted maternal role in a culture in which “parenting was deemed to be a divinely ordained vocation” (Charlton 195). The maternal duty to provide religious instruction to young children complicates the notion that private vocations practiced within the space of the home must fall within the definition of domesticity. Moreover, Bradstreet emphasizes an analogously extra-domestic activity: the “constant hours” her mother spent in the private labor of religious meditation, carried out in the consummate private space — the closet. Bradstreet compares domestic labor and space with the only acceptable private counterparts for married women: religious labor and the semi-domestic closet. Since religious meditation was private work that all Puritans were called to do, such a calling would have resonated with members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a sanctioned form of sacred privacy that was performed within the home, but that was distinct from domestic privacy. Withdrawing to a separate space to engage in sacred private work also paralleled the Puritan community’s self-exile from England to fulfill their errand in the wilderness. In this poem, Bradstreet represents her mother’s disengagement from the secular, private work of motherhood and household management to fulfill the sacred, extra-domestic private occupation that would have been expected of her as a proper believer. This religious vocation clearly does not threaten her domestic occupation. In fact, religious introspection was understood by Puritans as the basis for running a godly household, especially when it came to the religious education of young children. In “An Epitaph on my dear and ever honoured Mother Mrs. Dorothy Dudley,” Bradstreet suggests that sacred privacy in the form of private devotion could foster publicly constitutive qualities for wives without disrupting wifely duties. Sacred privacy authorizes Dorothy for participation in the “public meeting” — that is, communal worship at church services — which was attended by the limited public of the godly elect and removed from the public authority of the Church of England. Drawing on the “blessed memory” of her mother allows Bradstreet to understand how to extend private virtue into public spaces, and thus to construct a female laureate status that does just this.

78 wives with limited domestic authority, but also prevented them from claiming public authority. The first of Philip Sidney’s sonnets in the Astrophil and Stella sequence famously figures his poetic endeavor as akin to the labor of childbirth. He laments the lack of “fresh and fruitful flowers upon [his] sunburned brain” (8) and declares that

“words came halting forth,” (9) paralleling women’s common experience of travail in childbirth. Sidney satirizes the rule of feminine domestic authority over poetry, depicting

“Nature” and “Study” as mother and stepmother to his poetic invention: “Invention,

Nature’s child, fled stepdame Study’s blows” (10). Unable to resolve the somewhat comical pressure produced by the domestic disorder his poem has caused by refusing women’s literary authority, Sidney complains: “Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, / Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: / ‘Fool,’ said my

Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write’” (12-14).61 Sidney’s problem is resolved by a female muse, who counsels him to simply look inward toward his own emotions and talent for inspiration. In Bradstreet’s “Prologue,” the Muses, who represent the male- dominated literary system’s focus on classical sources, reward the male poet’s shameful labor with “natural” poetic skill. He simply must look into his heart, and poetic composition will flow naturally thenceforth. Like Sidney, who insists that he is a “fool,”

(14) that his words “come halting forth,” (9) and that he writes with a “truant pen” (13) and flees “stepdame Study’s blows,” (10) Bradstreet describes her “foolish, broken blemished Muse” (3, l. 16) with its “broken strings” (3, l. 14) that produce only her “main defect” (3, l. 15), writing poetry. In expressions of intellectual modesty, both poets develop the similarities between arduous labor in writing poetry and birthing a child.

61 References to Philip Sidney’s poetry, including sonnet 1 (pp. 153), are from Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones.

Sidney’s humor does eventually result in a “full requital of his striving pain” (p. 3,

l. 22) and paradoxically showcases his poetic imagination. Bradstreet, though, ironically

admits that despite many seventeenth-century wives’ impressive expertise in surgery and medicine, she cannot heal her poetic defect: “Art can do much, but this maxim’s most sure: / A weak or wounded brain admits no cure” (4, l. 23-24). The artistic authority of the traditional literary system cannot gauge the value of what only appears to be

Bradstreet’s lack of intellectual and poetic skill, a result of her “weak or wounded brain”

commonly labeled as women’s “main defect.” Ironically, Bradstreet’s “Prologue”

suggests instead that the “cure” lies not in correcting her own defective poetic

imagination, but in restoring the literary system’s ability to properly estimate her poetry.

If she is judged according to the same standards as men, her poetic “defect” will never be

cured because she does not possess the traditional private qualifications for laureateship.

Bradstreet paradoxically recuperates her own literary authority, neglected by the official

literary sphere, by granting men “preheminence,” (4, l. 41) a term that refers to “a

distinction conferred by a particular office or position,” while for herself claiming only a

“Thyme or Parsley wreath,” (4, l. 46) strictly domestic goods (“pre-eminence, n.”). In

place of “Bayes,” which were used in the home but also signified official recognition,

Bradstreet’s thyme and parsley match her request for a “small acknowledgment” of her

literary authority: “due recognition” by the limited group of godly elect who

acknowledge in her a calling from God.62 Gillian Wright posits that Bradstreet’s request

to receive “a ‘wholesome Parsley wreath’ in place of the traditional ‘Bayes’ also recalls

Woodbridge’s insistence that Bradstreet’s poetic and intellectual activities have not in

62 “Bayes” was a plainer, more home-spun term for laurel, the symbol for typical male laureates.

any way compromised her diligence in managing her household” (83). Bradstreet uses

the word “Bayes” humorously here to domesticate the laurel leaf, typically a sign of

patriarchal, institutional authority claimed by male laureates. While confirming the lesser

status of women’s poetry overall, she also rejects official poetic recognition in favor of

more lowly domestic honors that would previously have signified women’s public

autonomy before the fall.

In a scathing indictment, Bradstreet accuses laureates who receive official honors

— “ye high flown quills that soar the skies” 4, l. 43) — of fiendishness, warning that

“ever with your prey, [you] still catch your praise” (4, l. 44). In a stunning display of consonance, Bradstreet puns on the homonyms “pray” and “prey,” linking them to a grammatically uncertain arbiter of poetic “praise”: is it the English monarch or God? She ironically assures laureate contenders that her poetry is not a threat to their poetic domination, asking that “If e’re you daigne these lowly lines, your eyes / Give Thyme or

Parsley wreathe, I ask no Bayes” (4, l. 45-46) because “This meane and unrefined stuff of mine, / Will make your glistering gold but more to shine” (4, l. 47-48). Earlier in the poem, Bradstreet asserts that “Wars,” “Captaines,” “Kings,” “Cities founded,” and

“Commonwealths begun” are “too superior things” for her poetic skill (3, l. 1-3). She thus importunes the audience to “Let Poets, and Historians set these forth, / My obscure

Verse, shal not so dim their worth” (3, l. 5-6). What appears to be a genuine expression of self-deprecation is also, when read closely, a way for Bradstreet firmly to construct her identity by rejecting “too superior things” in the sense of institutions, poets, and literary systems that reach higher than what God has ordained for them. Bradstreet is content to

81 wait for the limited Puritan community of which she is a part to acknowledge her “lowly lines” with “wholesome Thyme or Parsley wreathe” rather than Bays.

Bradstreet represents her female laureate efforts on behalf of the elect and demonstrates that she is, like them, invested in the project of godly self-government rather than in worldly ambition and spiritually insignificant titles. She, therefore, depicts her own laureate status as opposite to that of poets who were actually or de facto considered to occupy the laureate position (or at least to approach it) and who were acknowledged by the courts of their respective monarchs.63 Accordingly, Bradstreet composes elegies to Philip Sidney, who was begrudgingly knighted by Elizabeth I and posthumously recognized for his poetic contributions by her court, and to Guillaume Du

Bartas, who was recognized for his diplomatic and poetic service to Henri de Navarre.64

In her elegy to Philip Sidney, as well as in “The Author to Her Book,” Bradstreet uses

63 Helgerson notes that the first official laureateship in England was awarded to John Dryden in 1668 by Charles II. Nonetheless, scholars agree with Helgerson’s observation that several poets had achieved a sort of unofficial laureateship prior to this, including Ben Jonson, who received an official pension in 1616, and Skelton, who received an “academic crowning” (6) as laureate of Oxford and Cambridge. See Helgerson 1- 53, esp. 6-8. 64 While I do not engage at length here with Bradstreet’s elegy on Du Bartas, further analysis would support my argument that Bradstreet’s modesty gives way at strategic points to a revision of the traditional model of male laureateship. In “In Honour of Du Bartas,” she expresses what appear to be contradictory sentiments of “ingratitude” and mourning for a poet whom she considers her benefactor. For example, alliteration arguably places stress on the first two syllables of the line “But barren I, my Daysey here do bring,” (207, l. 13) sharply distinguishing female laureateship from Du Bartas’ model. In the next lines, Bradstreet posits a model of female laureateship that is like “A homely flour in this my latter Spring, / If Summer, or my Autumn age do yield” (207, l. 14-15). She subtly puns on “flour/flower” and “homely” to express both poetic modesty and wifely duties in the home to frame her private poetic labor as proper wifely behavior. She compares “homely flour,” a common household product with which wives created foodstuffs, to ordinary flowers which often functioned as metaphors for poetry or “poesie.” When she asserts that “Flours, fruits in Garden, Orchard, or in Field, / They shall be consecrated in my Verse, / And prostrate offered at great Bartas Herse” (207, l. 16-18), her speaker subversively implies that she will offer the product of her sacred privacy in homage to Du Bartas. Like homely “flour” used in domestic work that went unrecognized in the public sphere, she offers Du Bartas poetry stripped of titles, honors, and ornament and paradoxically announces her publicly significant poetic labor. For an adept study of Bradstreet’s vexed engagement with the elegiac convention through the figures of Sidney and Du Bartas, see Julia Penn Delacroix 1-30.

modesty discourse to distinguish herself from the literary systems that honored these

poets, whether they actively cultivated laureate status or not.65 As a poet who died a

Protestant martyr at Zutphen in the Netherlands war against Catholic Spain and who was

famous for his Protestant fervor, Sidney would likely have been Bradstreet’s model for

the perfect laureate poet. However, she still had to adapt the terms upon which his

laureateship was based to compensate for the obstacles she faced as a wife and as a

Puritan. “An Elegie upon that Honourable and Renowned Knight Sir Philip Sidney”

provides an apt example of Bradstreet’s rejection not of Sidney’s self-conception as a poet, but of the public poetic title foisted somewhat awkwardly onto his persona after his death at Zutphen: “Her noble Sidney wore the Crown of Bayes; / As well an honour to our British Land, /As she that sway’d the Scepter with her hand” (p. 203, l. 2-4).

Bradstreet compares the “Crown of Bayes” that indicates Sidney’s poetic and military virtues to Elizabeth’s “scepter,” a symbol of her poetic and political legitimacy. Both the scepter and the crown of bays represent official titles that hold value only within worldly systems of authority. Looking back toward Sidney both to claim and to rewrite the poetic inheritance she receives from him, Bradstreet rejects the idealization of service to an official state or monarch, no matter how virtuous. Sidney was a figure for whom she felt a special kinship because he embodied her Puritan ideal of laureateship through his

65 Sidney, for example, would likely not have identified with the tradition of amateur poets, who sought courtly positions based on their self-deprecating representation as “humanistically trained, prodigal sons” who poetically indicated “their fitness for precisely the sort of service against which they were rebelling” (Helgerson 28). Sidney likely would not have identified with laureate status, given the relatively small preferment he received from Elizabeth following his criticism of her French match; nor would he have identified with professional poets given his elite, aristocratic status. Instead, he might be considered in light of “publicly less ambitious writers” who were “‘hors concours’ to the world of courtly patronage” in contrast to “‘professed’ poets” (Helgerson 4).

steadfast, zealous defense of Protestantism and because she shared with him a distant

lineage. In differentiating herself from him, she pays him homage and transforms his

model for poetic identity into one appropriate for a Puritan wife.

Sidney’s professions, which involved poetic and official civic service to the state,

became harder to sustain in the England of the 1630s and onward due to political turmoil,

the repercussions of Charles’ personal rule, and widespread political and religious

corruption. The English state was accordingly considered by Massachusetts Bay colonists

to be “a genealogical mess...the Tudors gone, the Stuarts of both Scottish and English

factions, the half-sibling rivalries among Henry’s progeny, the perverse intrigue of the

Court, etc.” (Ferszt 60). As a result, Bradstreet frames Sidney’s literary talent in the context of the Greek and Roman pantheons in a gesture that removes him from the Tudor dynasty of Elizabeth I and implies his own poetic “hors concours” status. This gesture

does not align him with the iconography of Elizabeth I’s artistic, religious, and political

authority, but instead with the courts of the Greek and Roman gods. While this strategy

might seem odd for Bradstreet, who admired Sidney’s Protestantism and Elizabeth’s

authority as a female monarch, she implicitly praises Sidney for his allegiance to divine

authority rather than an earthly ruler whose virtue was inherently limited by God himself.

Classical imagery also distances Sidney religiously, temporally, and geographically from

the sixteenth-century English public, making him appear an exception to the moderate

Protestantism of Elizabeth’s court, as well as the literary culture and England Bradstreet

knew. 66

66 In “Let Dainty Wits Cry,” Sidney separates himself from amateur poets and those seeking laureateship, declaring “Let dainty wits cry on the sisters nine” (1) while criticizing amateur poets as “Pindar’s apes” (3) whose poetry falls far short — despite its “phrases fine” (3) and enameled “thoughts of gold” (4) — of the

Greek mythology endows Sidney with alternatives to earthly marks of poetic

greatness. Sidney is a “pattern” of “Arms and Arts” (203, l. 6) for Bradstreet to follow.

He is the subject of Calliope and Terpsichore’s song, and the “King” of “Poesie and

musick” (203, l. 8), striking Polimnia dead with his rhetoric and embarrassing Mercury

with his eloquence by comparison. Finally, with his “Logick,” he wins “from

Euterpe...the Crown” of the laureate (203, l. 6-11).67 As his revisionary inheritor,

Bradstreet implicitly claims these alternative marks of poetic value to contrast the

classical literary pantheon with the conventional literary authorities of her own

seventeenth-century England. She calls Sidney’s detractors “Beetle-head[s] that can’t

descry / A world of wealth within that rubbish lye, / And doth his name, his work his

honour wrong” (204, l. 25-27). She recuperates his poetic identity by showing him to

embody rigorous Protestant ideals capable of refining inauthentic Englishness, calling

him the “brave refiner of our British tongue” whose poetry reflects “learning, valour and

morality / Justice, friendship, and kind hospitality / Yea and Divinity” that should be

obvious to anyone but the “prejudicate,” who “did not look” (204, l. 29-32). Like

Bradstreet’s own detractors, Sidney’s are incapable of properly assessing the value of his work to the English nation. Moreover, Bradstreet elevates Sidney’s poetry above even the

poetic authority represented by the nine lyric muses of ancient Greece. So too, however, do laureate hopefuls lack the godliness necessary for private poetic status that can generate public authority and voice. Of these poets, Sidney writes, “let them in statelier glory shine, ennobling new-found tropes with problems old,” (5-6) emphasizing the marks of greatness bestowed upon laureates who simply appear to lend grandeur to “new-found” literary devices by drawing on older rhetorical strategies. For Sidney, hopeful laureates draw on images associated with foreign nations — “with strange similes enrich each line, / Of herbs or beasts which Ind or Afric hold” (7-8) — while Sidney’s muse enables him to serve England in his poetry. See Katherine Duncan-Jones 153. 67 Louisa Hall argues that in her elegy for Sidney, Bradstreet “astutely interrupts or overflows the limits of her chosen metrical conventions in order to weigh in on the public event of his death without losing the particular difference of her own individual voice,” opening a “rupture...in the formal fabric of her elegies, which expresses the disinclination to be smooth, complete, and obedient within a form that insists on respectful compliance” (5).

85 classical pantheon that previously lauded his singularity as a Protestant defender of the faith and of English culture. “Cupid’s Dame” (204, l. 22) herself does not possess the rhetorical dexterity with which Sidney once cast spells on readers even in the youthful folly that produced the Arcadia, referred to as “rubbish” (204, l. 26). This paradoxically causes Sidney’s contemporary detractors to dismiss his poetry as inauthentic because they cannot admit his greater skill, just as Woodbridge hints of Bradstreet’s work.

Especially given the special kinship that Bradstreet felt for Sidney, adopting the role of female mourner in elegiac verse is a pivotal moment in constructing her identity as a female laureate. The elegiac form was a popular precursor to the laureate-written epic and was thus a good staging ground for Bradstreet to affirm her laureateship.

Through her elegy for Sidney, Bradstreet mourns the loss of a model for Protestant laureateship and of an older England whose literary and moral values more closely approximated those of her own community. Her poem mirrors Julia Delacroix’s definition of the elegiac genre as “refram[ing] the existential consolation provided by the genre as an explicit exchange of death for artistic fame, a trade inaccessible to female poets and unacceptable to Bradstreet herself” (4). Her elegy exhibits her opposition to poetic genres and practices that reinforced the laureate pursuit of public acclaim and personal glory. By underscoring her lack of talent, ambition, and acclaim in “An Elegie

Upon Sir Philip Sidney,” Bradstreet positions herself opposite Sidney, and especially those who bestow official but ultimately transient accolades upon him. Instead, she embraces the Puritan ideal of plain speech poetically to imagine the “city on the hill,” a marker of divine rather than worldly accomplishment. She thus recuperates Sidney’s reputation as an English national poet from the moderately Protestant but materialistic

86 court of Elizabeth, restoring his identity as a militant Protestant laureate. Bradstreet depicts her own reputation as even more removed from the English literary system, but nevertheless warns that none should “disallow of these my straines / Whilst English blood yet runs within my veins” (204, l. 37-38). Sidney’s nationalism was publicly recognized, albeit posthumously and with some contention, while Bradstreet’s only needed to be validated by the limited community of godly elect in New England.

Moreover, Bradstreet later claims that “The more I say, the more thy worth I stain, / Thy fame and praise is far beyond my strain” (204, l. 43-44).68 The assertion that Sidney’s

“fame and praise” are beyond Bradstreet’s range of skill is a typical expression of poetic modesty, but also more literally refers to the ways that Sidney’s posthumous laureate status is located beyond her chosen private vocation. Her description of losing her way attempting to do justice to his fame reflects her urgent withdrawal from public fame via sacred privacy: “But now into such Lab’rinths I am lead, / With endless turnes, the way I find not out” (205, l. 66-67). Writing about Sidney’s poetic endeavors leads Bradstreet into a confusing “labyrinth” that signifies the dangers posed to good Puritan believers by the English literary system. By wandering amongst the mundane accolades granted to

Sidney, even if it is to praise him as a great poet and kinsman, Bradstreet risks losing her way toward gaining legitimacy as a member of the Puritan public.

If Sidney was granted worldly praise for his public poetic vocation, Bradstreet aims for spiritual accolades, affirming Puritan virtues that justified her poetic authority to rewrite (New) England as a nation of the godly elect. The Muses, who previously supported Sidney as a Protestant laureate problematically serving secular patrons, now

68 Ivy Schweitzer suggests that the term “strain” also invokes connotations of bloodlines and descent through which Bradstreet connects herself to Sidney and his poetic legacy. See Schweitzer 291-312.

become vehicles for asserting Bradstreet’s independence from worldly patrons, the

classical literary tradition, and public recognition by the English state. In doing so,

Bradstreet faces a dilemma:

How to persist my Muse is more in doubt; Which makes me now with Silvester confess, But Sidney’s Muse can sing his worthiness. The Muses aid I crav’d, they had no will To give to their Detractor any quill, With high disdain, they said they gave no more, Since Sidney had exhausted all their store. (p. 205, l. 68-74)

In the last couplet quoted above, Bradstreet suggests that any succeeding poets who

aspire to laureate status in the future have already been surpassed by Sidney, to whom

“all their store” (i.e., the Muses’ gift of poetic ability) has been given. For this reason,

Bradstreet is doubly compelled to create a new kind of laureate position: she can never

achieve traditional laureate status because she is a married woman, but also because

Sidney will forever occupy the specific type of laureateship he cultivated and

championed. Detailing her own Muse’s inferior attempt to describe Sidney’s fame,

Bradstreet invokes St. Sylvester, an early pope who, according to legend, supported papal

authority and won Constantine’s abdication of imperial power over the Church to the

office of the Pope.69 While not Catholic herself, Bradstreet uses the myth of St. Sylvester

to present her laureate status as a sign of God’s supreme authority over the state.

Although her own Muse is lowly in comparison, its meekness allows Bradstreet ultimately to triumph over Sidney’s Muses, who transform into jealous effigies of

69 For an account of this legend about St. Sylvester in its medieval context of The Song of Roland, see Hans-Erich Keller 189-204.

traditional literary authorities from whom Bradstreet seeks to distinguish her laureateship.

The Muses become angry at the speaker’s efforts to honor Sidney:

They took from me the scribling pen I had, (I to be eas’d of such a task was glad) Then to reveng this wrong themselves engage, And drave me from Parnassus in a rage. Then wonder not if I no better sped, Since I the Muses thus have injured. (205, l. 75-80)

The Muses identify Bradstreet as a detractor, or one who “take[s] away a portion” and

“diminish[es]” or “lessen[s] (a quality, value, authority, etc.)” (“detract, v.”). In other words, Bradstreet’s praise of Sidney elevates his reputation so much that it threatens the

Muses’ poetic authority. Bradstreet shows that her intellectual and spiritual discipline matches Sidney’s by using excessive expressions of her own poetic modesty to praise him, illustrating her awareness of the limits God has lovingly set upon her. Bradstreet does not seek to usurp the public commendations Sidney received from other poets after his death by giving him the praise of a worthy laureate poet. Instead, she seeks simply to maintain the modest “scribling pen” that the Muses threatened to take when she elegized

Sidney in ways that highlighted her own godly laureateship.

After Sidney’s muses reject Bradstreet’s sacred poetry, she negotiates an agreement to “borrow” the pen they previously confiscated in return for permission to write only two lines to sum up Sidney’s greatness:

I pensive for my fault sate down, and then Errata through their leave, threw me my pen, My Poem to conclude, two lines they deign Which writ, she bad return’t to them again; (206, l. 81-84)

Errata is here the humorous personification of a common publication strategy: the name

“Errata” is a meta-reference to pages that were appended to printed texts to indicate the location of errors in the type and to provide substitutions or corrections. In this way, errors could still be resolved even after a text was printed by adding a page to correct the main body of the text. When the personification of such a page gives Bradstreet her pen back, she is giving Bradstreet one last chance to correct her supposed errors. The poet suggests here that within a traditional literary system, her skills would be judged as erroneous and in need of correction according to the traditional criteria for laureateship.

Bradstreet confirms the poetic authority of the Muses by giving back her pen. However,

receiving the pen from Errata suggests that the traditional literary system has given her an

unfit instrument for completing her intended task. If the name “Errata” personifies the

pages appended to printed texts to denote errors, it therefore specifically references

Bradstreet’s female inferiority in writing verse. That Errata is female intimates that the

traditional literary system is insufficient for Bradstreet’s errand as a female Puritan

laureate because it has set her up for failure according to its own standards, giving her

insufficient poetic tools and limiting her to recreational genres. Her previous references

to her own Muse as distinct from its classical counterparts undermine their authority to

suggest that she does not need their pen at all, but will rather draw her poetic virtue from

God himself. Both Bradstreet’s substitution of spondaic feet in the line introducing Errata

and the caesura that breaks the line’s flow suggest the action of breaking away,

mimicking her act of withdrawal from Sidney’s model of laureateship, a corrupt state,

and worldly fame.70 By indicating that Errata gives her the materials to write, but not the

70 For a study of these lines and a starting point for some of my own argument, see Louisa 1-27.

honors that attended public poets like Sidney, Bradstreet also shows her aversion to

publicly recognized poetic service. With immense effort, Bradstreet marshals her

intellectual and spiritual rigor, tersely expressing Sidney’s greatness in two lines of

iambic pentameter: “So Sidney’s fame I leave to Englands Rolls, / His bones do lie

interr’d in stately Pauls” (206, l. 85-86). These lines bring the reader back to Elizabethan

England, and Bradstreet’s depiction of Sidney’s interment in St Paul’s reminds the audience of the legacy Bradstreet inherits from him: an alternative vision of laureateship rooted in divine will. The audience’s thoughts are interrupted in their meditation on

“England’s Rolls” by the following line that focuses their attention on the image of

Sidney’s tomb. The lines indicate Bradstreet’s inheritance of Sidney’s poetic renown and skill after his death but also emphasize her self-exile from “England’s Rolls” as a result of her commitment to sacred privacy instead of publicly documented renown.

In “The Author to Her Book,” Bradstreet continues to use feminized versions of

modestus to highlight the tension between domestic and public spaces with regard to the

literary system. In the poem, she adapts the type of self-control attributed to men in the

public sphere to female laureateship, collapsing domestic and sacred privacy in an

expression of modesty that characterizes her poetry as a form of domestic (re)production.

The central poem-as-child conceit highlights the ways in which writing poetry is, for her,

a private activity that endows her with public authority rather than with limited maternal

authority alone. Bradstreet’s speaker expresses regret that the “ill’form’d offspring of my

feeble brain, / Who after birth did’st by my side remain,” has been “snatcht from thence

by friends, less wise then true / Who thee abroad, expos’d to public view” (p. 236, l. 1-4).

Unlike a similar moment in the first sonnet of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella sequence,

where he depicts his poem as a child, the speaker’s poem-as-child is exposed to public opinion against Bradstreet’s will — or so she would have us believe. Nonetheless,

Bradstreet’s mother figure in “The Author to Her Book” sends the child back out into public without stepping into it herself. The speaker is not intrinsically ashamed of her poems, but her “friends” cannot understand the extent to which these poems will be wrongly judged according to standards that, in her eyes, are misguided and corrupt compared to those of the godly elect and God himself. When Bradstreet says that her friends are “less wise then true,” she uses “true” in the sense of both loyalty and authenticity. By juxtaposing the word “true” with “public view,” she underscores the public’s failure to attain these virtues; “true” thus refers to the literary system’s flawed estimation of her work outside the proper framework – Godly vocation. The rhyme highlights the discord between godly truth — i.e., true authority and estimation, loyalty, or devotion — and the public’s conception of authenticity in poetry.

By abandoning Bradstreet’s poem to the misguided literary public, her friends expose her to a type of shame that she must meet with modestus rather than pudor to justify her Puritan laureateship. “The Author to her Book” appears to respond to John

Woodbridge’s apology in the prefatory material of Bradstreet’s volume, which deploys the poem-as-child trope as a mode of concealing the shamefulness of Bradstreet’s reproductive body, which is symbolic of her poetic labor. Woodbridge admits that “If’t be a fault, ’tis mine, ’tis shame that might / Deny so fair an Infant of its right / To look abroad, I know your modest mind” and anticipates how the reader “will blush, complain,

’tis too unkind” and censure his efforts “To force a woman’s birth, provoke her pain /

Expose her labours to the Worlds disdain” (A6v, l. 55-60). Woodbridge apologizes for

both his own and Bradstreet’s shamefulness in exposing her reproductive and poetic

labor, metaphorically described as “a woman’s birth.” Even though Woodbridge might

understand Bradstreet’s shame through the seventeenth-century conventions of the

repulsive birthing body, his shame is directed at her labor rather than the end product —

her poetry. Nonetheless, in “The Author to Her Book,” Bradstreet does not express shame

over her poetic labor, instead validating her ability to shield her poem-as-child from the corrupting influence of institutions that erroneously judge his or her worth. Bradstreet does not force the child (or herself) back into the home or into the corrupting clutches of a literary and political public that encourages vanity, ambition, and personal glory.

Instead, Bradstreet endows sacred privacy with more worth than public esteem because the former fosters intellectual labor — this child is the offspring of her brain, not her body — rather than the reproductive labor that, according to Woodbridge, warrants shame.

Bradstreet’s poetic volume is the product of her “feeble brain,” but her attempts to correct its deformity are couched in terms of domestic labor. The maternal speaker of the poem reminds her child/poem that she has “wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw, /

And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw,” (236, l. 13-14) echoing the work of motherhood. She “stretcht thy joynts to make thee even feet, / Yet still thou run’st more hobling then is meet,” and when “In better dress to trim thee was my mind... / nought save home-spun Cloth, i’th’house I find” (236, l. 15-18). No matter the effort the poetic speaker applies to remedying the deformities of her child, she cannot repair its deficiencies, which symbolize poetic lack in a distinctly feminine register. The child’s

“feet” refer also to the metrical feet of the poems contained within the book, which

93 cannot be made “even” (236, l. 15), and perhaps do not need to be. As Bradstreet’s modesty simultaneously suggests, the standards of “good” public poetry have been defined by a literary system composed of readers who are unfit to judge. Instead, the poem “run’st more hobling then is meet” (236, l. 16): the poems inside the book do not conform as smoothly or strictly to traditional poetic conventions as poems written by men for the contemporary literary system. However, the word “meet” could refer to the perceived impropriety of women who published their poetry and to Bradstreet’s criticism of writers who rely on material, worldly indicators of greatness.71 She thereby questions a literary system that dismisses women’s poetry because it exceeds the confines of domestic labor but applauds male poets who hypocritically use the domestic metaphors of the poem-as-child trope to attain extravagant honors and titles as laureates.

Yet “The Author to Her Book” focuses on Bradstreet’s poetic imperfection to reflect her awareness of the limits placed on her by God and therefore proffers intellectual and spiritual modesty as the foundation of her poetic endeavors. It is with this in mind that Bradstreet commands her book: “In this array, ‘mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam, / In Criticks hands, beware thou dost not come; / And take thy way where yet thou art not known” (236, l. 19-21). Bradstreet does allow her poetry to circulate publicly, but only within the select community of the godly elect.72 Comparing the work of editing to maternal duties defines the female laureate’s work as disparate from the superficial criteria and conventions of male laureateship. When the speaker warns her child/poem to

71 Indeed, according to the OED “meet,” could refer to something that was “suitable, fit, proper for some purpose or occasion, expressed or implied,” but could also mean “accommodating; submissive, mild, gentle” or, when referring to an action “fitting, becoming, proper” (“meet, adj.”). 72 I do not suggest here that Bradstreet did not support wider circulation overall, but that she envisioned the true audience to be one limited by evidence of election, who would likewise only bestow on her praises of godliness rather than titles.

94 circulate only where it is “not known” and advises it, “If for thy Father askt, say thou hadst none” (236, l. 22), she distances Bradstreet from the male laureate’s tendency to seek exposure to centers of power like the court, where the poem would be unable to avoid “Criticks hands” (236, l. 20). She highlights her withdrawal from the flawed scrutiny and inauthentic authority that male poets locate in the fallen English public sphere, here signified by the figure of the father. While denying her poem’s paternity may appear to render the speaker’s marital chastity questionable, the complete absence of a father figure here does not quite indicate that the poem is a metaphorical bastard born out of wedlock. Instead, Bradstreet’s poem suggests that the child has been abandoned at conception — or, in a reversal of female pudor, that he is shameful. Whether because of paternal death, or even, perhaps, because of the child’s deformities — themselves potentially a sign of the mother/speaker’s poetic insufficiency — the metaphor allows

Bradstreet to represent her poetry as having been similarly abandoned because it is unfit for laureateship. And yet the poem’s last lines echo the immaculate conception and miraculous birth of Jesus. Like him, the poem has no biological father and a poor mother who, as a weak vessel favored by God, embodies the declaration that “the meek shall inherit the earth.” In Bradstreet’s poem, her speaker warns her immaculately conceived verse to “take thy way where yet thou art not known” (236, l. 21), just as Jesus wandered among non-believers to build his earthly church. Bradstreet’s speaker counsels her child- as-poem to proclaim his origins in terms that echo Jesus’ own: “If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none; / And for thy mother, she alas is poor, / Which caused her thus to send thee out of door” (p. 236, l. 22-24). While Bradstreet certainly does not engage directly in saintly imitatio here, she subtly aligns herself with the figure of a mother and

95 exemplary believer in God’s gifts and limits. She thereby revises this spiritual inheritance to carve out forms of sacred privacy that could validate appropriate public roles for wives. As a female laureate speaking to and on behalf of the “city on the hill,” she legitimizes her community’s divine call to deny its lamentably corrupt “father,” Charles, and to recognize the spiritual poverty of its “mother,” England.

Chapter 2 “Nor Envy on a Laurel will bestow / Whil’st I have any in my Garden Grow”: Katherine Philips, Friendship, and Possession

Writing and revising her poetry during the Civil Wars and continuing well past

the Restoration, Katherine Philips modified discourses about the relation of married

women to friendship, ownership, and retirement in her writing. She achieves this by

strategically advertising married women’s discretion, stewardship, and loyalty within

public arenas that, paradoxically, did not traditionally recognize these private virtues

when exercised by femes covert.73 In poems like “To Mris. M.A. Upon Absence,”

“Friendship in Embleme,” “To the Excellent Mrs. Anne Owen,” “To Mrs. Mary

Awbrey,” “A Retir’d Friendship,” and “In Defense of Declared Friendship,” Philips

depicts wives who claim public legitimacy through unconventional forms of shared

custody that are fostered by clandestine, often retired female friendship. While friendship

between men typically endorsed their public autonomy, marriage — as women’s primary

relationship — typically prevented their virtues from signifying in the public sphere

through the legal doctrine of coverture.74 Orinda (Philips’ semi- autobiographical poetic speaker) and her married female friends engage in deep friendships beyond the scope of the marital bond that lend them each a publicly resonant sense of agency.

73 For important studies examining Philips’ poetry, see in particular Penelope Anderson, Friendship’s Shadows: Women’s Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640-1705; Elizabeth Wahl 76- 130; Gillian Wright, “Women Poets and Men’s Sentences: Genre and Literary Tradition in Katherine Philips’s Early Poetry” 77-94; Allison Johnson, “‘Virtue’s Friends’: The Politics of Friendship in Early Modern English Women’s Writing”; Harriette Andreadis 55-82; Valerie Traub 280-324. 74 Friendship between men registered their contribution of “textual and erotic surplus” (Waller, qtd. in Anderson, 174) to the political public sphere in particular; this tradition, of course, dates back to the Greek concepts of erotic friendship that produced model political citizens. See especially Laurie Shannon 18-23. 96

Philips’ poetry describes how female friendship allowed wives to imagine owning, handling, and exchanging possessions in ways that bolstered their own public legitimacy. Circulating poetry within the Society of Friendship becomes a way for Philips to express a sense of agency based on forms of private custody that she shares with Anne

Owen, Mary Awbrey, and Mary Dering, among others, outside the legal arena and despite the limits conventionally imposed on women by marriage. By documenting her intimate friendships with women in verse, Philips validates her private, shared custodianship of estates, names, texts, secrets and symbols of state and thereby supports her own public stature and poetic authority. She declares wives’ exercise of the virtues necessary to address the personal, political, and religious turmoil that characterized the period between the Civil Wars and Restoration.75 Philips’ verse about her friendships with other wives underscores her poetic virtue — itself a form of moral excellence that is in her custody, bestowed on her by friendship — and thereby lends her a measure of public autonomy in the changing political climate of post-Civil War England.76

75 Women, particularly wives, were traditionally excluded from Ciceronian (and other) models of friendship because they lacked the authority and independence necessary to engage in friendship voluntarily. Laurie Shannon studies how the figure of the monarch complicated the model of political parity found in Renaissance theories of friendship. Cicero’s De Amicitia, Shannon remarks, “offered a fully consensual image of participation, a world in which there were, so to speak, two sovereigns.... In the Renaissance setting, this mirroring form of sameness signifies a radical (or at least exotic) political equality in an otherwise hierarchized world” (91-92). This chapter analyzes how women’s adoption of Ciceronian and Senecan friendship complicated assumptions of parity, political significance, and privacy. 76 Writing during the 1640s and 1650s, Katherine Philips is best understood as an exemplary Royalist poet whose poetry responded to the “model of agency” that Hero Chalmers explains enabled “some conceptualization of a parity of political engagement for royalist men and women” (my emphasis, 14). Philips’ poetic choices reflect her acute awareness that this parity was unstable and limited at best. In fact, her revisionary engagement with royalist, pastoral, friendship and metaphysical poetic traditions typically adopted by male poets reveals the anxiety on Philips’ part that she would fall victim to “the royalist resumption of traditional externalized forms of power in the 1660s” (Chalmers 14). For Philips, and for other married women, this would mean “a marked move towards the reinstatement of separate spheres of male and female political agency” in which “women remain excluded from the public offices regained by their male counterparts” (14).

To understand the role of female custodianship and public virtue in Philips’ poetry, it is necessary to consider three versions of retirement relevant to notions of ownership and poetic virtue in late seventeenth-century England. In the restrictive sense of married women’s retirement, wives’ private status could not reinforce their public authority through, for example, their virtuous legal ownership of real estate. Rather, any virtues that regulated their stewardship or management of land or houses as femes covert only reinforced their husbands’ authority and legal ownership. A second concept of retirement applies to Royalists.77 Royalist retirement allowed men to publicly demonstrate their independence, as private citizens, from what was becoming an unstable and unfriendly Commonwealth. Before the Civil Wars, this independence often required exercising legal property ownership. During and after the Civil Wars, however, Royalists were routinely dispossessed of land confiscated by the Commonwealth. As a result,

Royalist men could no longer assert independence through ownership as private citizens because of how tenuous their legal relation to land had become. In a similar fashion to

Royalist men’s inability to claim certain forms of publicly resonant privacy, including land ownership, coverture prevented wives’ private authority from manifesting in the public sphere. Philips also draws on the retirement genre commonly adopted by Royalist poets and other seventeenth-century writers, for whom writing in this genre was an important milestone in their literary careers. The retirement genre used the discourse of stoic withdrawal to articulate sovereign authority, a strategy that Philips would have

77 Philips aligns herself with the Cavalier tradition of retirement poetry, which aimed to relocate political and sovereign authority to spaces of exile. See, in addition to studies mentioned in the main text and bibliography of this dissertation: Kristen D. Smith, “Speaking Gardens: Constructing Gender in Early Modern English Poetry”; Bronwen Price, “A Rhetoric of Innocence: The Poetry of Katherine Philips, ‘The Matchless Orinda’” 223-246 and “Verse, Voice, and Body: The Retirement Mode and Women’s Poetry, 1680-1723” 1-44; Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649-1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority; Hero Chalmers 56-148.

found especially useful for constructing her public authority by depicting her withdrawal

from traditional forms of material ownership that upheld the public sphere. Philips’

innovative portrayals of retirement constitute a new literary model for asserting

independence from state intrusion that could enable wives — and perhaps Royalist men

— to claim public authority. By depicting married women’s unconventional modes of

custodianship in verse, Philips shows how it could resolve the problems presented by

Royalist retirement and the restrictive sense of married women’s retirement.78 As a

married woman writer, Philips demonstrates that wives’ possession and stewardship over

poetic and other properties, shared between female friends, could generate legitimate

public authority.

Enriching the Public Sphere: Women’s Private Friendship and the Language of Value in Philips’ Poetry

In “To Mris. M.A. upon Absence,” for example, Orinda laments her geographical

separation from Mary Awbrey, imposed by Royalist exile.79 The distance between them

grieves Orinda even more because their love endures but cannot be enjoyed, given the

necessity of living in separate locations with their husbands. Orinda comforts Mary

Aubrey upon their parting, but confesses that “’Tis not thy Love I fear to lose,” for “That

will in spight of absence hold” (70, l. 7-8). The problem is not distance, but rather

78 My argument details more precisely Bronwen Price’s suggestion that “these features of innocence, chastity and privacy come to signify something more ambivalent than might initially be apparent” (“A Rhetoric of Innocence” 227). I build on Price’s project to show precisely how Philips’ poetry addresses the “ambivalent” connections among feminine virtues and privacy, friendship, and royalist allegiance and ritual by disrupting the conflation of the liberating sense of Royalist privacy and the restrictive sense of married women’s privacy. 79 All references to Philips’ poetry are from Poems By the most deservedly Admired Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda (1667).

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Orinda’s fear that “’tis the benefit and use / Is lost, as in imprison’d Gold” which “though

the Sum be ne’re so great, / Enriches nothing but conceit” (70, l. 9-12). An initial reading might suggest that “use” here refers to the erotic sense of sexual love between Orinda and

Mary Awbrey (also known as Rosania).80 In this case, the lines denote how geographical

distance prevents Orinda from physically or sexually expressing her love for Mary

Awbrey. The analogy between gold and sexual love reduces the latter to an object of

miserly pride whose value is not exercised or enjoyed because the women are

“imprison’d” and kept from one another. Like the “imprison’d” or enclosed gold, wives’

sexual continence was thought to be guaranteed by their enclosure in the home, and in

turn endorsed husbands’ public authority for enforcing such enclosure. In fact, “conceit”

could refer to “the action of conceiving offspring,” which lends a decidedly sexual tone

to the lines, and suggests that sexual love “enriches nothing” unless it is aimed at

reproduction (“conceit, v.”). In another sense, though, Orinda insists that Mary Awbrey’s

absence enhances only their opinion and love of one another (“absence makes the heart

grow fonder”), but not their physical pleasure, which is notably not directed toward

reproduction. If we expand Philips’ analogy between gold and her love for Mary Awbrey,

it becomes clear that Orinda’s concern here is with advertising their virtues and their shared ownership over valuable, if immaterial objects. “Conceit” could refer to a

“favorable opinion,” especially with regard to “one’s qualities,” implying that in the above analogy, absence only makes the heart grow fonder, without producing any tangible “benefit[s]” in the sense of physical intimacy with the friend, erotic or otherwise.

80 On eroticism in Philips’ friendship poetry, see: Elizabeth Wahl 130-70. See also Susannah B. Mintz 62- 78; Kathleen M. Swaim 77-108; Carol Barash 55-100; Arlene Stiebel 223-36; Kate Lilley 72-92; Elaine Hobby, “Katherine Philips: Seventeenth-Century Lesbian Poet” 183-204 and “Orinda and Female Intimacy” 128-42; Celia A. Easton 1-14; Harriette Andreadis, “The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664” 34-60; Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Forms of Engagement 113-142; Valerie Traub 280-324.

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As an analogue to their loss of physical closeness, “imprison’d” gold — no matter how great the sum, Orinda reminds Mary Awbrey — only enriches “conceit” in the sense of each woman’s “thought or understanding” (“conceit, n.”).

Not only does their distance prevent them from being physically close to one another and from intimacy, but it prevents them from garnering public recognition for their intimate friendship. The word “conceit” could refer to “a trinket; an ornament” and to the extended metaphor as a common poetic device. Orinda thus ultimately suggests that, like gold which must be made into an ornament to signify publicly, widely proclaiming their friendship in verse enables them to advertise their virtues in publicly resonant ways. When used in the sense of forming “a conception or notion of (some objective fact); to apprehend, understand,” the term “conceit” might also imply knowledge not shared with others, like secrets. The above lines might thus imply that depicting Orinda and Mary Awbrey’s custody of secrets in her poetry confirms Philips’ public poetic authority in ways that are parallel to owning refined, processed gold that publicly signifies the private wealth of its wearer. Philips asserts that the knowledge

Orinda and Mary Awbrey’s friendship protects through secrecy is like unrefined gold, since the value of both can be intrinsically recognized by its owners, even when concealed from others. Depicting in verse their shared stewardship of texts, secrets, or tokens, Orinda argues, “enriches nothing” (a common epithet for female genitalia) in terms of sexual pleasure, but does enrich their public reputations.

Women’s contributions to public virtue garnered no more recognition than gold that “enriches nothing.” According to the classical definitions of privacy and friendship that influenced seventeenth-century English thought, wifely contributions to the

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household were necessary to their husbands’ political roles, but were nonetheless

considered publicly insignificant. Thus, it might not be deemed legally feasible or

appropriate for a married woman to claim “textual and erotic surplus” (Waller, qtd. in

Anderson, 174) as her own to share publicly. Penelope Anderson suggests that rather than

being seen as an avenue for valid contribution to public virtue, friendship between

women was understood in seventeenth-century England as “a means of evading what

they owe to men, a deliberate cheating of the forces of law and the economy” (174). In

other words, the textual and erotic surplus created by friendship between wives could be

seen as threatening when “the withdrawal of the two female friends creates a debt to

heterosexual society by taking women’s reproductive power out of circulation”

(Anderson 174). In contrast to this vision of female friendship as impoverishing the

patriarchal public sphere, Philips’ verse uses metaphors like gold and poetic conceits to

illustrate how she enriches English national literature. Retired friendship with the female

friend allows her to share custodianship of texts, names, and secrets that preserve, rather

than deplete, publicly resonant virtues.

Philips’ representation of female friendship challenges commonplace Renaissance

notions of friendship that denied women publicly meaningful connections and reduced

their friendships to insignificant or unnatural bonds. 81 Ciceronian and Senecan models of

friendship, upon which Renaissance definitions of friendship were based, did not afford women a place in their paradigms. While Renaissance interpretations of classical friendship models asserted that men could achieve politically resonant friendship, women

81 See Valerie Traub’s discussion of “insignificant” female friendship and desire, in which she argues that although not encouraged, friendship and erotic desire between women was not viewed as threatening to patriarchal forms of marriage. It was therefore considered insignificant in the sense that it did not interfere with dynastic reproduction or men’s public roles. See Traub 158-187.

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did not theoretically possess the perfect virtue, constancy, and independent private

identities necessary to uphold this intimate, but politically significant bond. Nonetheless,

Philips’ poetry shows that intimate bonds between women could, in fact, meet the

requirements of “perfect friendship” or amicitia — often through novel private behaviors and strategies. In Ciceronian and Senecan models, true and perfect friendship can only exist between virtuous men, whose bond is steadfast and cemented by love and shared thoughts and desires. Classical authors defined true friendship — as opposed to common or vulgar friendship — according to the friends’ shared virtues, including benevolence, consent, charity, trust, and goodwill. Such shared virtues should be declared and circulated privately between true friends through the exchange of gifts and services.

Perfect friends share political aims, ideas, and wealth without the pursuit of personal interest.82 Philips’ poetry depicts women whose steadfast friendship is based on shared

stewardship over gifts and valuable possessions that announces their public virtues, like

moderation, temperance, self-government, and honor. 83

Another symbolic object in Philips’ custody to which she consistently refers is the heart, which was a commonplace trope in literary traditions like Petrarchan, Cavalier, and metaphysical poetry. In addition to the heart, Philips explores other tropes commonly found in seventeenth-century poetry, like compasses and flames to make an argument for her own poetic authority. She thus underscores her position as the central figure in the

82 See Willy Evenepoel 177-183; Albrecht Classen, Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age. 83 Although it is not within the scope of this dissertation, Philips’ depiction of such intimate friendships between women did not elide the possibility of at least occasional hostility. In fact, Penelope Anderson examines how the friends’ ability to overcome resentment, jealousy, and animosity actually ennobles the women’s political status. Like my arguments about positively nurtured virtues above, I understand Anderson’s work to suggest that virtues could be developed through negative experiences of friendship as well. According to Anderson, friendship between women in Philips’ poetry signifies publicly and demonstrates wives’ capacity for individual legal and social agency. See especially Penelope Anderson 69- 113.

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Society of Friendship, a literary circle that produced and circulated verse meditations on

fictionalized friendships between its principal female members. “Friendship in Embleme:

To my Dearest Lucasia” is a meditation upon an imagined emblem: hearts overlaid with

twin compasses that are surrounded by flames. The compass, only recently used in male-

authored metaphysical poetry — mostly notably by John Donne — represents Philips’ innovation in friendship poetry. At the same time, her use of the compass alongside the language of intermixture and refined love reflects her deep engagement with John

Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” Philips imagines Orinda and Lucasia’s joint possession of hearts and compasses through friendship to illustrate their command of the virtues associated with these symbols. Unlike commonplace meditations on amicitia written by male early modern and classical authors, the final stanza of

“Friendship in Embleme” insists on the public attribution of these features to friendship between married women. Deploying images like hearts and compasses to fit the intimate bond of friendship between chaste wives, Philips suggests that friendship could support married women’s public roles without endangering their reputations for chastity and obedience.

In “Friendship in Embleme, or the Seal, to my dearest Lucasia,” hearts and compasses illustrate that the friends “are, and yet they are not, two” (37, l. 24). In this line, Philips reflects on the female friends’ paradoxical unity and independence to show how the relation of friendship distinguishes rather than obscures each woman’s individual public role. Orinda connects her virtuous friendship with Lucasia to various qualities like steadfastness, purity, and passion symbolized by hearts, flames, and compasses.

Ultimately, she concludes that their friendship is “such as will transmit to fame /

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Lucasia’s and Orinda’s name” (39, l. 63-64): Orinda argues that friendship between

women should be as publicly significant as that between men. In contrast to “Friendship

in Embleme,” John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” uses these emblems

to encourage the reader’s meditation on heteronormative love rather than friendship. In

Donne’s poem, the male speaker reassures his female beloved that no matter how far he

goes, distance cannot break their spiritual and emotional bond. Donne’s speaker insists

that he will always find his way back to his beloved because she remains constant and

immobile. This contrasts with “Friendship in Embleme,” where Orinda’s love for Lucasia

is constant, but free and indestructible rather than contingent upon one friend’s

containment. Donne’s poem takes as its central assumption that the lovers have in fact

become one — and thus are inseparable — but only insofar as the male lover absorbs his beloved’s private identity: 84

Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat. (20-23) The extended metallurgic conceit illustrates the male lover’s creative, publicly resonant mastery over his female beloved, expressed through the image of “gold to aery thinness beat,” a term that highlights his culturally valuable skills and, by contrast, her fragile public role. The metaphor of gold “to aery thinness beat” also conjures the image of blonde hair or a gold necklace, an aesthetically pleasing distraction from the ways in which wives were often equated with objects over which men claimed possession to support their own public roles. By challenging the erasure of wives’ private identities in

84 As Pamela Hammons points out in Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse, Donne’s version of merged lovers tends to echo the legal theoretical notion of coverture: his male speaker and beloved become one, and that one is the male speaker” (67).

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“Friendship in Embleme,” Philips revises the dynamic between the speaker and his

beloved, which is nonetheless underpinned by restrictive notions of women’s privacy.

Flames, which form an important backdrop to Donne’s metallurgic conceit, were a

common feature of early modern love poetry and often represented the all-consuming nature of erotic and divine love. Flames were often deployed by a male poetic speaker like Donne’s who, in the Petrarchan tradition, is consumed by his love for the female beloved so completely that he sometimes turns his rhetorical violence upon the object of his love and destroys her in recompense.

Philips’ “Friendship in Embleme” reverses the paradigm in which women’s private virtues are absorbed to support men’s more visible public roles. Using the same motif of fire that Donne invokes via the image of metallurgy in “A Valediction

Forbidding Mourning,” Philips describes her bond with Lucasia thusly:

From smoke or hurt those Flames are free, From grossness or mortality: The Heart (like Moses Bush presumed) Warm’d and enlightned, not consumed. (37, l. 17-20) Like the divine virtue represented by Moses’ burning bush, friendship consecrates the friends’ individual virtues through the fire of same-sex friendship and love, rather than through the image of consuming fire that often represented heteronormative love in

Renaissance poetry. In Donne’s metallurgic conceit, the delicacy of gold increases its value, but only because the goldsmith beats it into a flexible version of its natural form that is still strong enough to bind the lovers together. Thus, the transformed material publicly signifies the creator’s artistic skill and the wearer’s prowess in strategies of self- fashioning. It took considerable skill for a goldsmith to craft something malleable but strong; despite the small size and delicacy of gold used to make a necklace, it still

107 demonstrated the goldsmith’s artistic mastery. The faint suggestion of a delicate gold necklace or blonde hair by the phrase “like gold to aery thinness beat” recalls popular tokens exchanged by lovers — but even a necklace received or gifted by a woman might not garner consequential public authority for her in the way that legal ownership might for a man. The same is true of wives’ artistic endeavors, often classified as unable to validate their public roles, or as indicators of wives inferior public virtue. Gold ultimately signifies male mastery — either as professional (a goldsmith) or as lover — so that in

Donne’s poem, wifely subordination magnifies husbandly authority in the public

sphere.85 By contrast, the friends in “Friendship in Embleme” exhibit independent virtues that are “not consumed” (37, l. 20) but are rather mutually enhanced, suggested by the words “warm’d” and “enlightened,” as well as the flames’ freedom from “grossness”

(i.e., baseness) and mortality. Donne’s poetic speaker is at pains to convince his beloved

85 Donne’s “The Sunne Rising” is another poem that supports my argument that male poetic speakers often depicted the construction of their public reputations through the domination of the female beloved. In “Friendship’s Mystery,” Orinda declares to Lucasia that “We are our selves but by rebound, / And all our titles shuffled so, / Both Princes, and both Subjects too,” (23-25) echoing parallel but strikingly different lines in Donne’s earlier poem. Donne declares of his beloved that “She’s all States, and all Princes, I, / Nothing else is,” (21-22) using the language of aristocratic titles and political hierarchy that Philips would go on to emulate in “Friendship’s Mystery.” Donne’s speaker further declares that the love he shares with his beloved is so strong that it elevates his public authority: “Princes doe but play us; compared to this, / All honor’s mimic, all wealth alchymie” (23-24). The above lines reinforce the gendered hierarchy conventionally found in Renaissance love lyrics. While the word “us” seems to imply that both the male speaker and his beloved enjoy enhanced public authority, a closer look at Donne’s language reveals otherwise. By aligning himself with “Princes” and the female beloved with “States,” the speaker ensures that her identity, however magnified by their love, ultimately collapses into his. In addition, “us” may be used here as a majestic plural, which would further support the idea that Donne is referring to the male speaker alone. Moreover, the speaker in “The Sunne Rising” laments the intrusion of the outside world — whose greater authority demands the male lover’s duty to powers superior to his own — into the private world that he finds with his beloved, and over which he exercises sovereignty. The passage above juxtaposes the male “I” with its corresponding rhyme, “alchymie,” a term that referred to the practice of transforming base metals into gold. Sometimes, this could involve the additional connotative sense of something counterfeited (see “counterfeit, n.” OED Oxford University Press, June 2016). The speaker attempts to evade the anxiety of being transformed into a baser material than the feminized “States” he dominates. This passage also reflects the speaker’s effort to ameliorate his own anxiety that his self- governance and sovereignty over the female beloved will be revealed as counterfeit. In contradistinction, “Friendship’s Mystery” presents two female friends who reveal their self-governance and sovereignty to be genuine by governing objects like fetters, hearts, and titles that became symbols of political power over which even wives exert authority. References to Donne’s poetry are from The Complete English Poetry and English Prose of John Donne, edited by Charles M. Coffin and Denis Donoghue.

108 that their single identity — that is, his own — and spiritual bond cannot be severed.

Philips’ poem insists that the wives’ virtue and friendship strengthens their individual roles: their “hearts are free from lower ends,” but are nonetheless connected, since “each point to the other tends” (37, l. 11-12). The “ends”/ “tends” rhyme suggests that although their identities move toward one another (“tend”), they do not fully collapse into each other. Rather, the friends maintain separate points of termination, or “ends.” By contrast,

Donne’s speaker in “Valediction” reinforces his beloved’s silence and containment by tasking her to “melt, and make no noise” (5).

While marriage restricted wives’ public identities, in “Friendship in Embleme” friends moderate each other’s public voices within appropriate limits. At the same time, they bolster each other’s independent public reputations. The wives “express” the value

(or “Interest”) of friendship, documenting their ability to “regulate” each other, to “stand fast,” or “make the wandrer’s motion straight” (38, l. 31-32). Each wife acts as an anchor to keep the other within bounds — that is, within the traditional expectations of wifely privacy. However, the metaphor also implies that each wife automatically participates in public discourse: the “circles” that each “seeks to cast” are analogous to men’s written contributions to the public fields of science and math represented by the compass:

And as when one foot does stand fast, And t’other circles seeks to cast, The steddy part does regulate And make the wandrer’s motion straight: (38, l. 29-32) Philips highlights the qualities of steadfastness, prudent governance, and moderation shared by female friends, which renders their private bond a valid indicator of their public virtue. Philips describes the married female friends through the compass metaphor:

“Their Points, like Bodies, separate; / But Head, like Souls, knows no such fate” (39, l.

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51-52). “Friendship in Embleme” reasserts each friend’s autonomy through their intellectual and moral virtue, expressed via the pun on the analogy between the “head” of the compass, and the human anatomical skull or the husband’s position as “head” of household. Such virtues remain, like the points of the compass, connected yet “separate,” confirming each female friend’s individual public autonomy.

Philips uses a rhyming couplet in “Friendship in Embleme” to emphasize the idea that “regulate” and “straight” (terms commonly associated with containment) could be considered consistent with the “wanderer’s motion.” Whereas the stationary leg of the compass “regulate[s]” motion by “stand[ing] fast,” the mobile leg “circles seeks to cast.”

Philips’ reference to “circles” drawn on paper by the masculine, mobile leg of the compass can be understood to symbolize the greater recognition of men’s written contributions to the public sphere, especially in the fields of mathematics and science.

Philips embeds the discourse of virtue into the compass metaphor to counteract common associations of women’s “wandering” with idle gossip, improper deportment in public, or even illicit sexuality. “Wandering” for Philips becomes an action characterized by moderation and discipline, rather than excess and unruliness. By governing themselves and one another, Lucasia and Orinda paradoxically ensure their own contributions to public institutions that typically excluded wives. By contrast, Donne’s earlier use of the compass conceit implies not just the greater morality of the feminine “fix’t foot” but the appropriation of this morality by the foot identified with the male speaker, which “lean[s] and hearken[s]” after the feminine “fix’t foot.” Donne suggests that the feminine foot’s immobility allows its counterpart to “rome” safely because it has a constant “home” to which to come back. Her constancy enables his roaming, just as women’s enclosure in

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the home supported their husbands’ public lives by fulfilling domestic needs. The male

speaker is arguably inconstant in his “roaming,” a form of public circulation that must be

supported by the dependent, female beloved’s steady moral compass at home. In

“Friendship in Embleme,” the compass instead shows how the friends’ autonomous yet

interdependent government of each other bolsters each woman’s public reputation:

So Friends are only two in this, T’reclaim each other when they miss: For whosoe’re will grossly fall, Can never be a Friend at all (38, l. 33-36) Orinda does not usurp the significance of Lucasia’s virtue in order to prove her own capacity to govern dependents. Instead, both friends derive publicly resonant reputations based on their proclaimed ability to “regulate” and “reclaim” each other. One cannot assert public authority without the other, and vice versa.

Both Donne’s and Philips’ poems use the central image of compasses to symbolize a lover’s steadfastness. In fact, women were often characterized as morally weak and inconstant. Compass imagery could therefore be used to highlight the perceived rarity of a woman whose private attributes included constancy. Donne’s use of the mathematical compass, however, does not assume that such constancy should endow the female beloved with a public voice:

Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th' other foot, obliquely run ; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun. (33-36) Although constant, the fixed foot is not the foot that sketches the geometric figures compasses were used to create. Rather, the moveable foot marks the page, and is anchored by the fixed foot. The mobile leg functions as a metaphor for male contribution to the public sphere, supported by the wife’s confinement to the private sphere and

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specifically the scientific arena, where she satisfied his domestic needs and acted as an

anchor. Nonetheless, Donne’s speaker does praise female constancy, admitting that his

beloved’s “firmness” allows him to “end where I begun,” or successfully to complete the

circle. The mobile, male foot enjoys public recognition because it determines the

compass’ precise angle and direction, and thus the shape of the completed angle or circle,

but only because of the fixed foot’s “firmness” and support.

Philips revises Donne’s use of the compass to support gendered hierarchy and female submission within the context of separate spheres. Instead, her compass highlights the female friends’ interdependence when it comes to self-government and moderation.

Philips borrows Donne’s depiction of rare female constancy, but emphasizes how mutual constancy between female friends generates their public autonomy rather than supporting the public lives of husbands:

The Compasses that stand above Express this great immortal Love; For Friends, like them, can prove this true, They are, and yet they are not, two.

And in their posture is exprest Friendship’s exalted Interest: Each follows where the other leans, And what each does, this other means. (37-38, l. 21-28)

The mirror image of twin compasses, in contrast to Donne’s single compass, expresses the wives’ independent but symbiotic virtues made publicly legible. While the compasses figuratively make public each wife’s private virtues by using the terms of Ciceronian friendship such as shared possessions and mutuality, Philips nonetheless also uses the conceit to illustrate the wives’ dependence on one another. Philips’ compass metaphor shows that through friendship, married women could maintain a level of dependence that

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did not silence them. When Philips writes that “Each follows where the other leans, / And

what each does, this other means,” (38, l. 27-28) she depicts the twin feet of the compass

as enjoying interdependent but free and constant motion. By contrast, Donne’s “A

Valediction Forbidding Mourning” perpetuates the idea that married women’s

dependence on their husbands negated their public autonomy. While the feet of Philips’

compass express “mean[ing]” (28) by following one another, Donne’s female foot simply

waits until her counterpart “comes home,” (32) existing to make the male foot’s “circle

just” (35) rather than to create her own meaning.

While Philips borrows the characteristics of friendship between men that lent

themselves to public legibility, she depicts friendship between wives as more natural than

friendship between men. By using the language of measurement associated with

scientific, medical, and mathematical public discourses to which men contributed in

seventeenth-century England, Philips suggests that friendship between women is also a

worthy object of study and emulation in these public arenas. The language of

measurement and perfection also suggests that friendship between chaste wives did not

constitute an inappropriate transgression into these public arenas. Rather, friendship

between wives enables them to make public their private virtues, challenging

expectations about the validity of wives’ public roles:

As these are found out in design To rule and measure every Line So Friendship govern's actions best, Prescribing unto all the rest. (38, l. 40-44)

Philips uses words like “design” and “line” to invoke the language of measurement, and thus alludes to scientific or mathematical arenas. These terms could refer also to the analogous process of “measuring” men’s valid contributions of private virtue to these

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same public arenas. Nonetheless, the rhyme comprised by the words “best” and “rest”

elevates married female friends as superior to “the rest” of the public sphere. Orinda

invokes the language of natural perfection to describe female friendship’s superior contribution to the public sphere, in contrast to the imperfect scientific language of measurement associated here with men’s private virtues:

And as in Nature nothing's set So just, as Lines, and numbers met So Compasses for these b’ing made, Doe Friendship's harmony perswade. (38, l. 45-48)

Rather than rely on man-made tools to measure and understand the criteria for private virtue capable of generating public legitimacy, Philips uses words like “just” to present friendship as closer to the ideal represented by nature. The idea that nature’s symmetry was infinitely observable and measurable was one gaining popularity in the revolutionary scientific arena during the seventeenth century. 86 This metaphor recognizes friendship between wives as an ideal measurement of natural public legitimacy, rather than public membership authorized according to artificial criteria.

Philips uses enjambment in the passage above to position friendship in relation to the discourses of retirement, feminized nature and masculinized science and mathematics.

The words “nothing’s set” are completed on the next line by the words “So Just.” The pause between the terms parallels the gap between the sense of imperfection and rigidity

(“nothing” is “set” or firm). The compasses in Philips’ poem, which symbolize male- dominated arenas like mathematics and science are only passive measurers of nature’s perfection — which Philips associates with female friends in particular. Although it would have been commonplace to associate women with nature, Philips innovatively

86 See Deborah Harkness 97-141.

114 equates natural perfection with wifely privacy. Wives were expected to adopt domestic retirement because they were deemed weak vessels unfit for the public sphere. Philips uses this association to suggest that in fact, wifely privacy fostered ideal virtues that erroneously went unrecognized as grounds for public authority because they differed from those that qualified men’s public reputations. “Just” could also be used here in the sense of “righteousness, equitableness, fairness,” qualities that earned men public reputations for honor. Philips uses the word “just” to convey how the virtues nurtured by friendship between wives, although legitimate, were erroneously judged otherwise according to imperfect, man-made measurements for inclusion in the patriarchal public sphere (“Just, n.”). Overall, Philips’ complicated exploration of friendship discourse through the metaphorical lines and angles drawn on paper using the compass analogously indicts the literary system’s refusal to acknowledge wives’ private qualifications for public literary roles.

Philips uses the compass conceit to depict women’s poetic styles as authentic and natural in contrast to what were considered more artificial styles typically adopted by male authors. Rather than conforming to these artificial traditions, Philips and her married female friends advertise novel forms of privacy when they withdraw intentionally from the literary system. While circulating poetry within a coterie was certainly an accepted form of literary transmission, Philips consistently uses the language of retirement and withdrawal to distinguish herself as separate from even conventionally appropriate roles for wives in the English literary system. “Friendship in Embleme” represents withdrawal from the traditional literary system as ennobling wives’ poetic virtue where it would generally be dismissed. In relation to the “compasses” mentioned

115 above, which only imperfectly measure angles or circles, friendship indicates more accurately the measure of one’s capacity to contribute to the public sphere. At the same time, however, the wives’ exemplarity rests upon their withdrawal from the same public sphere within which they sought recognition based on new private criteria, like intimate friendship between wives. Philips depicts retirement, in the form of intimacy and secrecy, as a solution to the dismissal of novel wifely privacy as grounds for public autonomy.

She locates the problem in the “dull ey[es]” of those members of the public sphere who fail adequately to discern or to judge the worth of wifely virtue in the public sphere. In the following passage, Orinda insists that the public worth of wifely privacy is visible only to those who are virtuous enough to decode its gestures:

There needs no Motto to the Seal But that we may the Mind reveal To the dull Eye, it was thought fit That Friendship, onely should be writ. (39, l. 57-60)

Philips draws on the analogy between writing and individual visibility in the public sphere to suggest that if wives’ private virtues are not legible in public arenas it is because members of the public sphere inaccurately evaluate these virtues. Philips suggests that instead, wifely virtues fostered by friendship should be read as one explicates emblems, which encourage complex interpretations based on multiple meanings. For Philips, the patriarchal written word — a metonymy, perhaps, of the male- dominated literary sphere itself — is analogous to the limited ways of signifying public personhood available to wives. Philips’ speaker insists that the visual imagery of the seal along with the action of writing the word “friendship” beneath it, should be enough to signify what ideal friendship means, but her emphasis is more prominently visual. While she invokes some of the more easily recognized forms of privacy that confer public

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authority (like literary traditions), innovation is a far more powerful tool: in “Friendship

in Embleme,” Philips uses visual literacy as an analogue for alternative modes of

advertising wives’ contribution to public virtue. One such mode that the poem depicts is

intimacy and secrecy shared with the female friend, which Philips signifies through the

metaphor of a “Seale” between the two. Female friends in Philips’ poetry prioritize

obligations to one another that equal and often supersede marital and domestic

obligations that were responsible for hindering the public expression of wives’ private virtue. In fact, Philips depicts how wives’ friendships with each other also challenged discourses that problematically conflated wifely privacy with the Royalist glorification of interiority and retreat. Philips instead depicts female friends as withdrawing in order to distance themselves from public arenas that obscured or trivialized their contributions to public virtue.

Redefining Retirement: Wifely Stewardship in the Society of Friendship

Philips uses the language of ownership, exchange, and withdrawal to address the legal, social, and material restrictions faced by seventeenth-century wives in the context of commonplace notions of domestic privacy. Philips depicts friendships characterized by self-protective withdrawal with the female companion, rather than domestic privacy closely regulated by the husband.87 Depicting withdrawal shared by female friends

constitutes Philips’ response to restrictive patriarchal ideas that encouraged men to treat

87 Hero Chalmers, for example, demonstrates how discourses of proper conduct encouraged married women to view inwardness, modesty, and silence as sources of feminine authority, so long as they were contained within the home and limited by coverture. Chalmers asserts that Royalist women writers like Philips embraced discourses of disempowering withdrawal because they accorded with the liberatory sense of royalist exile.

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wives as if they were pieces of enclosed land. Philips also engages with the discourse of

monastic enclosure that might appear liberating to wives, but was nonetheless restrictive

in other ways. While the luxury of female community, agency, study, and artistic creation

associated with the memory of convents certainly would have appealed to Philips, monastic discourse also implied limitations on desire between women and highly regulated daily routines. By sharing novel forms of retirement, married female friends like Orinda, Ardelia, Rosania, and Lucasia disrupt the idea that they are possessed and stored away in their homes by their husbands.88 Instead, they voluntarily withdraw with

the female friend in order to highlight their ability to act as agents rather than objects.89

Their mutually self-protective retirement provides them with positions and spaces from which they can safely assert virtues associated with stewardship. Retirement to the country, for example, enables female friends to advertise virtues like autonomy and self- government without the risk to their reputations for modest, wifely privacy. For Philips, friendship offered protection that enabled married women’s sense of custody without diverting public significance to their husbands’ respective reputations. The intimacy of retired female friendship that Philips expresses in her verse protects her poetic virtue not only from obscurity but also from defamation. The bond of friendship substitutes for

88 Philips might also be said to counter the increasing cultural trend of associating women with the luxury items that began to proliferate in the homes of the seventeenth-century gentry, aristocracy, and even the middling classes in England. 89 Amy Louise Erickson explains that married women often laid claim to, bequeathed, and managed property on behalf of husbands or children and sometimes even themselves. Erickson makes clear in Women and Property in Early Modern England that in “many boroughs — London and others as yet unidentified — from the middle ages on allowed married women the anomalous status of ‘feme sole trader’ if they were engaged in business on their own account separate from their husband” (31). Erickson’s example chronicles an instance in which women claimed a legal status that countered the nullifying effect of coverture on wives’ public visibility and their legal and economic activity. Philips imagines an alternate version of the feme sole trader status that allowed women to negotiate the complexities of ownership and stewardship from the Civil Wars onward. The particular forms of ownership adopted by Orinda and her friends were a means to manifest their public reputations in ways far less similar to those of the feme sole trader.

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marriage and “covers” her poetic endeavors. Instead of silencing her poetry, retired

friendship proclaims poetic and other virtues while also avoiding censure in the public

sphere.

Philips positions the private identity of wives in her poems against male-

dominated literary traditions, public arenas, and masculinist national imaginaries that

dispossessed them.90 Novel forms of publicly constitutive wifely privacy, such as

stewardship, revamped notions of virtues like honor, and more complex principles of

allegiance challenged their perceived inability to contribute to public virtue. Philips most

often portrays Orinda as being cloistered with married female friends in bowers, gardens,

or walled country estates that enable the friends to safely offer their virtues in the public

sphere. Philips’ poetic speaker often locates her intimate friendships with fellow wives in

metaphorically interior spaces characterized by the language of bondage, captivity, and

enclosure. The protection offered by such spaces and practices allowed wives to claim

unconventional forms of possession, such as the custody over land or homes, but also

through their guardianship of prized items such as secrets and knowledge, or jewels,

cabinets, hearts, etc. Philips depicts wives who exchange names, poems, and secrets with

each other in the sense of shared stewardship, rather than the mercantile sense of giving

them away in trade. Orinda, for example, bestows names upon her friends not only in her

personal letters to them, but also by addressing poems to them using these names.

90 Sarah Prescott investigates how Philips uses the retirement tradition to position wives as voluntarily removed from these institutions and systems. Prescott is also careful to assert that the positive potential of retirement for exercising wives’ public agency was complicated by Philips’ personal and social circumstances. The combination of Philips’ political exile in Wales and her marital obligation to a prominent Parliamentarian husband would have informed her use of retirement tropes. Prescott thus contends that “the virtuous removal of oneself from the fray — the classic Royalist position — is a political and moral choice, a sentiment which is at odds with her position as a wife who must live wherever her husband happens to be” (357).

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In the absence of the ability to legally inherit material wealth, receiving and

managing valuable immaterial possessions like names could publicly advertise wives’

sense of self-sufficiency, discretion, industriousness, and prudence. Male heirs were

expected to protect and manage responsibly the property they inherited, along with the

family name and titles. In response to their exclusion from these kinds of publicly

constitutive inheritance, wives in Philips’ poetry withdraw together as friends to prevent

their communal possessions from being annexed to support the dynastic public reputation

of male relatives. In withdrawing together they also practice emulation, which instead

projects their own independent virtues as custodians into the public sphere. Ultimately,

Philips demonstrates the self-sufficient virtues of Orinda and her counterparts, but also of herself as an author. Her poems fictionalize and mirror her own retirement at her home in

Wales, from which she composed poetry that contributed to public virtue based on the private attributes cultivated through retired friendships and forms of custodianship that she depicts in poems circulated within the Society of Friendship.91

In “To the Excellent Mrs. Anne Owen,” Philips solemnizes her friendship with

Anne Owen by giving her the name “Lucasia,” an event which the poem celebrates by

praising Lucasia’s virtue. Despite gifting the name “Lucasia” into Anne’s custody,

Philips transparently reveals Lucasia’s real name in the title of the poem to redeem the

value of Anne Owen’s name for her own public reputation, rather than that of a husband

or male relative. Philips writes that even “Annals of State are trifles to our fame, / Now

’tis made sacred by Lucasia’s name” (32, l. 5-6). At first glance, this line appears to mean

91 While there were male members of the Society of Friendship who also received pastoral names (Philips’ own husband, James Philips, was known as Antenor and her friend Charles Cotterell went by Poliarchus), my concern in this dissertation is with the ways in which Philips’ depiction of ownership and friendship between wives directly addressed the obstacles wives faced in articulating their private reputations independently from husbands and the state.

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that the public sphere is trivial in comparison to the wives’ friendship, echoing

contemporary lyric traditions wherein love is depicted as a sacred mystery in relation to

the profanity of earthly matters. In Donne’s “The Sunne Rising,” for instance, the male

speaker declares that his love for the female beloved exceeds the import of even the most serious political concerns. His speaker exhorts the sun to tell him “Whether both th’Indias of spice and mine / Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me,” (17-18) going on to

assert that the sun should “Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday, / And thou

shalt hear, All here in one bed lay” (19-20). Similarly, Philips reduces “Annals of State”

to “trifles,” implying that the poetic name “Lucasia” elevates and intentionally separates

Anne Owen and Orinda from the influence of their husbands and the state. Lucasia’s new

name remains her own even after the annals of state have become mere trifles of history.

Of course, married women’s names would probably be unlikely to appear in annals of

state, because any notable public record of their existence would be obscured by the

names of their husbands or sons. “To the Excellent Mrs. Anne Owen” instead suggests

that the public sphere is ennobled by Lucasia’s role in it, which has been facilitated by

her friendship with Orinda.

If understood as an epistemological possession, the name “Lucasia” challenges

the idea that Anne Owen’s private possessions could not properly register in the public

sphere on her own behalf, and could only be claimed publicly by a husband. While under

coverture women could still enjoy custody (rather than legal ownership) of personal

possessions — often domestic items, small trinkets, jewelry, and clothing — their names

and private identities were perceived as ancillary to those of their husbands. “Lucasia’s

name” (32, l. 6) also confirms Orinda’s self-sovereignty by illustrating her ability

121 independently to bestow stewardship of a name upon her friend. Lucasia’s ownership of her name allows her to safeguard it from wider circulation that might endanger her custody of it. Orinda’s gift also supplements the loss of wives’ “maiden” names in exchange for their husband’s names upon marriage. The poetic names that each female friend gives to the other to keep independently are more powerful, Philips argues, than any name bestowed on them by husbands who seek to legitimize their future children as inheritors. In Donne’s “A Valediction of my Name in the Window,” the poetic speaker similarly attests to the ability of his name to withstand the erosion of time and the temporal world: “no one point, or dash / … the showers and tempests can outwash / So shall all times finde mee the same” (7-9). This is because the speaker’s name, engraved upon glass, becomes a “charm” that proclaims the “firmnesse” (2) of his commitment and love to his beloved, whose “eye will give it price enough” (5) to “mock / the diamonds of either rock” (5-6). His name will act “as a given deaths head” (21) which she must

“keepe / lovers’ mortality to preach” (21-22). The speaker literally contributes to the public arena of written discourse, but his contribution is anchored by a female witness.

Yet the male lover’s name engraved in glass keeps his memory alive for his beloved even when he is dead, overriding her agency to choose another lover after his death. Donne’s speaker uses the female beloved as a vehicle for affirming his own public stature even after death.

“To the Excellent Mrs. Anne Owen” highlights the private virtue of Anne Owen and Orinda through their joint stewardship of names in their capacity as private epistemological possessions. Orinda declares that the “dull World must now confess / We

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have all worth” (32, l. 3-4) because their capacity for custodianship — even over possessions as seemingly immaterial as names — has won them public legitimacy.

Philips writes of Lucasia:

But as though through a Burning-glass The Sun more vigorous doth pass, Yet still with general freedom shines; For that contracts, but not confines: So though by this her beams are fixed here, Yet she diffuses glory every where (32, l. 7-12)92 The sun’s beams are contained by the “burning glass,” (32, l. 7) an instrument that

ensures “her beams are fixed here” (32, l. 11). A primary sense of “here” indicates that

Lucasia’s virtues are “fixed” in the very poem that Philips writes. However, “here” might

remain unidentified in the poem, prompting the reader to question whether marriage or

friendship is the proper location of Lucasia’s virtue. Glass acts as a possible reference to

windows or burning glasses, objects that were popularly featured in both domestic spaces

and scientific arenas.93 The conceit implies that like reflective glass or lenses, which

magnify and focus the sun’s light, friendship intensifies, but does not contain, wives’

private virtue. Friendship magnifies Lucasia’s virtue so much so that it becomes a

transformative — perhaps even destructive — force, just like a sunbeam when it passes

through a magnifying lens and hits a small object. Far from entertaining a wish to belong

92 When Philips compares Anne Owen to the sun and contends that she “diffuses glory every where,” (32, l. 12) she may be referencing the name “Gloriana,” a common epithet for Elizabeth which compared her to the sun. Elizabeth’s untitled poem written at Woodstock challenged the institutional authority that imprisoned her by proclaiming that, “Much suspected by me, / Nothing proved can be, / Quoth Elizabeth, prisoner.” By insistently carving in a glass her Christian name, which cannot be taken from her despite her imprisonment, Elizabeth prefigured the ways in which “To the Excellent Mrs. Anne Owen” proclaims that Lucasia’s value is magnified both by glass and by the name that she removes from exchange in the patriarchal sexual economy. Of particular importance here is the implication that Elizabeth, though a self- proclaimed “prisoner,” cannot be linguistically confined. 93 A burning-glass was “a lens, by which the rays of the sun may be concentrated on an object, so as to burn it if combustible.” See “burning-glass, n.” OED Oxford University Press, June 2016. By the seventeenth century, glass mirrors were slowly becoming more common throughout Europe and England. See Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History.

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to the public sphere as it already exists, then, this poem reveals Philips’ desire to destroy

or purify the corrupt public institutions that refuse to recognize her own and Lucasia’s

individual contributions to public virtue.

Nevertheless, Orinda imagines a liberatory form of privacy that magnifies her

own and Lucasia’s virtue as friends. In the sense of glass that magnifies and accurately

reflects, the conceit suggests that wives’ virtues could be affirmed in their own right,

through friendship, as publicly legitimate. The poem’s couplet structure lends itself to

this reading by connecting Lucasia’s hyperbolic virtue to her retired friendship with

Orinda:

Her Mind is so entirely bright, The splendour would but wound our sight, And must to some disguise submit, Or we could never worship it. And we by this relation are allow'd Lustre enough to be Lucasia's cloud. (32-33, l. 13-18) Philips innovates the commonplace Petrarchan trope of the beloved’s beauty being as bright or brighter than the sun, instead applying the vehicle of the metaphor to Lucasia’s mind, rather than her beauty.94 Friendship (i.e., “this relation”) must disguise the strength

of Lucasia’s mind for it to be properly recognized by the fallible institutional authorities

that refuse to consider Lucasia’s independent contribution to virtue as a wife. In fact,

Philips suggests that Lucasia’s intellect threatens the institutional authorities that exclude

her from the public sphere when she declares that Lucasia’s mind will “wound our sight”

(32, l. 14). Philips’ friendship poetry magnifies Lucasia’s virtue to the extent that it

destroys the public reputation of others; in response, Orinda “covers” or eclipses

Lucasia’s virtue in a gesture that is both protective and competitive. In this case, the

94 For comparison, see Shakespeare’s innovation of this Petrarchan trope in Sonnet 130: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun / Coral is far more red than her lips’ red” (1-2).

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above lines would then suggest that Orinda is trying to prevent the public being unable or

unwilling to recognize (or “see”) her own intellect in comparison to the blinding force of

Lucasia’s. Orinda is therefore content to act like the “cloud” rather than the sun, if it

means that by doing so she ensures that Lucasia’s mind does not negate her own chances

of public recognition as both poet and friend. The act, too, of magnifying Lucasia’s virtue

is a dangerous one, and Orinda must at least partially eclipse Lucasia in order not to be

seen as an excessive flatterer rather than a moderate contributor to the public sphere. A

more subtle resonance of the word “cover” utilized by Philips is “to protect.” Thus,

Philips presents friendship as a force that contains Lucasia’s mind to ensure that she safely adheres to the proper bounds of wifely privacy. In the extended metaphor above,

Orinda self-deprecatingly identifies as one who, like a cloud, “covers” Lucasia’s intellect in the sense of protecting a valuable object, or shielding a reputation from censure. In doing so, she also ensures that Lucasia’s intelligence is not obscured by the marital bond.

Rather, it is magnified by friendship and thus cannot be ignored or rendered insignificant.

In addition to names, secrets are another important possession over which wives in Philips’ verse imagine custody. In doing so, they assert powerful public roles for themselves, since kings, but also the Protectorate, were understood to “control tightly all access to the arcana imperii, or secrets of state, upon which the prince’s power often depended, and which spies, traitors, and other enemies of the state sought to discover in his words, gestures, or countenance” (Snyder 23-24). Philips depicts friends who exchange gifts and secrets exclusively amongst one another, solidifying their friendship and echoing Hero Chalmers’ observation that friendship between men was “underlined by its connection with the keeping of secrets whose violation is depicted as a form of

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treason” (70). Chalmers concludes therefore that Philips’ discourse of friendship, “which

places a premium on secrecy,” may also be closely connected to her “desire to counter

the notion that her writings are an unfeminine act of self-disclosure” (70). This desire may, however, extend beyond redeeming the status of Philips’ writing itself include

Philips’ desire to document the private virtues fostered by female friendship.95 In doing

so, Philips’ verse depicts the exchange of secrets and gifts between married female

friends and thus offers a commentary on models of political affiliation based on

preciosité, Senecan or Ciceronian friendship, or Royalist retirement.

The politically significant private exchange of gifts, souls, thoughts, and other

items between women within a larger, mixed-gender coterie depicted in Philips’ verse

was characteristic of the seventeenth-century practice of preciosité. In particular, Philips’

poetry echoes the ways in which preciosité was a reaction to perceived vulgarity in the

French court., and specifically to “the biologically enforced servitude which marriage and

childbearing imposed on the majority of women” (Howard 60). This response produced

beautiful art and poetry as well as provocative philosophical and theological ideas ripe

for intellectual discussion in private Paris salons. In the same way that those practicing

preciosité withdrew to salons in reaction to vulgarity and gendered servitude, Philips

expresses her distance from institutions and practices (like those of the court, church, and

university) with which she took issue. In “To Mrs. Mary Awbrey,” Philips depicts the

exchange and safeguarding of secrets between female friends:

How happy are we now, whose Souls are grown By an incomparable mixture one:

95 Jeremy Taylor unwittingly supports Philips’ vision of friendship between women when he affirms that friends should give each other gifts and “be sure never to despise the smallness of the impropriety of them” (100). See Jeremy Taylor, A Discourse of the Nature, Offices, and Measures of Friendship with Rules of Conducting it: Written in Answer to a Letter from the Most Ingenious and Vertuous M.K.P (1657).

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Whose well-acquainted Minds are now as near As Love, or Vows, or Friendship can endear? I have no thought but what’s to thee reveal’d, Nor thou desire that is from me conceal’d. Thy Heart locks up my Secrets richly set, And my Breast is thy private Cabinet (70-71, l. 3-10)

Philips describes Orinda and Mary Awbrey as enjoying the closest bond that is possible, despite friendship theories that suggested women were incapable of such a perfect relation. This closeness is inspired by their “well-acquainted Minds,” which they turn to the task of keeping one another’s secrets. While secret-keeping was a characteristic ascribed to perfect friendship between men — especially political actors — the intellectual capacity and moral vigor required to keep secrets applies to wives’ contributions to the public sphere. In the passage above, the word “endear” most obviously refers to causing Orinda and Mary Awbrey to be beloved by one another.

Philips also draws on the material sense of the word “endear” that meant “to enhance the value of; to render precious or attractive,” reflecting the way that friendship could, in her view, endow wives’ private virtues with public significance (“endear, v.” ). According to this reading, Philips suggests that friendship increases wives’ public value by showing them to be worthy possessors of precious secrets.

“To Mrs. Mary Awbrey,” depicts wives who jointly govern and protect “small” possessions like secrets with a degree of independent virtue fostered by their intimate bond: “Thy Heart locks up my Secrets richly set, / And my Breast is thy private Cabinet”

(71, l. 9-10). Mary Awbrey’s stewardship over Orinda’s secrets ennobles the latter’s public stature by representing these secrets as precious and thus requiring careful guardianship, and vice versa. Orinda in turn safeguards Mary Awbrey’s secrets in a metaphorical “private Cabinet,” (71, l. 10) thereby strengthening her own public role

127 based on her trustworthiness, secrecy, and integrity. Both participants illustrate their private custody of “richly set,” valuable possessions, like knowledge or secrets, that can be compared to a jewel set in a ring, for example, and must be “locked up” because they are rare and precious.96 Using the word “Cabinet” to indicate enclosure also invokes the notion of possessing a room in a house; a wife’s custody over even a small piece of real estate could endow her with autonomy. 97 Moreover, as a married woman herself, Philips constructs her own public role by preserving secrets in verse.

Each secret, text, and name that the friends entrust to one another, especially within the intimate spaces of gardens or bowers, is invested with the potential to restore the individual private identity lost by them upon marriage. Among the imaginary possessions over which the friends assert custody is the self, or soul, that Ciceronian models of friendship often represented as shared by two friends.98 In “To my Lucasia,”

Orinda declares she will seek “a new / Self in her [Lucasia’s] breast that’s far more rich and true,” (59, l. 29-30) demonstrating the exclusive exchange of selves between the friends. Orinda describes the new, private identity that is both given to her by, and shared with, Lucasia. She observes that this new self is “rich and true,” and therefore can

96 The poem represents each friend as a responsible custodian by referencing the fashion for household objects commonly owned by women, like cassone, cabinets, and ornate boxes. 97 See “cabinet, n.” OED Oxford University Press, June 2016. On the significance of early modern closets, which were often referred to as “cabinets,” see: Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England 161–170 and “The Early Modern Closet Discovered” 76–100; Heidi Brayman Hackel 34–43; Cecile M. Jagodzinski 13–17; James Knowles, 9–19; Lena Cowen Orlin, “Gertrude’s Closet” 44–67; Sasha Roberts, 31–39; Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance 176–178. 98 For studies on Ciceronian friendship in early modern English literature in particular, see: Penelope Anderson, Friendship’s Shadows: Women’s Friendship and the Politics of Friendship of Betrayal in England, 1640-1705; Maritere López, Daniel T. Lochman, and Lorna Hutson, Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700; Amanda Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain; Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge, Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse; Allison Johnson, “Virtue’s Friends”: The Politics of Friendship in Early Modern English Women’s Writing; John Garrison, Friendship and Queer Theory in the Renaissance: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern England; Marc D. Schachter, Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France.

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generate a legitimate, individual public reputation for her because it substitutes

metaphorically for material wealth (“rich”) and expresses the loyalty (“true”) expected of

men toward their peers and superiors in the public sphere. Like the bee who is given a

“precious Gum” (59, l. 33) that eventually becomes his “Amber-tomb,” (34) Orinda “gets

Eminence, and gets Eternity” (59, l. 36) from her friendship with Lucasia. In other words,

Orinda enjoys a “glorious” (59, l. 35) reputation as a result of the “precious Gum” (59, l.

33) that answers her prayer: “O may good Heav’n but so much Vertue lend, / To make

me fit to be Lucasia’s Friend!” (59, l. 27-28). The register of immortality should not be

lost here: the gift of amber not only immortalizes the bee, but the bee lends value to the

amber, which becomes a tomb. Tombs often became highly significant public

monuments that expressed the private virtues of the men and women they memorialized.

By acting as a living monument in this poem and introducing the problem of needing to

imagine death to achieve a public role, Orinda highlights the extent to which, in life, it

was nearly impossible for wives’ private virtues to be publicly recognized.99

Similarly, the gift of a virtuous “self” shared by the friends ennobles their public

stature as both receivers and bestowers of their own absolute selves. Through images

such as hearts and amber (or the implied beehive), Philips depicts the friends’

self-protective withdrawal.100 “To My Lucasia” also proffers a model for emphasizing

wives’ capacity for agency through exclusionary, collective forms of exchange: if one

wishes to understand “Nature’s harmony intire,” (58, l. 8) he

99 Consider, for example, how mother’s legacies often relied on the actual or hypothetical death of the author in order to safely laud her virtues and allow her voice to be heard without questioning her reputation. 100 The beehive and the heart are of special interest here because of their ability to accommodate complex networks of affiliation while retaining recessive structures (for instance, the chambers of the heart and the honeycomb structure of the beehive). Of particular significance here is the queen bee, who was thought to enjoy public reputation within the privacy of the beehive. The discovery of the queen bee’s gender was

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Must search agreeing Souls, sit down and view How sweet the mixture is, how full, how true; By what soft touches Spirits greet and kiss, And in each other can complete their bliss. A wonder so sublime, it will admit No rude Spectator to contemplate it (58, l. 9-14)

The “wonder” of nature that Philips describes applies also to the absolute self: “No rude

Spectator” can be admitted to such intimate, exclusive forms of exchange, and yet the poem suggests that collective responsibility for secret kisses, touches, and intermingled souls belonging to the friends paradoxically confirms Orinda and Lucasia’s mystical, autonomous selves. The word “mixture” in the sense of a chemical combination also suggests a reference to the male-dominated public spheres of science, medicine, and perhaps even alchemy — arenas she rejects because they do not recognize women’s public virtue. Orinda describes her friendship with Lucasia as one that only virtuous spectators will be able to view, and in fact invites only those whom she considers appropriate viewers to witness “how full, how true” (58, l. 10) the intermingling of souls is between herself and Lucasia. The phrase “No rude Spectator” might imply her desire to exclude only “rude” spectators, or to exclude all spectators, who are by definition “rude” because they intrude on Orinda and Lucasia’s private bond. Her use of the word “true” here, as elsewhere, suggests the wives’ loyalty and genuineness as custodians of a valuable sacred bond, in turn validating their legitimate contributions to the public sphere, especially as models of the virtues closely associated with political integrity. At the same time that Philips appears to lobby for Orinda’s and Lucasia’s fitness to

probably first published by Luis Mendez de Torres in 1586 (see John Capinera, editor. The Encyclopedia of Entomology 1842).

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contribute to the public sphere, she also depicts the wives’ withdrawal from its “low

Experiments” — perhaps a veiled reference to the Protectorate as a kind of experiment —

in favor of the natural virtues fostered by friendship.

Philips presents friendship between wives as ennobling their public roles, but also

as a form of withdrawal that allows them to position themselves against the public

sphere. For Philips, public arenas like philosophy, science, and medicine were sites of

rapid moral decay and sophistry from which she critically distanced herself. For instance,

in the opening lines of “To My Lucasia,” Orinda asserts that “dull Philosophers” should

abandon their efforts to understand “What secret unions secret Neighbourings make” (58,

l. 5). 101 She describes such efforts by legitimate members of the public sphere, including

philosophers, as “low Experiments” (58, l. 7) in an indictment of the moral ignorance and

intellectual turpitude of the public sphere that excluded her. Instead, she encourages

members of the public sphere to investigate “Nature’s harmony” (58, l. 8) because only

the natural “object” of friendship “will refine, and he that can / Friendship revere must be

a noble man” (58, l. 15-16). Philips illustrates here how friendship constituted an

alternative form of privacy that engendered genuine virtues as the basis for public

authority. Philips thus asks “How much above the common rate of things / Must they

then be from whom this Union springs?” (58, l. 17-18) in order to illustrate the authentic

social value (above the “common rate” of traditional public arenas) of friendship in

bolstering wives’ public authority.

101 Consider similar phrasing in John Donne’s “The Sunne Rising” and “The Canonization.” In “The Sunne Rising,” Donne’s speaker apostrophizes the sun as a “saucy pedantic wretch” (5) and admonishes him to “go chide / Late school boys and sour prentices” (5-6); the speaker continues references to public arenas related to (pseudo) science, alchemy, and education, declaring that “All honor’s mimic, all wealth alchemy” (24). “The Canonization” begins with the speaker’s disgruntled command: “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love!” (1) an address that is expanded throughout the poem to include — implicitly and explicitly — a variety of publicly recognized occupations including artists, statesmen, doctors, goldsmiths, merchants, lawyers, and soldiers.

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Philips identifies scrupulous secret-keeping as a feature of authentic virtue that wives could exhibit to secure recognition in the public sphere, but maintains that secrecy could be abused by recognized members of the public, too. Consider, for example, the implicit secrets that “dull Philosophers” attempt to uncover in the poem “To My

Lucasia.” Philips brilliantly responds to her exclusion from sites of power and political discourse by co-opting the language of secrecy and its counterpart, silence. Both traits

were primary characteristics of commonplace ideas about women’s privacy, but also of

men’s political virtue in general. Philips therefore suggests that friendship between

women fostered their capacity to keep and virtuously trade secrets in a way that should be

recognized as a valid public asset. By depicting wives, whose silence was so often

enforced by their husbands, as agents of secrecy, Philips shows that wives could

independently govern words and information in ways that could not be reduced to the

early modern housewife’s knack for gossip in the popular imagination.102 Rather, Philips

shows that such abilities should be respected as grounds for wives’ public authority.

Philips depicts friends sharing secrets amongst themselves, but does not actually reveal the content of these secrets. She keeps the details of this knowledge even from the

Society of Friendship, whose members comprised the original, primary audience for her poems. Philips highlights the autonomous, public recognition enjoyed by each wife as a result of private, ethical secret-sharing. Philips repeatedly references the act itself of exchanging these secrets. Orinda and her friends reject the unscrupulous trading of secrets in the male-dominated public sphere by showing that friendship between wives fostered in them a superior capacity for discretion. The culture of secrecy raised

102 On the figure and power of the gossip, see Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England.

132 substantial moral concerns in the context of political intrigue and strategy during the period between the English Civil Wars and the Restoration. Philips’ poetry registers anxieties about how to keep secrets safely, how to trade them scrupulously, to whom access should be granted or denied, and under which circumstances. These anxieties typically applied to men who were assumed to possess the requisite skills to understand how and when to exchange valuable knowledge or secrets appropriately. Wives, however, were expected to keep secrets as a matter of obedience to their husbands, not as a matter of their own efforts to exercise autonomous strategy, integrity, or to engage with intrigue in the public sphere. Philips’ poems represent wives whose capacity to share secret knowledge responsibly is not dependent on their husbands’ governance.

In “To My Lucasia, In Defense of Declared Friendship,” Orinda suggests that without the outlet for expressing her love for Lucasia, the danger of excessive, illicit secrecy risks defaming her own and Lucasia’s reputations in the public sphere. In fact, they will be perceived instead as tyrants or wantons — two vastly different social and political positions that nevertheless involve being divested of appropriate public reputation based on one’s private behavior. Orinda insists that conversation is necessary to sustain the private bond of friendship, and to establish each wife’s role in the public sphere. In order to depict the ways in which Orinda and Lucasia responsibly share the secrets of their bond in verse without divulging too much, Philips appropriates the language of currency and trade to highlight the act of exchange itself, and the concrete value of secrets and knowledge in the public sphere. This set of metaphors allows Orinda to construct private identities for herself and Lucasia despite their theoretical inability to legally own real estate or substantial material wealth aside from trusts or jointures. Wives

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in Philips’ poetry find ways around the devastating dispossession faced by many

Royalists, including men, whose public reputations were weakened by their inability to

control their private property or wealth. Orinda, however, regards friendship as an analogous means of demonstrating wives’ financial acuity, judiciousness, and perspicacity in private, symbolic transactions between friends. Orinda urges Lucasia to join her in declaring their love and friendship — to the public but also to each other — in

order to render that friendship socially valuable. If they advantageously proclaim the

distinct social value of friendship, the friends rise to the level of “mystick[s]” (85, l. 70)

or creators of celestial music.

The destruction of the Civil Wars put many wives in the position of managing

their husband’s estates, but this did not necessarily allow wives to claim public authority

on this basis. Often, wives’ astute management of financial affairs served to recuperate

their husbands’ reputations after the wars. Philips’ status as a Royalist poet, in fact,

redeemed the lost reputation of her own husband, James Philips, who might otherwise

have faced dire consequences. In Philips’ poetry, however, the private relation of

friendship allows wives to affirm their own public legitimacy through private virtues like

prudence and sound judgment. Philips writes:

Nay to what end did we once barter Minds, Only to know and to neglect the claim? Or (like some Wantons) our Pride pleasure finds To throw away the thing at which we aim (82, l. 13-16) In the lines above, the poetic speaker subtly adapts the financial term “barter” — and

others like it, including “assurance,” (82, l. 3) “improve,” (82, l. 7) and “gain’d” (82, l. 9)

— to show how wives’ governance over social currency exchanged within friendship is

parallel to men’s publicly recognized bestowal of private property upon legal heirs. In the

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stanza quoted above, the speaker implies that if the friends fail to make appropriate

decisions about their epistemological possessions — the “Minds” they “barter” to a

particular “end” — they amount to “wantons” unfit for even the private marital bond.

“Wanton” most commonly referred to a lustful, sexually promiscuous and often

unmarried woman, but could more generally refer to a person regarded as “undisciplined, ungoverned; unmanageable, rebellious,” or even to wealth that “tempts to extravagance or luxury; abundant; excessive” (“wanton, adj. and n.”). In contrast, the appropriate end to bartering knowledge within exclusive friendship is to better safeguard such possessions, but also thereby to advertise the wives’ private capacity for self-governance,

judiciousness, and moderation. These virtues must be quite literally announced: Orinda

insists that they must describe their friendship publicly without actually divulging the

sensitive contents of their “Minds,” (82, l. 13) “desires,” (83, l. 25) or “soul[s]” (82, l.

29). Only by referring obscurely to their own shared custodianship can Orinda and

Lucasia proclaim their public autonomy. Wives who do not use friendship in this way are

wasteful wantons who “throw away the thing at which we aim” (82, l. 16) and who “love

to have, but not to smell, the flower” (82, l. 20). Floral imagery suggests the ornamental

and organic social function of friendship that married women in particular could use to

overcome the obstacles that commonplace definitions of wifely privacy presented,

including patriarchal paradigms like coverture and sexualization represented by love

tokens (flowers) and the use of sexual epithets (“Wantons”).

“To My Lucasia, In Defense of Declared Friendship” depicts Orinda and

Lucasia’s discretion in deciding which knowledge to share with, and which to keep from, the Society of Friendship (and later, Philips’ readership at large). Orinda never reveals

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the contents of these secrets, implicitly proclaiming the wives’ aptitude — and Philips’

own as a poet — for responsible secret-keeping in ways that enhanced their public

stature.103 Their stewardship of secrets ensures proper credit to the friends for their

trustworthiness, scrupulousness, and loyalty in strictly sharing information only amongst

themselves. Philips implores Lucasia:

Ah! Then let Misers bury thus their Gold, Who though they starve no farthing will produce: But we lov’d to enjoy and to behold, And sure we cannot spend our stock by use.

Think not ’tis needless to repeat desires; The fervent Turtles alwaies court and bill, And yet their spotless passion never tires, But does encrease by repetition still. (83, l. 21-28)

Orinda assures Lucasia that their private love and desire, like gold, should not be buried or taken out of circulation. By proclaiming their love, the friends will strengthen their reputations as virtuous friends in the same way that those who wear or spend their gold advertise their wealth. Yet Orinda also assures Lucasia that their virtue — much like a renewable resource (i.e., gold) — cannot be depleted or ruined by “use,” which could refer above to erotic enjoyment. However, “use” could also refer to the proper mental or physical exercise of some skill or faculty, especially with regard to tools, resources, or language. Lastly, “use” might be used here in the monetary sense, referring to “the enjoyment of revenue, profit, or other benefit deriving from land or other property, especially where the person enjoying these benefits is not the nominal owner of the

103 Despite infelicitous situations in which men and women of both Royalist and Republican allegiance were dispossessed of landed property during the Civil Wars, wives in particular were often left in the position to defend or manage their husbands’ estates in their absence. My intention here is not to erase this fact, but to underscore the extent to which even when they did steward actual property, this did not earn them an independent, public reputation but rather aggrandized their husbands’ public life by showing him to have been a skillful and virtuous educator of his wife in such matters.

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property” (“use, n.”). These definitions contribute to the sense that each wife shows

herself capable of properly using coded language, prudence, and cultural literacy to

protect the value of one another’s secrets.

Moreover, Philips includes images of wasteful consumption caused when private

virtues are “buried” rather than proclaimed. Philips declares that “Misers” who “bury

thus their Gold, / ...no farthing will produce” (83, l. 21-22). As a reference to the parable

of the talents, these lines revise wives’ exclusion from the public based on their inability

to declare their private stewardship outside the household.104 Philips’ conceit turns on the

use of the word “stock,” which could mean “moveable property” or “an estate or property

that produces income; a person’s total property.” The term could also be taken to mean “a

line of descent; the descendants of a common ancestor, a family, kindred” or more

specifically “the source of a line of descent; the progenitor of a family or race.” Lastly,

“stock” could refer to inheritance — an endowment for a son, or dowry for a daughter

(“stock, n.1 and adj.”). All three meanings empower Orinda’s custodianship as a

“spender” of symbolic or genetic wealth whose private status is recognized in the public

sphere. Within marriage, her contribution of genetic property enhances her husband’s

public reputation by providing legitimate heirs upon whom he could bestow inheritance.

Within the competing relation of friendship with other women, wives could, at the same

104 Matthew 25: 14-30. In this parable, a master bestows upon three servants talents according to their ability. While the first two put these talents to good use by investing them for their master’s profit and are rewarded, the third fails to do so and is punished: “Then he that had received the one talent, came, and said, Master, I knew that thou wast an hard man, which reapest where thou sowedst not, and gatherest where thou strawedst not: I was therefore afraid, and went, and hid thy talent in the earth: behold, thou hast thine own. And his master answered, and said unto him, Thou evil servant, and slothful, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I strawed not. Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming should I have received mine own with vantage. Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents. For unto every man that hath, it shall be given, and he shall have abundance, and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away. Cast therefore that unprofitable servant into utter darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” See the Book of Matthew, 25: 14-30. Geneva Bible, 1560 Edition.

137 time, enhance their own reputations by acting as custodians/heiresses of one another’s intangible possessions. This is not to say, however, that such property is freely spent.

Orinda and Lucasia strictly control the transmission of their unconventional wealth

(secrets, names, knowledge, and poems) from circulation in the outside world. Orinda therefore importunes Lucasia to “use” their “stock” without fear of “spend[ing]” or depleting it because it will remain in their capable custody. She also assures Lucasia that they can safely proclaim their love without fear of losing it because their love and desire are infinite and only grow the more their expression is repeated or “used.” She does this by explaining that like doves who “always court and bill” — terms that both imply shows of affection — their “spotless passion never tires / But does increase by repetition still”

(83, l. 26-28). Her request assumes the wives’ custodial talents must be widely proclaimed to earn them public roles and ennoble friendship between married women.

The figure of the turtle dove in the passage suggests, too, that declaring the loyalty of each married woman to the other increases its resonance in the public sphere.

In “To My Lucasia, in Defence of Declared Friendship,” Orinda complains that

“To our Opinion we our Bliss confine, / And love to have, but not to smell, the flower”

(82, l. 19-20). In other words, she laments that by not declaring their love and desire, they confine their happiness to their own opinions. Orinda wants to declare their love — but perhaps not their secrets — to the wider public in order to intensify their happiness and to magnify their public reputations. The ambiguous use of “our” might appear to suggest that Orinda wishes that each friend would proclaim her virtuous love to the other (in which case “our” refers to the friends individually) or to the outside world (in which case

“our” refers to the friends collectively). She refines this request when she writes that:

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Although we know we love, yet though our Soul Is thus imprison’d by the Flesh we wear, There’s no way left that bondage to controul, But to convey transactions through the Ear (83, l. 29-32) The primary meaning of the above lines is that proclaiming their love to one another will offset the ways that their fleshly bodies prevent their souls from fully and freely mingling, given the confines of their physical bodies so long as they are alive. By affirming their love for one another in verse, they elevate friendship so that it allows them to more completely join their souls together. The lines above more subtly convey the secondary sense that the “transactions” the friends “convey” counteract the “bondage,”

“controul” and “confine[ment]” associated with restrictive wifely privacy. Even more notably, Philips’ verse suggests that secrets and knowledge must be displayed in ways that secure wives’ public autonomy without compromising their reputations for discretion. The slant rhyme “wear/Ear,” paired with iambic pentameter lines, corroborates the poem’s implication that there is an important distinction between appearance and hidden knowledge. As friends, wives can share secrets with one another

(“through the Ear”) that are not as legible to outsiders as “the Flesh [they] wear.” In other words, wives can show that they possess valuable knowledge without actually breaking the promise to keep it secret. Orinda shows that in this way, wives can deal in secret knowledge outside the marital bond without being guilty of gossip or treachery. Within marriage, however, keeping or obtaining secret knowledge for the spouse would be considered a duty that, if exercised properly, marked the wife as obedient to a capable husband. This particular wifely duty reinforced the sense of restrictive privacy that was deemed “necessary” to prevent wives from spreading secrets in idle gossip. As a result, wifely privacy might make wives feel quite literally “imprison’d by the Flesh we wear,”

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an experience Orinda describes as “bondage” in the passage above. Friendship mitigates

this restriction because it allows wives to make “transactions” of secrets “through the

Ear” independently, and to enjoy public recognition for those negotiations in their own

right. The relationship of Renaissance lyric poetry to sound through oral traditions supports the sense in these lines that “through the Ear” might also mean that for Philips, friendship allows her to use poetry in ways that earn her an independent, virtuous public role despite her formal exclusion from the traditional literary system.

Friendship instead promotes Orinda and Lucasia as individual, self-sovereign members of the “knowing few” who generate public authority by paradoxically exhibiting their command of valuable knowledge while concealing its secrets. “In

Defense of Declared Friendship” insists that wives’ custodianship was, in fact, a publicly relevant indicator of private virtue by using the language of political and divine power as well as wealth: “mysterious reign,” (82, l. 10) “heart,” (83, l. 38) and “tribute” (84, l. 42) recall the discourse of public, Royalist arenas from which wives were traditionally excluded.105 And yet Philips redefines the terms for inclusion, insisting on her share of

authority based on the secrets that she and Lucasia oversee. Philips asks in frustration

“And shall enjoyment nothing then improve?” and proclaims that “Now we have gain’d,

we must not stop, and sleep / Out all the rest of our mysterious reign” (82, l. 7; 9-10).

105 While women’s use of gifts for political reasons has been well-documented, Philips depicts this phenomenon in a context almost entirely removed from patriarchal economies and in service of wives’ own public reputations. See: Felicity Heal, Power of Gifts: Gift Exchange in Early Modern England; Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, The Culture of Giving: Informal Support and Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England. As Daniel T. Lochmann and Maritere Lopez explain, “Since medieval Europe had viewed women as ‘signs of credit’ — ‘the most precious of gifts’ in a culture of gift exchange — they had strengthened bonds between male ‘friends’ within networks such as the family and commerce” (12). He further notes that “after humanist persuasion displaced the woman as the pre-eminent gift, husbands in literary texts began to seek new ways to assure the credit of friends,” which left wives free to assume “a strong voice” (12). Philips’ poetry responds to this change in the relation of wives to friendship to offer wives and potential wives non-threatening ways to “assure the [public] credit of [female] friends” (12). Orinda and the married women to whom she addresses her poems become agents of exchange (rather than objects).

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Stewardship must be “enjoyed” — that is, private virtues must be exercised in order to maintain public autonomy. The enjambment of “sleep,” (which could here refer to death) with “reign” suggests that the female friends “gain” and “improve” the eternal “reign” of absolute authority embodied by their friendship only when they advertise their own self- sovereignty.

Wives’ responsible transmission of secrets constitutes, according to Philips, an appropriate mode of wifely privacy. Throughout “To My Lucasia: In Defense of

Declared Friendship,” Philips uses double entendres like “enjoyment,” (82, l. 7,18)

“multiply,” (83, l. 35) “tribute,” (84, l. 42) “produce,” (83, l. 22, 52) “treasures,” (82, l. 5)

“improve,” (82, l. 7) “obtain,” (82, l. 12, 51) and “use” (83, l. 24) to describe friendship in economic terms, and to highlight how friendship between wives allows them analogously to manage their private economic affairs, like they do secrets, independently of their husbands. Monetary language enables Philips to imagine that wives like Orinda and Lucasia could inherit and transmit even intangible possessions through the private relation of friendship, rather than being limited to patriarchal familial relations that did not support their consent as individuals, or as political subjects.106

106 Philips applies economic language to secrecy in much the same way that Shakespeare applies it to genetic property like children: as a way to establish one’s public legacy. In the first seventeen sonnets of Shakespeare’s sequence, the male speaker accuses his beloved of squandering the real property he was entitled to inherit, along with his future children, a form of property that he does not properly “invest” with value. For example, in sonnet 1, Shakespeare writes that “From fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauty's rose might never die” (1-2) holding that “the riper should by time decease, / His tender heir might bear his memory (3-4). The speaker appeals to traditional assumptions that men’s social value (“increase,” “tender”) is based not just on the production of an heir, but on the “memory” of his public reputation. While Shakespeare also links pecuniary value, same-sex love, and cosmological authority (“increase/decrease,” “desire,” “memory”), Philips adapts this language for same-sex friendship between women. Philips’ poetry assumes that friendship between women produces cultural credit because the women can function — much as the poetic speaker of sonnets was thought to function — as “keepers” of the genetic, textual, and even reproductive property that is of concern in Shakespeare’s sonnets, rather than as objects of exchange or vehicles for sexual reproduction. All references are to William Shakespeare, The Sonnets (John Hollander, Stephen Orgel, and A. R. Braunmuller, editors).

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“Insignificant” Possessions: Wives as Agents of Exchange and Poetic Inheritors

At best, commonplace expectations of wifely behavior meant that wives could only claim domestic authority based on their stewardship of household items and small, sometimes intangible belongings, including secrets. At worst, these concepts ensured that any skillful and scrupulous handling of secrets on the part of wives should be properly attributed to the government of husbands who enforced their silence and duty. These notions also conflated wives themselves with other “small possessions” like luxury objects that could be possessed, collected, and sold at will. Certainly the lack of publicly legible volition this implied also removed the possibility for friendships between wives to be considered meaningful outside the home. Philips depicts wives who nevertheless become heirs in an extra-legal sense when their married female counterparts entrust to them seemingly insignificant private possessions. Some of these “small” possessions were of an intangible nature and thus appeared to be trivial. For instance, in “A Retir’d

Friendship, to Ardelia,” Philips writes about the mind as a possession that is shared without being given away:

But we (of one another’s mind Assur’d) the boisterous World disdain; With quiet Souls and unconfin’d Enjoy what Princes wish in vain (29, l. 33-36)

In the above lines, “assur’d” refers most obviously to the emotional confidence the speaker enjoys in her friendship with Ardelia. In another sense, though, “assur’d” refers to the promise of payment, inheritance, or jointure that typically accompanied marriages or economic transactions. Friendship removes the imperative for wives to give away their most valuable, if seemingly insignificant, belongings to their husbands. Nonetheless,

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friendship also allows wives to retain such paraphernalia without entirely refusing to

share it with anyone. Orinda’s bond with Ardelia in this poem is such that the two share

custody of each other’s belongings. Both meanings of “assurance” allow Orinda and

Ardelia to “disdain” the “boisterous World” and therefore to position themselves against

public arenas that did not extend to married women an autonomous public role. Instead,

Orinda invokes a novel form of wifely privacy characterized by intentional austerity and

a lack of material wealth or official titles:

Here is no quarrelling for Crowns, Nor fear of changes in our Fate; No trembling at the great ones frowns, Nor any slavery of State.

Here’s no disguise nor treachery, Nor any deep conceal’d design; From Bloud and Plots this Place is free, And calm as are those looks of thine (28, l. 9-16)

In fact, Philips depicts titles and wealth as corruptions of true Royalist power in Philips’ fantasy of retirement with the female friend. Philips revises the discourse of retirement, which assumes that wives’ restriction upholds male public authority. In the excerpt above, the speaker rejects a false political economy based on errant forms of possession.

Philips insists that, in the context of the Civil Wars, “crowns” have become unstable objects of stewardship upon which to base one’s public authority. Crowns — and the political authority that wearing them can confer — can be lost, whether through death, coup, or regicide. Moreover, in the logic of “A Retir’d Friendship,” even unconventional possessions like “Bloud,” (28, l. 11) in the sense of both violence and lineage, are no defense against the violent dispossession of the Civil Wars and its aftermath. The intensity of the iambic tetrameter lines — supplemented with spondaic and trochaic feet

143 for further effect — deepen when Philips introduces “Plots” and “deep conceal’d designs” (28, l. 10-11). These types of unscrupulous secrecy throw into question their owner’s private virtue and thus his public authority. Philips’ invocation of “slavery,” (28, l. 8) the legal ownership of human beings, arguably condemns forms of ownership built upon violently denying subjects’ self-sovereignty. Taken a step further, the rhyme scheme of the poem juxtaposes “Crowns” (28, l. 5) with the pregnantly ambiguous “great ones frowns,” (28, l. 7) which might refer to either Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Richard

Cromwell, or even Charles II. This ambiguity underscores how morally risky it could be, in the aftermath of the Civil Wars, to exhibit ownership of material wealth and official titles as a means of securing public authority no matter what one’s political allegiance might be. Philips underscores how novel forms of private custodianship were necessary to secure individual sovereignty against invasive and violent state authority, and to reimagine the standards for membership in the public sphere. The alternating rhyme scheme uneasily yokes together “Fate” and “state,” (28, l. 6, 8) suggesting that

Philips/Orinda ultimately resists the state’s authoritarian influence on constructing her own public autonomy.

Orinda and Ardelia in “A Retir’d Friendship” construct their own public roles by trading “hearts,” (29, l. 16) “calm...looks,” (28, l. 12) and “what Princes wish in vain”

(29, l. 36). In this way, wifely privacy is characterized by the fullness of the friends’ innocent stewardship over natural, god-given possessions, like sheep flocks and streams.

These possessions exhibit Orinda and Ardelia’s individual ability to contribute valid private virtues to the public sphere. Orinda’s invitation to Ardelia reads thus:

Let’s mark how soon Apollo’s beams Command the flocks to quit their meat,

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And not entreat the neighboring streams To quench their thirst, but cool their heat (29, l. 25-28)

The reference to Apollo, the sun god, might initially appear to allude to Charles I or II, or

even to Oliver or Richard Cromwell. A seventeenth-century audience would also

recognize Apollo’s dominion over poetry, music, and knowledge, so that Orinda and

Ardelia become vessels of Apollo’s poetic authority as pastoral shepherd. Of course, the

valence of poetic authority lent to Orinda and Ardelia would also have applied to Philips’

position in relation to the seventeenth-century literary system in England. Philips presents

her poetic persona as sharing custody over Apollo’s domains — pastoral poetry in

particular — with her female friend. In doing so, Philips shows that this type of shared

stewardship could earn wives poetic recognition from symbolic literary giants, like

Apollo, who arbitrates (but is not subject to) the criteria for achieving poetic authority. In

this way, Orinda and Ardelia win his approval but still remain separate from the

traditional literary system that excluded them. Orinda and Ardelia become deputies to

Apollo’s power, acting as custodians who oversee natural resources that represent

Apollo’s pastoral domain, like livestock and water, and thereby demonstrate their

capacity for husbandry and its analogue here, poetry. Their proximity to Apollo implies

their own claims to the poetic and pastoral possessions associated with him. Their

positions as Apollo’s deputies also indicate their divinity as friends and poetic devotees

who endorse their own reputations as servants to Apollo.

In “A Retir’d Friendship,” Orinda and Ardelia enjoy mutual self-sovereignty as custodians of poetic virtue, divine knowledge, and natural resources under the ultimate authority of Apollo. At first glance, this might appear to mimic coverture and the ways in

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which wives were represented as being deputized by governor-husbands.107 However,

Apollo’s status as a deity endows Orinda and Ardelia with the capacity to serve the

divine on earth, in much the same way that publicly recognized men (and male poets,

especially) drew upon their relation to a Christian God to undergird their public

reputations. By practicing a novel form of privacy like retreat with the female friend,

Orinda and Ardelia enjoy freedom from the restrictions of wifely privacy. Orinda insists

that her soul remains “unconfin’d” and the “quiet” (29, l. 35) she enjoys is not a sign of

restriction, but of liberty to enjoy what even princes cannot have. Philips demonstrates

the authority of even the most marginalized subjects to govern their own private affairs,

and to exercise public authority based on a wider set of criteria. She explores the publicly

constitutive spaces of retirement that could lend wives authority outside the home.

Bronwen Price succinctly explains that such sites of retirement were often understood as

“removed from the interests of a world that is boisterous, vain, corrupt, and whose central

concerns are motivated by ambition and the drive for power and fame” (Price, “Verse,

Voice, and Body” 3).108 Philips uses the feminized topography of pastoral “groves, secret

bowers, and private glades,” (Price, “Verse” 3) to challenge the fluid boundary between

private retirement and public life that wives could not cross easily. Philips and her female

friends become “the speaking subject[s]” who, “while conventionally modest and

retiring, also implicitly speak from a position of moral authority” necessary to Philips’

revision of wifely privacy (Bronwen, “Verse” 4).

107 For a detailed discussion of the governor-deputy analogy, among others used to depict proper marital relationships, see Sid Ray 26-45. 108 Price reminds readers that while “its central features were in keeping with standard feminine virtues of humility and privacy,” the retirement genre “could be remoulded for different purposes,” in particular due to its association with “an enclosed, meditative space that operates separately from social parameters” and therefore might “provide a sphere for different modes of thought, identification and being, enabling the possibility for orthodoxies to be re-examined and questioned” (Price, “Verse” 4).

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In Philips’ “Upon Mr. Abraham Cowley’s Retirement” she declares, in what seems like a summary of her poetic project of disengagement, that she will to “no other

Wealth...aspire, / But that of Nature to admire” and will not “on a Laurel...bestow” envy

“Whil’st I have any in my Garden grow” (123, l. 47-50). She goes on to explain:

And when I would be Great, ’Tis but ascending to a Seat Which Nature in a lofty Rock hath built; A Throne as free from trouble as from guilt. Where when my Soul her wings does raise With innocent and quiet pride I’le sit And see the humble waves pay tribute to my feet. (123, l. 51-57)

Philips uses the language and genre of retirement to demonstrate her position as a custodian of poetic and natural possessions that reflect her contribution to public and poetic virtue. As the work of Jessica Rosenberg and others has shown, gardens often functioned as metaphors for poesy — the art of collecting or composing poetry, but also of composing bouquets, by collecting “good words” or beautiful flowers. Retirement here shows that collecting friends and small possessions is like creating poetry. Collecting friends, words, and belongings were all publicly constitutive modes of private endeavor, but exploring the intersection between them allows Philips to reimagine their public significance for wives, whom privacy rendered analogous to objects kept or collected by men. Philips figures her relation to such possessions as natural by using the pastoral language of poetic greatness. Philips’ poetic project identifies women, and particularly wives, as vital actors who preserve symbolic or intangible but valuable possessions through private friendship and retirement. These possessions helped demarcate a poetic identity for wives that was, quite literally, a “garden” in which they could “grow” possibilities for public significance.

Chapter 3 Collaborative Possession and Intellectual Partnership in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World and The Convent of Pleasure

This chapter examines Margaret Cavendish’s representation of collaborative writing and

performance, emulation, and intellectual partnership practiced by high-ranking female friends who jointly handle and enjoy land, houses, and even intangible belongings in The

Convent of Pleasure (1666) and The Blazing World (1668).109 Cavendish’s portraits of

female friends show that such alternative forms of wifely privacy were ideally suited to

support the public reputations of high-ranking wives or potential wives because they

enjoyed unusual (if still limited) access to public arenas from which non-elite women

were more forcefully excluded.110 Cavendish indicts these same public arenas because

they unfairly recognize men’s private endeavors but deny similar prestige to elite wives.

By imagining men’s exclusion from sharing and collaboration amongst married women,

Cavendish shows that they could accrue autonomous private sovereignty and

appropriately access public arenas independently of husbands or male relatives.

109 I use emulation here in the particular context of Renaissance notions of friendship, in which true friends — as opposed to vulgar or common friends — strove to “to equal or surpass” one another in the virtues, political interests, and values they shared. In this way, each friend raised the standards of the pair according to definitions of perfect friendship, and thus as contributors to public virtue. 110 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 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. 147

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Cavendish draws attention to the similarities between forms of exclusion from the

public sphere faced by elite men, single-women, and widows during the particular conditions of the Civil Wars and those regularly faced by wives under typical circumstances in seventeenth-century England. Cavendish finds the exile of the elite from

arenas like politics, education, and science especially wrongful because of her elitist

notion that high-ranking men and women should, in general, enjoy greater access in this

regard than lower-ranking men and women. But for all these groups, definitions of

private identity suited to higher social strata, which were based on commonly accepted

criteria like legal property ownership, material self-representation, or traditional forms of

authorship, for example, had become unstable guarantors of authority after the Civil

Wars. Novel modes of private sharing and collaboration adopted by high-ranking married

women in Cavendish’s texts highlight the loss of titles, prestige, lands, and wealth that

devastated the elite — including Margaret and William Cavendish — during the Civil

Wars. Thus, I consider The Convent of Pleasure and The Blazing World against the

irreversibly changed terrain of post-civil war England, showing how it prompted

Cavendish to theorize the increasingly unstable relationship of elite wives in particular to

the public and private spheres.111 Married women in The Convent of Pleasure and The

Blazing World are notably equipped to supplement with innovative forms of wifely privacy where traditional forms of authorizing privacy had become unstable or inaccessible for socially powerful men and unmarried women.

111 For readings that address Cavendish’s response to the political implications of the English Civil War and Restoration, see: Hero Chalmers 16-55, 105-144; Horacio Sierra 647-669); Victoria Kahn 526-566; Julie Sanders 127-142.

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Female friends and communities in The Convent of Pleasure and The Blazing

World challenge the use of commonplace heteronormative discourses to eclipse wives’ self-sovereignty as a means to elevate husbandly authority. Instead, Cavendish imagines that friendship and desire between women foster forms of privacy that protect wives’ sovereignty from being annexed to support patriarchal authority. In Cavendish’s texts, shared ownership, collaborative self-fashioning, and intellectual partnership remain free from obligation to male figures of authority, to whom elite wives’ limited public reputations were typically tied even more closely than those of lower-ranking women.112

Cavendish’s texts therefore commonly feature high-ranking wives whose backgrounds give them great access to innovative forms of wifely privacy that include claims to literary and intellectual possessions, and even intangible belongings, that they do not actually own legally.

Convents and Country Houses: Material and Performative Creativity in The Convent of Pleasure

As a never-married single woman inheriting her father’s estate without competition or male supervision, Lady Happy uses her private sovereignty to establish a community governed by potential wives who share in the pleasure and beauty of the estate. The distinction between legal and symbolic ownership in The Convent of Pleasure is important: Lady Happy’s devotees cooperatively act as if they own the convent,

112 Lower-ranking women were sometimes paradoxically afforded more practical freedom to access public arenas, like the marketplace. For the inverse relationship between women’s literary claims to property and their class status, see Pamela Hammons, Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects 115-185.

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contributing to and managing its rich cultural life.113 However, Happy enjoys a singular,

elevated status as the legal landowner in comparison to her devotees despite their

participation in similar forms of authorship, partnership, and custodianship. The kinds of

collaboration that potential wives exercise in the convent are specific to their rank, and

thus mainstain socially elitist class distinctions between Happy and her devotees. For

example, the devotees cooperatively compose and perform vignettes that Happy

supervises and therefore promote collaboration and sharing across ranks as forms of

publicly authorizing wifely privacy in The Convent of Pleasure. The Prince(ss)’ gender

ambiguity further reinforces the idea that gender influences access to masculine and

feminine forms of publicly constitutive privacy less so than rank and wealth, or perhaps

even marital status or sexuality. Thus, Happy and the Prince(ss)’ enjoy greater access to commanding roles in classical pastoral drama than their lower-ranking counterparts, who

engage with less prestigious roles and genres.

Lady Happy’s withdrawal from the marital economy provokes anxiety about the

potential for elite women to cultivate private sovereignty independently through male-

dominated forms of privacy, like friendship and legal ownership. Even other women, like

Madam Mediator, express anxiety at this prospect. When Happy declares her intentions

to retire inside the convent, Madam Mediator implores Happy not to “incloyster

[her]self” and to think about what she would lose were she to “banish [her]self” from

what Happy refers to as “the publick World,” which she says does not “invite [her] to live

in it” (1.2). Words like “incloyster” and “banish” recall the trauma of royalist exile and

the retirement tradition glorified by many royalist authors. However, Lady Happy is

113 All references to The Convent of Pleasure taken from The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays edited by Anne Shaver 217-248.

151 quick to explain how retirement differs for (prospective) wives, declaring that “Marriage to those that are virtuous is a greater restraint than a Monastery” (1.2). For Lady Happy, restrictive wifely privacy is far more complicated than the “pleasure, freedom, or happiness” (1.2) valorized in royalist notions of retirement. Happy explains that “those

Women, where Fortune, Nature, and the gods are joined to make them happy, were mad to live with Men, who make the Female sex their slaves; but I will not be so inslaved, but

I will live retired from their Company” (1.2). Cloistered retirement allows Lady Happy to avoid the fate of married women, whom she considers inferior because they are “poor.”

For Happy, “poor” means that non-elite women in particular are “only fit for Men; for having not means to please themselves, they must serve only to please others” (1.2).

Cavendish underscores the elitist notion that women of significant material wealth were particularly well-positioned to enjoy new forms of privacy like retirement, whereas wives lacking rank, title, or significant wealth were not.

Wives or potential wives could also be poor in the sense that they occupied what

Laurie Shannon identifies, in the context of friendship between male monarchs and their elite male subjects, as “the position of nonparticipation in direct forms of institutional governance (office)” (19). Like enslavement, poverty could render such women unable to demonstrate their independent, capable management of private affairs in ways that translated into public authority. In fact, the term “enslave” had come to mean by

Cavendish’s time “to reduce to political ‘slavery,’ deprived of political freedom”

(“enslave, v.”). Poor as they were in this sense, wives enabled their husbands to assert public autonomy by supporting their domestic needs and position as heads of household, virtuous property owners, and professionals in private vocations. By adopting retirement

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as a matter of choice rather than as an imperative, the women in Happy’s convent

transform this kind of poverty into an empowering form of nonparticipation that renders

them wealthy in other ways. For example, Cavendish’s later vignettes in the third act also

reference wives whom marriage renders “poor” in terms of private sovereignty, even if

they are fairly high-ranking: devotees play married women who are variously identified

as “A Lady,” “A Citizen’s Wife,” and “Ancient Ladies” (3.2-3.10) but whose husbands

usurp their private sovereignty through excessive spending, unruly behavior, and abuse.

That these vignettes are in fact performed by high-ranking women with diminished fortunes highlights the ways that rank qualifies them to adopt novel forms of privacy to replace those appropriated by husbands.

Cavendish revises the language and imagery of royalist retirement — monasteries, cloisters, freedom from political enslavement, etc. — to ennoble wifely privacy. 114 In contrast to the “poverty” of private virtue and agency that Happy seeks to

avoid, she describes her retirement as generous and autonomous. Happy declares that she

will maintain women whose “Births are greater then their Fortunes” on her estate, where

together they will “resolv[e] to live a single life, and vow Virginity” and “live incloister’d

with all the delights and pleasures that are allowable and lawful” (1.2). Happy generously

makes available a means of retirement that, like conventual retirement, was considered

114 For a discussion of Royalist retirement imagery and language, see Chalmers 105-117. Lady Happy carefully distinguishes between her resistance to commonplace notions of wifely privacy and the transgressive acts of public women, in particular courtesans or those who “delight in Admirers” (1.2). These women occupied notorious public roles based on illicit private activity and wealth — the opposite of the kinds of publicly constitutive privacy Cavendish imagined for married women of rank. If she were to adopt this particular alternative to marriage, she would not only “quit Reputation,” but would knowingly reject retirement as a fitter alternative: it is “only for the sake of Men, when Women retire not: And since there is so much folly, vanity, and falshood in Men, why should Women trouble and vex themselves for their sake; for retiredness bars the life from nothing else but Men” (1.2).

153 more properly the purview of high-ranking women who entered into communities headed by elite women of means like Happy, who is referred to by Madam Mediator as “Chief

Confessor” (2.1).

Although Happy’s direct claim to legal ownership weakens as marriage to the

Prince(ss) becomes inevitable, the creative and intellectual products of her collaboration with the devotees and the Prince(ss) constitute private, intangible possessions not subject to coverture. Even after her marriage, there is no indication that Happy’s creative collaboration with the Prince(ss) will end; the play indicates that continued collaboration is an important characteristic of the marital bond in the same way that it was for Margaret and William’s own marriage. Inside the convent, each wife and her second self act as if they own spaces of retreat, literary texts, performances, and knowledge despite their inability to claim legal ownership.115 Since convents were frequently transformed into country houses after the post-Reformation dissolution of the monasteries, the estate’s status as a convent invokes a sense of intellectual and literary partnership.116 Poems about country estates typically reinforce proper, hierarchical social relations in the community, often describing former convents to recall the greater access of elite women to forms of private collaborative creation, sharing, and possession.117 Convents were a familiar option for wealthy daughters with religious or intellectual aspirations, who came together

115 Studies of stage productions for masques and closet dramas at the courts of Charles I and Henrietta Maria include Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria and Roy Strong, Festival Designs by Inigo Jones. 116 For a discussion on the transformation of convents and monasteries into country houses and its attendant effects on country house discourse, see Kari Boyd McBride 17-46. 117 See Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” for an example of country house poetry that describes the monastic history of the estate.

154 to create remarkably rich traditions — music, poetry, art, material collections, contemplative gardens, and orchards — within the walls of the religious communities to which they retired after taking vows.

Cavendish innovatively adapts country house poetic conventions so that Happy’s convent allows elite women to access similar forms of private collaboration and stewardship before taking vows, in this case marital rather than montastic.118 In conventional estate poems like Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” and Aemilia Lanyer’s “A

Description of Cooke-ham,” the features of the estate are emblems of the owner’s or occupant’s hospitality, piety, fertility, and dynastic “dwelling.”119 The landowner’s correct use of bountiful orchards, populated forests, fertile gardens and fields, and Edenic bowers, alongside his proper household governance reinforce hierarchical relationships at the communal and national level. Likewise, in describing the convent to male outsiders,

Madam Mediator explains that Happy “has so much compass of ground within her walls, as there is not only room and place enough for Gardens, Orchards, Walks, Groves,

Bowers, Arbours, Ponds, Fountains, Springs, and the like” as well as “Women for every

Office and Employment….she hath a numerous Company of Female Servants, so as there is no occasion for men.” (2.1). Cavendish draws on images of gardens, bowers, and orchards as well as the tenants that tended these spaces that emphasized the landowner’s vast possession and virtue in seventeenth-century estate poetry. However, Cavendish translates the setting and subject of possession to a convent of elite, temporarily virginal

118 Convents remained sites for broader royalist claims to “intellectual and material power” (Crawford 183); for Cavendish, these spaces also recalled the more enduring sovereignty symbolized by royalist intellectual and literary pursuits. See Crawford 183, 119 All references to Lanyer’s “Description of Cooke-ham” are from Susanne Woods, editor, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer; references to Jonson’s “To Penshurst” are from George Parfitt, editor, Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems 95-97.

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potential wives governed by a female landowner.120 Like male landowners, Happy

maintains the class difference among the convent’s occupants even for tenants and

servants who nonetheless enjoy limited rights of use in exchange for labor.

Takepleasure’s description of the range of roles within the convent reminds the

audience of the labor necessary to uphold the convent, but uses the pronoun “they”

ambiguously, blurring the line between the devotees who enjoy rights of stewardship, and

servants and tenants who enjoy limited rights of use: “they imploy Women in all Places

in their Gardens; and for the Brewing, Baking and making all sorts of things; besides,

some keep their Swine, and twenty such like Offices and Employments there are which

we should be very proper for” (2.4). Unlike traditional male-authored estate poetry, even

the rights of use claimed by Happy’s servants and tenants, which allow them to share in

limited aspects of its beauty, remain free from the control of men outside the convent.

The elite women in the convent, however, claim its gardens, bowers, and orchards more

properly as possessions, even if they do not legally own them; their elite status gives

them the role of administrators, curators, and authors of the convent’s architectural,

culinary, and artistic features.

Descriptions of the convent echo Alastair Fowler’s emphasis on the landowner’s

good taste in curating an estate that features collections of personal possessions chosen to

inspire pleasure.121 In constructing her private identity, Happy emphasizes her ownership

120 In traditional country house discourse, “the virtuous wife is central to the ideal estate, her virtue both dependent on and significant of her husband’s particularly noble virility” and “the wife could never be more than locum tenens for her husband, to whom belonged the rights and responsibilities for the household’s virtuous ordering…his ventriloquized voice audible in her chaste silence” (McBride 5). 121 In his landmark study of estate poems, Alastair Fowler notes a key feature of estates like the one Happy envisions: “Italian giardini segreti were threaters for the paragone of art and nature; the fashionable garden had become a closet of curiosities, [emphasis mine] where plant collections [emphasis mine] rivalled antiquities” and “[g]rottos like cabinets [emphasis mine] combined rare plants with waterworks and

156 of valuable personal possessions that cultivate pleasure on the estate more than she asserts her legal ownership of the estate itself. Happy stands at the center of the estate, leading the creative and intellectual exercise of “good taste” among her devotees and ensuring that it is supported by non-elite servants and laborers. Reinforcing both her collaboration and her elevated status, Happy articulates the particular household orders and rituals of the convent, which she expects will be mutually agreed upon by all members. Happy anticipates the women’s enjoyment of the convent according to their own desires, in contrast to patriarchal regulation of these desires associated with wifely privacy. In verse composed of rhyming couplets indicating her eminent poetic status in the convent, Happy imagines that

Each Season shall our Caterers be, To search the Land, and Fish the Sea; To gather Fruit and reap the Corn, That’s brought to us in Plenty’s Horn; With which we’l feast and please our tast, But not luxurious make a wast. Wee’l Cloth ourselves with the softest Silk, And Linnen fine as white as milk. Wee’l please our Sight with Pictures rare; Our Nostrils with perfumed Air. Our Ears with sweet melodious Sound, Whose Substance can be no where found; Our Tast with sweet delicious Meat, And savory Sauces we will eat: Variety each Sense shall feed, And Change in them new Appetittes breed, This will in Pleasure’s Convent I Live with delight, and with it die (1.2) Happy reinforces the order and hierarchy featured in conventional country house poetry, elevating herself as mistress while still honoring her high-ranking guests. Happy carefully

statuary” (Fowler 7). In essence, gardens and their contents were, as Fowler explains of garden statuary in particular, signs by which owners “demonstrated the new ‘greatness,’ which was shown by exercising taste and power [emphasis mine] in art collecting” (7).

157 balances novel forms of wifely privacy with conformity in crafting a role parallel to the one typically occupied by the mistress of the estate in country house poetry. Cavendish uses the copia and sponte sua motifs to describe the plenitude Happy invites her devotees to enjoy alongside her: she punctuates the above description of the convent with “We” and “Our,” and frames her monologue as a list of all that “the Seasons,” as capable

“Caterers” who spontaneously provide abundant pleasures, make available at Happy’s request.122

While positioning herself as the generous landowner rather than merely a substitute for a male landowner’s “noble virility” (McBride 5), Happy balances this self- representation by confirming proper wifely behavior within the convent. Happy declares that “we’l feast and please our tast” but asserts that she and her devotees will not

“luxurious make a wast,” (1.2) emphasizing the fashion for simple pleasures in early estate poems by rejecting wasteful excess. Her assertion invokes both feminine pudor in the sense of bodily or sensual modesty and masculine modestus — the moderation of excessive appetites for food and luxuries.123 Happy also revises the country house convention of obliquely implying the lord’s duties as overseer of what appears to be spontaneous, seasonal, and undemanding labor carried out by his employees. She indirectly suggests her own duties as overseer of foodstuffs, linen, art, music, and perfume in the convent while inviting her devotees to share in these duties by enjoying the simple pleasures as her companions rather than laborers.

122 Happy’s use of “We” and “Our” could refer to her elevated status as landowner in the sense of the royal “we,” but it could equally refer to her less powerful devotees, who share with her the responsibilities of ownership in more limited ways. 123 For an investigation of feminine modesty in early American women’s writing, see Tamara Harvey, Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633-1700. On modesty rhetoric in early modern women’s writing, see Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty.

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Happy prefaces her description of the estate by exclaiming that “My Cloister shall not be a Cloister of restraint, but a place for freedom, not to vex the Senses but to please them” (1.2). Embodied pleasure registers clearly in Happy’s careful list of each sense and how the convent will satisfy the pleasures associated with it.124 Happy declares that the women will indulge their sense of touch with “softest silk,” their sight with “Pictures rare,” their smell with “perfumed Air,” their taste with “sweet delicious Meat,” and their hearing with “sweet melodious Sound” (1.2). Happy encourages elite potential wives in the convent to exercise ownership over their bodies and desires, in turn enriching the literary and intellectual culture of the convent. If they do so in roles less powerful than

Happy’s supervisory position, they still do so independently of men and primarily in support of their own public lives and desires. Happy and her devotees amplify their hierarchically determined, but independent capacity for public authority by withdrawing to exercise their good taste collectively.

In Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst,” Robert Sidney’s good taste and greatness register through guests’ enjoyment when the poetic speaker describes how all of Sidney’s guests benefit from the estate’s agricultural plenitude. Jonson writes that Sidney’s “liberal board doth flow,” describing Penshurst as a place “Where comes no guest but is allowed to eat, / Without his fear, and of thy lord’s own meat” (61-62) and where the poet and high-ranking guests can enjoy “the same beer and bread, and selfsame wine” (63). The poetic speaker goes on to explain that what “is his lordship’s shall also be mine,” (64) and even Sidney’s waiter generously “gives me what I call, and lets me eat; / He knows

124 Moreover, Happy’s vision of the convent emphasizes what Horacio Sierra describes as “women’s enjoyment of clothing, paintings, perfume, music” (Sierra 654) in his investigation of The Convent of Pleasure as a play that considers women’s limited role in Protestant society. He contends that this emphasis reflects the women’s control of “their sense and pleasures rather than how their body will be used and enjoyed by others” (654).

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below he shall find plenty of meat” (69-70). Sidney’s waiter earns praise in the poem by acting as a symbol for Sidney’s virtue and public generosity. In the same lines, the poetic speaker depicts his own capacity to endow Sidney’s private virtue with public greatness by recording guests’ equal enjoyment alongside the landowner. Both men, in service to

Sidney, emphasize his hierarchically dependent but nonetheless generous hospitality as authorizing his public reputation. Later in “To Penshurst,” Barbara Sidney elevates her husband’s public reputation by exercising good taste in “her linen, plate, and all things nigh” (86; my emphasis) and thereby earning praise from King James.125 This praise,

however, is directed at Penshurst, the living symbol of Robert Sidney’s virtue and virility.

Jonson notes the “high praise” that was “heaped on thy good lady then,” (83-84; my

emphasis) implying that Barbara Sidney is (like the game and fruits praised earlier in the

poem) part of the estate’s natural plenitude, rather than an agent deserving of individual

praise. By contrast, in The Convent of Pleasure, the devotees’ shared gender and elite status ensure that they all enhance their own public reputations by collectively exercising good taste and enjoyment, rather than enlarging the public reputation of a male landowner.

The tenants in “To Penshurst” bring with them gifts that symbolize their

subordinate relation to the owner of the estate who grants them temporary rights of use in

parts of his estate but retains his rights of ownership. In the same way, Lady Happy

grants similar favors to the laborers and servants of her estate. In exchange for gifts like a

125 Pamela Hammons carefully points out that “even if Jonson limits his praise of Gamage and fails to acknowledge her central role in the building projects of Penshurst, he does use the third-person female possessive pronoun, “her,” to designate the material objects—“her linnen, plate, and all things” (86; my emphasis)—that enabled the gift of proper hospitality to the king” (Gender, Sexuality and Material Objects 125).

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“rural cake,” (51) “nuts,” “apples,” (52) and “ripe daughters, whom they would commend

/ This way to husbands,” (54-55) the tenants receive the reward of their cooperative labor

within the estate’s hierarchy of hospitality and gift-giving. This is in direct contrast to the

guests who, like Happy’s devotees, enjoy the master’s hierarchically determined

generosity without laboring, gratuitously enjoying Sidney’s “free provisions” (58) from a

“liberal board” (59) where “comes no guest but is allowed to eat / Without his fear, and

of thy lord’s own meat” (61-62). Male-authored country house poems often praised the

fruitfulness and order of the estate as an extension of the male landowner’s virility and

household government, while The Convent of Pleasure highlights these features as

indications of private, virtuous collaboration between potential wives.

Estate poems also frequently dwell on the virtue and sexual continence of the

mistress only in order to reflect the master’s private sovereignty and public worthiness.126

Lady Happy’s verse shows how the women reflect one another’s virtues, strengthening the foundation of their creative partnership in asserting agency over the convent and contributing to its cultural milieu. Rather than reflecting their husband’s or father’s public stature, their minds are “full [of] delight and joy” for one another, “Not vex’d with every idle Toy” (1.2). Lady Happy anticipates the sensual pleasure that the women will enjoy without male regulation. Happy’s declaration that “For every Sense shall pleasure take, /

And all our Lives shall merry make” (1.2) implies that the convent provides an

126 While the mistress of the estate “reap’d/ The just reward of her high huswifry” (84-85) because she keeps “not a room, but drest / As if it had expected such a guest,” (87-88) her virtue is ultimately attributed to her husband: she is “noble, fruitful, chaste withal” (90) and because of this, “His children thy great lord may call his own” (91). Robert Sidney’s children are legitimate because he has ensured it by controlling his wife’s sexuality; Barbara Sidney’s reputation for piety is annexed to the estate’s public reputation, and therefore to her husband’s public stature. For the role of mothers in religious education, see Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion and Education; Rosemary O’Day, Education and Society, 1500-1800.

161 atmosphere that promotes intellectual and sensual creativity distinct from typical representations of wifely privacy characterized by unproductive gossip or of a vacuous public sphere, both enshrined by the phrase “every idle Toy” (2.1).

Whereas the “ripe daughters” in “To Penshurst” promise reproductive gifts,

Happy’s devotees contribute intellectual and artistic gifts that enhance their individual private identities as authors and creators. The well-kept order of the rooms in the convent is characterized by sumptuous luxuries like “silk,” “linnen,” “Pictures rare,” “perfum’d

Air,” and “sweet melodious sound” (1.2). Elite wives would have been expected, under the supervision of husbands, to oversee such material concerns as part of proper wifely behavior inside the seventeenth-century English home, especially as a means to support the public life of their husbands. In The Convent of Pleasure, however, these pleasures reflect the potential wives’ own sovereignty by demonstrating their collective virtue and skill as participants and governors of the convent; these temporarily virginal potential wives derive from these roles more independent, empowered public authority than was typically accorded wives in most country house poems. Just as the fantasized success of a country estate as imagined in traditional, male-authored country house verse was not the result of the landowner’s physical labor, Happy’s devotees disrupt the idea that wifely privacy was exercised only through housework and sexual reproduction regulated by husbands.127 Instead, Happy suggests that the intellectual and artistic labor required to maintain the material and intellectual culture of the convent are deserving of public recognition.

127 In a similar reading of Barbara Sidney’s depiction in “To Penshurst,” Hammons notes that Jonson elides Barbara’s more active, supervisory role in making decisions and engaging in activities that might not strictly be categorized as domestic, but that were considered by her husband to be part of the duties of housewifery (125-6).

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Lady Happy’s convent also bears a close resemblance to Lanyer’s 1611 “The

Description of Cooke-ham,” which describes Aemilia Lanyer’s stay — as an attendant,

tutor, and friend — on the estate occupied by Margaret Clifford, the Countess of

Cumberland, and her daughter, the then-unmarried Anne Clifford, future Countess

Dowager of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery and suo jure fourteenth Baroness de

Clifford. 128 Despite the significant difference between Lanyer and her employers, Lanyer

describes herself as sharing their natural claims to the estate, and the pleasure they derive

from its plenitude. This is probably especially true because of the situation of Cookeham

in the particular summer Lanyer recalls: estranged from her husband, Margaret Clifford

occupies a country estate that does not legally belong to her, but which had been lent to

her brother by the crown. While Lanyer clearly enjoys a more limited sense of use or

possession over the estate, she and the Clifford women share the role of “dwelling,” as

Jonson would describe it, that typically symbolized a male landowner’s administrative

role in the economy and culture of the estate. In response to their extra legal authority

over the estate, the grounds “put on their summer Liueries,” (21) while the trees appear

“with leaues, with fruits, with flowers clad” (23) and turn “themselues to beauteous

Canopies” (25) to “shade the bright Sunne” from Margaret Clifford’s eyes (26). Lanyer

casts the natural details of the estate as the consequence of Margaret Russell’s prophetic

union with God and Anne Clifford’s education to piety and chaste behavior — attributes

of wifely privacy that are here unregulated by men.

128 Lanyer resided at Cooke-ham for a short time as tutor to Anne Clifford and companion to Margaret Russell during the latter’s estrangement from her husband, George Clifford. In fact, Cooke-ham was the property of Russell’s brother, Lord William Russell, and as such did not belong to Margaret or her husband legally. See Susanne Woods, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum xlvii-xlii and Lanyer: A Renaissance Poet 3-41.

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However, Lanyer downplays Clifford’s wealth and rank relative to her learning and piety. Lanyer describes how Margaret “time in meditation spent, / Of their creators powre, which there you saw, / In all his Creatures held a perfit Law,” (76-78) showing how the estate affirms Margaret’s public reputation independently of her husband or other male influences. Margaret enjoys a special connection with the particular spot where her private virtues shine brightest — beneath an oak tree at the highest point on the estate — engaging not with living male authorities, but with Biblical patriarchs with whom she appears to share a mystical bond. Margaret walks “With Christ and his

Apostles there to talke; / Placing his holy Writ in some faire tree” and later “With Moyses you did mount his holy Hill, / To know his pleasure, and performe his Will,”(82-83; 85-

86). In this passage, Lanyer locates Margaret Clifford at the foot of a tree on an embankment that offers her a prospect of thirteen shires, literally elevating her by placing her at the geographic and spiritual high point of the estate.129 By comparison, Lady

Happy and the Prince(ss) occupy commanding dramatic and administrative roles in the convent that elevate them above the devotees. Their matchless leadership in performing and overseeing the content of the convent’s cultural life sets them apart insofar as their rank affords them more extensive access to such roles. Sharing her convent with the devotees is an ostensibly private act of withdrawal that elevates Happy in the public sphere. In the community of three about which Lanyer writes in “The Description of

Cooke-ham,” Margaret Clifford makes available to her unmarried daughter and employee an estate that fostered creative, spiritual, and recreational cooperation.

129 Alastair Fowler observes that country house poems often comment upon the elevated location of many estates, which in turn offer commanding vantage points to the landowner and parallel his elevated social status. Moreover, Jonson’s “To Penshurst” features two similarly important trees, both planted at elevated or otherwise significant locations on the state: one dedicated to Philip Sidney, which memorializes his birth and his place in the Sidney dynasty, and a second that Sidney called “My Lady’s Oak” because his wife, Barbara Sidney, famously went into labor beneath it. See Fowler 4.

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Happy’s legal inheritance of the convent from a male relative enables her

subsequent opening of it to high-ranking but financially humble women who share in its pleasure and contribute to its culture independently of male intervention. Margaret

Clifford enjoys a clearly elevated status and her daughter occupies an important, but

slightly less powerful role — notably in the absence of male authorities like Margaret’s

husband or brother. From Lanyer’s perspective, she and Anne form a companionate,

collaborative pair whose recreational and intellectual pursuits are similar to Margaret’s, if

generative of less powerful public authority. Lanyer exclaims, “Oh what delight did my

weake spirits find, / In those pure parts of her well framed mind” (97-98) and later

implores the estate itself to “Remember beauteous Dorsets former sports / Wherein my

selfe did alwaies beare a part” (119-121). In addition to the intense devotional practices

described above, Lanyer recalls the “Bowe in your [Margaret Clifford’s] faire Hand,”

(51) linking Margaret to Diana, goddess of the hunt and nature, a virgin who led a female

community. 130 Lanyer thus figuratively links Margaret — through the figure of Diana —

to Elizabeth I, a female exemplar of private virtue and public authority to whom

Cavendish links Lady Happy.

Happy’s elevated status in the convent positions her as a leader of creative

material practices in comparison to the spiritual and recreational uses of retirement by

Margaret Clifford in Lanyer’s poem. Happy’s public legitimacy is a result of her

cooperative efforts with her dependents, to whom Happy says that “I have order’d this

our Convent of Pleasure” for “our Ease and Conveniency” but also for “Pleasure, and

Delight” (2.2; emphasis mine). Happy next lists the personal possessions that will be

130 See Valerie Traub’s discussion of Diana in the context of mythological contexts for Renaissance concepts of chaste femme desire, 229-275.

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tailored seasonally to promote the cooperative pursuit of pleasure and creativity: in

spring, “Chambers are hung with Silk-Damask,” and in summer they will be “hung with

Taffety...and a Cupboard of Purseline, and of Plate, and all the Floore strew’d every day

with green Rushes or Leaves” and so on, with seasonal changes of “Sheets, Pillows,

Table-Clothes, and Towels,” (2.2) all suggesting Happy’s attention to the tactile and

sensory backdrop necessary for pleasure. Happy asks her devotees for their permission in

ordering the convent, which will feature “gardens to be kept curiously...in every Season

of all sorts of Flowers, sweet Herbs and Fruits, and kept so as not to have a Weed in it,

and all the Groves, Wildernesses, Bowers and Arbours pruned” (2.2) as well as seasonal

food and drink in the style often depicted in country house poems. Most remarkable,

however, is Lady Happy’s proclamation that “Change of Garments are also provided, of

the newest fashions for every Season, and rich Trimming; so as we may be accoutred

properly, and according to our several pastimes” (2.2). By emphasizing that their dress, an emblem of the material order she has so carefully described, promotes “pastimes” — the creative and intellectual pursuits intimately shared amongst the devotees — Happy

underscores the centrality of creative and authorial cooperation to the life of the convent.

As a prerequisite to membership in the convent, the devotees adopt virginity,

which encourages wives to think of the hierarchically determined friendship and desire

they share as publicly valuable. This agreement shows that heteronormative marriage

need not be a primary obligation that renders friendship and desire between women

incompatible with wifely privacy. Moreover, the agreement to remain virginal shows that

wifely privacy did not necessarily need to eclipse women’s individual consent. For

example, when the Prince(ss) asks Happy to be her friend, Happy remarks, “I should be

166 ungrateful, should I not be not only your Friend, but humble Servant,” to which the

Prince(ss) responds, “I desire you would be my Mistress, and I your Servant; and upon this agreement of Friendship I desire you will grant me one Request” (3.1). At first,

Cavendish positions Happy as a Petrarchan lover — a humble servant to the beloved — but the Prince(ss) quickly reverses their roles by reinforcing Happy’s status as mistress.

After marriage, these imagined roles were theoretically reversed, with wives expected to take a more subservient role to husbands, who now acted as governors over their wives.

Despite the Prince(ss)’ obvious outranking of Lady Happy, the Prince(ss) nevertheless wishes to act as a “servant” to her, and the word “agreement” refers to a contract of friendship, assuming both assent and sameness. Discourses of friendship and political sovereignty combine here to endow wifely privacy with public significance when the

Prince(ss) prefaces her request for Happy’s friendship with the remark that “many, that have quit their Crowns and Power, for a Cloister of Restraint; then well may I quit a

Court of troubles for a Convent of Pleasure” (3.1). Laurie Shannon explains that

“friendship reverses expectations...by switching who is sovereign and who is subjected,”

(10) making friendship and desire between women far more flexible than — but still not antithetical to — marriage as a means to claim public authority.131

The initial contract of friendship between the Prince(ss) and Lady Happy is ratified by a series of nine vignettes depicting unhappy wives that illustrate the devotees’ less ambitious, but nonetheless impressive, artistic work. Nevertheless, Happy ultimately rejects these vignettes because they fail to adequately celebrate female sovereignty.

131 An agreement was “an arrangement (typically one which is legally binding) made between two or more parties and agreed by mutual consent.” See “agreement, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2016.

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Happy takes on a commanding, but still collaborative, role in the devotees’ dramatic enterprise to highlight how rank influenced access to distinct forms of wifely privacy, such as more or less prestigious literary genres or performative roles. Rather than produce children and support husbands’ public roles, in keeping with forms of wifely privacy that reproduce patriarchal sovereignty, the women in The Convent of Pleasure reproduce one another’s self-sovereignty.

At the center of the dramatic plot, Happy and the Prince(ss) collaboratively revise heteronormative literary traditions, like the pastoral genre, in order to construct a private basis for their public legitimacy as a same-sex couple.132 In a set of performances resembling the seventeenth-century masque, a female devotee cross-dressed as a

“shepherd” challenges the pastoral traditions of heterosexual desire and procreation to endow love between women with the same capacity for public authority that marriage affords men. The “shepherd” in this performance entreats Lady Happy to “be you their

132 The Prince(ss), in fact, exclaims that “In amorous Pastoral Verse we did not Woo. As other Pastoral Lovers used to doo” (4.1). This is a witty nod to an existing sub-genre that challenged heteronormative imperatives only to seemingly revise them. Renaissance pastoral poetry and drama typically exalted friendship between men, but it sometimes depicted erotic friendship between women, if only to transform one of the women into a man by the conclusion of the narrative. In doing so, this strand of Renaissance literature negates friendship as a means to generate the public stature of female friends who were involved in a type of commitment that competes with marriage. These representations of desire between women were also understood to ultimately redirect female sexuality toward what was considered the proper object of heteronormative, permanent desire — a husband. By revising this genre, Cavendish implies that friendship and even same-sex love between wives could be a valid qualification for public authority that nevertheless did not threaten wifely chastity. The fact that these traditions end with a reassertion of heteronormativity should not detract or undo the weight of their central material. In fact, Happy and the Prince(ss) might be said here to anticipate the ways in which the end of the play does not erase the Prince(ss) queer performance any more than the gender reversal in these strands of pastoral verse erases the now-male lover’s (previous) femininity. By designing literary and dramatic performances that reject the heteronormativity traditionally featured in pastoral verse, Lady Happy and the Princess underscore their own individual sovereignty as creators. Cavendish presents Lady Happy’s and the Princess’ identities as collaborative producers of knowledge and culture within the convent as different from, but coextensive with, heterosexual marriage and patriarchal literary traditions, showing that friendship between women could generate valid public stature. (See Traub 229-250.) Given Laurie Shannon’s observation that friendship privileged homonormativity over the early modern imperative to heterosexual reproduction, it is important to recall that Cavendish revises a rich poetic subgenre that places same-sex love between women in pastoral environs. See Valerie Traub’s discussion of same-sex pastoral traditions in texts like Gallathea, including Ovid’s and John Lyly’s versions 327-354.

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Shepherd’s Wife” (4.1) and vows, in exchange for Madam Mediator’s intervention in his suit, to “plow [Madam Mediator’s] Grounds, Corn…in Winter sow,/ Then reap [her]

Harvest, and [her] Grass…mow” (4.1). While on the surface the Shepherd’s agricultural imagery appears to be a sexual innuendo that reduces her to a reproductive role, the implication that the “Grounds, Corn” and “Harvest” belong to Madam Mediator nevertheless lends a more empowering sense to the Shepherd’s sly wordplay. The

Shepherd’s suit is cut short when Madam Mediator tells him that Lady Happy prefers to live a single life: she mis-recognizes Happy’s desire for agency and female companionship for her incompatibility with marriage. In fact, Madam Mediator insists that her “Daughter vows a single life, / And swears, she n’re will be a Wife” but will

“live a Maid, and Flocks will keep, / And her chief Company shall be Sheep” (4.1).

Madam Mediator comically elides the possibility of female desire here, countenancing only the possibility of marriage or spinsterhood among sheep. In Madam Mediator’s eyes, Happy may be able to occupy an appropriate public role as solitary shepherdess, but

Madam Mediator sees this role is entirely incompatible with wifely privacy. Ironically,

Madam Mediator unknowingly underscores how the independent private role Happy could gain as a “maid” among “sheep” is in fact exceptionally compatible with alternative forms of wifely privacy, like female friendship and desire, collaborative stewardship, and creative partnership.

Lady Happy and the Princess soon reverse Madam Mediator’s assumptions by declaring their love for one another in Platonic terms that stress complementarity and

169 collaboration. The Prince(ss) praises Lady Happy’s wit and learning in natural philosophy; in return, Lady Happy compliments the Princess’ poetic skill.133 The

Princess addresses Lady Happy and declares:

Thus Heav’n and Earth you view, And see what’s Old, what’s New; How Bodies Transmigrate, Lives are Predestinate. Thus doth your Wit reveal What Nature would conceal. (4.1)

The Princess details Lady Happy’s epistemological command of the laws of natural philosophy, astronomy, and cosmological order by describing Happy’s understanding of

“predestinat[ion],” “transmigrat[ion],” and the broad historical perspectives of “Old and

New” knowledge. The Prince(ss) praises Happy’s extraordinary “Wit” for its ability to overcome the limits “Nature” has set on which forms of knowledge are appropriate for humans, and especially women, to access. While biological gender — another meaning of “Nature” — “conceal[s]” Happy’s intellectual mastery, her “Wit” nevertheless

“reveal[s]” it. What is particularly remarkable here is Cavendish’s use of “wit” rather than “reason” or another similar term. “Wit” as it applied to men typically signified advanced ingenuity and intellectual rigor developed through formal study. While “wit” could be applied to women pejoratively, in the sense of a weak form of cleverness or the practical ability to manipulate, Cavendish uses the more positive sense of well-developed intellect and reason typically applied to men to describe Happy, a female friend and potential wife. The Prince(ss) thus rejects popular Aristotelian models of natural law that

133 That Cavendish saw literary skill and knowledge in natural philosophy as complementary is evident in her choice to attach The Blazing World to her Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy.

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represent women as “by nature” inferior to men, physically and psychologically. 134

Cavendish highlights “Nature” as a social construct created by man that is unjustly used

to disguise female intellect as grounds for women’s exclusion from the public sphere,

which would have been further reinforced by women’s lack of formal education.

Moreover, Cavendish empowers the term “wit” to advertise women’s intellectual

parity with male “reason.” Whereas in the passage above “wit” refers to Happy’s

intellectual acuity, Cavendish uses the same term to refer to the Princess’ “fancy” in the

sense of her literary skill. Happy exclaims of the Prince(ss): “you are born a Poet / Your

Wit doth search Mankind” (4.1). Just as Happy’s “wit” allows her to discover

philosophical and scientific laws, the Princess’ “wit” — which here more properly means

“fancy” — allows her to “search” human nature.

Your wit doth Reason find, The Centre of the Mind, Wherein the Rational Soul Doth govern and controul, There doth she sit in State, Predestinate by Fate, And by the Gods Decree, That Sovereign She should be. (4.1) While poetic skill is most readily with creativity and freedom, it is linked here to discipline and authority, which typically confirmed men’s written public contributions.

That “wit” is used to describe two apparently opposite but related sets of abilities implies both sameness and difference between Happy and the Princess: while Happy can ascertain the truth of science and nature, the Princess can descry the truth of human nature. By presenting the women as reflecting one another’s equivalent abilities to generate different kinds of knowledge, Cavendish accentuates each woman’s separate

134 For a more detailed explanation of the belief that women were “by nature” inferior physiologically and intellectually, see: Kate Aughterson 41-47; Constance Jordan 30-34.

171 identity. Each woman is a mirror image of the other, but is also a “Sovereign She” (4.1)

— an epithet that remarkably echoes Laurie Shannon’s concept of “two sovereigns.”135

After Happy and the Prince(ss), dressed as a Shepherdess and a cross-dressed

Shepherd, have exchanged praises and vows with one another, they dance around the maypole and are declared King and Queen by Happy’s devotees, themselves dressed as shepherds and shepherdesses. Despite the Prince(ss)’ declaration that “In Amorous

Pastoral verse we did not Woo” (4.1), their private relationship is publicly legitimized through a traditional pastoral performance, the maypole dance.136 This rustic ritual associated with agricultural laborers is used to endow the pair with public legitimacy specific to their elite status, in much the same way that feasts depicted in country house poetry often celebrate the greatness of the lord and lady. After the pair is crowned, they are honored in a speech delivered by a shepherdess, who proclaims that the shepherds

“offer here/ Our Hatchments up, our Sheep-hooks as your due, / And Scrips of Corduant, and Oaten pipe” (4.1). These “Pastoral Ornaments” are a symbol of their agreement “to obay / All your Commands, and all these things we bring / In honour of our dancing

Queen and King,” here recognized for their individual artistic excellence and authority within the convent. While the titles of “Queen and King” that they receive are partially symbolic, the titles also confirm their already elite statuses as “Lady” and “Prince(ss)” become “Queen” and “King,” respectively. The offering of “Hatchments,”

“Sheephooks,” “Scrips of Corduant” and “Oaten Pipes” as tribute are symbolic “Pastoral

Ornaments” in the sense that they act here as stage props rather than tools. However, these “ornaments” might refer to actual tools used by Happy’s servants who tend the

135 Laurie Shannon 91-92. 136 While may-pole dances were outlawed during the Interregnum, they were still practiced sporadically in the countryside. See Ronald Hutton 233-236.

172 grounds of the estate but are notably absent from performances like this one. The performance moves from one in which Happy and her devotees play similar roles as common shepherds and shepherdesses to one in which Happy and the Prince(ss) are quickly elevated to reinforce their actual ranks.

Moreover, this moment in the play ironically parallels celebrations of the lord and lady’s fertility in country house poems like “To Penshurst,” particularly considering the association of natural and reproductive fertility with maypole imagery and the offering of gifts. In direct contrast to these associations, Cavendish substitutes the couple’s artistic creativity for reproductive or agricultural fecundity. Happy and the Prince(ss) are elevated according to their elite social status and their exceptional status as collaborative creators and artists, but Cavendish accentuates the latter much more than the former:

“Dancing heretofore has got more Riches / Then we can find in all our Shepherd’s

Breeches” (4.1). As a creative contribution to the culture of the convent, dancing endows

Happy and the Prince(ss) with more public legitimacy than “Riches” might lend to men.

Cavendish marks the devotees’ verse encomium as a publicly constitutive form of private collaboration: the rhyme and meter that craft their speech mark it as a literary endeavor worthy of notice. The interplay of dance and spoken verse here imagines interdependence and exchange across literary, artistic, and intellectual economies in the convent as more powerful than legal land ownership or wealth.

In the central performance of the play spoken by Lady Happy and the Princess, the couple revise classical myths to advertise their creative authority through metaliterary performance. Dressed as Neptune, the Prince(ss), first announces, “I am King of all the

Seas, / All Wat’ry Creatures do me please, / Obey my Power and Command” (4.1).

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Neptune reinforces his status as a divine and supernatural ruler when he declares that

“...from the Earth a Tribute I / Receive, which shews my power thereby” and therefore that his “Kingdom’s richer far / Then all the Earth and every Star” (4.1). The tributes

Neptune seizes from shipwrecks legitimize his authority in the public sphere, and constitute his assertion of sovereignty guaranteed by hoarded material wealth. Neptune always desires more despite his excessive wealth, demonstrating that his material wealth is never enough to permanently register his public authority.

That Neptune receives wealth via “tribute” suggests a political or legal contract in which a subordinate party periodically makes payment to a governing political body. If the water “lays in” further wealth from shipwrecks, this wealth becomes private property in the sense that it cannot — according to the laws of nature — be recovered from

Neptune’s grasp by those who lost it. Neptune’s tributes echo the great royalist loss of sequestered property, which could not be regained since it had been commandeered by the Parliamentary army. The image of tribute reaped by Neptune (a divine and supernatural king of the seas) from shipwrecks recalls Charles I’s “ship money,” which he believed belonged lawfully to him because of his status as an anointed king. While

Cavendish does not criticize collecting tribute as a method of asserting public authority in regards to the metaphor linking Neptune and Charles, her description of Neptune here might faintly echo the tragically irrecoverable loss she and William faced when their property was sequestered and their wealth depleted during the Civil Wars. Cavendish therefore substitutes alternative methods of asserting private sovereignty over personal, sometimes intangible belongings. While wives could not always claim legal ownership these kinds of belongings as nonetheless valid indicators of their public autonomy, their

174 handling of them demonstrates that extra-legal forms of custody over such materials were perhaps less destructive to not only wives, but also to unmarried or widowed women and men.

William Cavendish puts into Neptune’s mouth criticism of alternative forms of wifely privacy as dishonest, deceptive, and perhaps ostentatious. In addition to his tributes, which he appears to regard as personal possessions (a transgression of which

William might have considered Oliver Cromwell guilty) Neptune insists that “My

Palaces are Rocks of Stone, / And built by Nature’s hand alone, / No base, dissembling, coz’ning Art/ Do I imploy in any part” (4.1). This directly contradicts the convent’s economy of material, artistic, and intellectual collaboration, which could be considered in a pejorative sense to fit Neptune’s definitions of artifice, “coz’ning Art” and deception, rather than the traditional simplicity and naturalness featured in country house poems that focused on the state rather than the prodigy house. Cavendish’s description of the convent focuses on both its natural splendor and forms of artifice, like performance and music, that devotees contribute to the unassuming culture of the convent.

The Sea Goddess relies on both natural possessions that cannot be legally claimed as well as the practice of artifice to legitimize her public person. She practices what appear to be forms of privacy that are analogous to common notions of domestic privacy: objects like coral and oysters are natural resources found in the sea, while combs and mirrors are novel private paraphernalia, and even the Sea Goddess’ crown is made from natural elements (pearls) and is a private possession, rather than one she exhibits as an indicator of public status. She explains that her “Cabinets are Oyster-shells, / In which I keep my Orient-Pearls,” for which she uses the tide “As Keys to Locks, which opens

175 wide/ The Oyster-shells then out I take; / Those, Orient-Pearls and Crowns do make”

(4.1). The Sea Goddess simultaneously conceals and discloses symbols of her private sovereignty. “Oyster-shells” must be opened, as if under lock and key, in order to reveal the worth of “Orient Pearls,” “Crowns,” and “Coral.” As symbols of covered, wifely chastity, the “orient Pearls” can analogously demonstrate wives’ private sovereignty if properly displayed, signifying the Sea Goddess’ self-control over her own sexuality. Her use of personal possessions to assert her private sexual autonomy, in contrast to

Neptune’s use of material wealth, presents these two methods of generating public legitimacy as equally valid. Her modest personal possessions legitimize her public voice, allowing her to “sit and sing” while “the Fish lie listening” (4.1).

The Sea Goddess advertises her ability to participate in a public realm peopled by

Apollo and “Fish” who inspire and listen to her music, a common metaphor for poetry.

Apollo facilitates the Sea Goddess’ poetic and material forms of publicly authorizing wifely privacy in much the same way that William Cavendish did for Margaret. Yet

William Cavendish, who writes this section, urges limits for the independent, alternative forms of private identity that Margaret Cavendish imagines. Later in the performance, the

Sea Goddess describes how the sun, personified as the male god Apollo, “begins to burn,” and she retreats underwater. Perhaps a reference to women’s perceived inferiority, the Sea Goddess responds to Apollo’s dangerous heat by declaring as she retreats: “with

Waters am I Crown’d” (4.1). The above description suggests the Sea Goddess’ withdrawal from a potentially destructive patriarchal public sphere represented by

Apollo, who also paradoxically inspires her artistic endeavors. In other words, the Sea

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Goddess flees the public sphere for the protection of the private sphere, where she is

Neptune’s subject but also retains some degree of autonomy (“with Waters...Crown’d”).

Despite the ambiguity of the final scenes, written “By My Lord Duke,” Happy’s

marriage does not bring about the dissolution of the convent, nor does the convent revert

to the Prince.137 Instead, the Prince gifts the convent in its entirety to the female

community, declaring that “to shew my Charity, and to keep your Wife’s Chastity, I’le

bestow my bounty in a Present, on the Condition you speak the Epilogue. Come, Noble

Friends, let us feast before we part” (5.3). And yet this might be a wink to men

acknowledging that, from a patriarchal perspective, temporarily virginal potential wives

could not be responsible for their own chastity, and must therefore be kept under scrutiny

until marriage and beyond. Despite Happy’s silence here, which appears to reinscribe

patriarchal values, the convent remains a means of providing a “room of one’s own” to

which never-married or previously-married women can retreat to correct the ways in

which their past or future status as femes covert diminishes the public significance of their individual, private sovereignty. At the same time, the convent might also be a means to keep potential wives quarantined, ensuring their chastity for the picking by other high- ranking husbands. Even if these closing scenes attempt to reinscribe more traditional

137 The final scenes of The Convent of Pleasure, and especially those that have been attributed to “My Lord Duke,” have long been understood to reflect Lady Happy’s unhappy reintegration into the patriarchal social order as a silenced, covered wife. While Happy’s silence might be understood to illustrate that there are two sovereigns, but one voice — the Prince’s — this may not necessarily indicate an unhappy, disempowering end for Lady Happy. In fact, it might indicate quite the opposite — that her high rank and happy marriage, like Cavendish’s, limit how far she is comfortable going to pursue publicly constitutive, alternative forms of wifely privacy. For both Cavendish and Lady Happy, perhaps, elite social status and a happy marriage endowed them with enough patriarchal support to enjoy public stature constructed through more traditional forms of wifely privacy, removing the need for experiments like the convent. Cavendish, for instance, enjoyed a public authorial persona and remained the traditionally enclosed wife of William, Duke of Newcastle; largely because of his support of her work, she did not have to reject all concepts of wifely privacy. Notable exceptions of Cavendish’s adherence to expectations of traditional wifely privacy include her personal eccentricity and her visit to the Royal Society, but she insisted that these were anomalies inconsistent with her typical wifely retirement.

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forms of wifely privacy, they do not diminish the emotional weight and impact of the

forms of wifely privacy that appear throughout the rest of the play — and which remain

at least partially open to future devotees.

Refracting Selves, Texts, and Worlds in The Blazing World

In The Blazing World, Cavendish’s experimental efforts are perhaps more

successful: she creates a world of one’s own for her literary avatar, the Empress.138 The

Empress rules over an imagined world, known as the Blazing World, accentuating her

absolute self in contrast to expectations of wifely privacy associated with coverture.

Catherine Gallagher has argued that Cavendish’s depiction of secret worlds frames the

Empress as an isolated, autonomous agent despite women’s traditional roles in the private

realms ultimately ruled over by men. 139 Rachel Trubowitz adds to this claim, suggesting that Cavendish creates a female monarchical self by “recast[ing] the public world of men

in female terms,” simultaneously maintaining “the prevailing ethos of male sovereignty”

within “the paradigm of female dominion” in The Blazing World (237).140 Cavendish

engages with this “ethos of male sovereignty” through emulation and collaboration,

rewriting the common themes and traditions of absolutism with significant differences for

women. One of the main points of distinction between “male sovereignty” and “female

dominion” in The Blazing World is what appeared to seventeenth-century century

audiences to be the Empress’ unnaturally intimate collaboration with the Duchess in

writing, producing knowledge, arbitrating legal matters, and overseeing military

138 All references are to The Blazing World and Other Writings, edited by Kate Lilley. 139 Catherine Gallagher 27. 140 Rachel Trubowitz, 229-245.

178 campaigns. These activities would have been considered inappropriate for women of rank to adopt, especially without male supervision, and therefore labelled non-normative.

Since their friendship is characterized by partnership and shared personal, often intangible belongings, the Empress’ friendship with the Duchess therefore raises questions about the reliability of traditional wealth to generate public authority. Symbols of state like crowns, robes, and scepters physically manifested monarchs’ private sovereignty in the public sphere as proof of divine authority. The Empress and the

Duchess emulate male monarchs who signify their sovereignty in this way, but revise the model by introducing texts, worlds, and scientific knowledge to the range of possessions used to substantiate their private sovereignty as wives.

Cavendish describes how the Empress manipulates clothing, ornaments, and architecture in order to counteract wives’ exclusion from male-dominated institutions like education, literature, and the law. Upon their marriage, the Emperor invests the heroine of The Blazing World with the title of Empress, preserving and even elevating her private sovereignty and public stature (which she might otherwise have lost upon marriage). The narrator of The Blazing World remarks that:

Her accoutrement after she was made Empress, was as followeth: on her head she wore a cap of pearl, and a half-moon of diamonds just before it; on the top of her crown came spreading over a broad carbuncle, cut in the form of the sun; her coat was of pearl, mixed with blue diamonds, and fringed with red ones, her buskins and sandals were of green diamonds: in her left hand she held a buckler, to signify the defence of her dominions; which buckler was made of that sort of diamond as has several different colours; and being cut and made in the form of an arch, showed like a rainbow; in her right hand she carried a spear made of white diamond, cut like the tail of a blazing star, which signified that she was ready to assault those that proved her enemies. (132-133)

Cavendish emphasizes the sartorial details of the Empress’ person and the ceremony attached to her rule. The Empress strategically chooses each symbol that she carries

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according to its capacity publicly to register her personal sovereignty as monarch, having

been elevated from a “Lady.” The Empress presents herself alone, much like Elizabeth I

did, rather than as the socially and politically dominant member of a heteronormative

marriage, as did Charles I. The details of her appearance here also mirror the imagery of

chastity that Elizabeth I adopted in her iconography. The Empress wears precious stones

typically used to represent virginity or chastity, including “a cap of pearls” with a “half

moon of diamonds,” a pearl coat, and a spear made of “white diamonds.”141 As Valerie

Traub astutely points out, some of the same symbols that Elizabeth used also strategically

referred to mythological virgins. Perhaps by way of Elizabeth I, the half-moon the

Empress wears references the virgin goddess Diana, the huntress followed by an

exclusively female community of nymphs.142 The Empress’ militarized appearance

recalls early modern depictions of Amazonian warriors that featured sandals, armor, and

weapons, echoed in the Empress’ buckler and spear, her “buskins,” and the armor-like coat of pearl and diamonds that she wears.143 The Empress’ sartorial choices constitute a

nostalgic turn to Elizabeth’s glory as a never-married monarch. This nostalgia provides a

useful model that the Empress innovates to distance herself from the limits imposed on

her by her marital status, while maintaining her identity as a wife — just as Elizabeth

141See Valerie Traub’s analysis of Elizabeth’s queer iconography especially her analysis of Elizabeth’s rainbow portrait,125-257. 142 Rachel Trubowitz remarks that “Crossdressed in her imperial garb, she is as Empress an emblem not of domestic harmony but of military prowess, a figure reminiscent of Ariosto's Bradamante, Spenser's Britomart, and other literary Amazons and androgynes. She also recalls Elizabeth I, England's androgynous ‘Amazonian Queene.’ In detailing the Lady's military costume, Cavendish not only links her heroine to the female kingship of Elizabeth, who donned battle gear to review the English troops at Tilbury in 1588, but she also symbolically evokes the androgynous “body politic” of Elizabethan England and a cultural moment, unlike her own, in which the lines demarcating gender boundaries were at least partially effaced” (233-234). However, Trubowitz does not make the connection to female sexuality, friendship, and community that I argue is central to addressing the gendered limitations of separate spheres ideology as Cavendish does here. 143 See Annette Dixon, Women Who Ruled: Queens, Goddesses, Amazons in Renaissance and Baroque Art; Roy Strong, The cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry and Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I.

180 presented herself as imaginatively married to England. However, this occurs prior to the

Empress’ realization that her strategic use of material and sartorial possessions fails to make visible the true nature of her private sovereignty.

By imagining a world in which female friends share personal belongings to claim self-sovereignty independently of their husbands, Cavendish invokes what Rachel

Trubowitz describes as “a ‘magical’ past” and an “idealized pre-Civil War England...in which the mystical sovereignty of monarchy prevailed over an undivided nation and when custom, tradition, and other rationally irreducible supports for social hierarchy were embraced by all classes” (231). Rather than using more commonplace forms that reinforce custom in support of patriarchal authority, The Blazing World uses novel forms of wifely privacy like emulation and friendship between wives to construct their shared private possession of texts and imagined worlds. As I explain in more depth below, the most successful performance of absolutism in The Blazing World occurs when the

Duchess imagines a world all her own, privately contained in her mind and shared only with her double, the Empress.144 The Empress and the Duchess do not construct their absolute selves by unproblematically appropriating forms of private self-fashioning commonly adopted by men, which involved asserting legal control over private property and dependents with minimal intervention from institutional authorities. In collaboration with the Duchess, the Empress publicly asserts her sense of private custody by virtuously ordering the magical Blazing World created by Cavendish, and by writing the text that becomes The Blazing World, which is in turn a symbol of Cavendish’s own authorial identity.

144 Trubowitz points out that “in her Utopia, Cavendish cancels these new gendered demarcations between public and private by casting her heroine in a variety of "male" roles, most notably that of warrior or general” (233).

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Rewriting the tradition of collaboration between male poets or playwrights to include homosocial female partnership, the Empress shifts the focus of her primary obligation toward the Duchess rather than her husband. The Duchess, however, indicates fairly equal levels of affect and an appropriate sense of duty toward her husband and the

Empress. In both cases, their friendship therefore remains innocuous to their respective marriages and echoes the friendship and collaboration Margaret and William Cavendish enjoyed in their own marriage. Valerie Billing theorizes that Cavendish’s literary partnership with her husband was a “collaborative marriage” that “subordinate[d] physical gender difference and heterosexuality in order to achieve an equal spiritual and intellectual partnership” (94). According to Billing, this model of marriage allowed her to negotiate tensions between her “public identity as the wife of an aristocrat and her self- constructed identity as a unique writer” (94). The Empress and the Duchess enjoy a parallel concept I call “collaborative friendship,” which helps the Empress negotiate the tension between her private scholarly endeavors as a married woman and her public identity as monarch.

When the Duchess decides to write a cabbala, she expresses the need for a scribe and eventually decides upon “the soul of some ancient famous writer, either of Aristotle,

Pythagoras, Plato, Epicurus, or the like” (180). When the spirits advise her that “those famous men were very learned, subtle, and ingenious writers, but they were so wedded to their own opinions, that they would never have the patience to be scribes,” she rejects these classical writers despite the early modern respect for classical authority. Next, she requests “one of the most famous modern writers, as either of Galileo, Gassendus,

Descartes, Helmond, Hobbes, H. More, etc.,” which the spirits assess as “fine ingenious

182 writers, but yet so self-conceited, that they would scorn to be scribes to a woman” (181).

Taking the advice of her advisors, the Empress at first espouses these key figures in the patriarchal literary system who represent “great” but perhaps controversial writers, but ultimately rejects them because they would not be suitable or willing scribes for a wife’s literary project. The Empress rejects these men, who occupy public positions encompassing characteristics of laureate, professional, or philosophic writers, because she believes they will not assist in what they perceive to be publicly insignificant married women’s writing. The Empress will only collaborate with a scribe who supports her endeavor in declaring her private sovereignty through a secretive caballa, even if its secret code is never fully revealed to the public. The Empress appropriates aspects of wifely privacy like enclosure and concealment, but strategically displays evidence of her literary skill to claim independent public authority rather than relying on the title and authority her husband has delegated to her alone. The Empress’ strategies analogously support Cavendish’s own literary authority as both the covered wife of William

Newcastle and the “singular” female laureate Margaret Cavendish.

In place of a male-dominated literary system in which women were rarely accorded a place, and against which Cavendish was often positioned by herself and others as “solitary” and “eccentric,” the Empress proffers a model of publicly constitutive, private female literary collaboration. After she has rejected several ancient male predecessors and Renaissance mentors as well as the literary system they represent, the spirits suggest as an appropriate scribe

a lady, the Duchess of Newcastle, which although she is not one of the most learned, eloquent, witty and ingenious, yet she is a plain and rational writer, for the principle of her writings, is sense and reason, and she will without question, be ready to do you all the service she can. (181)

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The use of the term “service” in their description of the Duchess might initially seem to suggest a relationship of patronage, especially given the Empress’ outranking of the

Duchess. Yet the affiliation between the two wives exceeds even the intimate bonds that defined Renaissance patronage between men, defying physiological, material, and affective boundaries between them. Upon the Duchess’ arrival, “the Empress embraced and saluted [The Duchess of Newcastle] with a spiritual kiss; then she asked her whether she could write?” immediately establishing a creative partnership that is at once erotic and intellectual. It is not long before the Duchess addresses herself to the Empress in an advisory capacity — and more specifically, as a literary collaborator. She asserts that

“[i]f your Majesty were resolved to make a Cabbala, I would advise you, rather to make a poetical or romancical Cabbala, wherein you can use metaphors, allegories, similitudes, etc. and interpret them as you please” (183, my emphasis). In other words, the Duchess encourages the Empress to intervene in a genre that will allow her to exercise agency over literary devices to which she can assign value without patriarchal intervention, as would be required to write a religious, philosophical, or political cabbala — all public realms from which women were banned or ridiculed for their interventions. Even

Cavendish, whose rank perhaps afforded her greater access to certain arenas, was ridiculed for her formal visit to the Royal Society. 145

The Empress retains the right to “interpret” literary devices “as [she] please[s],” claiming autonomy over her own work. Her intimate relationship with the Duchess prompts the Empress to “embrace” the Duchess’ “soul,” after which she “told her she

145 For a detailed treatment of Cavendish’s visit to the Royal Society, see Emma Wilkins, 245-260.

184 would take her counsel” (183, my emphasis).146 The Duchess is much more than a scribe: she is the Empress’ second sovereign, who although less socially powerful, cooperatively creates worlds alongside her “other self,” the Empress. By engaging in such generative forms of withdrawal to other worlds and coded texts, these married women exert authority over literary and other possessions through which they proclaim their autonomous selves. Given the Duchess and the Empress’ intimate practice of retreat to worlds that they collaboratively generate and govern without the supervision of their husbands, the Duchess warns that “husbands have reason to be jealous of platonic lovers, for they are very dangerous, as being not only very intimate and close, but subtle and insinuating” (180-181). Although this statement most obviously references the erotic threat posed by lovers in general, regardless of gender, it also speaks to the public significance of wives’ private creative agency: intellectual cooperation evokes jealousy in husbands not because it threatens to replace the bond of marriage altogether, but because it denies husbands access to an intimate, intellectually productive and publicly significant bond between women, reversing the tendency for wives to be excluded from husbands’ private bonds with other men. That Cavendish describes the friends as “platonic lovers” implies that friendship inspires their minds and souls in the same way that private societies like the Royal Society did for men, who enjoyed public stature as a result of their “intimate and close, but subtle and insinuating” connections to other men. The

Empress and the Duchess embody these same kinds of connections to a similar effect in regards to their public reputations, and therein lies the threat for husbands. More than the fear that female friendship would replace marriage and heteronormative sexual desire, the

146 See Laurie Shannon’s explanation of a “royal favorite” and “familiars” (132).

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Duchess insinuates that husbands fear that their private intellectual connection with other

men and the public stature that comes with it will be rivalled by private societies of

women. 147

The Duchess insists that the women’s cabala project remain secret — even, to a

certain extent, from their husbands — and that once complete, it be removed from

general circulation. Added to these conditions of privacy for their jointly authored text

are the encoded forms of writing that each woman practices. The Duchess explains that

she can write, but that her “letters are rather like characters, than well-formed letters”

(182). In other words, her writing is a type of code that must be learned, because it is written “not so intelligibly that any reader whatsoever may understand it, unless he be taught to know my characters” (182). The Duchess introduces a linguistic code understood exclusively by the two women (and potentially a sexless spirit who attends the Empress) directly after the Empress has rejected the greatest male classical and modern writers on the basis of either their contentiousness or their misogyny. The

Duchess’ code thus stands as a reminder of what Zelia Gregoriou describes as women’s

“exclusion from men’s discourses” (460). If the Duchess’ code is a discourse, it is one from which almost all other men and women are banished, echoing women’s exclusion from male discourses that shaped education or the literary system, for example. Her code can also be considered one of the “cultural performances” that, according to Gregoriou, the Empress “stages in order to overcome this exclusion, e.g. fashioning new ways of writing based on supplementarity” (460). The act of writing a cabbala — a mystical text that must be decoded — through an amanuensis who herself writes in coded characters is

147 For a related discussion of women’s counter-publics in the 18th century in particular, see Nancy Fraser 56-80.

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an alternative performance of privacy and exclusivity. The act of writing is thus, for the

Duchess and the Empress, one that makes publicly visible their election to a “singular”

friendship in the sense of both the absolute self and of eccentricity that characterize their

authorial project and their friendship. Readers outside their friendship may never fully

decode this cabbala, but the act of writing a coded text without the support of male family

members advertises their authorial agency and their command of secret knowledge —

both strong cases upon which to claim public authority. Both the Empress and the

Duchess metaphorically contribute to fashioning the link between writing and

Cavendish’s “singular” identity, in the additional sense that she acts independently of her

husband, even with the level of support he lent to her literary endeavors. Writing

becomes a substitute for publicly legitimizing forms of privacy that wives were typically

barred from, such as private property rights. Although the Duchess and the Empress are

not legal guardians or owners of land, they imagine entire worlds over which they assert

possession. For Cavendish, writing became a substitute for the jointure and lands she

could not claim on behalf of herself or her husband during the Civil Wars. Literary

partnership turns the Empress and the Duchess into virtuous guardians and owners of

imagined spaces of retreat that undergird even more powerful forms of public stature than

legal forms of property ownership.

Cavendish ultimately finds the literary possessions generated jointly by the

Duchess and the Empress to be more productive than the Empress’ elaborate, staged

performances of wealth and mysticism as monarch. The Empress attempts to mediate her

exclusion from institutions of linguistic, literary, and epistemological authority as a married woman. By engaging in a private program of experiential learning and

187 authorship alongside the Duchess and various informants in her retinue, the Empress supplements her deficiency in these arenas.148 She compensates for her exclusion from formal literary training, for example, by carefully revising literary traditions in order to produce uniquely private kinds of writing. Gregoriou contends that Cavendish figures

“the Empress’ blazing performance as a founder of new institutions and, on the other hand, on her own performance as the writer of a new hybrid genre” (466). I suggest instead that the Empress’ rejection of male literary ancestors and mentors in favor of authorial partnership with an intimate female friend creates revisionary forms of wifely privacy by establishing a private literary system in opposition to the traditional male- dominated one:

Amongst the rest she enquired whether there were none that had found out yet the Jews’ Cabbala? Several have endeavoured it, answered the spirits, but those that came nearest (although themselves denied it) were one Dr Dee, and one Edward Kelly...but yet they proved at last but mere cheats, and were described by one of their own country-men, a famous poet, named Ben Jonson, in a play called The Alchemist. (167) By delegitimizing well-known male authors of private writing such as the cabbala, the

Empress exposes how an illegitimate authorial identity based on private texts like the cabbala could be exposed by more public forms of literature, represented above by reference to Ben Jonson’s printed play. That Ben Jonson, who arguably approached informal laureate status during his lifetime, exposes John Dee and Edward Kelly suggests a potentially fraudulent and hostile literary system from which the Empress is crudely

148 Zelia Gregoriou argues that “throughout the Blazing World Cavendish negotiates the need to fashion an authoritative authorial identity and present her female protagonist as studious and competent in the sciences, with an ongoing critique of the sciences as exclusionary patriarchal discourses. This negotiation often involves eliminating or limiting Socratic dialogue and instead borrowing new utopian narrative conventions from romance novels and memoirs” (466).

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thrust out.149 However, this exclusion puts Cavendish in an advantageous position

because it distances her from such corruption while allowing her to cultivate and

participate in an alternative literary system. In some ways, Cavendish used her exclusion

from public arenas like literature and science to accentuate her “singular” reputation for

innovating literary genres and scientific theories.

In jointly writing a cabbala, the Duchess and the Empress inaugurate a rival literary system that the Duchess seeks to protect by refusing to teach the “code” of her writing to the spirit. In doing so, she avoids compromising her intimate relationship with

the Empress. However, the Duchess eventually reveals her linguistic code when the

Empress implies that refusing to do so will implicitly undermine the Duchess’ reputation

as a writer. The Empress explains that her advisor has “informed me that you writ sense

and reason, and if you can but write so that any of my secretaries may learn your hand,

they shall write it out fair and intelligible. The Duchess answered, that she questioned not

but it might easily be learned in a short time” (181-182). The Empress’ intimate

friendship with the Duchess is a form of withdrawal from the male literary system that

allows the women to generate new literary genres and traditions without the limiting

influence of male writers.

Despite each married woman’s desire for the other and the anxiety over gender

and sexuality that this raises from a male perspective, Cavendish presents their desire as

non-threatening to the patriarchal public arenas from which women were typically

excluded. Her explicit insistence that men should not feel threatened or jealous implies

149 Richard Helgerson notes that the first official laureateship in England was awarded to John Dryden in 1668 by Charles II. Nonetheless, scholars agree with Helgerson’s observation that several poets had achieved a sort of unofficial laureateship prior to this, including Ben Jonson, who received an official pension in 1616, and Skelton, who received an “academic crowning” (6) as laureate of Oxford and Cambridge. See Helgerson 1-53, esp. 6-8.

189 the reverse: that readers, husbands, and members of the patriarchal literary system might assume there is real reason to feel this way precisely because the relationship appears to require a stated qualification to contain its transgression. Nevertheless, she presents wives’ desire for one another as acquiescing to standards of appropriate wifely privacy by showing that it could be included within the parameters of the marital bond. Upon agreeing to their roles in the literary partnership they have established, the Empress

“made [the Duchess] also her favourite, and kept her sometime in that world, and by this means the Duchess came to know and give this relation of all that passed in that rich, populous, and happy world” (183). After several visits between their souls, the narrator remarks that “their meeting did produce such an intimate friendship between them, that they became platonic lovers, although they were both females” (183). In fact, the

Empress’ primary emotional and erotic attachment seems to be to the Duchess, but this does not detract from her economic, political, or dynastic wifely duties. Cavendish depicts the relationship between the Duchess and the Empress as neither threatening nor insignificant in the eyes of the Duke, the Emperor, or the general public. Whereas the friendship between the Duchess and the Empress underscores their individual autonomy through emulation, which accounted primarily for differences in rank between the

Duchess and the Empress, the Empress’ marriage is based on gendered difference. An important distinction to make here is that, in contrast to traditional forms of marriage, the

Empress’ marriage seems not to involve erasing either her own or her husband’s personhood. While the Empress might be considered a placeholder for her husband’s authority, she exercises significant autonomy within this role with little oversight by the

Emperor. In comparison, the Emperor asserts his own private autonomy despite having

190 invested the Empress with his formal, public authority. Yet there is very little description of their marriage as companionate or based on concepts of domestic heterosexuality:

No sooner was the lady brought before the Emperor, but he conceived her to be some goddess, and offered to worship her; which she refused, telling him, (for by that time she had pretty well learned their language) that although she came out of another world, yet she was but a mortal; at which the Emperor rejoicing, made her his wife, and gave her an absolute power to rule and govern all that world as she pleased. But her subjects, who could hardly be persuaded to believe her mortal, tendered her all the veneration and worship due a deity. (132)

Like a good ruler who respects her subjects’ autonomy over their own private affairs, the

Empress does not appropriate or transgress her husband’s private autonomy. The

Emperor worships his intended wife, equating her with a deity. The Emperor’s non-

European status renders him, according to assumptions of Eurocentric superiority, an atypical spouse whose willing delegation of rulership is conducive to the Empress’ alternative forms of wifely privacy. His love is not disturbed by her acknowledgment that she is, like him, mortal. Instead, his love is tempered by his willing support of her political and legal power, which would typically have been erased upon marriage.

Cavendish’s emphasis on the Empress’ perceived other-worldliness indicates that for the

Emperor, her private sovereignty registers publicly in a way that it did not for most married women. 150 The unspoken contract in which the Emperor “gave her an absolute power to rule and govern all that world as she pleased” indicates his delegation of public authority to her and emphasizes the malleability of hierarchical gendered roles. It also legitimizes the Empress’ private authority by showing her to be a capable steward of

150 The Emperor’s perception of the Empress’ private autonomy as exceptional in the way it registers publicly could be interpreted as a continued echo of Elizabeth I. A further nod occurs when the Empress offers to help her native country win the war and the narrator reflects upon “what several opinions and judgments did this produce in the minds of her country-men; some said she was an angel; others, she was a sorceress; some believed her a goddess; other said the devil deluded them in the shape of a fine lady” (211).The narrator’s remarks about the range of reactions to the Empress’ political authority, especially in the context of her perceived divinity, further underscore her emulation of Elizabeth I.

191 delegated authority. Despite her admitted failings even at the end of The Blazing World, this arrangement is never revoked, perhaps because of the relative parity between them in terms of private sovereignty.

In fact, Sandra Sherman traces Cavendish’s model of dialectical authorial identity for women, underscoring its tension with “Cavendish’s ostensible strategy...of the female with no access to literary/scientific discourse” (191). In the same way that Cavendish positively represents the Empress’ withdrawal from male-dominated literary systems, she also “discredits engagement and announces that privation confers an enabling privacy” when it comes to other patriarchal institutions and systems, such as the law (Sherman

191). An illustrative moment occurs when the Duchess, the Empress, and the female figures of Fortune and various personified virtues hold court to decide the Duke of

Newcastle’s fate at the hands of Fortune. In contrast to the inability of femes covert to conduct legal business or appear in court without their husbands, this legal case is entirely carried out by women who act as judges, jury, and witnesses in a trial that comments on the ways that the Duke’s private authority and therefore public persona have suffered as a result of political turmoil. The court case in The Blazing World represents a moment in which the collective agency of the Duchess and the Empress, along with other women, supplements their individual lack of access to discourses, spaces, and identities in the legal arena. In fact, Fortune’s speech transmutes the Duke’s soul into a feminine one, stating that “yet it had been fit, the Duke’s soul should be present also, to speak for herself; but since she is not here, I shall declare myself to his wife” (197). While this was a commonplace gendering of the soul during the

Renaissance, this moment also poignantly reverses the typical position of female agency

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so that the feminized soul of the Duke of Newcastle is absent in a courtroom populated

entirely by women, and his wife represents him in a legal suit against Fortune. The

Duke’s absence recalls how Cavendish legally petitioned on behalf of the Duke in her

efforts to recoup her jointure and his properties during the Civil Wars. The complaints

lodged against Fortune for her treatment of Newcastle echo those that might be made

about unjust rulers:

She being a powerful princess, and as some believe, a deity, overcame him, and cast him into a banishment, where she kept him in great misery, ruined his estate, and took away from him most of his friends; nay, and even when she favoured many that were against her, she still frowned on him; all which he endured with the greatest patience, and with that respect to Lady Fortune. (197)

Fortune casts the Duke of Newcastle into “banishment,” a form of exile parallel to the domestic enclosure enforced upon wives by patriarchal authorities. The narrator contends that Fortune also “ruined his estate,” presumably a reference to the Duke of Newcastle’s sequestered lands, and perhaps an analogue to the ways coverture allowed husbands to effectively sequester their wives’ property. The Duke accepts his powerlessness in the face of Fortune’s arbitrary power; his privation engenders virtue, while the gendered exclusivity of the court itself supports the public authority of its female speakers.

Despite the women’s private experience of sameness, the Duchess desires a public display of her likeness to the Empress. The narrator explains that upon discovering the

Duchess’ melancholy, “Truly said the Duchess to the Empress (for between dear friends there’s no concealment, they being like several parts of one united body) my melancholy proceeds from an extreme ambition….that I would be a great princess” (183). The

Duchess’ desire to be like the Empress in terms of public stature causes a significant moment of tension. The Empress’ response to the Duchess’ ambition is telling: “No

193 sovereign does make a subject equal to himself, such as kings’ eldest sons partly are: and although some dukes be sovereign, yet I never heard that a prince by his title is sovereign, by reason the title of a prince is more a title of honour, than of sovereignty; for, as I said before, it belongs to all that are adopted to the crown” (184). By underscoring the complicated relationship between noble title and sovereignty, the Empress complicates the criteria for sovereignty even across rank and status. This passage is an excerpt from a much longer meditation by the Empress in which she initially suggests that despite the doubling effect of their literary efforts, the private status they enjoy as a result produces radically different public identities for each of them. Accordingly, the Empress expresses the importance of maintaining distinctions between their public ranks. In the complex world-within-a-world structure of The Blazing World, it is ultimately the Duchess who creates the world that the Empress rules over, in which she cultivates with the Duchess’ counsel the kind of extravagantly material cultural performance that enables her to save her own country, and perhaps world, of origin. The Empress’ material wealth only confirms her public stature effectively when it becomes the raw material that she and the

Duchess collectively transform. And yet the Empress cannot send her wealth to the

Duchess’ world because this wealth is ultimately the imagined creation of the Duchess herself — as are the Empress’ native world and the Blazing World.

The spirits correct the Duchess’ mistaken desire to conquer another world, become a Princess, and thereby emulate the Empress’ public identity. The spirits explain the Duchess’ faulty logic, insisting that “for the most part, conquerors seldom enjoy their conquest, for they being more feared than loved, most commonly come to an untimely end” (185). Moreover, the spirits explain that

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every human creature can create an immaterial world fully inhabited by immaterial creatures, and populous of immaterial subjects, such as we are, and all this within the compass of the head or scull; nay, not only so, but he may create a world of what fashion and government he will….And since it is in your power to create such a world, what need you to venture life, reputation, and tranquility, to conquer a gross material world? For you can enjoy no more of a material world than a particular creature is able to enjoy, which is but a small part, considering the compass of such a world; and you may plainly observe it by your friend the Empress here, which although she possess a whole world, yet enjoys she put a part thereof. (186)

In effect, the spirits explain that sovereigns, like all “human creature[s],” are subjective, limited beings whose ability to rule over or “enjoy” possessions is circumscribed by the very materiality of those possessions. The spirits distinguish between ownership and enjoyment as forms of publicly enabling privacy. Cavendish’s repetition of the word

“enjoy” refers to “the possession and use of something which affords pleasure or advantage” but might also indicate “to have the use or benefit of, have for one's lot

…something which affords pleasure, or is of the nature of an advantage” (“enjoy, n.” ).

The sense of “benefit,” “advantage,” and “possession” suggests that “enjoy” in the

passage above refers to ways that wives and subjects could establish their private status

through extra legal forms of possession and thereby fully “enjoy” legal, social, and

political personhood. By privileging enjoyment, the spirits illustrate the limited public

stature supported by legal ownership of property relative to the much greater public

autonomy signified by more organic claims to intangible but nevertheless valuable

belongings, like literature or knowledge, that wives do not legally own. Moreover, the

spirits observe the Duchess’ limited perspective as an individual, implying that a

cooperative perspective among women of similarly high rank and wealth would expand

enjoyment, and more effectively support public authority. By implication, the spirits

encourage the Duchess to instead cultivate further the virtue and intellectual rigor

195 fostered by collaborative authorship and learning characteristic of her friendship with the

Empress. Given that The Blazing World is written into being by Cavendish herself, this moment points to the blurred line between literary and material authority as forms of privacy that could more or less successfully engender wives’ legitimate public reputations.

The Duchess’ and the Empress’ shared custodianship eventually supersedes the

Empress’ individual political power. Cavendish presents the women’s world-making in

The Blazing World as parallel to men’s private property ownership because it establishes their capacity for emulating virtuous ownership. In further probing the nature of doubling, the Empress asks the Duchess “the reason why she did take such delight when she was joined to her body, in being singular both in accoutrements, behavior, and discourse?” (218). The Duchess’ answer expresses her desire to mimic the Empress’ singularity not through base imitation, but through an intimate friendship that involves a complex form of emulation. Although the Duchess confesses earlier that she would like to become a ruler herself, like the Empress, she later specifies that this is no simple wish to achieve absolute likeness between them. Instead, she states, “I endeavor...to be as singular as I can; for it argues but a mean nature to imitate others; and though I do not love to be imitated if I can possibly avoid it; yet rather than to imitate others, I should choose to be imitated by others” (218). Rather than reinforcing the Duchess’ dependence on the Empress, as imitation would, emulation accentuates each woman’s singularity even within their sameness. In order to achieve this, Cavendish borrows from the imagery of mirroring and doubling commonly found in descriptions of friendship between men. It is telling that the Empress asks the Duchess why she enjoys singularity — in the sense of

196 oneness with the Empress as well as the sense of eccentricity, individuality, independence

(especially in regards to coverture), or even political dissent — when the two are joined physically in the same body (“singularity, n.”). Of course, the imagery of joining two in one body was not only a common friendship trope, but one used to imply wives’ loss of individual identity in marriage. Revising this trope by representing wives who join their souls within the same body challenges masculinist ideas that women could not enjoy perfect friendship and that wifely privacy required them to annex their own private identities to enlarge their husbands’ public stature. “Singularity” could refer to the

Duchess’ heightened enjoyment of an individual, publicly legible identity when she inhabits the interiority of the Empress’ body and soul. The Duchess clarifies a third meaning of singularity, which for her is a way to reconcile the negative effects of imitating or being imitated with the positive sense that comes nearer to emulation.

Cavendish writes that the Duchess “confessed that it was extravagant, and beyond what was usual and ordinary; but yet her ambition being such, that she would not be like others in any thing if it were possible” (218). In reflecting on the anxieties inherent in self- fashioning, the Empress and the Duchess meditate upon sameness, hierarchy, and material markers of private sovereignty in their respective home worlds. The Empress explains that though “she loved her native country and her own family as well as any creature could do...she would not enrich them” because “much gold, and great store of riches makes them mad, insofar as they endeavor to destroy each other for gold, or riches’ sake” (217). The problem for the Empress, in other words, is her people’s refusal to honor traditional class-based hierarchy. When the Empress offers to repair the

Duchess’ lost fortune, the Duchess ultimately concludes that despite the apparent

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usefulness of wealth for “my lord’s posterity’s sake,” she “should not petition Your

Majesty for gold and jewels, but only for the elixir that grows in the midst of golden

sands, for to preserve life and health” (217). The Empress, in return, revises her initial

offer and awards the Duchess a similar public reputation to her own, rather than parity of

material wealth: “I love you so well, that I would make you as great and powerful a monarchess as I am of the Blazing World” (217). In this exchange, both the Duchess and the Empress consistently question the value of gold and jewels, ultimately confirming their sameness not by ensuring equal material wealth, but rather enjoyment of the same

kinds of imagined possessions.

Cavendish presents material wealth as an unreliable method of supporting one’s

public role that is more productively replaced by the absolute self, whether officially

titled or not. Despite all of her power and knowledge, the Empress cannot create passages between the Duchess’ world, their imagined worlds, the Blazing World, or her native world through which material wealth can pass. Although the Empress’ material practice of privacy ultimately fails her in the Blazing World, her effectiveness as a public ruler improves as a result of the Duchess’ counsel; the Empress recognizes, with the Duchess’ help, the power of collective authority. Men’s public reputations were supported by their autonomy over material markers that only very imperfectly translated their private sovereignty and virtues into the public sphere. Wives could not rely on legal possession to substantiate their public lives, since under coverture this did not signify in the patriarchal public sphere. The Duchess’ desire to become Princess of an immaterial world reflects her understanding of how unreliable material wealth and property were for asserting private autonomy and might refer to the dispossession of William’s lands and

198 the need for William and Margaret to rely on titles and personal credit in order to survive exile. Her private creation and ownership of an imaginary world, however, validates her public role as Princess far more effectively. Moreover, the Duchess’ desire to emulate the

Empress’ singularity in regards to world-making and rulership illustrates the positive potential of friendship to create “two sovereigns” who are not identical, but whose relationship is structured by key points of sameness.

In articulating the importance of learning as a driving force in the gendered politics of The Blazing World, Gregoriou notes the imperial implications of the Empress’ politics. She writes that “the doubling of female agency that we see in the collaboration between the Empress and her scribe...enables Cavendish to fashion creativity, learning ability and female empowerment in ways that negotiate rather than recapitulate the rhetoric of colonial conquest” (468). Instead, the spirits “juxtapose the pleasures of writing (and creating artificial worlds) to conquest (of natural worlds)” (Gregoriou 468).

The distinction Cavendish makes between writing and conquest indicates the contingency of the Empress’ material practice upon the Duchess’ intellectual pursuits. The Duchess counsels the Empress to disband all official societies when she learns that there is discord in the Blazing World, arguing that “wheresoever is learning, there is most commonly also controversy and quarreling” because it “breeds factions in their schools, which at last break out into open wars, and draw sometimes an utter ruin upon a state or government”

(202). In this way, Cavendish takes aim at public arenas like the Royal Society, which excluded women and therefore ridiculed Cavendish’s own attempt to articulate her autonomy in the male-dominated public sphere by writing scientific texts. Cavendish thus shows how the public sphere privileged official, traditional forms of personhood and

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education to the detriment of married women who were resigned to the domestic private

sphere even when their rank and the support of their husbands theoretically gave them

greater access to the public sphere, as was the case with Cavendish. The Duchess’

criticism of factional “schools” in The Blazing World insinuates that the private identities

and knowledge produced through her collaborative friendship with the Empress, which

were removed from more official institutions of authority, formed an alternative basis for

expressing public autonomy. The Duchess and the Empress come from worlds

characterized by violence and political turmoil, which the Duchess implies proceed from

diversity of opinion and perspective.151 Multiple perspectives, she insists, produce

more sovereigns than worlds, and more pretended governors than governments, more religions than gods, and more opinions in those religious than truths; more laws than rights, and more bribes than justices, more policies than necessities, and more fears than dangers, more covetousness than riches, more ambitions than merits, more services than rewards, more languages than wit, more controversy than knowledge, more reports than noble actions, and more gifts by partiality, than according to merit. (201) The same might be said of the contentious politics of the Empress’ world of origin, torn apart by war. Shared identity allows the Duchess and the Empress to imagine that the private worlds they create grant them a public voice in their respective worlds of origin.

The Duchess’ world is revealed, as the Empress’ world of origin will be later, as having fallen prey to false indicators of private identity and corrupt public institutions. The

Duchess’ world of origin (which also reflects on Cavendish’s historical moment and world) is refracted into the Blazing World, and the Empress refracts this in turn into her own world of origin, ESFI. It is only in the twice-reimagined vision of England signified

151 Alker and Nelson contend that “This is less an affirmation of the belief in the disruptive effects of women than a gesture toward the Empress’s origins and those of the advisor she selects: the fictional Duchess of Newcastle, who appears in spirit form to commune with and guide her. Cavendish emphasizes that both women come from a world marked by violence and their quest for socio-political power has left them gravely fearful of social disorder and therefore highly sensitive and reactive to discord” (114).

200 by ESFI that the Empress’ performance of wealth becomes more than a problematic signifier of political authority. Instead, it becomes a reflection of her private creative partnership with the Duchess, which allows them to reimagine an England in which wealth, jewels, and property are simply ornaments. As such, material possessions are insufficient compared to the intellectual and literary possessions that establish their private discipline and virtue, and that demonstrate their fitness for public participation in the Blazing World.

In the Blazing World, the Empress’ public performances eventually have little effect on the adverse political conditions she creates when she drastically changes policy without considering the new context in which she finds herself. This need to adjust for a changing atmosphere with new criteria for public autonomy analogously parallels the ways in which the Civil Wars necessarily changed the basis for private sovereignty, especially with regard to material wealth and property. However, the Empress’ private sovereignty allows her to master the material performance of privacy in order to use it effectively in her home world, ESFI. In a reference to the Civil Wars, the Empress secures peace in her world through very violent means. In order to restore concord after such turmoil,

...the Empress appeared upon the face of the waters, dressed in her imperial robes, which were all of diamonds and carbuncles; in one hand she held a buckler, made of one entire carbuncle, and in the other hand a spear of one entire diamond; on her head she had a cap of diamonds, and just upon the top of the crown, a star made of the star-stone, mentioned heretofore, and a half-moon made of the same stone, was placed on her forehead. (211)

The Empress surpasses her previous performances when she engineers the illusion of walking on water to impress the monarchs of various nations who are enthralled by her magnificence. It is unclear whether this is a vain exploit or one designed to foster

201 political diplomacy. Nonetheless, it is only once the Empress has created another world and corrected her faulty policies in the Blazing World that she understands how to use wealth and property to foster her private authorial identity. Rather than articulating a public voice backed by private property and wealth, the Empress uses her own jeweled wealth as monarch to inspire creative performances and knowledge that could be socially valuable in encouraging peace. Gregoriou has argued compellingly that by the end of the narrative, “the female subject’s agency is not grounded on the singularity of her sovereign performance. Instead, it is dispersed and multiplied through female doubling in performances of emulation, imitation, and bonding” (469). Less than emulation or imitation, however, The Blazing World is about how the Duchess and the Empress use mimicry to create new, but slightly different, female selves through private friendship and creative partnership. Cavendish proffers a model of collaboration that could be adopted by wives and translated into the language of marital and political contracts. There could, she implies, be as many sovereigns as there were worlds.

Afterword

The experience of writing and researching Wives Writing Privacy has underscored

for me time and again the concept that opposites are not static, and certainly not always

predictable in their opposition. While creating or participating in public arenas has been

historically and culturally positioned as antithetical to private experience, this project has

– as a matter of methodology and content – complicated this construction. Instead, this project culminates in the realization that in fact, privacy and public sphere(s) are part of the same complex system that is, in turn, dialectically related to ideas about religion, marriage, friendship, and politics across a variety of contexts. For example, Nancy

Fraser’s work posits that women’s exclusion from the Habermasian public sphere was met by the creation of counter publics, focusing on the creation of these women-only societies and associations focused on philanthropic work and moral reform. Looking at this phenomenon from a different angle, this dissertation has taken as its focus the process of how women’s private activities and relationships answered their exclusion from the male-dominated public sphere(s) of seventeenth-century England and its colonies. In fact, Fraser points out that while “these associations aped the all-male societies built by the women’s fathers and grandfathers...in other respects the women were innovating, since they creatively used the heretofore quintessentially ‘private’ idioms of domesticity and motherhood precisely as springboards for public activity” (61).

Fraser’s remarks focus on the innovative efforts of women in eighteenth-century

America, who respond to their exclusion from the public sphere by creating small,

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woman-centered, oppositional publics. In order to place texts by Anne Bradstreet,

Katherine Philips, and Margaret Cavendish in dialogue with one another, I have had to

think about how women responded to the specific grounds upon which they were

excluded from various public arenas, and changed them. More than this, I have

considered how they revised ideas about what constituted valid contribution to the public

sphere. If married women’s enclosure in the home and their status as legally covered housewives governed by their husbands meant that they could only hope to support the public lives of their husbands and sons, the authors examined in this dissertation respond by expanding what “wifely privacy” meant to include private identities, relationships, and activities that would support their own public roles. This dissertation has therefore been concerned more properly with married women’s commitments to reframing the ways that

“‘private’ idioms of domesticity and motherhood” (Fraser 61) are valued by the public and to rejecting the problematic mechanisms of that public. In many ways, then, this project speaks to the eighteenth-century women who built counter publics. I do not suggest here that this project necessarily explores the groundwork laid for these women

by their seventeenth-century forebears. Rather, I propose a diffuse, affective connection

across time between the seventeenth-century wives who revised political thought as well

as concepts of domesticity and religious privacy, and the eighteenth-century women who

vigorously worked to create woman-centered counter publics. This project considers the

possibility of resonances – albeit non-linear or nebulous – between the two that help us to better understand the salient cycles of ideas about privacy and public arenas.

Wives Writing Privacy therefore demonstrates the ways in which Habermas’ understanding of the “transformation” of “the public sphere” implies a false sense of

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teleological process. As I have shown, wives imaginatively expanded the kinds of

relationships and activities that could be regarded as within the purview of wifely privacy

and that could be considered grounds for valid contribution to the public sphere. That

they did so even as the discourse of domesticity doubly reinforced the “longstanding

prohibition on female public speech” (Van Elk 4) shows that the separation of the public

and private spheres was a complex set of multiple and sometimes volatile reactions rather

than a single, straightforward process. That seventeenth-century wives’ innovations in

this regard to relate, if tangentially, to discourses as varied as politics, religion,

housewifery in their own time and in adjacent periods of history indicates the importance

of studying how seventeenth-century married women wrote about privacy. For example,

how might Katherine Philips’ revision of retirement discourse have peripherally betoken

the energies eighteenth-century women would devote to forming counter publics often distinguished by their separation from men’s societies and by class-based exclusivity?

Considering such questions gives scholars a more complete understanding of how

“progress” could be relative to perspective: what “privacy” meant did not simply develop linearly over time, but was subject to the experience of it by marginalized groups, by people in different historical and cultural contexts, and by political and religious beliefs.

The specific forms of novel wifely privacy that Bradstreet, Philips, and Cavendish managed to present as empowering also support the conclusion that opposites are not always obvious. The opposite of the social and spiritual bond of marriage was not always solitude, but could also involve different kinds of partnership — with friends or even with God — that allowed wives to assert independent, private authority and to be recognized for it in the public sphere. Friendship between married women allowed

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Katherine Philips to assert her status as a private citizen independently of her husband, mitigating the ways that marriage presented her private status as dependent and insignificant. Anne Bradstreet could certainly be considered to have influenced democratic concepts of privacy and freedom, since she managed to map out intricate boundaries between herself as an individual and institutions of authority by using the seemingly opposite discourses of sacred privacy, solitude, and domesticity. While

Cavendish is best known for her fascination with the absolute self, Jeffrey Masten and others have only just begun to be done to uncover more fully how private friendships, communities, and partnerships enable her to claim a public identity based on absolutism. 152 More scholarship would reveal the possibility of an unexpected and paradoxical relationship between Cavendish’s theories of collective private identity and public spaces, discourses, and activities.

As Wives Writing Privacy has demonstrated, the opposite of privacy is not always publicity; the answer to compulsory enclosure is not always freely wandering; solitude can foster closer connection, especially to God, than communal worship; printed writing, even if read by a large audience, can still reflect privacy. As these contradictory statements imply, there are subtle but important distinctions between different experiences and practices of privacy. Understanding what might seem like the inconsistent ways that wives positioned themselves in relation to the public and private spheres in seventeenth-century England can help us to understand these contradictions.

Domesticity, for instance, is the most recognizable discourse attached to wifely privacy, but this dissertation has revealed that the experience of domesticity was for many wives

152 See, for example Julie Crawford 177-223; Jeffrey Masten,“Material Cavendish: Paper, Performance, ‘Sociable Virginity’” 49-68; Horacio Sierra 647-669.

206 not opposite to a publicly recognized, private status. As the analogy between state and household disintegrated and gave way to the separation between public and private spheres in the sixteenth- and seventeenth century, married women emerged at the center of a domestic sphere designed to support men’s public roles. The wife’s “central position as educator of the children, leader of the servants, transmitter of the faith, and exemplar of proper behavior” (Van Elk 12) might seem to suggest that she was considered to be at a double remove from public activity. By attending to how these writers imagined novel forms of wifely privacy, it is possible to see that domesticity and other forms of privacy attached to the household were powerful strategies for asserting public autonomy in seventeenth-century England — and perhaps to reach back and “touch” these moments in the past through our own questions about privacy and public spheres.

In particular, the writings of Bradstreet, Philips, and Cavendish show their willingness to accept and even emphasize their separateness from the public sphere as a form of criticism and rejection. In some ways, their emphasis on separateness and voluntary withdrawal from the public sphere alongside the innovative ways in which they demonstrate their fitness to contribute to these arenas speaks volumes. As I hope this study and others like it will continue to uncover, it seems that insisting on their separateness from “the sphere of private people [coming] together as a public”

(Habermas 27) did just as much cultural work as those bona fide members of the public sphere who discussed and debated in conventional ways. For all three authors discussed in this dissertation, voluntary withdrawal becomes a way to redress their exclusion from public arenas and to supplement the limits imposed on them by conventional definitions of wifely privacy. Cavendish’s The Blazing World demonstrates how private,

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collaborative study ultimately produces a more legitimate public authority than

contentious academic “societies.” In other words, wives emphasized their intentional

separation from the Habermasian public sphere — by definition a realm of reason, debate, and argument rather than status — in order to redress the exclusion of even the most intelligent women, who did not receive formal training in reason and argument and who were not considered to possess the capacity for reason. Wives, whose primary concerns were supposed to be child-rearing, domestic order, and pious virtue, managed to show that these forms of wifely privacy, in addition to friendship, stewardship, solitude, gift exchange, and authorship provided them with an alternative training in argument and reason.

In fact, studying how women responded to their exclusion from the public sphere in particular provides insight into their roles in political resistance, and in particular how privacy could be used by all citizens to guarantee political rights, including a voice in the public sphere, and freedom from state intervention in private matters. Margaret

Cavendish anticipates similar concerns with women’s political rights when she writes that women are

not tied, nor bound to State or Crown; we are free, not Sworn to Allegiance, nor do we take the Oath of Supremacy; we are not made Citizens in the Commonwealth...and if we be not Citizens in the Commonwealth, I know no reason we should be Subjects to the Commonwealth. (Sociable Letters 26-27)

Cavendish highlights her separation from the influence of the estate here, obliquely referencing her coverture as one reason why she is not a citizen of the commonwealth.

Rather than lamenting this, Cavendish accentuates her privacy — in the sense of having no formal political status — in order to claim freedom as a political privilege. At the same time that Cavendish seems to argue in favor of this freedom from political

208 obligation, her concluding statement frames her withdrawal from it as a protest against her non-citizenship: she is shirking her obligation because she has been excluded from the public sphere at the political level. The question that this dissertation ultimately raises is about feminine dissent. What happens when women or other marginalized groups use their private status to rebel with impunity or to ignore their exclusion? What do forms of transgressive or illicit privacy practiced by married women reveal about the structures of power that determine proper versus improper forms of private behavior? How, if at all, might transgressive wifely privacy have modeled ways to protest political oppression and corruption in movements like the French Revolution? The answers to the above questions lie in further research on how domestic tragedies, ballads, and other forms of popular culture figure women’s practice of privacy, especially across rank and wealth. Studying texts in these genres that feature unruly domestic settings, relationships, and practices could fill scholarly gaps in how wifely privacy was represented across various ranks, but also in how illicit privacy could be redeemed and deployed.

In many ways, Bradstreet, Philips, and Cavendish present wives as models for utilizing the strategy of political disengagement to protest exclusionary tactics, and to show the value of alternative systems for guaranteeing citizenship. That these authors responded to vastly different political, religious, and personal circumstances in the wake of the Civil Wars attests to the increasing scholarly need to consider the particular role of the wife in the context of developing separate spheres. The differences between these authors also underscore the applicability of wives’ practices of privacy to address the political, religious, social, and economic disempowerment faced by various marginalized groups during the seventeenth century, but also looking forward to the eighteenth-century

209 political upheavals. The language of separation and withdrawal used by all three authors implies freedom and independence from husbandly and state authority, echoing the sentiments of political movements in England, on the continent, and in the Americas.

Privacy is a privilege, and a powerful tool.

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